The Autumn Equinox

The world turns
As the ferries glide
Through the fragile night

Kids on the beach
Throw cheap fireworks
And the young girls scream in delight

Their hand-held thrills
Passing for touch

And the boy turns his back to the light

For your lover

Just popped into an exhibition down the beach of the life's work of Henri Riviere (1864 - 1951), a Frenchman inspired by the likes of Hiroshige to produce woodblock prints of various aspects of France (and other things). Never came to Japan.

La Tour en Construction, number 32 of Les 36 Vues de la Tour Eiffel, after the 36 views of Mount Fuji series by Hokusai, and Hiroshige.

L'enfant prodigue.

Claires de lune.

http://www.henri-riviere.org/v2/

http://www.moma.pref.kanagawa.jp/en/museum/exhibitions/2009/riviere/index_en2009.html

http://www.hiroshige.org.uk/hiroshige/36_views_fuji_1858/fuji_1858.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-six_Views_of_Mount_Fuji

Richard Hawley - For your lover

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG6itlFun5A

Trampled Rose

Long way going to
Get my medicine
Sky's the autumn grey of a lonely wren

Piano from a window played
Gone tomorrow, gone yesterday

I found it in the street
At first I did not see
Lying at my feet
A trampled rose

Passing the hat in church
It never stops going round

You never pay just once
To get the job done

What I done to you,
I know you've done to me
So what happened to the trampled rose?

In the muddy streets
With the fireworks and the leaves

A blind man with a cup I asked
"Would you play 'Kisses Sweeter Than Wine'?"

I know that rose
Just like I know my name
The one I gave my love,
I swear it was the same
Now I find it in the street,
A trampled rose


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHxmr3vZlAk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7a85yBt4Wk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGWUt0wgHg0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuHlMn1scAI&feature=PlayList&p=47216A5369233AA1&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=6



Tom Waits



Through bushes and through briars
I lately took my way
All for to hear the small bird sing
And the lambs to skip and play

I overheard my own true love
His voice did sound so clear
Long time I have been waiting for
The coming of my dear

Sometimes I am uneasy
And troubled in my mind
Sometimes I think I’ll go to my love
And tell to him my mind

But if I should go to my love
My love he will say nay
If I show to him my boldness
He’ll ne’er love me again

Anshu

Home as the light fades -

Your opened white flowers
welcome me

Orwellian future

"Rather than viewing the wars of the past decade - against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq - and the concomitant expansion of U.S. and NATO military presence inside all three countries and in several others on their peripheries as an unrelated series of events, the trend must be seen for what it is: A consistent and calculated strategy of employing each successive war zone as a launching pad for new aggression.

The Pentagon has major military bases in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq that it never intends to abandon. The U.S. and its NATO allies have bases in Bulgaria, Romania, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait, Bahrain (where the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet is headquartered) and other nations in the vicinity of the last ten years' wars which can be used for the next ten - or twenty or thirty - years' conflicts."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15239

Sisters

"Sachiko sensed that much of her sister's love for Osaka was in fact love for the house, and, for all her amusement at these old-fashioned ways, she felt a twinge of pain herself - she would no longer be able to go back to the old family house. She had often enough joined Yukiko and Taeko in complaining about it - surely there was no darker and more unhygienic house in the world, and they could not understand what made her sister live there, and they felt thoroughly depressed after three days there, and so on - and yet a deep undefinable sorrow came over Sachiko at the news. To lose the Osaka house would be to lose her very roots".

From The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Badgers

I am in Shikoku, the smallest and perhaps least 'developed' of the four main islands of Japan. About to cycle off to the end of the Yashima peninsula to where I discovered a lovely little sandy beach yesterday, from where I can sit and look across to the passing ships and the various islands dotted around the Inland Sea, including Ogijima, which is where, according to legend, Momotaro (a boy born from a peach) defeated some devil or other. At the highest point of the Yashima peninsula is a shrine (number 84 of the 88 that form a circular pilgrimage route of the whole island - a 3-month hike). This shrine is dedicated to a 1000-handed kannon of mercy, and a badger. There are large stone badgers and the tourist shops are full of happy dancing badgers with straw hats. Next to the shrine there is a large marble plaque with the following inscription:

"In the old days when the grand priest Kobo opened the 88 pilgrimage temples on Shikoku, he lost his way in foggy Yashima and met an old man wearing a straw rain coat, who guided him to the peak of mountain. It is believed that the old man was the figure of the Yashima tasaburo's badger's metamorphosis. The Yashima tasaburo badger is noted for being one of 3 badgers in Japan, together with the danzaburo badger of Sado island and the shibaemon badger of Awaji island. It was the messenger of the Senju kannon or the thousand-handed kannon found in the main hall, enshrined preciously because he did a lot of goodness as the tutelary god and was respected as the general head of badgers in Shikoku. The legendary skill of the sophisticated metamorphosis stood unchallenged throughout Japan. The Yashima tasaburo badger was also considered to be a monogamist and is respected as a god of peaceful families, marriages and the restaurant business. Believers who wish to have babies and good luck visit the Yashima tasaburo badger from all over Japan."

You couldn't make it up. It really is extraordinary what piffle we are capable of believing, as long as enough other people around us are convinced, and we are desperate to believe in something, anything that gives us hope. Anything to avoid looking at the truth - ie. in this case, a monk met an old man who showed him the way.

"The legendary skill of the sophisticated metamorphosis stood unchallenged throughout Japan" - how could anyone possibly hope to compete with a 1000-handed god pretending to be a badger pretending to be an old man? Even if he was a monogamist. And compete for what? Being god of the restaurant business? Would that include cafes? Or would there be an opening there for a separate god I wonder? A 12-nosed caterpillar god with 3 arms pretending to be a flying walrus impersonating a barber shop quartet perhaps?

At the foot of the mountain is a museum of sorts, consisting of houses, agricultural in the main part, dating back to Meiji and beyond (19th century), which have been dismantled and rebuilt here - a paper-making hut (washi), where thin mulberry branches were first steamed for hours, then the bark was stripped off and the white inside beaten to a pulp, laid out, dried and Bob's your uncle. A soya factory with its great wooden vats the size of a small room. A sugar cane mill, driven by an ox going round in circles all day. A water wheel. Oddly, a British Victorian (VR) pillar box and telephone box, and some lighthouse keepers' cottages, the sturdiest structures there, built by British engineers, reflecting the importance (to the British) of protecting their ships in the 'opening up' of Japan.

July 4th, Independence Day, 1945, between 02.56 and 04.42, 116 US B29 bombers dropped 809 tons of incendiary bombs on this city, destroying 18,505 buildings (16,103 homes) - 80% of the urban area. Remarkably only 1,359 people were killed and 1,034 wounded. This was one of over 800 such raids on Japan.

I walked up the mountain through the woods, but when I got to the top found that a wide road had been built round the back, bringing coachloads of tourists - hobbling high-heeled girls with fake suntanned boyfriends. There is an aquarium up there. I watched from the road as the Bay City Rollers' 'Saturday' (a great karaoke favourite here) blares out. I can see two grey seals swimming round and round interminably the edge of a small transparent-walled pool, and a large turtle. I walk away in disgust as 'Saturday' starts up again - evidently also on an interminable loop.

Right - time to get the bike out ...

Words of advice

Well worth a quick read:

http://www.sfgoth.com/~immanis/rilke/letter1.html

http://www.scienceof911.com.au/the-argument/introduction

My home is in the human race

How many lives can one man live?
How we long for the bonds of attachment
We cling to hope like limpets to a rock
Battered by a sea of random indifference

How easily we accept love
How willingly we throw our hearts open
to the whim of passing strangers
though we know the solid pain

We live a layered myriad of lives
One floats to the surface and then another
Through the flickering shoal we see what we can
and catch a glimpse of the fleeting soul within

A constant maybe, a might have been, a could be one day
living only in this one, this space
peering into and from this face
these faces surround us, these eyes

on the train to Hiratsuka this Tuesday morning
September 8th 2009

The frog in the dark well
waiting for the cold echoing drip
to ripple through his film
gulping while his thin webbed feet
paddle the depths below


http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15147

The roots of a tree cast no shadow

Touched down yesterday from my mountain home

Now I'm back by the sea

You wonder where you're going, and just where you belong

Take a long look back at where you've been

(A,E)






Heard some wise words on the plane





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC5Tjq2Faks





"If you want to know where you're going, you got to know where you've been"





(Bluesman on Scorsese's film)





"The world is a tragedy to those who feel,


but a comedy to those who think"





(Walpole)





Discuss.