THE ROCK

The Rock is a work

of quiet atmosphere

and simple exterior.

The Rock defines

a place in nature.

The approach to The Rock

is by footsteps

symbolizing passage

from another world.

To passersby, The Rock seems

nonchalant, perhaps even

uninterested.

Yet once inside, 

the visitor discovers

one ingenious space 

after another.

The Rock is conceived

as a series of experiences,

based on its own

compositional logic.

Rock visitors encounter

emotions they would not feel

elsewhere.

The Rock is neither abstract

nor representational;

The Rock is enthralled with

ambiguities of perception.

The Rock evinces 

an uncanny power

to convince the observer

of its spatial impact.

The Rock is the embodiment

of gravity.

A linear path

links all Rocks.

Each Rock is located 

at the center of the site.

THE CLOUD RESEMBLES A RABBIT

In a previous millennium, not long after I had come to Japan and seen how different the news was over here from what it had been back home, where Japan was still not quite above suspicion as an ally (and never will be, in some still-living minds), I was experiencing what every traveler senses at every international transit: that borders determine news, and that all news is local. Every seasoned border-crosser knows how the truth changes when that judicial interface is passed, how the victims on one side become the murderers on the other. But this was all rather subconsciously perceived by me at the time, amid the swarm of new information travel stirs up.

I guess that’s why not long after I arrived in Tokyo I had a dream in which as a dream novice monk I asked my dream abbot the koan “What is media?” and he responded “The cloud resembles a rabbit,” which phrase was floating homeless in my newly alien brain as I awoke. I thought it a rather silly answer at the time; but then, I was only a novice alien dream monk.

Since then I’ve traveled more, and have seen and heard more news here and there and elsewhere from an increasingly alien perspective, and have observed how difficult it can be for a local to maintain a healthy skepticism while immersed in a sea of information served up by ‘trained’ and ‘qualified’ professionals who are actually ‘on the spot’. It seems most people never travel ‘far’ enough to gain such perspective, and never see how profoundly their own borders alter news, and so general populaces tend to trust their media, which by definition stand between the seeker and the truth.

Once upon a time, when there was nothing between us and reality, when rock or tree or flower or wind or stream was as real as our imagining – when we were inseparate from the actuality around us-- our hands were easily water, our eyes easily sky, our hearts easily fire. Long before there were media standing dutifully in our light, or streaming through the air in disembodied voices or faces, or sheets of paper covered with words from minds, times and places we can never know or be in; before we began to indulge in the narcissistic addiction of setting ourselves up to believe even history was true as told to us, subsequently relying on second, third and fourth-hand accounts of events to keep us abreast of things we didn’t really have a clue about except this or that smidgeon afforded us by an unknown and elsewhere accredited committee, thus collectively aspiring to the dangerous illusion that bides at the heart of modern society, i. e., that we actually have a handle on what is going on around the world even now – as I say, before all these veils came to be (pay no attention to that man behind the curtain), we saw no separation between ourselves and the world around us, had as yet created no distinction, no palisades of faith, no moats of patriotism, no need for better and better weapons and the right to bear them, no seeds of distrust, no doubting the very air.

Environed as we are now by information and its aftereffects, with billboards on our eyeballs and pixels in our faces, new stars in the sky and etherwaves sectoring our very bodies, all we need is the internet. How crucial it has become, then, that we revive and maintain our ancient skepticism, our own intelligence, as we carom like corks down the whitewater rapids of data directed by experts. So gain perspective: look at a tree if you can find one, and remember the roots; or at least look up at a patch of sky and remember that the cloud resembles a rabbit.

One of my Rambles, From Kyoto Journal #46

THE BEST SELLERS OF 1855

What do you think was the best-selling nature book of 1855: Walden? (Published 1854.) And the best selling novel: Moby Dick? (Published 1851.) Best-selling book of poetry: Leaves of Grass? (Published 1855.) Fact is, apart from a bit of negative notoriety, those three classics bombed at home for half a century after they were first published. It took that long, and a lot of murky water under the bridge, for the general perspective to come round to these visionary ways of looking at the world.

Few people in the present day see the world the way top-ranked authoress Lavinia Braithwaite did, in her runaway best-selling nature book of 1855, The Truth in God’s Word as Manifested in the Geometric Flower Garden for all Mankind, Who Should Dress in Black.

Nor can much of today be found in the best-selling novel of 1855, Black Hats, Black Suits and the Wrath of Paradise, a gripping saga of irrepressible redemption, wherein author Livingston Hornthorn explored the salvational possibilities to be found in dark garments, tight collars, cold water and daily prayer at home with mother and father.

And there’s less now than ever in the best-selling poetry tome of 1855, Three Posies and a Nosegay in Black Crepe, a leatherbound heartstopper by author Pangborne Thorogood, who epically visualized for all of his contemporaries a world of funereally pale virgins dressed in black holding a lock of hair of the deceased and some violets, loitering among the lilies in a graveyard, a veritable heaven on earth.

But now that we’ve gotten through all that, and are here at last in the comparatively loosened up and more organically responsible future with its burgeoning Henry-Herman-Walt perspective, our attention is being fought over by such bestsellers as Bonecrunch and Bloodbath and Suffer and Die Vicariously, semi-automatic page turners surpassing even the blockbuster Absolute Misery in their ability to kill time with an Uzi, then just toss it in the landfill.

For illumination after a fashion there’s Cellophane Prophecies; for the more hardy there’s Ten Easy Steps to a Lifelong Journey; then there's the presidential biography Appear to Have Scruples, popular diversions from sugarless reality via lo-cal bromides.

Do we moderns deem ourselves deserving of these sentences imposed by our own Lavinias, Pangbornes and Livingstons, when so few have even heard of the elegant and heartfilling Waldens, Mobys and Leaves of our time, that can assist in our creating and reaching a worthy future, even show us around when we get there?

You’ll have to exit the best-selling book hangar and search where few ever go, to find out how tomorrow has been foreseen and forenourished; what’s more, you’ll have to have taste-- so seldom a thing of its time.

[Previously published - in different form - in Kyoto Journal]

THE SUMMER OF THEIR CONTENTMENT

Now that the cooling days of late August are here, the insects that sing of night are singing of day as well, full in the summer of their contentment… Here in a mountain breezy afternoon I can't begin to count the variety of choruses from earth, underbrush, tree and sky-- it is impossible to distinguish, into their exquisite threads, all the woof and warp of this skywide tapestry of song...

Last night a singing insect of a kind I'd not yet heard (i.e., not paid attention to) began singing through our screen door-- or rather, sounded, for it was not so much a song as an unadulterated call, unrefined for human ears of course, it was a summons to all kindred, with a rhythmic generation more sensation than sound, defying such mereness as ears, meant for entire bodies of the proper size and impulse, a vibration of greater measure than humanity allows... would that I could hear beyond our mundane range to the sonic rainbow this song implied, with its attention-perturbing power.

On and on it went as we do in our own conversations, but this was only one, giving all there was, awaiting a response in its brief turn at life and what it means to say... A little Zen master, unseen, offering nonetheless a cosmic koan. The same heaven was born in us, if we have not been taught - and learned - to forget…

Hiroshige
never heard of Goethe
and yet... and yet...

REAL RAINBOWS

This bright morning I traced a rainbow that arched from somewhere around Steve's house all the way to Mt. Hiei, and stood there swimming in the vision. We get full and long-term rainbows all the time out here, as compared to the couple of minutes of barely distinguishable portions of arc we used to get sometimes in the city, kind of faded and archaeological, like an artifact that disintegrates on contact with modern air, such as that is, but these arches of light we see against the mountains and the Lake are real rainbows, rich ones, wide ones, full ones, all the way from here to there, pots of gold everywhere, from violet to orange with all the in between, and you can't help but stand and ponder (unless for some criminal reason you're in a hurry) that you can't find the edges to the rainbow (but the rainbow is distinct, isn't it; yet it isn't, is it), and none of the colors have an edge but they too are distinct but not, which leads you to realize as you stand there, fully rainbow-minded by now, that this small band of colors we are vouchsafed to see is but a small segment of the infinite stretch of vibrations there are; that sound and gamma rays are of the same continuum, as are all other 'waves,' including us, and why in the world should we see only this little bit, would it be too much if we could see it all; and in a way we're seeing with our ears when we hear sound waves, and hearing with our eyes when we see light waves, and hearing/seeing with our skin when we feel heat waves, all part of the one continuum we chop up into different senses; and in the very same dark-age way that we used to think the world was flat and the sun rose, so we still think our senses separate, our perceptions isolate and all distinct, 20/20, and at the edges where only the senses get fuzzy begins the dogma...