SEA-SIGHT: DAY SEVEN
northward the honshu coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
waking up in the shrine dormitories is a series of immediacies. the sharp winter that seeps through the paper and the tatami. the brittle knock at the door that announces the beginnings of prayer. the hurried and hypnogogic walk along the angled corridors to the temple, where a young miko hands us the prayer book and we are ushered into the delicate, ancient sphere in which the same choreography has taken place for a great number of years.
the belly of a drum is the baritone of beginnings. they walk in, eight in all. the chanting begins with a heavyset priest in green-gold robes whose voice I feel in the deep of my chest. pressed melody which must reference the pre-existence of instruments, in which the collusion of wind, and sea, and singing formed the foundational architecture for what would become symphony. the cold sending tremors. a young priest shakes the haraigushi, above our heads as well, in a rustling sharp and clean. the rainbow braids of paper to the right side of the stage are gleeful in the way that only children know. the small wooden boxes we bow towards are giving off their own observances. twin fires are lit and the smoked grasses singe the morning. the recitation continues. the miko perform their permeating dance with bells and sure steps (I recognize one of them as the young milk-skinned girl who I had bathed with the night prior). a kamisuzu is shaken in searing chimes. when we are given our tamagushi and made to stand up, placing the branches upon the stage, I am thrilled through with the sounds, the visions, the static rituals which pounce into the minutes with the enormity of hushed stillness. I barely form a silent statement of gratitude before we are made to bow, to relinquish our hopes to the overall.
I do not yet have words for what this means, but I trust that they will come.
okuda-san, a staff member at the shrine, has kindly offered to drive us to a beautiful flat base which ranges the sea. down a road that tumbles with every bit that it leads, we are taken to a field of austerely yellow grasses and a stunning view of the pacific’s elapse. the waterfront is a collection of mirrors—none are facing us, but they all inform each other, each portion acknowledging and reflecting in turn. I’m lucid with cold and wonder at the sea-edge as f and okuda-san talk, their words sporadically rising and falling with the arches of intersecting sounds (waves which have their own language) from all directions.
later f will tell me that okuda-san’s family cannot visit him at this place because they are clairvoyants, and kinkasan is too forceful with voices. I think, it is the great dream that weighs down the world. and sometimes it approaches an incredible lightness. then there is a place where I can write poems.
we leave the island and its specters. back on the mainland, we drift to cape kamiwarizaki, where my favourite kind of ocean is residing. the furious churn of a violent tide. its colloquy which veers from lyric to soliloquy. a concoction of white-blue, of the light in the deep of sapphires, of a living grey that does not hesitate to burrow. I could watch it endlessly. this mutability of water. waves seizing one another and collapsing. waves crashing forward to become unanimous. waves that are the address to desire in the envelope of the sea. I can only find human patterns in these waters; they rage like people I’ve known. people I’ve loved.
our next stop is a wide drape of water, only about an hour away, but the ocean is already of an entirely different mood. what was wild has been tempered, and the quiet of the volcanic rocks, graduated from light to dark, seizes the wave like a performance of alchemy. the sun, in today’s surreal yellow, dawns on the paper. the words come easily and are free. it is an uncomplicated happiness. the kind you almost want to keep secret, the kind that interiorizes and makes a home inside you. this kind of happiness does not burn, but radiates a modest warmth, easy to hold in the hand and carry your whole life.
f and I can never make a sunset on time. I drive recklessly, but still. we come to kurosaki hirotachi, a resplendent, craggy section of southern iwate just as night is imitating the secret power of the day, before it fully delves into its own darkness. yesterday was new moon, and today she appears in a perfect sliver. the remote image of almost disappearing. the islands are contrasting one another in ink-dwells of diverging cobalts and steels. every hue of this mutable silk. it is a time of day full of lust, the perfect tension of separation. I write until I cannot distinguish the black ink of the words from the black ink of the night.
