After a period of sitting, a wooden sensation, rigid but yielding. There was give in the grain. Clean and dry, sap smell. It was like a desert gully, a channel where water ran once and might run again.
Dig under that tree, is the challenge, and find the bones of an interesting person. I do my best. But once the first layer of dirt is scraped away there’s nothing between the roots but trash, a dead crab, vegetable slime. I pull out something like a long fibrous husk. It doesn’t count.
On TV there’s a show about a small surviving population of Homo habilis, who have been living in the open all this time adjacent to urban civilization. A young female, eyes bright under her brow ridge, listens as her new friend from the city explains science. “I understand you,” she tells him, “but how did Einstein and Schwarzschild feel when they made these discoveries? Where was the emotion?”
Bad Trip
Heart, unhitch
from future time, dire honey
of the not yet opened. Idle
in the garden, the light won’t eat you.
Faust chasing his pleasures
was always in hell.
The shark afraid to drown in stillness
carries time in its gills, ceaseless.
Yourself is the shear of what swam. Swim.
I said, I was drawn to Kannon at the start because I felt in need of her comfort and protection, very much the relationship one has with the Virgin if one happens to grow up with the Virgin. But as time went on, and especially after becoming a mother, I began to feel a reproach in her, an ideal that I was always falling short of.
My teacher thought a moment and said, it’s true, there are two Kannons. But in my experience, she only pulls out that sword when there is real need of it.
We sometimes said the problem was “quantum entanglement,” but it would have been easier just to call it a three-way light switch, where you never knew if up or down was on or off because you had no insight, that day or any other, into what anyone else was doing at the other end of the goddamn hall.
Silence as gift. That Peter Stamm novel, The Sweet Indifference of the World, had a good title even if as a novel it was mood and not much else.
The “vulnerable narcissist” is a new type to watch out for. From a distance we do no harm.
Climbing, ladders and skylights.
Once upon a time the shtick was to have no secrets. Then I got better at “interpersonal connection,” as in, I learned how to make my problems other people’s problems; so here we are.
R. went to the first day of eighth grade in big Zoomer jeans and the little butterfly crop-top we bought together in Hongdae. Coming home, she said no one at her new suburban school dresses like that. No inspo. This might be a difficult fall.
I had a surgical thing done to me that has thrown my hormones out of whack, again. All the crying and texting gets old, but the real problem is forgetting how to concentrate, and how to be lonely; which are, I said, the basic things when it comes to writing. That makes sense, said my companion, but do you think when it’s going well it isn’t lonely? I said I thought so. But maybe the better answer would be that it shines a light through the loneliness. The loneliness rings out like a metal bowl.
Hokkaido, Reiwa 6
It was Valentine’s Day for me but not for J., and she sent a wish across the date line that I could think some quiet thoughts. Short on sleep, a bright day in the forties after a week below freezing, our little group walked the sunlit slush in front of the tourist shops along Lake Akan. So far from anything.
“Bokke,” an Ainu loanword, picks out a boiling pit of sulfuric mud along the lakeshore. It steams, it glops. Proceeding to the right, one finds a half-snowed path stamped with dirty bootsoles leading around an advisory sign (“warning on encounters with bears”), an older couple eating lunch out of plastic containers (“konichiwa”), to a little prominence where the path swerves and the hillside cover of bare branches draws back to admit the mass of Mount Oakan, enormous across the flat of frozen lake. I tried to take a picture but it was stupid, it just looked like it was illustrating a Wikipedia article about the mountain. Your gaze brings nothing to a volcano, it’s already itself.
I stood maybe ten minutes with its weight in my eyes. The trees up slope were Cézanne brushstrokes but monochrome; I’d never seen a brush-and-ink painting like that in the created world. A faint cry, maybe a hawk, otherwise hushed snow. Zero point. Find your balance. I’m here, I’m you. In the summer the lake ripples, and you’ve been living in that surface motion; but winter stills it. The deep freeze is where writing comes from, or used to come from. Not death but solitude. Black water, white snow, tree and stone, that gets you started. Any more and you’ll lose your way. Girl, you haven’t left any space empty.
My friends didn’t know where I was and I had to turn back.
Sea of Okhotsk tomorrow. Close to forty years since I saw the name on a map and it might as well have been in Middle-Earth.
Fuba Jien Considers the Passions, Again
I’m grateful to the friend who let me know that Muqi’s Persimmons and Chestnuts had been agriculturally imported to San Francisco; they stay in Kyoto otherwise, and are hardly ever on view, and I’d figured we would never cross paths. You know the large panel screens and hanging scrolls will never show up right in reproduction; I didn’t expect it from these two. Something about how the silk takes the ink, and gives it back, still. The different shades of black wash look colored. They emerge from the void and leave you in doubt about the completeness of that emergence.
Rāgarāja in the permanent collection is a tantric figure who got to Japan via Shingon. The museum lets us know he “embodies the concept that earthly desires, including carnal passion, can be a pathway to spiritual awakening,” and Wikipedia chimes in, “while it is ahistorical to ascribe a ‘gay’ self-identification to historical figures, clear examples of Rāgarāja's patronage of men having intimate sexual relations with other men appear in the historical record. Male kabuki actors placed love letters to the men they desired on the wall of Rāgarāja’s temple at Naniwa.” Thanks, Wikipedia, what other kind of kabuki actor was there going to be? In onnagata or otherwise. I remember the first time I saw footage from a Heron Maiden dance and fell in love, before reading the fine print and realizing I wasn’t supposed to... but there’s nothing appealing about Rāgarāja, he scares the shit out of me, terrifying to think of inviting all those arms and eyes into my mind.
The life-size Kamakura bodhisattva across the room, on the other hand, has been a friend for a while. They used to think it was Avalokiteshvara; now they’re not sure, but it’s still androgynous as you please, slim-chested in a draped robe, and couldn’t have been carved by someone who did not find the human form beautiful. One imagines embracing it. To embrace the bodhisattva without turning into Rāgarāja. I don’t know.
The seasonal screens one room over are always fairly well crowded with motifs, but across the way was one of those temple scenes that depict mist simply by ceasing to paint the temple... one whole panel with nothing on it but a floating line that might have been a roof, a bridge. Form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. We literally chant that all the time. I don’t not believe it. Why, then, this need to fill everything up? Why not let the emptiness be? Our monk at the panel screen, she could have wept for it.
Venus in Scorpio will task me till I’m dead, I’m sure of it, but I never seem to sting anyone other than myself.
My therapist recommended an older book on trauma, embodiment and so on. I know it’s well regarded and everything, but I haven’t caved on picking up a copy because, tragically, it’s called Waking the Tiger, has tigers on the cover, makes me feel like I’m being sold supplements by a website….
Poor awful hungry Polyphemus stumbles out of the cave clutching his ruined eye. What’s the trouble, Polly? Cue the disco beat as he starts to bellow, “Nooobody, nooobody, nooobody, nobodyyyy….”
