where the knife is less sharp

I felt it today again, contemplating this almost unreal sunset touch a placid silvery sea I once knew so well.

Walking hand in hand with my daughter along the beach, envisioning our next move, imagining a more liveable, saner place out there.

Where shall we go next? Where shall we, when the world is going mad?

We belong, indeed, in the place we long for.

*       *       *

I live on an island
I work on that island


there is no home
(and that the hardest to admit -
that we're here naked, alone)


the island part of a continent
and that part of the world (obviously)


Fly, float, drift, from place to place,
land to land.


And where is the knife less sharp, sir?


--Lee Harwood, from 'Notes of a Post Office Clerk' in Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2004), p. 252.

the tsunami, the atom, and the cherry blossoms

To those who read French, I vividly recommend this recent text by one of the leading scholars on Japan's cultural geography and landscape:

'Le tsunami, l'atome et les cerisiers', by Augustin Berque
http://culturevisuelle.org/catastrophes/2011/03/19/le-tsunami-l’atome-et-les-cerisiers-augustin-berque/

to begin to begin again

How to begin to find a shape--to begin to begin again,
turning the inside out : to find one phrase that will
lie married beside another for delight         .        ?

       --William Carlos Williams, from Paterson, Book III.

.

disquieting questions

... that speak volumes of Japanese politics, its lack of leadership and of democratic and transparency standards.

*       *       *

Japan Extended Reactor’s Life, Despite Warning

Just a month before a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the center of Japan’s nuclear crisis, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the six reactors at the power station despite warnings about its safety.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22nuclear.html?_r=1&hp



TEPCO, Credibility, and the Japanese Crisis

Since the 9.0 quake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11 and the situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant rapidly degenerated, Fukushima residents and politicians, those most afflicted by the current crisis, have criticized the lack of information provided by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the government. Prefectures with a concentration of nuclear power plants like Fukui and diverse citizens’ groups have also sounded off, condemning the lack of information and delay in releasing critical facts to the public. A particular concern is that the government initially left far too much up to the company, was slow in establishing a headquarters to coordinate joint response, and initially accepted TEPCOs vague description of the situation and assurances, many of which have since turned out to be suspect.
http://japanfocus.org/events/view/52



Japan's Nuclear Crisis: Status of Spent Fuel at Exploded Reactor Buildings Unclear

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) is asking an important question about Japan's nuclear crisis that seems to have been ignored by the media and in announcements from the Japanese government and Japan's nuclear power industry: What is happening with the spent fuel pools located at the top of the buildings housing the Unit 1 and Unit 3 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant facility? Both reactor buildings have lost their upper structures due to explosions possibly caused by a hydrogen gas build-up (Unit 1 on March 12, Unit 3 on March 14).
http://japanfocus.org/events/view/51

on the razor's edge

Justifiably or not, many, including yours truly, have left Tokyo - or Japan altogether - due to radiation fears. Well, the truth is that personally I'm much more concerned with this and this, and weary, way too weary of living on the razor's edge.

On borrowed time, at various levels.

Much as I sympathise with the suffering of those affected by the unfolding disaster, this has long ceased to be a land I want to live in.

In the interim, I shall get back to Jared Diamond's Collapse, a most timely reminder of how very fragile certain societies can be.

even in the pitch dark

Despite everything - the distance, the unforgiveness, the hopelessness of it all - I can't help thinking & worrying.

I just can't.

*       *       *

All I've got is one eye and two brains
to love you with and I'm so concerned
especially at night for your peace
since the directions are uncertain
meagre and costly for two as for one
but to the tune of a progressive reluctance
we shall one day attain some kind of summit
don't you think? These are verifiable things:
that in the presence of two hundred screaming
aircraft known as 'the future' our slowly
unfolding certainties keep us upright
even in the pitch dark while the alarm clock
in my chest keeps me gentle, where
would you be about now?


--Peter Riley, 'Folded Message' in Passing Measures: A Collection of Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), p. 96.

farewell, all lovely vanishing things

I knew it would happen some day soon, but never in this way. Never.

The ominous, gathering gloom over these past few months had made me want to leave as quickly as possible and find a more hospitable place to live. Yet deep down I was hoping that the transition would be somewhat smoother, though inevitably painful.

Who could have foreseen such an unspeakable tragedy?

Escapist though it may seem, I've spent these last days trying to come to terms with this country I so passionately love and hate. Listening to the trees and the birds, feeling the snow beneath my feet, bathing at the local onsen, revisiting some of the beautiful places where I once felt happy and whose memories I'll cherish forever.

Preparing to leave.

Because I don't really know when - or if - I'll ever be able to see them again, these beautiful vanishing things, now that I'm being compelled to flee disaster and leave so much behind. We're never prepared indeed.

This was thus the closest I could get to a proper farewell. Sad, but beautiful.

I shall hold you close forever keenly in my memory - and hope that some greater good may one day emerge from all this catastrophe.

I then leave by making mine George Mackay Brown's wish:

It could happen that the atom-and-planet horror at the heart of our civilisation will scatter people again to the quiet beautiful fertile places of the world.

I hope so, I hope.

unpreparedness

You spend your life preparing, rehearsing, putting on masks for this and that, but are never prepared for what really matters.

For being alive.

And how could it be otherwise? Because being alive is being alert and responsive to those unscripted moments, those empty spaces that can change everything and in relation to which all preparations are in vain.

How difficult to face our general unpreparedness, though; how much easier to run away and take refuge in the predictable.


How much easier to be untruthful, disloyal to ourselves.

*       *       *

Coming into the world
unprepared


and being then always --
in honour of that
birth and to stay
close to it --
under-provided


and driven to exhibit
over and over again
unpreparedness


habitually
unready to be caught
born


--Roy Fisher, 'A Poem to be Watched' in The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1996), p. 144.

'Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age'...

The snow falling faintly outside this afternoon has brought back memories of one of my favourite films ever, one that I always watch with deep emotion.

John Huston's final work, a faithful adaptation of James Joyce's short story 'The Dead', from the collection Dubliners, is an elegiac tale about the inexorable passing of time, the perception of ageing and mortality, and the ways in which the memory of loss impinges on our relationship with the present.

http://www.videodetective.com/movies/trailers/the-dead-trailer/698

The backdrop of the story is a Christmas family reunion in the Dublin of the early 1900s, but its appeal is universal, beautiful, shattering, particularly the final scene in which Gabriel Conroy muses on his wife's revelation of her long-deceased lover and is overwhelmed by self-doubt, by regret at his own emotional paralysis and lack of passion, which make him suddenly aware of his own frailty, of the fading and passing of everything, as he contemplates the blank snowy landscape outside:



One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.


Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.


A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.


--from 'The Dead', by James Joyce.

writing matters (2)

The forms of communicating with the other in his/her absence have multiplied and accelerated beyond belief over the past decades. At once producers and products of our changed, anguished sense of time and of our loss of intimacy, they have brought into disrepute that once quintessential vehicle for defending ourselves against the pain of separation: a painstakingly handwritten letter.

Maybe because your bodily investment into it is so limited (or at least so automatised), maybe because the sense of distance in space & time can be so easily deluded through its apparent immediacy and its lack of physicality, an e-mail can never be a substitute for that fiction of intimate connection which a letter aims to create.

Pace all e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc., enthusiasts, no other space of communication gives you so much scope for self-creation and self-discovery than a letter to a friend, a lover, a close relative. In its unabashed physicality - the handwriting, the paper, the textures, the scents - a letter assumes itself as an idealisation, a fantasy of intimacy, and, at the same time, a testimony of distance.

The response it eventually elicits (or not) is beside the point, because the wait, the anticipation itself is part of the movement of creation - that transformation of affect hunger into hallucinatory nourishment, of loneliness into an imaginary communion.

A sustaining fiction, in sum, unlike all the other seemingly more sophisticated yet impoverishing fictions we continue to invent to tackle distance and separation.

a manifesto for sanity

In a culture where derrangement and disequilibrium are the constant and inescapable climate of a politics of bewilderment, the militant tactic is not intoxication and excess but to come to our senses and to learn to live in the space they open up.

[...]

Within the present order, new models of order can be conceived, realised, maintained and dissolved, to leave a world that will seem less intractable.

The issue is not transcendence or escape but to realise that we do not confront an objective and final reality, that the means are available, that in any situation there may be intelligence, movement, sufficient light.

Imaginative transformation should be considered as preliminary to a corresponding transformation at the level of materials and events.

--Thomas A. Clark, 'On Imaginative Space'.

Source: http://www.cairneditions.co.uk/On_Imaginative_Space.pdf

remembrance, on a starless night

The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek.

            --Basil Bunting, from Briggflatts, Part V.

Galapagos syndrome...

... or the beginning of a new sakoku?

Credit: Eddie Gerald/Alamy 

'Galapagos syndrome': Japan's gaze turns inward

27 January 2011
The Times Higher Education Supplement
Castigated for its timidity, a 'risk-averse' generation shuns study abroad, Michael Fitzpatrick writes


The yen has never been mightier and their country never more tied to the global economy, but Japanese students increasingly are turning their backs on studying abroad.

Figures for the UK show that the number of Japanese students has fallen by more than a third in five years, from 6,800 in 2003-04 to 4,505 in 2008-09, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

In a country with a shrinking population - the number of children under 15 has declined for 28 consecutive years - some of the fall can be attributed to demographics, but analysts in Japan see the trend as part of what has been termed "Galapagos syndrome".

Originally said of the country's highly advanced mobile phones that failed to find buyers outside the domestic market, the term is now also applied to a country said to be isolating itself from the rest of the world.

As commentator and blogger Mariko Sanchanta writes: "An official at one of Japan's leading banks recently confided that it was impossible to get young employees to study abroad - fully funded by the bank - or even to do an international stint. They feel like they'll fall behind their peers if they go overseas. 'It's so stupid,' grumbled the official, who came from a generation when Japan's best and brightest were dispatched to (the US) to learn English and gain perspective by living overseas."

The decline in the number of Japanese students in the US is even more pronounced than in the UK. According to the US-based Institute of International Education, the country had 30,000 Japanese students in 2008, approximately 60 per cent of the number studying in the US a decade earlier.

Many in Japan are worried about what the figures mean for its export-driven economy, and there is much soul-searching in the media. This has focused on what such reticence says about the country's young - particularly men, who have been variously labelled as "herbivore males", "grass-eaters" or simply Ojo-man ("girly men").

A study by university researchers for the publisher Benesse on the attitudes of children seems to support some of the speculation. It says that Japan's young are less adventurous than previous generations.

"Children fear that in a society with a widening gap between the rich and the poor, making a big mistake will prevent them from moving up in the world, which diminishes their ambition," said Kiyoshi Takeuchi, a professor of educational sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Not only are young people more risk-averse, a belief that home is safe (anzen) and abroad dangerous (abunai) is gaining traction.

Meanwhile, books such as the sensationally titled Don't Let Your Daughter Study Abroad (2007), aimed as an antidote to the unrealistic expectations of young Japanese hoping to study English abroad, do little to promote overseas education.

It is one of a number of books that detail the "horrors" of studying abroad. Its author, Mitsuko Takahashi, a coordinator for overseas Japanese students, paints a dark picture of life outside Japan.

Other texts about foreign perils include the Manual for Women Students Regarding Depravity (1995), published by the Research Institute on the Delinquency Problem. It warns Japanese women to avoid men while studying abroad because "they don't have money" and "want a lot of sex".


Source: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414933

read in passing

Some things strike you like lightning, because so uncannily accurate:

       What is most strange is not to be found in exotic locales but close
       to home.

Because so very true.

tatemae & honne (2)

I have recently felt that I might be getting mellow [...]. 
The Japanese are just like other people. They work hard
to support their--but no. They are not like everyone else.
They are infinitely more clannish, insular, parochial, and
one owes it to one's self-respect to preserve a certain
outrage at the insularity. To have the sense of outrage
go dull is to lose the will to communicate; and that I
think is death.
---Edward Seidensticker, This Country Japan (Tokyo:
Kodansha, 1984), p. 332 [my emphasis].


One thing about us foreigners is we can become friends overnight,
become really close," [Konishiki] explains. "The Japanese people
are more like, 'up front we are good friends,' but at the back they're
not too sure, they don't show that side, it takes time for them, but
they won't show it. [Us] foreigners, we tend to be very open when
we meet Japanese people," he adds, "which is OK, but make sure
not to get too deep, thinking that they are 100 percent with you-
it won't work with the Japanese.
---Konishiki, former Sumo star, in interview with The Japan Times
[my emphasis].

A slow lunch with a group of dear friends yesterday has once again set me thinking on the issue. That is, on how long it has taken me to realise this simple - and, to me, painful - truth that so many Westerners living here for any considerable length of time seem to take for granted: to enjoy and make the best of life in Japan you absolutely need to shield yourself from any close contact with most Japanese, with their stiff mental categories and regimented behaviours, and move within a selected circle of (mostly) Western friends. For the sake of sanity.

Yet nothing is more contrary to my beliefs in intercultural dialogue, to my cherished faith in people's capacity to overcome even the most difficult cultural and psychological barriers. Not in Japan though, alas. Slow learner as I am, I've had to reach my wits' end and accumulate an almost unbearable amount of professional and, above all, personal disappointments to realise this truth and restore my faith in the rest of humankind. And the sad truth is what Edward Seidensticker, one of the most eminent and perceptive scholars of modern Japan, describes in the above-cited passage: that the Japanese are not, to their own detriment, like everyone else, and that, despite the 'all-smiles' facade, the barriers they erect to the successful personal and professional integration of non-Japanese are far higher than anywhere else.

It's all well and good as long as you're a passing presence, a linguistic and cultural ingenue who sticks to the surface of Japanese life and lavishes praise on the exoticism of the culture. But once you become fluent in Japanese and begin to perceive the murkiness that lies underneath the glossy, hyper-polite surface of the national psyche, then you step into dangerous territory and will soon be seen as a threatening, inconvenient, intrusive presence. As our dear wise man Konishiki (a Japanese national of Hawaiian origin who, symptomatically, still considers himself a 'foreigner') advises, make sure not to get too deep with the Japanese - that is to say, never, but never let your guard down and make the naive mistake of assuming you're part of their uchi. They will always keep you at arm's length.

In a soberer tone, Seidensticker's note touches on the crux of the Westerner's experience in Japan. Their manifold differences and idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, most Westerners, and particularly those who pursue intellectual/scholarly interests, were educated within cultural traditions that generally value individuality and encourage reasoning, debate, inquiry, critique, dissent, and friction as healthy, essential aspects of the life of the mind.

And yet criticise is precisely what you're not allowed to do in Japan - or, if you're willing to, you can be sure you'll pay a high price. And yet... criticise is precisely what any observant and discerning Westerner must perforce do to keep one's self-respect and sense of justice (or of outrage, as Seidensticker puts it) in Japan. Unless, of course, you're one of those calculating long-residing chaps who readily sell out in order to achieve their petty ambitions, and have no qualms about cynically surrendering to the prevailing tatemae mindset. Since I have little respect for the latter though, I shall waste no time with them.

But why is then the very lifeblood of intellectual and civic existence in the West - the ability to criticise and oppose existing conditions in order to change them for the better - so widely disliked and feared in Japan? And an even more baffling question: how come people who are supposed to be highly educated display such an ingrained inability to deal with criticism, and thus recurrently censor, snub, bully, and condemn to all sorts of mura hachibu - the colourful native word for ostracism - those who dare to express some form of dissent from their envisaged sense of wa (和), the Japanese concept of a group-oriented harmony or consensus?

A partial answer to the enigma lies in a key distinction that the Western mind takes for granted: that between society and self, between group and individual. Due to the blurring of this distinction, criticism of Japan tends to be taken personally by the Japanese, and more often than not seriously threatens, or destroys altogether, basic loyalties and friendships. Hence I couldn't agree more with a remark cited in Ivan P. Hall's devastating portrait of the Japanese intelligentsia and its cartel mentality, Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop:

'If you're a foreigner who is too critical about Japan, your sources of information or friends dry up'. [...] Access in Japan depends excessively on a warm personal rapport, for the sake of which too many [Western] scholars, cultural diplomats, and other intellectuals with a stake in Japan have trimmed their critical sails. [...] For those foreigners willing to bear a certain personal cost, however, I must stress the importance and feasibility of speaking out. (pp. 177-78)

And what a cost you often bear, what a cost. Most disheartening of all is how these forms of censorship and snubbing can manifest themselves not only in the domain of work relationships but also in the private sphere. I've recently learned a painful lesson when a native chap I had (naively) taken for a friend bluntly warned me that I'd soon lose all my Japanese friends, one by one, if I continued criticising Japan the way I do. As the saying goes, with friends like these who the hell needs enemies?!

Not all Japanese are as undiscerning and infantile as this and other chaps I've met here are, thank goodness, but the way such thoughtless, bigoted behaviours recur even among seemingly intelligent and cultured people who should know better is quite alarming. However I try, I can't imagine being cold-shouldered by a Western friend just because I've criticised some aspect of her/his culture. While s/he might disagree with the remark(s), we'll certainly remain friends as before. You expect people to be sensible or, well, sane (!) enough to make some basic distinctions.

Not in Japan though, apparently. A small-minded, kokoro no semai, ki ga mijikai Japanese will bitterly resent you, and your outspokenness will forever cast a shadow on your... er... 'friendship'. It's only a question of time until you pay the price and have the door slammed in your face. These fellas will make sure you do: they simply know no other way, so deeply is the pattern of surveillance & punishment engraved in their psyche (since, say, the Edo period?).

On the other hand, a Western assertive mind can't help wondering that one must be really at a low ebb - or in a state of utter denial - and have a very, very fragile sense of identity to display such a chronic inability to gracefully deal with criticism, to make some basic distinctions like those mentioned above as well as to see or judge the flaws in the bubble inside of which one lives.

Now, reverting to my very open circle of Western friends in Tokyo and our recent slow lunch. As we were discussing these and other matters concerning cultural-national allegiances and their pitfalls, one of them wittily remarked that the reason why most Westerners find it so hard to cope with this straightjacket society is that we are creatures of exuberance, passion, who thrive on individuality, idiosyncrasy, iconoclasm, dissent, conflict, risk-taking. The fragile, diffident, self-censored Japanese ego, by contrast, feels gravely threatened and easily freaks out and crumbles when faced with all these things that unsettle its overneat uchi/soto mental categories and challenge thereby its spurious sense of wa.

In view of all these crucial differences, what forms of understanding and dialogue with such hopeless people can one possibly envisage? I'm at my wits' end indeed, I must confess. After all these years.

the pleasures of friendship

Impromptu, sincere gestures of friendship are a rarity in this land of sickeningly untrusting and two-faced people.

That's why these gestures are such a joy -- as when you arrive home late in the evening after an exhausting day and find a small bowl of delicious, wholesome stew at the bottom of your stairway tenderly left by a friend with an affectionate note.

Arigato, I.-san! You're one in a million indeed.

everlasting resurrection

At the end of an unbelievably stressful and hectic month that never seemed to end, the first intimations of spring bring some signs of hope.

This winter of my discontent will soon be over, it will be.

Frostbitten and battle-scarred, but I've survived another one.

*       *       *

Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise
mournful candles. Sad is spring
to perpetuate, sad to trace
immortalities never changing.


Weary on the sea
for sight of land
gazing past the coming wave we
see the same wave;


drift on merciless reiteration of years;
descry no death; but spring
is everlasting
resurrection.


--Basil Bunting, from First Book of Odes (1924) in Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 75.

so as not to forget

For friendship
make a chain that holds,
to be bound to
others, two by two,

a walk, a garland,
handed by hands
that cannot move
unless they hold.

            --Robert Creeley

into the shadows, again

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.... 
        --T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


Who has the courage to go into the dark places where
there is nothing but feeling?   
                 --Thomas A. Clark, 'A Walk by Moonlight'




Baffling indeed, how this growing obsession with the spotlight of continuous display, this incessant chitter-chatter on mobile phones, Facebooks, Twitters, whatever, can coexist with, or perhaps serve to mask, a neurotic fear of genuine disclosure, a panic over the emotional openness to others --- and to oneself.


When everything, everyone is mask, performance, stage, rehearsal, calculation, is there any room left for the shadows of true intimacy, for the spontaneity of feeling?


For life itself...?

indeed

In the same way that sometimes you have to get rid of yourself to find yourself, other times you have to leave home to find home - or at least to write it.

wanting a message

If you want messages you must provide an orifice.
But to really want messages is itself an orifice,
a lesion, an interruption of the diurnal pact. The future
ferments in this cleft, packed with honour and disdain,
drawing us ever larger and further on, to this self-
same world, that listens; the rest is vain stuff.

Surely it is this whole particular, this action we
are that draws our sight into the funnel, opening
and closing as the light wing flutters, back
and forth, back and forth, wisdom and rubbish -
poetry is the flight. And now if I can just get out
of this notional claw I'll find exactly where I am.


--Peter Riley, from 'Ballad of the Broken Bridge' in Passing Measures: A Collection of Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), p. 16.

my own pillow book (2)

Resuming the compilation of intense dislikes for my own pillow book...

*       *       *

Sanctimoniousness. Self-righteous, holier-than-thou people who don't hesitate to summarily judge and execute others for their faults and shortcomings, as if they themselves were paragons of virtue. (And, of course, they're always the first to claim they never judge other people. Never. What an idea!)

Needless to say, hypocrisy and fickleness never lag far behind these chaps.

Maybe because I come from such a stuffy old catholic culture, I'm way too familiar with the pattern and have no patience whatsoever for such troubled souls.

Let them rot in their own misery thus.

Amen.

forgetting me, remember me

At the end of a day full of bitter-sweet memories you want to forget and remember, an old fave.

Because the goal of living is to contradict ourselves.

*       *       *

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me


   --e. e. cummings


.

literary women

Some things haven't changed that much indeed concerning the treatment of women deemed to have transgressed their 'proper' place or certain social and cultural boundaries.

*       *       *

To be pointed at - to be noticed & commented upon - to be suspected of literary airs - to be shunned, as literary women are, by the more unpretending of my own sex: & abhorred, as literary women are, by the more pretending of the other! - My dear, I would sooner exhibit as a rope dancer.

--Mary Brunton, 1810 [qtd. in E. Eger, C. Grant, C. O' Gallchoir, and P. Warburton, eds. Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1.]

women on the move

And the journey continues, with the most interesting discoveries and insights cropping up on the way:

The historian Eric J. Leed acknowledges the constitutive masculinity of travel when he argues that, 'from the time of Gilgamesh,' journeying has served as 'the medium of traditional male immortalities,' enabling men to imagine escape from death by the 'crossing' of space and the 'record[ing]' of adventures 'in bricks, books, and stories.' He even labels this travel, which provides men the opportunity to achieve notable distinction through self-defining experience far from home, 'spermatic' travel.

Ever in the process of becoming 'men,' travellers affirm their masculinity through purposes, activities, behaviors, dispositions, perspectives, and bodily movements displayed on the road, and through the narratives of travel that they return home to the sending culture. Thus, travel functions as a defining area of agency. We cannot imagine Odysseus without his travels, or Aeneas, or the knights of the Round Table, or Columbus, Captain Cook, Boswell, Byron, or Loti, or, closer to our own times, Jack Kerouac. Nor can we imagine them without their travel narratives. These narratives of travel can be read as journey myths 'project[ing],' as Richard Slotkin suggests of myths generally, 'models of good and heroic behavior that reinforce the values of ideology, and affirm as good the distribution of authority and power that ideology rationalizes.'


Leed contrasts the masculine logic of mobility with the logic of 'sessility'. To be 'sessile,' in botanical terms, is to be permanently planted, tenaciously fixed, utterly immobile. It is, in a sense, to remain always 'at home,' which has been the traditional locale assigned to women. What Judith Butler describes as 'the domain of socially instituted norms,' through which gender identity and gendered relationships get reiterated in everyday occasions, secures the domestication of a woman through protocols of proper femininity that tether her to home and thus to a requisite sessility. But she is not just resident in the home. As Karen R. Lawrence observes in Penelope Voyages, 'She in effect is home itself, for the female body is traditionally associated with earth, shelter, enclosure.' Whatever particular women may be doing in their everyday lives, the idea of woman as 'earth, shelter, enclosure,' as 'home,' persists, anchoring femininity, weighing it down, fixing it as a compass point [my note: an idea that is deeply - and depressingly - entrenched in Japanese culture and language]. Moreover, the 'home' that is identified as feminine, feminized, and equated with woman becomes that which must be left behind in the pursuit of agency. This 'stifling home,' Meaghan Morris observes so tellingly, has been precisely 'the place from which the voyage begins and to which, in the end, it returns.'

Yet, even though travel has generally been associated with men and masculine prerogatives, even though it has functioned as a domain of constitutive masculinity, women have always been and continue to be on the move. They climb aboard sailing vessels, or pull themselves onto horses, or grab a walking stick and set out along rutted paths, or rush to make a train. If traveling, being on the road, makes a man a man - and makes masculinity and its power visible - what does it make a woman, who is at once subject as home and subject at home? What does it make for a particular woman to gain access to this defining arena of agency in the West?


--Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. ix-x.


The journey continues...

===================
Image: Isabella L. Bird, the intrepid Victorian traveller, in Tibet at the end of the 19th century.

(source: http://seducedbyhistory.blogspot.com/2010/10/isabella-bird-victorian-lady-world.html)

and you can turn back no longer, no longer stand still

Strange days. The wait on the eve of momentous decisions suspends time, puts life in parentheses, allows even the nursing of a heavy cold at home. Good for reading, writing, musing, imagining future possibilities.

Yet impossible at the same time to avoid a certain sadness, a sense of loss at the prospect of other once imagined possibilities and cherished hopes being left behind - foundered, shipwrecked, scorched.

But maybe, as a dear friend has recently told me, the hardest thing will be when the moment of truth arrives and you will have to renounce the numbing security of old habits, the memory of places & people that were once part of your life, however briefly. For good and all.

In the meantime, this strange limbo. Neither good nor bad, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither warm nor cold. Just something in between, moving in slow motion - inexorably, though.

*       *       *

Above and below
The roll of days spread out like a cloth
Days engraved on everyone's forehead
Yesterday folding Tomorrow opening
Today like a horse without a rider
Today a drop of water falling into a lake
Today a white light above and below

A fan of days held in a virgin hand
A burning taper burning paper
And you can turn back no longer
No longer stand still
The words of poems curling among the ashes
Hieroglyphics of larger despairs than ours.


--David Gascoyne, 'No Solution' in Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), p. 34.

writing matters (1)

... Writing matters tremendously for women; ... how we plot ourselves into our fictions has everything to do with how we plot ourselves into our lives.

Writing hurts.


--Ruth Behar, 'Introduction: Out of Exile' in Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. Women Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 15; 23.

to a troubled friend

Past the desert, out of the fog, whatever, but we will.
We shall ride out this storm, girl.

*       *       *

i command you to be
good runners
to go with grace
go well in the dark and
make for high ground
my dearest girls
my girls
my more than me

            --Lucille Clifton

poem at the end of the world

the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow   the one
she cannot tell    the one
there is no one to hear       this poem
is a political poem    is a war poem        is a
universal poem but is not about
these things    this poem
is about one human heart    this poem
is the poem at the end of the world

       --Lucille Clifton, from shapeshifter poems.

we are easily disloyal

                              ...That's how we
are disloyal, without constancy to the little
play and hurt in the soul. Being less than
strict in our gaze; the day flickers and
thins and contracts, oh yes and thus does
get smaller, and smaller: the northern
winter is an age for us and the owl of
my right hand is ready for flight. I have
already seen its beating search in the sky,
hateful, I will not look. By our lights
we stand to the sudden pleasure of how
the colour is skimmed to the world, and our
life does lie as a fallen and slanted thing.

   --J. H. Prynne, from 'Love in the Air' in The White Stones (1969).

kurutteru shakai

Again, it's somewhat reassuring to notice that I'm not alone in my perception that the number of mentally deranged individuals in this society - monster parents, monster children (not to mention monster dogs!), claimers from hell, and all sorts of misanthropes & sociopaths - is well beyond the safety limit, and that they're increasingly capable of anything to vent their spite and rage.

So watch your back - and, above all, do not ever touch anyone, not even lightly...

Kurutteru shakai, most definitely.

*       *       *

There be all kinds of monsters among us
By MARK SCHREIBER


An old saying goes "Issun no mushi ni mo gobu mo tamashi" (even a one-inch worm has a half-inch soul); i.e., even the most humble and powerless creature can put up with only so much before turning on its tormentor.

As if to confirm this aphorism, the media has been abuzz since belatedly learning that last September, a teacher at a public primary school in Gyoda, a city of 85,000 in northern Saitama Prefecture, filed suit against the parents of a girl in her third-grade class.

Reports on the TV wide shows and in the print media invariably referred to the defendants as monsutaa pearentsu (monster parents).

Apparently the previous June, the teacher had mediated a dispute between two girls, and the parents of one, believing the teacher had not been impartial, reacted with a torrent of verbal and written complaints to the school, the Ministry of Education, the Gyoda City office, the prefectural Board of Education, and the Commission on Human Rights.

"They even filed an assault charge at the Gyoda police station against the teacher, for touching their daughter on the back," a reporter at a local news bureau told Shukan Shincho (Feb. 3).

The child had reportedly claimed the teacher had smacked her from behind. The teacher said she had only "lightly touched" the child.

The 45-year-old teacher charged that the parents' persistent and aggressive complaints had traumatized her, leading to insomnia. She also maintained she could no longer function as a teacher, and demanded ¥5 million in damages.

According to a colleague, the teacher decided to proceed with the lawsuit because she "would be marked as a criminal" if the parents didn't cease their attacks.

Despite the child allegedly being singled out for bullying by classmates, the parents kept her in school to maintain her record of perfect attendance.

Determined to find proof that his complaints were justified, the father even had his daughter secrete a voice recorder on her person before going to school.

"My kid would absolutely never tell a lie," he's quoted in Shukan Post (Feb. 11).

The school has declined to comment to the media, but perhaps as a result of the growing media exposure, on Jan. 21, the teacher tendered her resignation.

"She was a good teacher, but from last year I could tell she'd begun to appear haggard," a colleague told Shukan Post.

It has been widely reported that this monster parent phenomenon by no means ends upon leaving primary school. In some cases, it continues while a child is in university, or even after reaching adulthood and taking up employment.

In Nikkan Gendai (Jan. 27), labor consultant Yuka Inage recalls a case where a parent complained to the company that her offspring was obliged to work overtime without compensation, and demanded overtime pay: "He's too docile and won't speak up for himself," came the explanation. But from a legal standpoint, writes Inage, parents or guardians are only empowered to act on behalf of minors. If you're really serious about claiming wages on your adult child's behalf, you'll require a power of attorney — a tactic unlikely to endear anyone to his or her employer.

Other species of "monsters" have also been making increasingly frequent appearances at government offices and businesses. Several years ago a business magazine, Shukan Diamond, devoted its Jan. 26, 2008, cover story to "claimers from hell." As a prime example, it related the story of an infuriated resident of Uji City in Kyoto Prefecture, who persistently demanded the city replace all its manhole covers because they bore the manufacturer's name, which happened to be the same as his surname. "My children will suffer harassment," he ranted.

Diamond went so far as to categorize claimers into 11 basic types: 1) the outright sociopaths; 2) people who harbor a phobia of dirt or germs; 3) the goody two-shoes meddlers on behalf of others; 4) the self-righteous sermonizers; 5) those who imagine they are victims of some injustice; 6) those who feel they deserve deferential treatment just because they paid money; 7) the overly tenacious; 8) those with too much time on their hands; 9) the persistent, "stalker" variety; 10) those who revel in showing off their superior knowledge about the product or technology; and 11) the hysterical whiners.

Japan, in the view of those who must contend with the above, is metamorphosing into a nation where people don't just raise complaints, but make false charges and pick fights at the slightest pretext.

The phenomenon inspired Shinichi Sekine to write a book titled "The Claimer Next Door" (Chuokoron Shinsha, 2007).

Sekine told an interviewer in Shukan Gendai magazine that he believes the recent barrage of bellicose objections reflects a change in the temperament of Japanese.

"They are not just complaining; their methods are becoming increasingly spiteful, such as demanding money or that an apology be made in writing," he noted.

The archetypal image of Japanese as a people who are stoic and undemonstrative, it seems, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.


The Japan Times: Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011
(C) All rights reserved
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fd20110206bj.html

how can we sustain such constant loss

... And yet home is easily our
idea of it, the music of decent and proper
order, it's this we must leave in some quite
specific place if we are not to carry it
everywhere with us
......................
... Music is truly the
sound of our time, since it is how we most
deeply recognise the home we may not
have: the loss is trust and you could
reverse that without change.

--J. H. Prynne, from 'Thoughts on Esterhazy Court Uniform' in The White Stones (1969).

existential shipwrecks...

My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions and desires--for they amounted to desires--... I regarded . . . as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfill.

--Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 57.

down with it (2)

I give up.

However hard you try to keep yourself in good spirits and show goodwill towards people here, you're constantly butting heads with this unassailable wall of narrow-mindedness and aloofness.

You write to a non-Japanese friend or colleague asking a favour and s/he promptly and gracefully responds, no matter how eminent or busy s/he is. You expect the same of a Japanese colleague or... er... 'friend' - and s/he couldn't care less.

These cultural and psychological differences are so immensely, so sadly revealing.

What damn moronic society is this that brainwashes people into believing that to show themselves aloof, unavailable and unresponsive to others is some kind of manly virtue or a sign of moral superiority...?

Rock bottom indeed.

But, well, you live and learn...


(Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28749138@N00/321328912/)

a wave-blurred portrait

Enough of romanticised sirens and their songs, enough.
An anti-siren song, for a change -- for something truer to life.

*       *       *

My life is hung up
in the flood
  a wave-blurred
             portrait

Don't fall in love
with this face--
   it no longer exists
              in water
                    we cannot fish


            --Lorine Niedecker

sinking to rock bottom

Whew, it seems I'm not the only one who's noticed that there's something terribly amiss in the widespread apathy, inhibited - or perhaps I should say castrated - body language, and emotional & sexual atrophy of the Japanese, especially the males, in spite of the impressive hairstyles and outfits (trying to compensate for something lacking inside?):

Only our descendants will know for sure, but we may be witnessing something not seen in the world since the slow demise of ancient Egypt — a nation expiring of natural causes. Nations, unlike people, are potentially immortal. When they die, it's usually violently. Japan may make history by its manner of leaving it. It may simply crumble into dust.... 

Of course, the young are forever astonishing the old; there's nothing new there, but generally it's youthful excess that shocks, not youthful . . . what to call it? When, as a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry survey revealed last month, fully one-third of adolescent boys aged 16 to 19 claim to have no interest in sex, a line is being crossed that suggests not simply new developments under new circumstances but a newly evolved species. [my note: there's already a name for this new species, it seems: the 'soshokukei danshi' / herbivorous men...]

Disinterest in sex is rising in both genders of all ages, the survey shows. It was this which prompted Shukan Shincho's "rock bottom" remark. "It's true," affirms a 23-year-old male university student to whom the weekly speaks, "that many men have no interest in women. My own friends seem quite satisfied to moon over anime voice actresses and computer game characters."

When a nation sinks to that, it seems reasonable to regard the future with grim foreboding.

From Michael Hoffman, 'The decline and fall of Japan and its sex drive'

The Japan Times: Sunday, Jan. 30, 2011

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fd20110130bj.html



Couldn't agree more, alas... [sigh]

1/29

Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

The date conjures up bitter-sweet memories. Thirty years ago precisely, the move to a new house, from an impoverished working-class suburb to a delusional middle-class one of parvenus forever carrying the poverty within.

The derelict railway station left behind, the forsaken best friend smiling and waving goodbye to the end of childhood.

The new family dog, born on that very day, and who'd stay with us for thirteen years. My constant, inseparable companion, and ever so often the only reliable friend.

The promise of a fresh start amidst the changes, soon followed by the realisation that the chilliness and immobility of the house, and of everything else, would never disappear. I'd never find a home there, a realisation that would condemn me to an adolescence of daydreaming and vicarious travelling, at once a blessing and a curse.

And later on the wanderlust, triggered by the rebelliousness and restlessness within. Changing beds umpteen times, incessantly butting heads against unassailable walls - against heartless, intractable people.

Forever searching for that which does not exist, despite the infernal inscription.

Painfully taking shape ever since, stumbling in the dark, groping in the half-light, growing, changing - and slowly learning to carry my clarity with me.

*       *       *

life-defining

One of my current research projects has led me to read extensively a genre of which I'm especially fond due to its hybridity and potential for experimentation: travel writing. And I especially like it when written by intrepid, unabashed ladies with a sense of humour.

I've just come upon this most interesting travelogue by Dervla Murphy, Muddling Through in Madagascar (1985). As I open it, I'm struck by the epigraph, taken straight from the OED entry:

muddling through: 'to attain one's ends in spite of blunder after blunder'.

Amazing indeed how certain phrases have the power to define a whole life - to define our journey through life.

This too would be a most appropriate epigraph for my own life story, were I ever to write it...

and yet another siren song

At this time of the year I'm way too busy and exhausted with grading, research & all sorts of deadlines looming ahead to be able to devote even a few lines in the small hours to this little corner. Yet, I couldn't resist posting this most wonderful song, with a big thanks to my dear friend Antonio for the reminder. Goodness gracious, I hadn't heard Buckley for ages!

This has also brought back fond memories of a lovely version by This Mortal Coil, which was quite a hit in the early 80s - and justly so.





Tim Buckley, Song to the Siren

Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
'til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang
Sail to me
Sail to me
Let me enfold you
Here I am
Here I am
Waiting to hold you

Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks,
For you sing, 'touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow:
O my heart, o my heart shies from the sorrow'

I am puzzled as the newborn child
I am troubled as the tide:
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Should I lie with death my bride?
Hear me sing, 'swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you:
Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you'

*       *       *

There are several versions, with different lyrics, of the song - such as this one:

Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
'Til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving into your eyes.

And you sang 'Sail to me, sail to me;
Let me enfold you.'

Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you.
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was full sail?

Now my foolish boat is leaning, broken love lost on your rocks.
For you sang, 'Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow.'
Oh my heart, oh my heart shies from the sorrow.
I'm as puzzled as a newborn child.
I'm as riddled as the tide.
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or shall I lie with death my bride?

Hear me sing: 'Swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you.'
'Here I am. Here I am, waiting to hold you.'

siren songs...

Mermaids, sirens, selkies have provided endless inspiration to artists - and, in a particular, a privileged means for the embattled, fragile male ego to express its ingrained fear of female fullness and strength.

Here goes one more such expression by another favourite artist - an amazing musical revelation.

Thomas Feiner & Anywhen, The Siren Songs

(Music: Feiner, Thorslund, Tigerstroem, Sandahl)

On the last day of summer the sun shines bright
And we're walking through the woods
What if love is the greatest damn liar of all
Would you trust me with your life?

On the last day of summer the clouds are white
And I'm sitting by the lake
And she's singing my name, she's beckoning me
If I just lose myself for now
For one day

I want to drown in her precious arms
I want to listen to the siren songs
She got me down into the water
And she got me holding on

And she's floating oh so peacefully
As I'm watching from below
In the bluest water I ever saw
The palest body to be striped
By the sun

I want to drown in her precious arms
I want to listen to the siren songs
She got me down into the water
And she got me holding on

So let me drown in those precious arms
With all my untouchabilities washed away
Let me for once be lost for reason
Let me be lost
For words

From the album The Opiates - Revised (2008).

songs of exile (3)

Estranged as I've always been from my homeland, I must confess that I have a difficult relationship with the 'national' song (or with anything 'national', for that matter), the Fado.

Yet, Amélia Muge's music, and in particular her reinventions of Fado, defy any categories, genres, styles, traditions, and passionately combine her love of poetry in the Portuguese language with a boundless musical imagination that travels along the most unexpected and unconventional routes, all over the world, from Portugal to Africa and Brazil - and beyond.

Tempestuous, frank, fiery, fierce, Muge is not for the faint-hearted and the indifferent. As she puts it in the dedication in her wonderful album A Monte (2002), she sings for 'the friends and dear enemies. Let the indifferent go in peace. This kingdom is not theirs'.

Were I to single out a song that has stayed with me over the years, it would be this O Fado da Sereia / The Mermaid's Fado, which I leave here with no further explanation - the music and the poetry speak for themselves.

Oh, and I've taken the liberty of adding a (very) rough translation of Hélia Correia's stunning poem below, with implicit dedication.



O Fado da Sereia / The Mermaid's Fado (click to listen)

Lyrics: Hélia Correia
Vocals, Music: Amélia Muge
Piano arrangement: Jorge Palma


Serei, serei a sereia
a do pescoço doirado
que no fio da sua voz
te arrastava para o largo?
Serei, serei a donzela
que em teu desejo aparecia
sempre que à noite acordavas
contra uma cama vazia?

Ai, ai, marujo, mareante
porque te foste encerrar
num barco à prova de encanto
num barco à prova de mar?
Já das rotas me apagaste
E já o teu olhar não vê
minha garganta nas rendas
que me vestia a maré

Quem me tivera avisado
que o amor de um marinheiro
é como os vícios do mar
é como o mar traiçoeiro
Que me deixavas trocada
por mulheres que a terra dá
mulheres de pernas cobertas
por balões de tafetá
Ai tem, cautela, marinheiro
que o mar é coisa ruim
e o amor de uma sereia
não vai acabar-se assim
Que hás-de vir de novo à rede
de um amor que engana e mata
que, à vista deste, outro amor
é cinza à vista da prata

Ai quem me dera que em vez
de filha do mar, me achasse
rapariguinha solteira
que nesse mar se afogasse
Ai quem me dera que em vez
de cantadeira do mar
fosse eu mulher de viela
para ainda me ouvires cantar.

*       *       *

Am I, am I the mermaid
the one with the golden neck
who would in the thread of her voice
lure you into the open sea?
Am I, am I the maiden
who would in your desire appear
whenever you woke up at night
against an empty bed?

O sailor, seafarer
why have you shut yourself off
in a spell-proof boat
in a sea-proof boat?
You have already erased me from the sea routes
And your gaze no longer sees
my throat in the lace
in which the tide clad me

Had someone warned me
that a sailor’s love
is like the vices of the sea
it is like the treacherous sea
and that you would leave me
for women who the land offers
women with their legs covered
in taffeta balloons
O sailor, beware
the sea is an evil thing
and a mermaid’s love
won’t just end like this
You will be netted again
by a love that deceives and kills
another love that, in comparison to this one,
is as ash to silver

O I wish that instead
of daughter of the sea I were
a little maiden
who drowned in that sea
O I wish that instead of
songstress of the sea
I were a woman of the streets
so that you could still hear me sing.


[Translated from the Portuguese by DK.]

the game of intolerable shame

For E., who understands, in the skin and the bones, every word of this song.

(But you'll get over it, chérie, you will. For your own good.)

Playground Martyrs
(Music: Steve Jansen  /  Lyrics: David Sylvian)

You run to the gate

but you'll be marked late
it's for your own good
it's for your own good

You're likely to make
the grandest mistakes
you suffer alone
in the skin and the bones

Let's sharpen those
new sets of arrows
for the next generation
of playground martyrs

And joining the game
of intolerable shame
'cause everyone shares
innocence of their fathers

School bell rings
single file in
trade you my
unhappily ever after

So bring out those things
to hammer the wings
of the next generation
of playground martyrs


Source: http://www.davidsylvian.net/releases/tracks-poems/63-tracks-live/1139-playground-martyrs-live-occurrence-of-slope.html

for A., in memoriam

How uncanny it is to remember, all of a sudden, a writer-friend from whom you had been estranged for years and to learn, from his own website, that he has recently died. There is something ghostly indeed in personal diaries on the web. The boundaries you used to take for granted no longer seem to exist: distance/proximity, past/present, truth/fiction, life/death.

In the same way he had done with life, he fictionalised, poeticised his own death - to the very last words. Painstakingly, obsessively. Words almost unbearable to read now, yet so spellbinding, so desperately clinging to the last remains of life.

Despite the distance, I'm overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and regret, of having been way too unforgiving and harsh in my judgement, of not having listened enough - of having so heartlessly bitten the hand that reached out to me then.

The memory of the last time we saw each other, years ago, has haunted me ever since. Not so much the unanswered calls and messages, the unread books disdainfully kept in a plastic bag, but that pathetic, shrivelled little flower I trampled on and threw away. I would rescue and hold it close forever keenly, weren't it too late now.

In a sense, it was always too late for us, even then - and you knew it.

Stubborn as you are though, I'm sure you will be waiting for me there, in that impossible place, as you once promised.


See you there, some day.


(And yes, in the meantime I shall try myself to be those words you were unable to write, because it all ended too soon.)

down with it

What a wonderful coincidence, to find tucked behind a bookshelf a dusty pocket notebook with this outrageous quote I jotted down ages ago.

I could hardly think of more suitable words to translate my current state of mind - and what passes for life in this land of the setting sun:


Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

--Situationist graffiti

Paris, 1968.

 There you are.

will you still be there?

As though to compensate for yesterday's ballyhoo, a quiet afternoon & eve working quietly at my desk, interrupted only by the occasional daydreaming --

Those impossible, endless journeys with you.

 

*       *       *

A rocky headland dreamt of.
Its road jammed with cars,
with tangled crowds, police,
authority snared in its own grip.

As dusk cloaks us I leave the road,
walk the cliff edge. Tussocks and drops.
Rock-faces in darkness. Large shadow birds.

In the distant town can we buy food?
Like refugees.         Like distant bombs.
A stumbling return. Will you still be there?

Our babe-in-arms, you, me,
us three in this bare grey landscape.
No word reaches us, not even in dreams.
As though lost and searching, almost lost.


Lee Harwood, 'Fragment of an indecipherable inscription', in Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2004), p. 483.

I won't be disappointed

To the morbid, suicidal self-absorption of the mediocre afraid to live and love and let themselves go, the perfect antidote.

Yes, that's exactly how I feel - a world citizen.

And I won't be disappointed this time around, I won't be.

I want to feel
Until my heart can take no more
And there's nothing in this world I wouldn't give
I want to break
The indifference of the days
I want a conscience that will keep me wide awake...


Amazing song.





World Citizen - I Won't Be Disappointed
(Music: David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto; Lyrics: David Sylvian)

What happened here?
The butterfly has lost its wings
The air's too thick to breathe
And there's something in the drinking water.

The sun comes up
The sun comes up and you're alone
Your sense of purpose come undone
The traffic tails back to the maze on 101

And the news from the sky
Is looking better for today
In every single way
But not for you

World citizen

World citizen

It's not safe
All the yellow birds are sleeping
Cos the air's not fit for breathing
It's not safe

Why can't we be
Without beginning, without end?
Why can't we be?

World citizen

World citizen

And if I stop
And talk with you awhile
I'm overwhelmed by the scale
Of everything you feel
The lonely inner state emergency

I want to feel
Until my heart can take no more
And there's nothing in this world I wouldn't give

I want to break
The indifference of the days
I want a conscience that will keep me wide awake

I won't be disappointed
I won't be disappointed
I won't be.

I saw a face
It was a face I didn't know
Her sadness told me everything about my own

Can't let it be
When least expected there she is
Gone the time and space that separates us

And I'm not safe
I think I need a second skin
No, I'm not safe

World citizen

World citizen

I want to travel by night
Across the steppes and over seas
I want to understand the cost
Of everything that's lost
I want to pronounce all their names correctly

World citizen

World citizen

I won't be disappointed
I won't be.

She doesn't laugh
We've gone from comedy to commerce
And she doesn't feel the ground she walks upon

I turn away
And I'm not sleeping well at night
And while I know this isn't right
What can you do?


© 2003 by David Sylvian/Opium (Arts) Ltd.
Source: http://www.davidsylvian.com/lyrics_and_poetry/world_citizen_i_wont_be_disappointed.html

motto for the new year

In a new year that is bound to be propitious for sea changes and turning the tables, a negative motto.

Because I do care - a lot.

*       *       *

If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.

           Dorothy Parker, 'Observation'.