SEA-SIGHT: DAY FOUR
northward the honshu coastline in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
at just before six am we awoke in anticipation of sunrise, but f parts the curtains and announces that it is snowing. we fall back asleep.
driving fifteen minutes south to where we missed yesterday, bentenjima is a shrine on a small island at the end of a brief, perfect bridge that leads into the heaving pacific. the wind is fierce but because the shapes and figures—even the dark ones—are sacred, we stay. the red of the gates cuts into the grey like an iron burn. everything is as painting, because every aspect informs itself, but also leads the eye gently to what is to be seen next. it is hard to believe that this did not erupt from the utmost imaginings of what holy is meant to inscribe upon earthly matters. it is not that I felt something godly here, but that there is undeniable evidence of something being declared, in a voice that is larger than human, but perhaps still has human origins. it is very much like poetry.
f forges ahead to photograph a small house and I seek the reprieve of a small cafe. inside are eight women who are startled when I walk in, and one of them sweetly—but brusquely—inquires about my identity. I explain to them that I’m a writer. illustrator? one of them asks. no, writer, I say, making the motions of inscription on a page even as I’m realizing that I might as well be mimicking illustration. she nods solemnly, and goes to report back to her friends. I overhear the standard repetitions, and then the shock of laughter, and then the smoothing down at the edges as they go back to whatever it was they had been talking about, presumably what they always talk about. the immense grace of routine in this wild world.
I want to see oragahama lighthouse which is right in the middle of the nuclear explosion zone, and we are predictably stopped at every turn by men in strips of reflective neon. I notice a fluorescence of pink ribbon tied to branches, to poles, to strings stretched across the stark strips of wooden fences—they are warnings of what has been preserved longingly in the stream of time. it has been ten years. it has also been, in many ways, yesterday. I am not afraid of the radioactivity, but of perpetuating in this monumental human mistake. I drive down streets that grow ever heavier with thinking, with consideration, with memorial. I feel strange, as if invading. I feel a sadness that does not give its secrets away to words. I do not feel the presence of ghosts. what I feel is the presence of people. there are clothes hanging still in shops. pots still false with the memory of flowers.
we make our way to an observation point designated on the map, a slight shoulder in the middle of the highway that looks out upon the sight of eruption, from a great distance. it’s difficult to tell the subject from the landscape, the new snow dusting the tops of trees, the inky mountains whose verges are lost to the papered clouds, the tunnels and their black mouths, our vertiginous height which sends my feet into nervous taps.
along the coastline there are the preserved ruins of ukedo elementary school, so we move there in the dying day. I am very tired. the greyed-out expanse skyward seems to me very tired as well. the long thin road leading to the wreckage is ominous, replete with pits and falls, but the vehicle tumbles along the path, and we arrive at the edges of what had once been a structure meant to serve.
it’s all blue. (alice oswald: be amazed by that colour it is the mind’s inmost madness) the column that reaches up as if gasping for air. the blown-out gates and crushed steel. I can see into their splintering internalities, and I don’t fight the urge to look away. there is nothing in me that gets off on tragedy. nothing here is pronounceable. trauma fragments and nothing coheres it. we walk along the perimeter, towards the seawall. the snow threads a thin linen. beyond the barricade the ocean is a gateway, a gentleness that contains and understands rage. almost fata morgana. the water is the ink by which the story of the land may be written. memory that may be projected into the future.
