SEA-SIGHT: DAY FIVE
northward the honshu coastline in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
five marks the direct middle of things, where beginning parts paths and the definition of an ending begins to excise its place. today we break from the tenderness we have carved with the coast to work our way inland awhile, toward the buddhist temple run by a well-regarded monk, whom we know as a friend’s lover.
today’s sky is of an immense, fatalistic height. now that we invade them so often, it seems that the upper realms fail to impress, but here, roundly carved with cumulous clouds and set stark against the dull gold of winter farmland, it becomes impossible to understand its range, its exhalations, its solid hovering holding the simmer of the day.
the temple is broken in places and polished in others. melted snow tapping a xylophonic melody as it drips downward from the sculpted roofs. he lets us into the grand structure, which is startlingly alive, as all things in the process of healing are alive. the smell of pine-wood. tatami brittle and new and cold. inviting us to the sitting room, we lean into our knees in front of oranges and green rice cakes, a soft brown tea which he pours with hands accustomed to folding. we make small talk. we ask questions. he speaks. we speak. the words collapse in on themselves between us. most of all I am watching him looking at us or not looking at us.
it’s strange to know someone first through the layering eyes of someone who loves them, and then to meet them in the odd circumstances of reality. they are arriving papered with all the wondrous exposures of having been deeply known and cherished. as something tender already. he is serious, then he smiles, and it is as if something has settled rightfully into place. I want to ask him about the sea, what he felt in the immediate aftermath of its most disastrous manifestations, then about what followed. I want to know what he thought.
I thought about the unity of all living things, he says.
we leave feeling the levity and inductive allure of having been privy to something rare. as if in hallucination, the volatile blue of the stratosphere integrates the whole landscape. along the newly built roads of the fukushima coast we pass the evidence of things being fixed. replacing is different from amending. one is trying to start again from zero, but the same natural elements come into sight, even as the architectures displacing them change. even if we change. there is still the continuous silt of the soil. the morphing tendencies of salt-breeze. the grey road that cuts through the sea. we are at the centre looking outwards, under the false, but happy impression that we see everything.
a ballet of swans vary the current. if prosody had a law it would be the way a swan portrays against the water.
today’s clouds are mischievous, thickly veiling the light then pushing it forward in broad oil-strokes. giggling with the threat of rain. shimmering and pluralizing. we curve the car into a horribly thin path then abandon it and go forward on foot. past the hanabuchi lighthouse we slip our reluctant feet down a vicious concoction of a path: rich earth and fervid roots and the integrated grey of these always ocean-stones.
then, at the end of it, the sea.
always as if seeing it for the first time. the unity of this landscape is a dream that has been dreamed many times, yet in its presence one does not think of recognition, but the way any single thing multiplies to become many, as we come to meet it with the brilliant images of itself compounded. every sighting of the sea is every memory of the sea. and it is the sea’s primal origins. and it is the sea’s voyage into the not-yet known. we are early for once. the light is almost slow to fade. the colours it entrusts to us are tucked into my sleeves for material; they will be saved and dreamed another time.
