Posted Friday, January 31, 2003 by Robert Brady

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MORNING LACE

I don't know why the memory came back to me so strongly this morning, must have been something in the sunlight through the trees, but all at once I remembered that huge box of lace--- first a little background.

Back in 1971, after I'd simply walked out on my fast-track NY office career to travel at my leisure around the world, free of the chains of salary, the first 'job' I had, when at last I'd meandered my way to the west coast, was as a scavenger in the Berkeley landfill. That's right, I was a recycling pioneer. Big business nowadays. I'd go a few times a week to the landfill, take what I scavenged (you name it) and try to sell it at the huge flea market they used to have every Sunday at the Alameda drive-in.

Me being so fresh from a standard-educated non-scavenging lifestyle, it was at first a puzzle what to scavenge, what would sell, what would get the highest price with the least potential for breakage and loss, and of course the least effort (scavenging for a living teaches you the basics of marketing VERY quickly).

One day, as I was cruising the stuff that was about to be thrown into the pit and plowed out into San Francisco Bay forever, I came upon a box of lace, just a big cardboard box holding about a cubic meter of lace (for those of you who haven't handled lace in extremely large volumes, that is a lot of lace), of doilies and collars and cuffs and yokes and whatnot, some of it ivoried with age, but all still sturdy and all finely detailed work.

Where such a quantity of handmade lace came from I have no more idea now than I did then. As a male at that age and of those times I knew as much about lace as I knew about the mating habits of the giant squid. To me, lace was pretty nearly as old-fashioned as you could get and still be alive; it was what grandmothers pinned to the backs of chairs from the days when men wore macassar in their hair (told you it was old-fashioned)... but something told me it might just be worth a few dollars to maybe some elderly ladies.

It wasn't heavy (I'd quickly given up trying to sell old TVs) and wouldn't break if I dropped it, so I salvaged the box and at the flea market that Sunday I just dumped the whole thing right out there on the ground, a mountain of lace (you don't see many of those anymore) and within five minutes there were women of all ages crawling all over me with one hand full of lace and the other full of bills of varying denominations, in itself an unforgettable moment in the life of any man.

Few indeed are the lucky men who have sold a cubic meter of exquisite tattings hand over fist to a mob of lace-hungry women. Things are somewhat different now that I no longer have a mountain of lace, but I learned a lot about lace (and about women) as a result of that experience.

Not long ago in one of those exclusive type antique shops here in Japan I saw featured in the front window a small piece of lesser quality lace, pinned out upon velvet to display the fineness of the work, selling for close to 1000 dollars. They don't make lace like mine anymore. There was probably a million dollars worth of lace in that box at today's prices, lace that had been painstakingly crafted long before by very elderly immigrant grandmothers with centuries of European lace-making knowledge in their hands.

The way, way less than a million dollars I made from that box got me to Japan, where this morning the lace came back to me as it does sometimes, though the older I get, the less and less the money part of it looms and the more and more the lace itself stands out, and with it a growing pride in the fact that I saved all that delicately wrought beauty from destruction, sent it on through time to other lives and eyes, where all that art and all it meant will not be lost.

That was one of this morning's gifts to me.

Posted Thursday, January 30, 2003 by Robert Brady

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IN THESE TIMES

Kurt Vonnegut, one of those actual war veterans I spoke of in my WAR SALESMEN post, has a few words to say on C-Students in Office...

Posted Thursday, January 30, 2003 by Robert Brady

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COLDHOUSE2WARMHOUSE

I love to sleep in a cold house, and wake up and get warm by getting it warm. In the winter I sleep with the window open because I love the feeling of being living toast with the contrasting wintry coldness on my face. I will pass up this serendipitous but excellent entree into what I believe are the debilitating effects of central heating and move right on with what I was going to say, that today the dawn was a cold icy one more suited to late February, when it seems the sun has just given up and acts about as warm as neon, the kind of morning that when you go outside to thaw the water pipes shows you where your nose is. Out there in the predawn air, the only light was a very, very sliver of the moon, dangling like a bright icicle among the black-ice branches of the trees reaching into a gray empty sky, the kind of sight that tickles your history and stirs up thoughts of ancient gods... Our firewood stocks had been getting low, but fortunately in the deceptive warmth of yesterday I harnessed a bunch of springtime energy and chainsawed a bunch of primo cherry wood into stove lengths and stacked 'em up on the deck so we had a good supply of the wherewithal for a bright warm fire, before whence to gaze out upon the frosty dawning.

Posted Tuesday, January 28, 2003 by Robert Brady

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WAR SALESMEN

Seems the web these days is filled with macho blogs by war salesmen, desktop warriors who love to talk as though their words were ready weapons, and act all sorts of just and righteous and knowing and all-seeing and caring about the pain and freedom and rights of those they would invade and save with the wars they crave, wars that will kill and maim and starve more of those very folk in the process, though this does not figure much in the salesmen's calculations, for what they love above all (excepting themselves as virtual heroes) is war: not to fight it, but to talk about it endlessly. And if war does come, it will not be the masters of war or these posturing apologists who rush out and sign up to fight on the front lines and stare death in the face, it will not be they who pay with their blood for any victory or defeat; they themselves do not go to war, they send someone else: not their sons but the other ones, the sons of the quiet folk, who do not shout and call for death, the ones who live just across the street from us all and mow their lawns and go each day to school and the shop, and do not swagger for the right to bear arms; it is they who will march into death, take the brunt and sometimes survive, then later never boast about it, or even want to talk about it, and never call for more (they call rather for an end to all war). But they will fight a war if it comes, for duty is strong in them, not the craving for power. You quiet folks out there, don't listen to the hollow men who fill themselves and your ears with talk of war. Listen to those who have fought because it was their duty, not because they loved it. They will tell you the truth.

Posted Saturday, January 25, 2003 by Robert Brady

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In Memoriam: TADA CHIMAKO

Tada Chimako, one of Japan's great poets, has died. She was a wonderful and gentle woman. Here is one of the poems I co-translated for her book Moonstone Woman, published in 1990 by Katydid Books:


To the Last Stop

Each time I wake the scenery has changed
In which direction is time flowing
Ahead and behind, rails of mercury gleam
---Where will you get off
---I'm going to the last stop
Weeds growing thick and wild I fall asleep
Coiled up in soft beams of sunlight
tail of dream in mouth
(Perhaps after all the head is not the beginning
nor the tail the end)
It seems as though I haven't yet been born
and the world is the light beyond the egg shell
An alarm clock is ringing far off
Whose morning is that
Eggs hatching all at once
grammar school games between joyous teams
As the starting gun is fired
a hearse is waiting at the school gate
Carried away in sleep
Each time I wake the scenery has changed
The air is filed with butterflies
Tumbling over they become dead leaves
scatter away leaving emptiness behind
A roaring tunnel of hollowness
---Where is the last stop
---Don't you know either

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Posted Wednesday, January 22, 2003 by Robert Brady

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ARTHURIAN
THE MORVELS OF ABILITY

Don't ask me. I haven't got a clue either, and it isn't the first time, as intimated by my use of this unique morsel for the title of what you are now reading. I ask you: can that be considered English? I'm beginning to suspect, rather, that we are witnessing the emergence of a new but still largely formless language that will one day be the language of the world. I remember the moment clearly: there was this lettering, this mentally disturbing roman lettering, sewn on the back of an expensive-looking jacket worn by a guy my age I saw getting off the train in Yamashina. Syntactically it reminded me of another equally confusing jacket in the new world language (forget about t-shirts) I'd seen not long before, going up the subway stairs in downtown Kyoto, an expensive dark leather jacket with lettering in lighter-colored leather sewn on the back that said "Bone In America." Then, as now, I ask you. I asked myself: if I were living in the US or Europe, would I ever pay big bucks for, then wear in public, with all those folks from all over the world walking around, an expensive jacket with a lot of kanji on the back regarding whose meaning I hadn't a clue, that many of those worldly folks might very well understand? No way! So how does it happen here, unless this is a new world language saying something profound that remains beyond the grasp of we who speak a fading language? What else would enable men of my age and intelligence to ostensibly paraphrase Bruce's most famous refrain so ludicrously unless they were in fact talking about, say, US paleontology or pornography, or offering cryptic reminders of Arthurian morvels? I've heard all the standard arguments about how romaji themselves are fashionable here in Japan, it doesn't necessarily matter what they say. Western visitors have been collecting such phrases since the black ships first elbowed in to Shimoda (I myself have a rather sizeable collection from various media); by now there must be genres and classifications for such phrases, but none of this answers my question. Why make such an expensive item without checking for linguistic coherence and potentially outrageous meanings, unless this IS the meaning, and some of us haven't a clue as to what it is? Western fashion designers often get into conventional trouble with cloth prints using other current languages they haven't fully checked out--most recently, quotes from the Koran at a sexy fashion show--but they were actual quotes, and were coherent, so they don't count. Does anyone out there have a clue (other than the writers of the phrases on the above-mentioned jackets) regarding the actual meanings and intentions of this new world language, whether or not you were bone in America, but preferably with Arthurian morvels of ability?

Posted Monday, January 20, 2003 by Robert Brady

GETTING WARM

Living out here in the country in the woods on a mountain above a lake has taught me, among so many other things, that firewood warms you not just twice, as the old saying goes, but a number of times additionally: once for each day you work to earn the money to buy the land the wood grows on, once when you and at least five muscled friends carry the large cast-iron stove into the living room from the truck parked out on the road, once when you assemble and put up the intricate snake of stovepipe and link it way up there to the ceiling, once when you clean off the creosote that has run down the outside of the stovepipe because you assembled it backward, once when you take down the stovepipe, reverse it and put it back up again, once when you come within a whisker of being mulched by a falling tree, once when you cut the tree into sections, once when you cut the tree into sections that fit the stove, once when you quarter the sections into firewood, once when you just miss your foot with the axe, once when you just miss the other foot, once each time firewood shows you it knows where your toes are, once when you stack the firewood, once when you restack the firewood over there, where it won't be buried under the next meter of snow, once each time you re-cover all the stacks each time the wind blows the covers off even with those huge rocks you put on them, once when you put those huge rocks on them, once when you finally build a woodshed, once when you carry an armful of wood through a howling snowstorm into the house at night without slipping on the ice or tripping over the cat, once when you actually at last burn the wood, once when with your clean pajamas on and holding an ashdrawerful you open the door into a high wind, once when you scour the stove at the end of the season, once when you take down and scrub out the stovepipe, once when you nearly fall off the roof while reaming the stovepipe chimney soot down into a plastic bag taped to the bottom of the chimneypipe where it enters the living room ceiling, once when you go inside and find out that the plastic bag came off the chimney at the first ream, once when you clean up the soot all over the living room, once when you have to take the top of the stove off to replace the combustor because you've been burning green wood, once when you have to pay for the new combustor, one very-warm once when you have a stovepipe fire, once when you finally pay for the stove, once when you see the spark burns in the carpet, and I'm sure there are lots more but I've got to go restack the firewood for next year where the raccoons won't pee on it.

The above is of course largely exaggeration; most of these things only happened a few or more times. Still, I wouldn't trade in my woodstove for anything except maybe a red '55 Corvette, which shows you how truly warming it is.

Posted Friday, January 17, 2003 by Robert Brady

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LIFE IN LEFT FIELD

The other day I was outside just standing around as one can tend to do on sudden splendid winter days when there is so much to do inside, just go outside and stand there and take the whole scene in from all directions, trees earth sun sky you name it, throw in a galaxy or two if you want (it was one of those days), it'll just lighten my heart all the more, when straight out of left field I saw a large woodpecker stroll right up the side of the tall oak tree like you and I walk down the street. He'd pause every couple of feet and listen to the tree to overhear bug conversations, that's not illegal in the wild, then he'd stroll another yard or so straight up as casually as if he were twirling a cane, cock his ears and eavesdrop, poke a bit at the bark to maybe make a bug yell for help, then glide on upward, very dapper in his pinstripe. He strolled thus for over twenty meters before the promenade got too narrow and he flew off to begin strolling another tree. And if I hadn't left my urgent indoor tasks and gone aimlessly outside to just pointlessly stand there on the edge of left field I never would have seen the woodpecker stroll. So if you've got a lot of really urgent stuff to do indoors, why not just go outside and simply stand there for a while? Left field is just the greatest place.

Posted Wednesday, January 15, 2003 by Robert Brady

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DEVIL RUNNING

Drove over to Chojuji temple in Ishibe-cho in the mountains across the lake to see the oni bashiri (devil running), which I'd expected to be thronged and peppered with neck-craning tourists and diluted with that sense of urgency and unrealness that tourists impart, but there were only locals there, mostly grandparents and their grandchildren, the new parents apparently not so interested in passing on to their children what is about to be lost, the parents themselves maybe never having embraced it enough to value, so it was all the more poignant to see this time-alloyed excitement of the aging soul, this modern-age pointing out by the elders to the exceedingly young the basic truths of life as manifested in devils and masks and ritual and chant and bell and drum and fear and redemption. It was a small building as temples go, built near a thousand years ago and roofed in cedar bark, far off to one side of the main highway artery, close to the heart of things. All the doors were closed, and after the cradling lull of the sacred chant, when the drums began to boom and the bells to clang, the heart and the blood did the same, no matter what one's religion; for truth has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with blood and bone and eyes and time, with rhythm and memory in those rising through an entire life on the cusp of now, and both the future and the past were there in great measure, devilish and otherwise, with respect, awe, humor, and a touch of disdain from the teenage oni with their bleached hair, who nevertheless did their best and it was none too bad, clearly they had dallied with deviltry before; but it was a revelation to see it all without a mass of tourists, it was like another country, so simple still, and so pure, as to give me some hope for the heart of Japan, that it may yet beat into the coming century, when some new hearts will take it up and make it their own, and so that what is good about devils will go on.

Posted Wednesday, January 15, 2003 by Robert Brady

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SNOW LOAVES

Big night snow still falling, transforming our pastoral world into idyllic white; a cornucopia of nostalgia and snow down your neck from cedar trees. Gorgeous rich curlicues of windcarved snowloaves adorning the deck rails and roofs and bushes and trees and rocks and everything, observer warm by wood fire. For brief moments among gouts of white that the wind brings down from the forests, the Lake is visible, a gray swath of moire silk spread out before some mountains dim and snowclad, in glimpses of distance as in a Chinese painting-- then just a few flakes and a bit of gold suncoin is scattered over the white countryside in a procession of noblesse oblige at the heart of the snowstorm-- then back to clouds of snowflakes I see swirling all along the mountain and down in the village from clumps of trees when they are touched by the wand of the wind, poof: now it's white, then it's green, then it's gone!! And looking at the Lake, unlike as at the sea, one can see the corridors in the palace of the wind, and how the wind has many rooms and vast, and how it is yet the palace of a dragon, that travels the world at its whim and dances its dance over land and water alike; on land we rarely see the palace chambers except in a whirlwind now and then, but the comparatively calm mirror of the Lake is its open stage, where the architecture of the wind is plain, its undulations like the land turned upside down and made liquid, peopled by beings with the voices of trees...

Posted Tuesday, January 14, 2003 by Robert Brady

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BUDDHA SMILES

A few days ago I noticed the sound of destruction and the smoke of debris fires beyond the trees up across the road, took a walk over there and found a half dozen men at work demolishing a couple of old cabins and clearing the property, about 500 tsubo, for what they said would be a new house. I asked if I could have the trees they were cutting down, big oak and beech, since they were just burning them there in a big pit (the waste!!!), they said sure. They were glad to be spared the noxious task of burning green wood on wet ground for fixed pay. So at my request they said they'd cut the logs into ca. 80 cm lengths and leave them near the road on Monday. Later, when I went back to explore what the men would be cutting down on the morrow, I came upon a cluster of kuromoji (Japanese spicebush), its light golden buds glowing like secret Buddha smiles in the dusk of the copse; there were five trunks to the cluster, each 1-2 inches in diameter. First I clipped all the smaller branches, then cut the trunks, took them all home and filled the house with that special scent by carving multiple vari-sized acupressure sticks, hiking staffs, toothpicks, skewers, shavings to use for the bath; and arranged branches here and there in vases. The great thing about kuromoji is that the creamy white, splendidly carving wood never seems to lose its fragrance; I've had some bunches of it here in the loft for 5 years or so now, and if I break a twig, there is that perfume, makes Buddha smile like that.

Posted Monday, January 13, 2003 by Robert Brady

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WONDROUS THINGS

When late at night before sleep I step outside to stand within the star-sparkling darkness and breathe deeply the clear, clean breath of the mountain forest, spiced with cedar and pine, truly it is a wondrous thing---and when I turn and look up at the chestnut tree, its bare winter branches reaching up into the night sky like hands of greeting, stars sparkling among its fingers, and at its crown a big silver spangle of the filling moon, truly it is a wondrous thing, worthy to take into dreams---

Posted Sunday, January 12, 2003 by Robert Brady

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THE GOD OF BUSINESS

Today Echo and I drove across the mountains into Kyoto and visited a yuba restaurant where we had a fine lunch comprising mainly, and not surprisingly, yuba, that healthful mouth-ambrosia skimmed from soy milk that originated in the temple kitchens as an essential part of shojin ryori (monks' food) and can be made into so many nice traditional foodthings from soup to dessert, and is so rich in clean proteins and other nourishment. We were on our way to visit Ebisu Jinja down in Gion, Kyoto's entertainment district, a very traditional and very photogenic place where each year at about this time all the folks doing business in the area come and pray to Ebisu, the God of Business (among other things), for success in the coming year. Prayers were tied everywhere. What a crowd, from geisha and maiko (apprentice geisha) to grandmas and and grandpas, tourists and romantic couples, the young women dressed in kimono finery. The day was fine, the food was fine, there were smiles everywhere.
Our return was via the famous walk past Kyoto's icon Yasaka pagoda to Maruyama Park; along the way, stopped in at one of my favorites among the many tiny wonderful shops that line the narrow streets, and from the sweet elderly lady who sits there on the tatami surrounded by thousands of amazing animal dolls of all sizes from the very small to the very very small, bought a splendid 3cm New Year ram that was in the window.

Posted Saturday, January 11, 2003 by Robert Brady

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DIETARY ABUSE

Just saw on Japanese tv something I can, yet cannot, believe is currently (according to the tv program) a BIG hit with youngsters in the US: dayglo margarine (blue, purple, pink etc.), that is squeezed from a plastic bottle onto whatever and eaten. This bizarre-looking and dietarily abusive product is reflective of so many problematic aspects of the American diet and its effects on American youth and life, and of the nutritionally neglectful attitude of the US government and US corporations toward American children, I don't know where to begin... Enlightening US parents' comments on the subject can be found here.

Posted Friday, January 10, 2003 by Robert Brady

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SAM'S BLOG

One of the world's earliest and longest-lasting bloggers (and my historical favorite) Samuel Pepys, has started up his blog again on the first of January just as he did so long ago, still one page a day, with all those people now watching over his shoulder and offering very nice annotations; at last Sam's gaining the diverse, discerning and distant audience he wrote for. I just now read the latest entry----and so to bed.

Posted Thursday, January 09, 2003 by Robert Brady

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BASHO UPDATE

furu-ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
keitai no oto

Posted Thursday, January 09, 2003 by Robert Brady

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cell phone rings
on the morning train
everyone awake

Posted Tuesday, January 07, 2003 by Robert Brady

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STEAMING POCKETS

Walking down the early morning street in the big city on my first day back at the office in the new year, my mind in that kind of hapless fog it enters when, in all its ancient innocence of having gotten up more or less around dawn for the past ten days, it is one day (for no reason it can truly understand) gotten up very early in the morning and dressed up and put on a train from the clear, bright, quiet countryside and taken off the train into the darkly roaring canyons of a vast Asian metropolis rivered with strangers zipping here and there on errands that appear to involve life and death, my coat pocket soon steaming warm from the Japanese fast-food breakfast I've purchased for myself (I've minimized meat and dairy in my diet for over 40 years now, but "That which is never broken is not a rule" is one of my more adhered-to mottoes, so I got a couple of nice warm steamed meat and curry buns to have for breakfast) and thus it is that I find myself on the way to the office, pockets steaming as I say, meditating upon the comparative qualities of Japanese and American fast foods (Big Macs! Bucket-o-Chicken! Barrel-o-Coke!) and finding therein the very width and breadth and gravity of many of the problems that beset the world today. Japanese fast foods (I refer to traditional Japanese fast foods here, the modern ones being essentially indistinguishable from those of America, except in perhaps the packaging) tend to be lighter and more natural, involving fewer stages of refinement. The Nikuman, for example, is a fluffy steamed bun cored with a stew of meat and costs less than a dollar. It's hot, fast, tasty, filling, low in calories and easy to find at all hours. (For simplicity, I'm leaving out all the other stuff that dietary pain-in-the-necks like myself often decry, like additives, preservatives, organics etc., also in the firm belief that just about anything is ok-- in fact, quite delicious-- once in a while). There's no real American equivalent to the Nikuman. Nor is there any real American equivalent to the Taiyaki, another of my street-sold winter favorites, a crispy mold-baked fish-shaped crepe-dough filled with a paste made of sweetened adzuki beans. Warm and tasty, natural winter street food, and the vendor is always interesting. Another favorite is the pebble-roasted yakiimo (baked sweet potato), sold from singsong trucks that slowly wend the winter nights. Great handwarmers as you eat the steaming and nourishing sweetness. Food built for the air and the season and the body. No American equivalents there either. So I guess there's no comparison after all. Maybe the US could gain something, as it were, from fast food like this.

Posted Saturday, January 04, 2003 by Robert Brady

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SEEDS

Kaya and I were taking a walk to the pond this morning when along the roadside I noticed a locust tree that still had some long felty pods hanging from it. As Kaya watched, I jumped way up high and grabbed a branch and pulled it down to lower another branch that had a big pod on it. I broke off the pod and gave it to Kaya, who, being just two years old a couple of days ago, had never seen such a thing, or anything even remotely resembling it, in her entire life; and here I was giving it to her as a gift. She was dumbfounded at this magical event, and stood there open mouthed for a long time, looking at this strange object in her own hand. Then I took the pod from her and split it neatly into two magical halves, each half nestling four or five large round flat brown hard shiny seeds, like gems in a fitted box. Kaya looked at them in amazement, then at me in amazement. I took one seed out and put it in her hand. She stared at it with two years of intensity. Then we took the other seeds out and she put them carefully in her pocket and went to the pond rich, and went back home rich. The seeds are all now carefully stacked on Kaya's little table, gaining interest.

Posted Friday, January 03, 2003 by Robert Brady

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MORE LIGHT

...like all living things a fire is a river of need, a kind of conversation, a dialog of light with darkness, like the fire in the sky and in a leaf. The heart itself is a flame, ablaze at the sight of itself in another eye; we carry all this like a sky in ourselves, and so when we come to tend a fire, we find that delight of meeting an old friend. Just stir this bit here and the fire flares up, fuel once starved for air now fed, from ember to flame, setting new thoughts alight. Tending a fire is the whole soul's delight, much like tending to life itself; in return the fire shares more than light and warmth, if we listen to its ancient tongue, for it speaks a language that lived far before and lives yet within us: This is the way you should tend yourself; this is the way you should tend others and your world. The fire is that of us outside ourselves. We recognize this tacitly, as we do in the light of stars. When we gaze into a fire's light we gaze into a mystic mirror, upon vast and untold secrets of ourselves. What we find there we feel to our depths, but cannot say.

Posted Thursday, January 02, 2003 by Robert Brady

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LIGHT


Sitting here alone at the kitchen table in close attendance upon getting some work done, my eye is caught by the flickering of the fire in the stove, the flames dancing in time to the second movement of Mozart's sonata in E flat for piano and violin (K. 380)-- I lift my eyes and see just a strip of land this side of the blue Lake in the sunlight, the foreground all in the shade of the mountain: in the luminescent air across the Lake rise the snowclad mountains of Ibuki and Suzuka and I feel what I've felt at every epiphany in my life, that my time has just begun, that each beginning begins with light: the light in Mozart's music, the light of the fire, the light of the sun, the light of the land, of snow, of seeing, of knowing, the light of being mortal that puts the fire into it all...

Posted Wednesday, January 01, 2003 by Robert Brady

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
WELCOME TO THE YEAR OF THE RAM!!

May you this year enjoy the Peace and Good Fortune brought by the Ram.