~~~~~~~~~


YUKIDARUMA

During the snowfall a few days ago Kaya and I went out on the deck and made a yukidaruma (the Japanese name for what we call a 'snowman,' yuki being 'snow,' daruma being short for Bodhidarma, the founder of Chan Buddhism in China (Zen Buddhism in Japan). When I looked out this sunny morning, this is what remained.

NOTES FROM A FELLOW WHO LIVED NEAR HERE YESTERDAY

"I too gave up city life some ten years ago, and now I'm approaching fifty. I'm like a bagworm that's lost its bag, a snail without its shell. I've tanned my face in the hot sun of Kisakata in Ou, and bruised my heels on the rough beaches of the northern sea, where tall dunes make walking so hard. And now this year here I am drifting by the waves of Lake Biwa. The grebe attaches its floating nest to a single strand of reed, counting on the reed to keep it from washing away in the current. With a similar thought, I mended the thatch on the eaves of the hut, patched up the gaps in the fence, and at the beginning of the fourth month, the first month of summer, moved in for what I thought would be no more than a brief stay. Now, though, I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever want to leave.

Spring is over, but I can tell it hasn't been gone for long. Azaleas continue in bloom, wild wisteria hangs from the pine trees, and a cuckoo now and then passes by. I even have greetings from the jays, and woodpeckers that peck at things, though I don't really mind-in fact, I rather enjoy them. I feel as though my spirit had raced off to China to view the scenery in Wu or Chu, or as though I were standing beside the lovely Xiao and Xiang rivers or Lake Dongting. The mountain rises behind me to the southwest and the nearest houses are a good distance away. Fragrant southern breezes blow down from the mountain tops, and north winds, dampened by the lake, are cool. I have Mount Hie and the tall peak of Hira, and this side of them the pines of Karasaki veiled in mist, as well as a castle, a bridge, and boats fishing on the lake. I hear the voice of the woodsman making his way to Mount Kasatori, and the songs of the seedling planters in the little rice paddies at the foot of the hill. Fireflies weave through the air in the dusk of evening, clapper rails tap out their notes-there's surely no lack of beautiful scenes."

Excerpted from The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling by Basho

From the Country of Eight Islands New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.

~~~~~~~~~


BEYOND CROWS AND MONKEYS

Yesterday evening when I went out into the snowfalling dusk to gather some leaves from the biwa tree (loquat; Eriobotrya japonica), the leaves-- moreso than the seeds (as chronicled in earlier here)-- being a general tonic/panacea particularly useful in the winter (and when Kaya is visiting), I found that something had been there before me.

When I got ten meters from the tree in the dimming light I could see that several of the tree's branches had been freshly broken in other than the direction of the limb, and that the tip (new) leaves were gone, which ruled out the weight of the snow as the cause. Immediately I thought of monkeys, as per the fig tree episode that I had originally wrongly blamed on Dr. Crow, but I hadn't seen or heard any monkeys-- which would be eminently visible cruising through the leafless trees-- nor could I picture monkeys eating biwa leaves, which are rather dry and hard, not at all succulent. Monkeys love succulent.

I was standing there pondering this puzzle when from across the road I heard a great thrashing in the wild mountain bamboo, its violently waving tips taller than a man, and turned toward the sound thinking that it couldn't be monkeys, who don't fancy hanging around down in the bamboo, and judging by the size of the thrash it was a lot bigger than even a big male monkey; whatever it was had been doing this to the biwa tree when I had interrupted.

Judging from the thrashing, the beast had apparently picked up my scent, since I was upwind. I thought it might be a crescent-moon bear; I couldn't see the creature itself, but I stood there staring and sending my scent and before long from the far edge of the bamboo into the distant meadow leaped a white heart-shaped patch of whitetail, that bounded away up toward the greater forest; all I could see in the dusky blur of falling snow was that much brighter patch flashing away to disappearance.

Perhaps I had been too hasty in blaming the no-good renegade onion/shiitake marauding monkeys for the fig tree... this deer had come to the garden in the light of afternoon and not been seen; they must also then come at dawn and when no one is here, to dine on the fine new leaves and buds.

I cut the several broken branches off the biwa tree and now we have enough leaves for a long winter's tea. To make the tea, you wipe the fine hairs from the leaf backs with a wet sponge, then scissor the leaves into ca. 3 cm pieces and boil; you can also tincture the pieces in white alcohol (e.g., vodka, shochu) for an excellent topical/internal home remedy. Thanks to the deer. This time. As to solutions, I wonder what deer think of hot peppers. Nature leads the mind into places wondrously strange...

~~~~~~~~~


"NO GODS MATCHING YOUR QUERY WERE FOUND IN THE DATABASE."

That's the result I got when I typed Japan's No. 1 deity, Amaterasu Omikami (I left off the Omikami, figuring last names were unnecessary, given the finite database) into the search box at GODCHECKER, Your Guide to the Gods (in case you got lost), where it's "LATEST NEWS: MAYAN GODS NOW ONLINE!!" And you can check out the "Top Ten Gods," browse the "New Pantheon Section" and theocommercially order "THE OFFICIAL GODCHECKER MUG" wherewith to quaff your nectar of choice.

Despite all that cyberomniscience, though, Godchecker seems to have a bit of an occidental bias, since even with "Over 1300 Gods now online!", the primo Japanese deity is nowhere around, not to mention her major pain-in-the-mythology brother Susa-no-O-no-Mikoto, who has been known to cause BIG trouble when slighted. They've got African gods, Australian gods, even Finnish gods for godsake, but no Japanese gods.

Is nothing sacred?

~~~~~~~~~


AS TO THE PUNCH-CLOCK PERSPECTIVE:

Are US corporate profits for real? Excellent analysis at CFO.

TEACHINGS OF THE WOODPILE

This morning, as I was sitting more-and-less absently pondering the woodpile (a common and valuable woodheater activity), yesterday's gift of straw-tied firewood seemed now to glow with a special value, compared to the already firewood stacked nearby. As I sat and awaited the reason, all in its own good, slow, woody time the bundled wood finally enlightened me.

Clearly I hadn't initially given it all the thought it was worth. In my modern fastframe ergocentric take on why the wood had been thus arranged and bound, the only possible conclusion was that the woodcutter had bundled and tied it for his own convenience, or perhaps even for mine; what a punch-clock way of looking at the world!!

I had to slow down and rise quite a bit to perceive that the woodcutter had bundled the wood thus not out of convenience, but out of respect. Even the original pile had been neatly arranged, as I recalled, and in my modern quicktake approach that aspect had at the time been invisible to me. As well rice-straw rope, the kind often used in Shinto ceremonies, had been used to tie the uniformly segmented wood into symmetrical bundles. The woodcutter had done so because he was dealing with kami.

Kami is perhaps the hardest Japanese concept to bring to blossom in the Western mind, which has only its highly strictured Godhood, under whose scripturally carte blanche auspices the trees and animals, indeed the entire earth, are here for us to overlord. The idea of kami, in contrast, puts humanity in and of the world, not above it.

This had perhaps been a particularly auspicious tree because it came from a place the cutter respected or honored in some additional way; thus the wood deserved more than to be simply cast haphazardly in a pile like mere trash. Such distinctions have all but disappeared in today's throwaway society, wherever they may have existed. There was kami in the tree that gave this wood, so there was kami in the wood, that had to be honored.

And now, as a result of that selfless time-sacrifice on the part of the farmer, there was kami in me.

~~~~~~~~~


HOW TO WRAP FIVE STICKS OF BUNA

Japanese folks out in the country are so in tune with all the things there are out here to be in tune with, the details are frequently disconcerting to a city boy. As, for example, the other morning down in the "firewood dump" as I call it, the place I mentioned in a much earlier post (whose link I can't find), where all the farmers (and thus landscapers) go to toss their woody detritus where it will either go where all organic detritus goes-- slowly back into the big cycle-- or be picked up by a new and radical group, the Free Firewood Gatherers, whence it will go more quickly back into the big cycle.

Since the site is a few hundred meters down mountain from me (take a right just past the tunnel), each time I go by there I try to remember to check it out with a quick and practiced glance sideways. Said other morning, as we were on our way out to do some long errands, I spotted a new and very goodlooking bunch of wood there (one acquires a fast sense about these things, fine-tuned in my case by my year of scavenging in the Berkeley landfill, to which I referred in a post called Morning Lace, whose link I can find); might even be buna (beech).

It looked so good I was afraid it would be gone before I got back but it wasn't, turned out it was in fact buna, an excellent firewood. What's more, the farmer had tied it all up in neat bundles with straw rope!! Just to throw away!! Or perhaps for the convenience of firewood scavengers like myself? In any case it was a beautiful and touching thing to behold, all that fine wood lying there, tied up so neatly and time-consumingly, simply to be given back to the world; there was a folksy beauty to it that I still haven't had the heart to untie, though it's all in my woodpile now, where it was all the more easy to stack for having been so considerately arranged and stoutly bound. Except for two big trunkchunks that I'll have to go get later with the chainsaw, if another woodster doesn't beat me to it (we do move fast when there's goodwood to be had). And from the melodic tonality of all that fine, rockhard buna as I tossed it all together on the pile for later arrangement, with a little more work than usual it would make a very big and damn fine marimba.

~~~~~~~~~


LANDOVER BAPTIST CHURCH,

"The Largest, Most Powerful Assembly of Worthwhile People to Ever Exist (Unsaved Are NOT Welcome),"

is toying with our souls again.

~~~~~~~~~


SHOVELING YEN TO FLOAT THE DOLLAR

"Japan seems to be infected with some strange sort of death wish similar to the male black widow. I do not know what promises of 'sweetness and pleasure' the big spider, which is comprised of our financial elite here in the U.S., has beguiled them with but they are dead set on filling their reserves with U.S. paper which is losing value on a daily basis and getting devoured in the process.

One can only feel sympathy for the common Japanese men and women who have been sold out by their financial elites as Japan sells its soul to the Fed and Wall Street interests. Think what wealth that nation could have secured for its people had it plowed a goodly portion of that trade surplus into gold bullion or even silver for that matter over the last year. Instead, like England whose people no doubt 'benefited' from the sale of England's gold at sub-$300 prices in exchange for paper assets that bear 'interest,' Japan has embarked upon a fool's course that will have repercussions lasting well into the next decade.

What is so tragic in this debacle we are witnessing unfolding before our eyes is that the entire game is played for the benefit of the few whose shortsighted folly is slowly but surely laying the groundwork for the loss of economic power and supremacy in the years ahead for our nation and that of Japan as well."

Dan Norcini

~~~~~~~~~


DEEP DOWN IN YOUR IQ YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE

"Granted, there are certain subsections of the American polity that have substantially benefited from this presidency. Millionaires and charismatic Christians have accrued either material or spiritual fortification from Bush's administration. But surely these two groups are a small minority of the population. What, then, can account for so many people being so supportive of the president?"

~~~~~~~~~


LETTER FROM VIETNAM VET FATHER TO GIs (HIS SON AMONG THEM) SOLDIERING IN IRAQ

...

"They are your enemies--The Suits--and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they f***ing aren't there. You are.

They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having their benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious illnesses."

...

Read the rest of this harrowing but brilliant letter.

~~~~~~~~~


BET YOU CAN'T

Go a few million parsecs out into space, turn around and come slowly back, looking around you carefully at the passing supernovas and black holes and galaxies, newborn and dying suns and blue, orange, green, red, yellow, ringed and striped planets, planets of every description, some of their gazillions upon infinitillions bearing life but most not, and as you drift back toward your own microscopic blue dot of a planet there in the far distance, ponder the things you have seen and all that they mean and imply, then upon your return take a look at all earth's archaically manmade, pompously homocentric holy books and the people who take them literally-- and who use them as justification for killing each other daily-- without thinking there must be a more intelligently inhabited planet out there somewhere...

~~~~~~~~~


UNCENSORED GORE VIDAL

Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won't be pretty.

~~~~~~~~~


THE DEPRESSION YEARS

On looking through THE DEPRESSION YEARS as Photographed by Arthur Rothstein, I feel the value of every little thing there is, I am more aware of the invisible in the visible, and that these times are simpler than we will ever know.

[RB journal excerpt, April 8, 1982]

~~~~~~~~~


THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY? GIMME A BREAK!!

As long-term readers of PLM are well aware, my relations with monkeys have not always been of the best, given the utter lack of diplomacy and consideration, not to mention general social and other niceties, on the part of the simians as distinct from myself (when there aren't any monkeys in my garden) and my species, which disparity has led on a number of local occasions to the reactionary hurling of insults and such various physical deprecations as sticks, stones and other rock-bottom diplomatic exchanges, and since this is the year of the monkey and NOT THE YEAR OF THE HUMAN, I must state for the record that I feel this lapse to be extremely unfair in view of the simian record, which is as long as their arm, a record right there in ravaged onions for all to see, and as a result perhaps join me in the diplomatic propulsion of sticks and stones and anything else we can get our diplomatic hands on when the highly honored monkeys try to steal tomatoes or a year.

I do want to be fair about this and I know the Year of the Monkey et al. is largely metaphoric, but can't we find a better metaphor somewhere? Giving those howling brigands a year of their own? Come on! I know we're noble creatures and all, but how noble can you get for godsake? We don't have our own year, do we? The monkeys have their year, even snakes have their year, rats for cryinoutloud, even dragons (that's cool, I'm a white metal dragon, myself) and the others, but not a year for us, the noble, seed-planting, garden-guarding, calendar-making species? I ask you, is that fair? Who started all this anyway? That's right, us: who else would care enough to stick a monkey in their face for a whole year?

It all started way back when we were still monkeys ourselves, still invading paradise (as we came to call it in our many one-and-only holy books) to steal apples and onions and whatever else we could get our hands on, initially without that twinge of guilt we soon picked up thereby, given our innate nobility, guilt that has made us the supreme beings we are today, creatures who feel so guilty that we give monkeys their own year, of all things... doesn't such selflessness deserve a year of its own?? And who else is going to give it to us but us? Forget about asking the monkeys.

So let's hear it for The Year of the Human!! Trouble is, though, we'd have to live up to it...

~~~~~~~~~


THE TRUTH MUST BE IN HERE SOMEWHERE

"Stocks End First Positive Year Since 1999"
"Dollar Trims Losses After Record Lows"
"Year's Big Rally Helps Investors Regain Ground"
"Wall Street ends 3-year losing spell"
"The key to Wall Street's comeback"
"Profit-taking stalls Wall Street's end-of-year bull run"
"Finally, a year to really cheer about"
"Stocks rally"

Judging from those New Year headlines, you'd think the US economy has put the pits behind it and made a remarkable comeback, yet nary a mention of the de facto fact (as opposed to media artifact) that gold, the thermometer of a healthy economy, has hit a 14-year high of $417 and is still climbing (both gold and silver are up over 30%), while everything else has been sinking or at best treading water with "profits" diluted by inflation or debt, while for the past seven months corporate insiders have been dumping stock at more than a 20-to-1 ratio... can't help but wonder why none of that is mentioned anywhere in the major media (owned largely by Republicans), while debt-saddled US taxpayers foot the rocketing Bush bills with their jobless income and their sons, in a scenario worthy of Orwell...

As Bill Bonner of The Daily Reckoning puts it,

"The huge burst of government spending and additional debt did manage to hold off the day of reckoning... at least for a while. George W. Bush still has a shot at another term. Alan Greenspan is not yet regarded as the mountebank he really is. Americans are deeper in debt than ever... and going bankrupt at the fastest rate ever in history... but seem perfectly happy to do so!

So, it worked! The bubble was successfully reloaded. Investors can now buy stocks for more they are worth... and ruin themselves by borrowing for less than the real cost of money."


Another year of head-shaking...

~~~~~~~~~


INFINITY TO THE BONE

A fascinating tale about another of the one and only Emily...

"This is the story of how I stumbled on something rare almost beyond comprehension. On April 12, 2000, I purchased in an eBay online auction what may be the second known photograph of Emily Dickinson..." The rest of the story...

~~~~~~~~~


STUFF YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW DEPARTMENT: Battery University


"Battery University is an institution that provides practical battery knowledge for engineers, educators, students and battery users alike. The papers address battery chemistries, best battery choices and ways to make your battery last longer.

The presentations are easy-to-read and are limited to about 1000 words."

HATSUMODE

Late afternoon yesterday, for Hatsumode (first visit to the gods) we walked down to the village to the main Shinto shrine there, whose name translates as "Eight Places" (I have to inquire into the origin of that interesting name, I'll put it right...down...here on my huge list.)

As we walked down the mountain, the sky was exhibiting its awesome winter lighting, coloring and texture techniques, the towering clouds curving, silvering, rippling, purpling and ivorying with patches of blue now and then, setting the perfect tone for the spiritual mood of the village; for unlike cities, where Hatsumode is pretty much a social habit, here in the countryside it is still deep and real, still what it began as, most people around here yet maintaining direct connection with the earth and the water from which they derive their food and livelihoods-- this is where they grew up, this is what they grew up on, this is what they are made of. So Hatsumode here has all the depth of ancient simplicity.

Eight Places was clearly once a key shrine of the lakeside road, the Shrine's main power channel running as usual arrowstraight out from the main axis of the shrine complex through the entrance torii and down a small road leading directly to the Lake, a road seldom traveled anymore except by the folks who live down there, since it leads only to the Lake, though not so far back in the past the road was doubtless the major source of commerce for the village, most local commodities in olden times, not to mention fish, coming via and from the Lake, the region's major highway during the BP (before petroleum) era.

On their altars the gods get sheaves of rice, hulled rice, chestnuts, persimmons, mikan, sake, mochi and salt, and everyone within kami-radiant reach of the Shrine comes and claps and bows and then gets a cup of hot amazake (sweet sake) and stands socializing around the big fire that's always burning on the cold days of Hatsumode, preparing together for another in the thousands of years they and their ancestors have shared so far in this place.

ENDLESS BREATH

There are spells within time and language by which words are transformed and no longer hold precisely the old meaning because of their new shape, which causes them also to be pronounced differently in the language of the current tongue, and then some generations down the etymological expressway there is an exclamation of surprise at the discovery that a given word, so native to the tip of this very own tongue, stems from a tongue that spoke the word differently a long time ago, a word that in its turning came from an even longer-ago tongue that spoke another of the same language altogether, passing the word along the length of breath from the hum of beginning, just as all things and people and tongues have been passed along without cessation if they exist today, and transcending the surprise is the enlightenment that 'your' language is not yours at all, but a borderless portion of a vast, living, autonomically shifting mindlight aurora that illumines the earth and outlives us each and can never be pinned down as so many have so humanly vaingloriously tried to do, and that this one endless breath that is language, as it breathes through you is breathing you too, breathing you into meaning, for you think along the lines and seams it allows you, as dictators (from the Latin root dicere, "to speak"), for example, have always known, and that the freedom and flexibility in your language correlate with the freedom and flexibility in your life; you are as free as your language, and as confined, unless you go beyond its edges into the wilds...


[Adapted from the version originally published in Kyoto Journal "Word" issue, #29, 1995]

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2004, THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY.

woodcut by David Lance Goines

For HalfTheSky.