…Originally recorded August 14th…
So I’m performing a ritual that was one once rife with teenage puppy love and urgency: the express train ride from Takanohara to Kyoto. Today the air is filled with as many ghosts as my mind; it’s unseasonably cold and raining. The rice fields look all the more vibrantly green against the grey water-coloured sky and the mountains which sang to me yesterday now hide in anonymity, obscured by fog. Telephone and power lines spread in spidery directions over all planes in my 16-bit vision. I find myself wanting to crawl through the pumpkin patches and paddies, soaking up the raw honestly, freeing my conscience of the industrial grime and tendrils that have festered and sprouted on my skin. So many small rivers fall before my eyes in between clumps of weathered earthone houses. Like a salmon I want to navigate them all to the sea. But blind poetry has me jaded, and perhaps I’m too far gone.
In a cloudy world do we find drama – the dark eyes and hair of a candy-lipped nymph, I begin to think myself spoiled to pine for such pet-bottle innocence long lost in the crow’s feet of my face. Fitzgerald and the color green spring to mind, echoing “symbolism! symbolism!” from my literature teacher’s bobbing throat. In perspective foreshortening does our idealism grow, for smaller things farther out of reach have less flaws. There’s enough hidden energy on these rooftops alone to keep my gnarled form breathing.
Rusted numbers stand ungarnished golems in a sea of weathered, carbon-copy apartments, and the rice fields and mountains become occluded by gambling dens and billboards. But Japan doesn’t have enough money to keep all the scenery fresh, so walls crack unpatched while sprawling weeds and moss attest nature’s perseverance over paving.
More and more tall beige buildings loom over the cockeyed, stained houses. The feeling ebbs from my legs as I slide further down in my seat from the train’s gentle rocking, and with the numb paralysis comes the end of my train ride. In a few moments I’ll disembark into the monolith of human self-effacing achievement, Kyoto eki….a place large enough to make even the most jubilant of lovers feel small, for you take it all at once….mammoth, blue, and vaulted.
