SEA-SIGHT: DAY EIGHT
northward the honshu coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
the winter sun disentangles itself from the horizon at 6:50. this time we are there to meet it. the vision throws itself from the looking-point on the goishi coast a few slight minutes before the sun is beginning to rid itself of water. nude for a few moments to be looked into. there is the same upward reach of all living things: children growing to meet the palms of their mothers. bougainvillea stretching to tiled rooftops. the elliptic build of cedar trunks summoning themselves skyward. it all mimics the motions of this first rising. one that washes clean the incoherent shadows with its doctrine of shade and colour and gloss, fine features that meet the eye lucid. to watch the sunrise is to participate in that wonderful and terrible idea—amor mundi. love of the world.
back to the hotel for breakfast, served by the elderly women who run the inn we are staying in. a meal humble in its offerings and endlessly generous in its careful preparation. then the drawn stretch of the road again.
there’s a large buddhist monument not far away, with a gigantic, daisy-white statue of the daikannon that overlooks kamaishi bay. the temple is somewhat clinical in the way that all these significant sites eventually become; respite with signatories and assertions, admonitions and trinkets. but she is a reverie. her placid expression, the stark ivory of her facade against the powdered skies. still, what takes me are the mountains. pressed as if on coquille, embossed with textures that vary from the diffused chiffon of snow to the fused forest tracks of conifers to the woollen brown strokes of turned earth. their fresco secco evidence of some recondite mastery. they comfort the stilled waters of the bay in a cradle, arms softened by centuries of holding.
I’ve found this place called kagami kaigan—the mirror cape, a name which to a poet is something irresistible. we curve along the increasingly icy pavement to a point where a board, coated in the familiar language of caution, probes us to stop. so we leave the car nestled in the woods and continue on feet. the walk is rough. the serpentine path sporadic with patches of snow and slush, the tanned needles of pine and unforgiving cobbles which crunch under the feet. I don’t know how long we walked for (f tells me later that it was around fifty minutes), only that it is a relief when the path brights out to a white breadth, and at its end—her. the sea.
to round a curve and be confronted with what you were seeking, it’s an incredible sensation, referring back to must have been the first discovery of things. there is a single set of footprints in the pale, so we are not the first ones here, but that knowledge does nothing to impede on the sense that something was in the process of being found for the first time. sacred in the preceding moments, but no less suited to awe for the disturbance of its purity.
in a circle of mountains that almost completes, the enclave towards the waters is a carpet of pebbles saturated with sun-stroke. the matchstick trunks of trees collating to form an opaque thing, growing from the stone. the sea laps softly at it. we are minuscule in the depth of this colossal bowl, privy to its insatiable thirst.
after the trek we are exhausted, and I sleepily and incautiously speed the car towards the sweet sea at jodogahama (north, always north). we miss the sunset, and the dusky leather of blue is already draped firmly over the shoreline as we walk it. the diligent islands that petal the flowering middle of the shore. I am so, so tired. a tiredness that sinks knowingly into the skin. the day has taken forever. I can’t cohere the beginning of it (that tangerine in the sky all glaze at its base) with the end (the forgiveness this royal dark lays on the shoulders of its subjects). it has been a hundred days. the words know this most of all. it is they who bring this phenomenon to hand. contains the heat enough so that it can be held. it is how beauty becomes a physical fact.
