autumn tactics

Basho came to Hiraizumi to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Yoshitsune’s death. It was then, seeing the open fields, all that remained of the once great Fujiwara monuments, that he wrote the famous haiku to sum up mankind’s fleeting glory.

Natsukusa ya (Ah, summer grass)
Tamedomo ga (All that remains from the ruin)
Yume no ato (of warriors’ dreams)

Though I always turn off my iPod when I enter a temple or shrine, I’ve spent most of my time walking around listening to the solemn half of the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. While this is fitting, reinforcing the muted, cold atmosphere I half-wished to find on this trip, this is not completely fair. Music, like any other form of art, can be used in recreation to serve us. We see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear, and we feel what we want to feel. Walking around with headphones all the time reinforces any barriers we already have built up around us, encased in our our little private bubbles. This cannot continue for very long without adverse effect.

So I took off the headphones to leave my mind to idle though. As I further realized when walking through the jukai of Aokigahara, it’s not long before I start making nonsensical remarks to myself, quoting movies and books, frequently in an absurd voice. Before stopping for afternoon tea I wondered aloud if Basho talked to himself three hundred years ago, and if he did, did he quote popular theatrical comedy of the day, pausing to chuckle at how amused with himself he was?

When I was in elementary school, the annual book fair was always a time of great anticipation. How many yarn-tasseled Garfield bookmarks could I con mom into buying me this year? One time I bought a book, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. At the time I thought that it was related to Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective, in which the main character was named Basil. However, this was not the case as my mother informed me before buying it, but stubborn and not wanting to believe such depressing news, I insisted I knew this and wanted the book nonetheless. So, she bought it and it did indeed end up about being nothing about detectives or mice named Basil, but it was a very interesting read about two children who run away and live in a museum for a number of months. The image of all those toilets to oneself; the kind of comfort that comes only from the absolute pristine silence of dozens of toilets all to oneself, was strangely appealing. There is a similar line in the film With Honors; Joe Pesci makes such a comment about the bliss of living in a Harvard library.

I have a similar situation presented to me now, the only patron in a camping area with dozens of empty, tidily swept lodges. I enjoyed heavenly twenty minute trips to the ice cold toilets, slowly savoring my third read of The Dharma Bums.

Today was indeed a day spun in stories. Like a lot of times my assumptions and plans were all nonsense, but i was lucky to have people showing me the way. I climbed a 1200 meter mountain, I rode a horse, I picked my way through suicide woods at desk, I went spelunking in a bat cave, I bathed in hot water springs and ate one of the most perfect meals of my entire life. Twelve miles, thirteen hours, and a sense of deep satisfaction. I have half a bottle of the most delicious win but Japhy was right, in the mountains the air is thin and you don’t crave it. Kerouac was telling the truth, and I know how he felt…

Too physically active to drink, and something of completeness, and the hope to start a new direction in one’s life. The silence is almost maddening. [It was at least until a deer scream from the forest behind sent me quaking deeper into my Carinthia.]

expression.

through a lattice of shade
from an autumn sun,
the joyful youth of Tokyo
assembled.

blades of tall grass and smiling faces
sunglasses, blue jeans, and cigarettes
the air is damp with vapor rub incense.
bass ricochets through trees and
rattles in concert with sub-way below.

staring at my thumbnail I realized
the primary difference between
photography and music: time.
I’m sweaty sunk in that celebration–
the weekend a 48 hour drag
on a glorious 4-D joint.

on being

what is techno what is love?

to illuminate or fade, so many choices at instants in our life.
unthought, unspoken, unfelt, but in the pit of our souls a gear is turning.

yes today was x, y, and z.
tomorrow I will do great things and be songworthy
but no… yet no…

now we are faced with a challenge as always:
to burn, or to fold.
tomorrow is uncertain, now the blood of time is within you.
so ignite! so shine!
so give every last drop of your beautiful broken life to the stars,
for only in this instant will they weep for you!

on dancing

pulse until you drop thrive shake and spin
do not listen to the music!
run ahead of it!

you already know the next four beats, this is obvious.
they have telegraphed themselves into your brain,
you need only to complete the sequence.
it is a game of chess encoded in the rhythm of raindrops;
you have no choice honestly except to submit to their will.

So, Design Festa has ended, much sooner than I expected, actually. Friday night I toiled updating my poems and assembling my concept summary until morning, returning from the Southern Tower Kinko’s as the sky grew light at 4:30 Saturday morning. After sleeping for two hours and being dead to my alarm, the impatient calls from my ride at seven threw me into a dash of assembly until 12:15, over an hour past the show opening. I foolishly thought that being the second time around I’d be more prepared and installation would go smoother, but again this time I had nearly twice the materials as the last, and my booth setup was more complicated than my previous outing. Thank the Lord I had friends with me to put it together. Without them, there would have been no show

Then with a sweat-frosted brow, I stood proudly in my skiing cowboy shirt, eyes alight nostrils flaring, continuing on energy that came from some sort of environmental tap. Balancing on my toes, rocking over my knees I smiled, beamed, and gestured. I explained what Tokyo meant to me, what my goals were for the future, how the buildings and the colors, the stories witnessed and imagined all drove me nearly insane with ardor that simply must be redirected onto these two dozen pieces of coloured paper.

I didn’t eat for thirty hours, just absently sipping plastic bottled sports drinks between the waves of young girls that drifted in and out of my booth. When I sensed someone was not in a hurry and genuinely looking at my wrinkled black canvas, I intruded making a slight bow and offered a headset playing a remixed version of Leonid’s Crater. The ambient river that I coaxed out of the microKORG mingled with samples of clacking heels, passing bicycles, and slowly withdrawing automobiles. Birds warbled and summer cicadas sang: so much shuffled and tinkling green tea powder over a sublime layer of mint cake. The sound was well-received and led to conversations, long moments where I forgot my humility and sped on feverishly, taking every question and using it as a springboard into a clammy reel of my philosophy. Perhaps too emphatic, after finishing a complete revolution of my spiel, conversation often dropped off sharply and my exhaustion precluded common sense, ending each meeting with a weak smile and a passing of my business card.

I sold a dozen or so postcards, gave away a handful more, and at the end of the day had so much in my mind of how I would improve upon it all next time, during packing up and the train ride home I was virtually catatonic.

Already a bushel of future concepts have risen up in my mind like sprouting weeds after a long summer rain. I don’t have time to enumerate them all right now, because this is the stream of consciousness post, and I don’t have the gallery assembled yet anyway. Give me a day or two and then you can see the collective fruits of my efforts (and maybe even hear them).

Not much, apparently. Actually even though I had a couple days off last week for Golden Week, much like last Christmas there was very little resting going on. I didn’t even make a 36-hour trip to Kyoto this time. I went to the park like once.

I’ve been grinding my gears with Photoshop, OpenMPT, and the microKORG over the past month. I forget if I mentioned it, but I’m currently working on a show and this time I have a theme. The good thing about this is if I pull it off, it’s a lot easier to connect with the guests, increasing the chances of having some sort of lasting effect on someone. The bad thing is that my tool usage skills are behind the curve for what I hope to accomplish.

I have sixteen days. If you have a spare moment, send me an angel.

Though I can’t really claim to have had any significant downtime in the last four years, I do have a standard that I’ve maintained for more or less half a year. A normal day starts with one hour waking up/shower, thirteen hours communting/work, one and a half hours dinner/television, one hour reading news/comics on the computer, half an hour tidying/getting ready for bed, and then roughly six-seven hours of sleep. I used to analyze it thinking I could improve it somehow, but there are constants which fighting will only exhaust you more.

After I got back from Paris last May and registered for GEISAI, I made plans for a restructured schedule, and got into it really during the summer, at which point I spiraled into an intense three months of simply work (corporate) + work (private). It was tiring, it was exciting, and it ended in a sleepless daze that I vaguely remember. Afterwards I “took a break” which meant going back to “the standard”, and not touching my camera or synth for about six weeks. It didn’t exactly get me back to like-new condition.

But, an idle mind is a crazy one, for me, so perhaps it’s best that I stay near the cusp of exhaustion fighting for something that only makes sense to me.

Now that I am “idle”, and have a lot of time on my hands, I decided I needed another improbable goal to motivate me to tighten the screws on my regimen. The next GEISAI is proported to occur sometime in the summer, and a tentative art show four months away isn’t enough of a impetus to spur me to serious action, so I made a spur of the moment decision. I squeezed through the closing door of DESIGN FESTA 25 registration and got myself a booth for Saturday the 26th of May.

My gosh! That’s less than seven weeks away! How in the world will I put together a display of artwork that’s a substantial improvement over last autumn in half the time?

Good question, let’s find out.

faint linen petals
sunlight falls in spring
deftly rise and climbing
the hollows of my cheeks

below grey skies
and leafless trees
you spent your winter alone

walking down wet stone streets
to the sound of car tires in rain
half asleep you found your way home

but the bread was dry
and the long nights empty
a space full of things
but little warmth

you spent all that time
by yourself just searching
for what unsure, but nobly

through the months quietly on
an independent sort of dream
a barren winter of adagio

Full moon, tranquil night.

By pale lamp post I rest awhile in Maruyama Park. Water gurgles from a fountain to the west; occasionally a dog cries out in frustration. Lovers chat on a nearby bench, and far away in Gion an ambulance murmurs.

A puddle, the rock.
January second, the start of winter, yet thinking I do not grow cold. My mind is filled with a hundred deliberations, but the space around me just says, “Stop.”

Stop all this nonsense, stop the spinning of wheels. Stop fumbling through things only half aware of what’s going on. This time was given to heal, heal the mind, heal the body. This time is meant to be used for restitution. Yet for four years I’ve sought restitution, and only managed to leave a thousand doors half-opened.

What is the ideal? Can there be a paradigm? If there were an example, or a prophet, then quickly I could emulate that style. Why does growing older and knowing more mean having diminishing answers and multiplying questions? Is ignorance the true nirvana? Or is this a crossing in a forest, and the myriad paths will with time merge back into one? I’d like to think that at worst, through trial, I’ve found what the answer is not, so this narrowing of choices will one day reveal the way. But in prolonged emptiness I’ve lost confidence, and now looking back with doubt at each temrinated road I worry that one if not many were correct, and I only gave up too soon or applied too little perseverance. Now this lack of focus taints every endeavour I make, so the quality of everything suffers as a consequence, dragging me deeper and deeper into the quagmire of obscurity.

A thinker sits, his blog the stage, to an audience two billion ripe, all caught up in the act of one from a troupe two billion poets strong.

As the ambient light fades the ducks quack indifference, and the whistle crossing signal of Sanjobashi consumes the waning day.

Oh, but why? How a winter’s day by the Kamo can chill a man. No sun, no snow, just damp and stone. How else could the day be spent? But so much, so many things… how many do await in this old city for a traveller and a thinker? But money does not buy happiness, oh no. With money comes so much baggage, so much regret, like a city, not your own, but only belonging to someone else, now gone.

Gentle duck, fair fisher.

The heron finds meal for today. Waking water, tender sleeper; you will flow no matter how many lovers visit your shores. Silent reed, ragged grass; in your weathered arms the crane keeps her home.

Not skirts, not pavement, not dates made on a calendar; time walks by while I sit.

There is another force inside of me, it rests. It waits and sleeps, sleeps for the sunlight, sleeps for the cold, sleeps for the metallic verve to caress and stroke its latent kinetic.

Down into the ground, to a world of concerte and plastic, to a capillary of transit, a translucent valve into a pulsing network. The guards slide open and I step across to join the stream, and again I’m racing to a land of illusion.

Forests, mountains, and fields. Color blurs and the residual image of my footsteps melts across soil and brick. The noonday sun is enveloped like me, and both are made to move, cutting through nonlinear planes.

What need have I for a home? Why assign meaning to concepts best left vague? Already we’ve broken at so many junctions, two meters apart and gazing into different stars. The impermanence of everything is atmospheric, and the awareness of that humidity has already cast fates down in the sand. But freedom is movement in four dimensions, and from fifty miles above unchanged but here in the grass a number of paths can be cut.

So today I leave the hours and minutes behind, and only move; moving forward, moving up, moving still while the current runs circles in my mind. Snake, dart, jump, and devour. Tonight I’ll go looking for contrast in life once more.

life, reverbs, i am asleep, but here
no, floating nirvana
so lost in the crowds of a tunnel
notes casade, over and over, like the drops of a sweet waterfall
through heaven, into the ope and waiting eyes of the visionaries.

awake, dear children! this is the moment for your learning
so far, so far, you’ve come to recieve this, and now is the time when it will be given in generous helpings.

awash, awash, sweet lover.

I sat in the sand, huddled between the legs of smoking buddhas, while you drifted among the currents.

so fresh, so fresh, at last I was bathed in starlight

no, oh yes, reach into the places of me so often hidden, reach in and let them unlock all the doors I’ve shut around my self. you must have broguht me here for this purpose, for there really is no other.

then comes the echo, then comes the burning spirits to visit each tongue and mind with the fire of understanding. then we wait in waiting and stretch long unused muscles in eager anticipation of the union.

stretch, extend and release, deep in swirling fogs. there all things left hidden, will be found.

sweet life, saggy eyes. hello long road snaking through these hills.

somewhere beyond the stream of bleary incadescent lights a mind awaoke from an hour of fitful sleep and found its way into the passenger seat of my journey home.

talking about rent and picnics in the park, yawning with the grit of a night in a tent and gazing at the ocean, elbow deep in the sands left golden by mindful souls.

the rain broke and the fog burned off, but I was left nestled deep amidst a purple sea of experiences caught on the edge of my conscience.

an acoustic guitar and a soft voice, the middle seat and a cooler of spent bacchany; something tight was loosened to make me strong.