Sailing Out of Sight

October 31, 2003 | Laughing Knees | 6 Comments 

Tall ship “Roald Amund­sen” sail­ing into Strom­ness Bay, Orkney Is­lands, Great Britain, 1995.

What a strange feel­ing to have had a steady stream of read­ers who com­mented reg­u­larly on my posts for the last two or three months and then sud­denly it dries up for no dis­cernible rea­son. Are my re­cent posts that bor­ing and that ir­rel­e­vant, com­pared to ear­lier posts? Did I do some­thing wrong to the tem­plates so that no one can find my page any more? Did I com­mit a faux pas in my com­ments some­where on other people’s sites? Or is the con­tent of my own site objectionable?

It is as if I have en­tered the dol­drums and there is no wind. I keep try­ing to con­vince my­self that this is only a blog and not re­ally very im­por­tant, but then, I worked so hard on mak­ing this come true, put my heart into it. Blog­ging out there in the ocean of blog­gers and not be­ing in hail­ing sight of a sin­gle fel­low sailor makes for pretty lonely sail­ing. What is the point of writ­ing a blog if there is no in­ter­ac­tion? Might as well just keep my di­ary here at home.

I shouldn’t com­plain, of course, at least I’ve had vis­i­tors and com­ments. I drop by Pa­cific Tides quite a lot, and he has never got­ten a com­ment, other than by me, so far as I can tell. It’s cu­ri­ous, be­cause the site is beau­ti­ful and the writ­ing is in­ter­est­ing and rel­e­vant. Thomas has trav­eled quite a bit and has a de­light­ful out­look on peo­ple and travel. I once asked him if he was at all con­cerned about the lack of traf­fic to his site, but his re­ply seemed like a philo­soph­i­cal shrug; per­haps it is just enough to get the thoughts and cre­ative map­pings down.

I would like to be so non­cha­lant. Per­haps I take this blog­ging busi­ness way too se­ri­ously. But then, for me, writ­ing is im­por­tant stuff. And I want to be true to my own thoughts and feel­ings when I write in the blog or make com­ments else­where. I am good at jok­ing around in per­son, but not so good in my writ­ing, so per­haps I come across as this mon­u­men­tal bore who has to phi­los­o­phize about every­thing. But why not? So much other stuff that you come across on the in­ter­net re­volves around noth­ing, around pass­ing on in­for­ma­tion sim­ply for the pass­ing on, like elec­tron­i­fied gos­sip, e-​​gossip. It has been good to find other blog­gers will­ing to dis­cuss things in depth, and will­ing to write more than a sen­tence or two.

So the web of con­tacts that I’ve con­nected to through this blog have come to mean some­thing, es­pe­cially in my discussion-​​starved lifestyle here in Japan. The dis­cus­sions have kept me think­ing daily, even while walk­ing to the train sta­tion or sit­ting on the train or eat­ing din­ner at the ra­men restau­rant near my work­place. Of­ten I jot down top­ics or threads of ideas as I walk. The dis­cus­sions have got­ten me read­ing more phi­los­o­phy and meshed with the storm of opin­ions and the­o­ries and in­tro­spec­tion that whirl around in my mind these days. And by writ­ing about place and na­ture, I’ve taken more time to look around me and look closely, with my eyes, my ears, my fin­gers, cam­era, pen­cil, my feet. A kind of cen­sus of lo­cale and a per­sonal em­brac­ing of hope.

I will con­tinue to write, throw­ing these words out into the void and hop­ing the seeds land on some fer­tile ground some­where. But as long as I sit here writ­ing so­lil­o­quies it will be more like a her­mit mum­bling to him­self, than a mem­ber of a fo­rum. Then again, didn’t the sages and wise men, pun­dits and gu­rus all sit alone some­where on some in­ac­ces­si­ble moun­tain? Per­haps I would be bet­ter off to con­tem­plate it all in silence.

Body and Soul

October 30, 2003 | Laughing Knees | 2 Comments 

Puf­fin peer­ing from the edge of a cliff, the Shet­land Is­lands, Great Britain, 1995.

In the midst of read­ing her book, The Mak­ing of the Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Planet 8, the fourth in her “Space Se­ries”, Doris Less­ing talks in depth about the re­la­tion­ship of the im­per­ma­nence of the world with the con­cept of self. Two of her char­ac­ters go through two long so­lil­o­quies as they at­tempt to come to terms with the knowl­edge that they will be­come ex­tinct. Three con­cepts emerge: dreams are col­lec­tive, the body is but an ephemeral con­tainer, and the self is but a man­i­fes­ta­tion of other selves that came be­fore. I’ve been read­ing the book on my com­mutes to and from work, while sit­ting with a wall of bod­ies lined up right at my knees, in­di­vid­u­als each, but one per­son lit­tle dif­fer­en­ti­ated from the next. The book and all these peo­ple of­ten left me sit­ting with my eyes closed, try­ing to pull aside the veil that hides comprehension.

It is true what Less­ing says, each morn­ing I wake to the con­vic­tion, “Here I am. This is me.” And yet each day my ex­pe­ri­ences tell me that this is not re­ally how things are. This de­ter­mi­na­tion to de­fine “me” in the con­text of the world around al­ways flut­ters out into dis­ap­point­ment when I re­al­ize that I am not re­ally so im­por­tant in the scheme of things af­ter all. We cry when some­thing dear to us dies or we lose some­thing that we value. And yet even­tu­ally all things die and dis­ap­pear. We know that. The cake we made rots. The book we read dis­in­te­grates. The dog we cher­ished dies. Even the moun­tain we roved in a reverie crum­bles into dust. It is the way of the world and we are all an in­ti­mate part of it.

But it seems we spend most of our time deny­ing it and re­sist­ing the going.

Per­haps it has some­thing to do with get­ting older, and re­al­iz­ing that this body that I’ve in­hab­ited all these years is steadily let­ting go, that even­tu­ally it will give and wink out. More and more I’m com­ing to re­al­ize that this youth ori­ented so­ci­ety that we push so strongly is ill-​​prepared for the awak­en­ing to the ephemeral na­ture of our lives. We spend so much time buy­ing the make up and work­ing out in the gyms, that we’ve left no space for the habi­ta­tion of our minds, which must take time to grow into the ac­cep­tance of even­tu­ally let­ting go.

I watched a pro­gram the other night about a Japan­ese busi­ness­man who gave up his lu­cra­tive job as a sales­man to live as cheaply as pos­si­ble and con­cen­trate on tak­ing pho­tographs. He bought a run down old farm­house just on the out­skirts of Tokyo, threw away all mod­ern ap­pli­ances, learned about how farm­ers in the poverty stricken days be­fore the war kept them­selves warm, cooked, and ate. He adopted the sim­plest, most technology-​​independent lifestyle he could find and set­tled down to en­joy his lifestyle. What he found was that a per­son barely needs much to live rel­a­tively com­fort­ably, and that his time ex­panded into hours.

“When you’re spend­ing less money and time on the items that are sup­posed to make your life bet­ter, you gain back all that time. And what I’ve found is that there is more space for my mind, now. I hadn’t re­al­ized just how grat­i­fy­ing the older lifestyle was. There is some­thing that feels com­plete in cook­ing fish over an open fire or putting a veg­etable from your gar­den onto your plate. It is a sat­is­fac­tion that you just can’t de­rive from TV or cell phones or computers.”

I am won­der­ing more these days if the rich­ness of close as­so­ci­a­tion with the sur­round­ing world that a life of vol­un­tary poverty and sim­plic­ity seem to em­body ac­tu­ally helps you in­cor­po­rate the ephemer­al­ity of life into your out­look and works in bet­ter with the birth and death of your pre­cious self. For it seems to be the cling­ing to self that most harms the cy­cle of things.

Would that our so­ci­eties let go of “pros­per­ity” and learn to tran­scend the lim­i­ta­tions of de­sire. We could con­cen­trate on our col­lec­tive dream instead.

Herbsttag (Autumn Day)

October 30, 2003 | Laughing Knees | 2 Comments 

View from a friend’s cot­tage win­dow in Quoy­loo, the Orkney Is­lands, Great Britain, 1995.

In 1991, while at­tend­ing a writer’s gath­er­ing I was in­vited to in Glen­brook, New Hamp­shire, Wal­ter Clark re­cited this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my fa­vorite po­ets, and fa­vorite poems:

It is dif­fi­cult to trans­late into Eng­lish the in­her­ently melan­choly voice of the Ger­man lan­guage and even more dif­fi­cult to as­cribe the longer rhythms and con­so­nant rich sound of Ger­man words that Rilke uses so mas­ter­fully in his po­ems. It is sim­ply im­pos­si­ble to bring across the full beauty of Rilke’s po­ems in Eng­lish. For the sake of most of the read­ers of this weblog, I’ve made my own attempt:

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Ger­man books are still pub­lished in small for­mats that are easy to carry in pock­ets. Japan­ese books, too. When I in­tro­duced a Japan­ese friend to The Lord of the Rings se­ries last year, at first she re­coiled when she saw the huge pa­per­back vol­ume in the Eng­lish sec­tion of Ki­noku­niya, the gi­ant six story book­store in down­town Tokyo. “It’s too heavy!” she protested. “Who’s go­ing to carry around a lump like that?” She was re­as­sured, how­ever, when she went down­stairs and dis­cov­ered that the Japan­ese ver­sions had been split into seven vol­umes, each small enough to slip into her purse’s side pocket.

I’m puz­zled why west­ern book com­pa­nies now is­sue most of their books in these huge bricks that barely fit into your bag and add up to the equiv­a­lent of a weightlifter’s bar­bell when stuff­ing a bag for school or work. Dur­ing the Sec­ond World War pub­lish­ers dis­trib­uted the newly de­signed “pocket books” so that sol­diers might carry a vol­ume in their back pock­ets, but the mo­bil­ity of these books still holds true to­day. Not only would car­ry­ing the lat­est edi­tion of the Harry Pot­ter se­ries while walk­ing the moun­tains make my pack a lot lighter (no I don’t bring such big books into the moun­tains!), but it would cer­tainly make hav­ing books shipped from Ama​zon​.com in the States here to Japan a lot cheaper.

Autumn Grey

October 28, 2003 | Laughing Knees | Comments Off 

Lac­quer Vines on the trunk of a Beech tree, au­tumn, Oze Marsh, Gunma Pre­fec­ture, 1994.

It is time to turn on in­can­des­cent lights while the skies har­bor the new ar­rival of nim­bus clouds. Sum­mer has passed, giv­ing way to the slow grip of win­ter. I sit fur­ther back from the win­dow, draw­ing in­ward to the map of my mind. Soon ex­cur­sions will is­sue chal­lenges from the tips of my shoes, kick­ing through the bones of leaves, and leav­ing a wake of as­sur­ance and re­gret. Grasshop­pers and man­tises shrivel into leaves. Lizards and toads in­cor­po­rate the earth, like clods of in­choate dreams. The aban­doned cries of dun minded birds ring out from the quiv­er­ing branches, un­chal­lenged and brave, small breasts held out to­wards the in­evitable cold. And the light, which heated the rooms of my sum­mer rever­ies, fades into sleep. Sleep and still­ness. The ship head­ing into a grey and silent peril.

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