"Calmly Crashing"

I spell like a five-year-old in Japanese - probably worse.

Ohio/OHAYO

how to feel: #2

On the first day late in the summer when it truly begins to smell of autumn, and the chill is something of a comfort, and the rain gets a little on your clothes when you go outside, that is a time to think of sitting quietly for hours, being lazy, sharing a blanket, warming her toes, laughing, letting her rest her head on your chest. Breathing slowly. And sometime making coffee. And baking cookies. And watching an old movie. And falling in and out of sleep.

It is best to think less about this as the day wears on. And to direct your mind to a book. Walk to the store. Write emails and letters. Find a glass for whiskey. And wait.

Older Plans

One day at lunch at the university, I opened my notes on the table and, over an hour and a half, we designed a hospital--though it could easily also have been a hotel or an apartment building--in the form of a unicursal labyrinth. That is to say that there is only a single path to follow from entrance to exit. It was deceptively so. A patient or visitor is meant to feel that she is wandering the halls freely, never even leaving the ground floor, but eventually to find herself facing something new in a place she has expected to find only a wall. It is a large stained-glass depiction of Saint John, chosen partially because of his significance in my life--parenthetically if you will, in possibly an open-ended sense, as I was born in St. John's in Santa Monica--but also to signify the revelation of path. Though the wandering patient feels she has been wandering, she is now made to see that she has been on a singular path. Having never believed herself traveling anywhere, she has ended up on the highest floor of the building. This understanding, once bestowed, will have one or a few of various effects upon her, determined not by our design but by her state of mind upon the moment of revelation, and of course by her wealth of experience that she has brought with her to this place.

It might be natural to hesitate when confronted with something unexpected. To consider whether or not it is dangerous. To begin slowly to investigate the surroundings. To look for signs of treachery, betrayal, abandonment. And of course she would not be blamed for turning around and following the path back to its beginning. The main problem then being that irksome knowledge that there are questions that will always go unanswered. Security and comfort can be forms of decay. But that is for her to say, and not for any of us.

It was our hope that her discovery would also be ours, each time new, a true revelation always being something internal, reflective, a discovery of self rather than of anything external. Our hospital only being a catalyst for the germ of thought. The appearance of the saint, not a call to salvation or spiritual ascendancy, but instead a call to ruminate, to stew, to stir, to overflow with self and to watch as that fullness reflects in those she encounters from that point forward.

But our design was flawed. It would never be constructed. I opted instead to design a city grid, the streets and waterways a model of a neural network of a person attempting to remember something he saw when he was seven, continually unable to do so. To find this image would, for him, he believes, reveal the true nature of love. Not merely the signifier tossed about across cultures or between gentlemen and ladies. It would be that perfect connection to the true thing, and not just the shadow of it. It is why he chooses to use long sentences to describe small ideas, because he believes the simple terms have been infested with meaning to the point of meaninglessness. And so in the city I saw built, it might take a man an hour to travel from his house to the nearest corner store, and it would certainly take him a lifetime to find the great center of it. Though perhaps only a moment or two to catch a glimpse of the park, the acropolis, the mall, the expansive library, the entrance to the zoo, the place where the children ride the trolley while a man dressed in lavender pinstripes calls out stations, there are no exits or entrances, only miniature models of other cities. And the children, they are children for an eternity, or at least until the city crumbles. They were designed this way. They are memories.

the problem outside the peanut

An expert on dinosaur teeth came into my office and asked me my thoughts on what happened before the Big Bang. I drew something resembling a peanut on the whiteboard, then produced an equation for the speed at which a particular internal combustion engine should motivate a two-ton truck, 65 mph. Then we observed that the truck was actually traveling at 50 mph. After a long discussion, the tooth expert asserted that there must be something wrong with my math. Maybe, I kindly suggested, there was something wrong with his mother's math. The truck that weighs two tons must actually have more mass somewhere. Hiding. Mass that doesn't affect the gravity of the truck, but which affects inertia in some other way. He explained that some dinosaurs may have had feathers. I called him a communist.

The peanut is a closed shell. There is nothing outside the peanut. If you try to crack the peanut open from the inside and look outside, you can't. So what about the rest of the whiteboard? The part outside the form of the peanut? This entire space is inhabited by a giant elephant, and if you ask too many stupid questions about what's outside the peanut, the elephant will find the peanut and eat us all. There's nothing outside the peanut, like I said. What happened before there was a before? That's one of those stupid questions.

Our conversation is being monitored, he said, from Tokyo. Why would anyone be so creepy without cause? I asked. It is because they are afraid of what you mights say about them. Who is "they?" It's hard to say, and you probably don't even know them.

I made notes on the conversation for my office records and placed them in a file folder before heading out to the store. I had been craving sushi. It was still early in the evening, but it gets dark relatively early also. I have stopped being able to recall the directions from the office to the supermarket. It is a series of steps, pauses, turns, and breaths stored somewhere in a physical memory. It plays out automatically so I can be free to concern myself with other matters. And why these other matters should somehow be more important than the way to food, I am not certain, but the fact remains that all I thought about on the walk was whether or not to make dinner plans for this Saturday. I was tempted to buy a bag of chocolate-covered peanuts, but opted instead for whiskey.

path, as it were

I come here in the mornings to read Homer. And I am told the birds I've been calling cranes are actually white heron. It is a better name, and I'm glad the better bird got it. A young Korean woman stopped me and made small talk. I pointed to where I thought the Jusco was, and she pointed almost in the opposite direction. The streets here wind more than even in San Antonio. Her name is unpronounceable to me, so she said I could call her Jaime, which seems very unfair. It isn't her name. It's just easier for those unwilling to call her what she is meant to be called.

I do a lot of walking away around corners

But being a film guy, I want to see both shots, to linger in the moment after and watch quotidian set in, or at least imagine it. He begins walking more quickly, reaches in his pocket for some change and enters a seven-eleven. I don't have the shot list for the other side.

This month, the budget has to include the expensive coffee place, regular visits. It is the place to sit when working. I have been sitting on my wallet for a while. This past week was unavoidable. There was no wallet to even sit on. But there was money in the bank this morning, and when the supermarket opens, there will be food in the cupboard and that is a wonderful thing. To be celebrated. Not too heartily, there is the coffee place to think of.

Had my first Japanese lesson in a while. I learned some body parts, and I asked how to say perfect. "compiki" I think. Before that I could only say good. I was very tired. Drinking on others' dimes. Disinterested. I am thinking more and more today about fruit. I was told that I am a big believer in bananas. I think it will have to be a banana then. And I need to buy a gift, perhaps some chocolates, to say thank you for allowing me to live.

Chocolates are good for the saving of a life, I think.

bites

One week before the first bite, I met the devil in a sandbox. I scooped him up with a red plastic shovel, and he hissed. From then on I steered clear, remaining for the most part under the thick wooden beams of the playhouse, in the shade with the mud-cake children. One of them was determined to dig out his brain with a straw, and it was when I refused him this pleasure that he lunged for me, taking a chunk near my armpit. The doctors treated me for rabies. That is my recollection, anyway.

And then she bit my ear, softly at first, almost unnoticeably, but she was unsatisfied and began to press harder, she wanted to tear the flesh, and so I threw her down and waited for her to relax, then I sat on the sofa next to her and watched some TV a while before she had her teeth in my scalp. There was an intellect to it, the devouring of brains, not just the blind lust of zombies, though that was not completely absent.

It was completely dark in the tent, and despite the netting, we were kept awake all night by the sounds of hands slapping ankles and necks, fingernails scratching dry skin, frustrated breathing.

I once wrote a poem in which I devoured you. I thought it was a clever way to talk about what it must be like to love me. To watch yourself being slowly broken down into nutrients and absorbed. I never wrote the end. Three hours on the toilet. It didn't seem beautiful.

The devil is small and pink with white teeth and no eyes, in case you were wondering.

we make places for them to inhabit

we build cities from thought, desire

we map their worlds, interior, little doll houses where we can keep an eye

it is our need for objects to continue, necessity, development

from: if i cannot see you, you do not exist

to: i ride trains, erasing track behind the yellow past--they are covered in rust

she will sometimes close an open window to stop a draft, and i will imagine it open again because of the way small winds play in her hair

it's cold, she says, stop toying

so i give her a silk robe, white, but she only wants to go to bed now

i haven't built this for her, and so it is only a stillness when she goes,

it is sometimes best to see circles where you have been taught to make frames

Which is the very salt of patience. I misunderstand the direction of syllables. When I walk into rooms, she is scraping a fork across the surface of a plate, laboring to produce a porcelain zest. Her feet are labored, her eyes labored, those thoughts that pass between the kitchen sounds are labored. And I am tempted to paint the scene, of course as a historical painting because those are the most important, but I am relegated to the pastoral or the realist genres. Or else a mosaic, repeated shades of labored colors. On this margin, you are directed to think of motherhood, new, unbroken, still pushing everything out. On this margin you are directed to the waning days of a prison sentence, a clean room, a library book, fantasies of stripes and chain gangs, roof-work and highway construction, the digging of ditches that serve no purpose. A clean room. Well lit. A toilet. And a window in the door. But the center. The center is a question. A demand. A word you forgot to hear, or you woke in the middle, or fell asleep at the end of it. And when I sit down to tables, she is placing salt--heaping it--in front of me. It is the very best sort, I can hear myself pretending to lie, but in fact I believe it.

the end of that summer holiday feeling

I've decided to stay in Furukawa at least another year. Working on the logistics of that, but it looks like it's going to happen. I'm really happy about it, but I do extend my apologies to those I assured that I'd be returning to Texas.

So all the Summer festivities are over, and the campaigns for the Japanese general election kicked off this week. Should be an interesting civics lesson for me. Meanwhile, it seems like a good opportunity, with projects coming to a close and a certain renewal of earnestness in the air, to hit the writing again with some vigor. I've allowed myself to lose the love of it, as it was recently put to me.

Back in the stoop days, I was sitting with Elizabeth over a glass of whiskey (she had a merlot in one of her grandmother's glasses, I think) and I was maligning a certain friend for having dropped contact with me for seemingly no reason. You were there when things went wrong, she said, even if you helped in some way, sometimes just reminding someone of pain is enough. I couldn't accept it, but I think I am beginning to agree. Writing saved my sorry ass after the split with the woman, the divorce, the ensuing identity crisis, it was sometimes the only thing I knew I could trust, but as I began to feel more like myself, I became sick of the sound of my own words. They had the feel of disgust, even when they were positive. But I have been living long enough without the love of words, the finding of things on blank screens, that now it is the silence that seems to drone. It is time again, finally, to live in anticipation of the next story, to love my shitty poetry (no joke, it's bad, but I love writing it) and to stop seeing writing as a way into pain.

Also, I need some coffee and some hot water.

Kyoto, Tokyo, an illiterate guide to:

sexy ham