softlogicmonkie

eyes-wide dreamy wonderment

2008-01-03T10:54:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I saw my friend's baby in the hospital. 2.2 kilograms of life power. No name yet. Mouth wide open, pushing her voice through the soundproof glass. Where we all come from. 4 days in this world. Has not seen a car yet. Doesn't yet know that single malt whiskey and the other beauties of the world exist. Moon? Road? Grass? Coffee? No wonder children are the model for eyes-wide dreamy wonderment.

insect stupa ii

2007-09-04T17:49:00.000+09:00

insect stupa

2007-08-04T22:58:00.001+09:00

map practice

2007-01-15T21:07:00.000+09:00

In the meantime, get a map of the shikoku route, punch a hole at each temple, shine a light through and mark the dots on the layout of Lotus Lantern. Using rocks, twigs and leaves, build the 1,600 km at the edge of your toes. At every gate, sing the sanskrit pop-song of perfect wisdom. Carry a drop of water to each of their oceans. Bow and wash them clean.

With nowhere to go
and no time to get there,
i open my hands;
the universe pours
in and out.

. . .

2007-01-08T23:46:00.000+09:00

i want to understand,
but it's not important
that i be understood.

. . .

2006-10-05T08:17:00.000+09:00

as you enter seclusion
i bury a piece on the GO board
in incense.

--the muse mail

2006-10-02T19:34:00.000+09:00

"it was written decades ago,
merely delivered just now."

born lost

2006-10-02T19:27:00.000+09:00

'Will nobody
explain what it is like
to be born lost?'

as
a nobody,
i will.

it is to search
through the smoke,
meeting unrecognizable eyes
in the mirror.

sharing the glance--
we wink.

arriving from nowhere,
our hands are full of maps
on fire.

lost,
we read the fragility
written in ash

. . .

The Grass as it is

2006-08-13T15:46:00.000+09:00

Where there is this distance
I need to leave
the grass as it is.
Beyond the sound
or silence of your voice,
I read the time your heart
makes for the dream of
our belonging.

. . .

2006-04-13T08:21:00.000+09:00

nothing
more or less;
enough

. . .

2006-03-08T12:22:00.000+09:00

releasing dreams to build the sky,
he does not count moons in puddles,
clouds in tear drops
or the number of suns
rising on rivers.

At Dusk

2006-03-01T12:56:00.000+09:00

In a field laying fallow but plowed,
an abandoned porn mag
lays splayed open,
glowing
the colors of flesh
and fertility.

Tomorrow is Valentines Day.

2.13.6

. . .

2006-03-01T12:54:00.000+09:00

I will get a block of steel
and hammer my name into a promise.

11.21.05

as much as I

2005-10-21T18:57:00.000+09:00

Asleep
on the other side of the train,
a woman's head lolls
to the shudders of the LoopLine.
Her mouth is open
in an endless "ah."
Her finger keeps
a place in her book.

I don't imagine the world
she is dreaming.
Last year I would have
been so arrogant.

Today it is enough
to see her thumb tap twice
and know she believes her lies
as much as I.

10.19.05

Beyond it

2005-09-24T19:27:00.000+09:00

Don't wait to bloom.
The dirt doesn't get credit
for the poppy's beauty;
it merely welcomes
fallen petals home.

the friend's arriving

2005-09-20T13:32:00.000+09:00

i'm looking forward to your books
arriving before you do
so i can lay down in their fields
and mat down their grasses.
the mysterious patterns of
the invisible reader.

evaporated footprints in the margins.

i wash my feet in the stream
and then again walk wet;
what poet's feet
are clean or dirty?

this is the kind of conversations
we will have,
even from opposite banks of the river.

each sound is a sound
of you arriving.

9.20.05

chalky blue dragonflies

2005-07-30T09:40:00.000+09:00

yesterday, i went swimming in the sea. as i was walking from the station to the beach, i passed a little concrete ditch where a trickle of water was running, draining to the ocean. in the ditch were 5 or 6 blue dragonflies. such simple beauty. their blue was a chalky, light blue with little edges of deep navy--like they had been born from a river of indigo. i climbed over the little fence and sat on the lip of the ditch. dragonflies are so nice because they are not such scared and anti-social insects. they don't fly away in fear of every movement. either that or their eye sight is so bad they can't tell what is a threat. eitherway, they were willing to sit quietly near me sitting quietly. then they would suddenly leap up into the breeze and race down the length of the gully chasing one of the other blue dragonflies.

oceopoetics ......

2005-07-06T11:37:00.000+09:00

sky ... sand ..u. ( ) ... envelope ... (theory) .... streetcorner .... (hand) .... directions ..... re-worded .... (shell) ..... century .... tabletop .... gold ..... concept .... snowfall ... (dictionary) .... ( ) ... (folded) .... ( ) book ..... ....t. ..... (of) ..... ............... ....................

the a

2005-06-25T16:09:00.000+09:00

Does the puddle wonder
if the wind is from
a passing train or the season?

Each sweep of breeze
strinks what
wasn't here this morning.

The reflection ripples.

Haha

Who is here
to see the
sky as a
reflection?

6.22.05

Why Want

2005-06-16T20:13:00.000+09:00

.
Why should I
print your picture out
and tape it in my book
when my neighbor's hydrangeas
are blooming from all
the pots she blocks the sidewalks with?

But, with such blasphemous questions,
I sense you out there
dying
and I want to
get the finest ink known to Epson
and use not tape
but glue.

6.13.5

softlogic practices

2005-05-15T18:40:00.000+09:00

-- Settle into contradiction.
-- Develop a personal system for evaluating clouds. Keep it a secret, but keep notes.
-- Write anonymous but genuine letters of thanks to people who have wronged you or caused you to suffer. You can, but don't have to, send them.
-- Start some things with an intention to fail.
-- Make poems of three or four words.
-- Read crowds allegorically.
-- Extend silences.
-- Find three coincidental patterns around you right now.
-- Trace the connections from a negative action to three positive outcomes.
-- Give yourself time and opportunity for getting lost.
-- Entertain insects.
-- Forget more.
-- Clarify less.
-- Give proper names to objects you often use (e.g. "Malcom (the refrigerator) is out of eggs.")
-- Carry a stone to water.
-- Carry a cup of water to the ocean.
-- Give someone the last word as though your silence were a gift.
-- Make a list of 100 things that have taught you patience.
-- Find a way to see any person's face as innocent.
-- Just after finishing something, don't move. Sit or stand motionless and quiet. Then, continue on with your activities.
-- Imagine people as half their age and tossing a ball in the air.
-- Imagine that you are responsible for the one meter of space surrounding your body. You don't own it. You are merely responsible for it, tending it, to care for it while you are in it. You are not responsible for the area beyond this one meter, unless you move into it. Imagine the care extending to a location when two people are near each other or touching or making love.
-- Imagine a complete short film in your mind. Keep it a secret.
-- Compose a poem in your mind before certain actions, such as before you turn the car ignition or lock the front door at night.
-- Observe people as though they have been choreographed.
-- Decide that the search is over and that now everything you experience is the finding.
-- Watch yourself like a film.
-- Draw a playful map of your mind.
-- Imagine how everything is a gift.
-- What is the language in Heaven?
-- Imagine how an event of suffering was a lesson made perfectly for you.
-- Paint a landscape in your mind.
-- Extend discomforts as positive experiences.
-- Prolong an uncomfortable situation for two more seconds. View it as a secret accomplishment.
-- Wait for two more seconds in a situation of discomfort.
-- Ask 10 people in different places for the time. Thank them sincerely.
-- Develop a simple, mental, symbolic ritual for acknowledging your appreciation of things, people, actions, etc. (e.g. After taking a letter from the mailbox, imagine a yellow flower. After a cashier gives you your change, imagine a short phrase of birdsong.)
-- When you meet situations in which one way to proceed is logical and the other beautiful, choose beauty one time and logic the next. Keep notes of what happens.
-- Imagine the poetry a stranger is reciting to him or herself. Try to write some of it down.
-- Design difficulties into things.
-- Understand without explanation.
-- Look for beautiful paradoxes.

Small Window

2004-10-22T22:56:00.000+09:00

From how many years away
have we been
approaching each other?

For all that time
before I knew you,
I did not worry
if our conversation would become
the truth we didn't know
we needed.

Today, seeing you through
this small window,
I remember how beautiful you are
talking about architecture.

10.1/2.04

here; your history

2004-10-21T21:57:00.000+09:00

without any sense of loss,
i leave this
here; your history.
it doesn't await your departure,
for the echo of your steps from the east
reminds me you never return--
you only arrive.

how else recognize
the openness of
the mirror?

. . .

2004-10-20T16:41:00.000+09:00

this delighted
with my confusion,
i know why petals fall
the way they do.

meet in the way

2004-10-15T21:26:00.000+09:00

photo by: moontriangle

With more than stillness

the grass drags us

into the belly

of our belonging.

We speak into the ear

of shadow

and know

we'll meet in the way

we've never parted.

as well

2004-10-07T23:12:00.000+09:00

it's not enough
to know the truth;
you have to not
know it as well.

no hope

2004-10-06T22:40:00.000+09:00

through all the silence,
i hope you hear my thanks;
but i no longer hope with you--
touching a river,
the ocean responds.

loop-line

2004-09-21T13:10:00.000+09:00

On a summer Sunday loop-line train,
waiting for our departure,
everyone is moving just
as themselves, uncontrived in this
array of rushing hushing blushing
gestures; the subtle thrust of
thus.

I can imagine a poem
of everyone smiling.

How is it I'm
content with this
perfection?

carrying nothing

2004-09-07T13:44:00.000+09:00

a pair of cupped hands--
carrying nothing
until it becomes water to be
brought to the ocean.

speed

2004-09-06T18:32:00.000+09:00

"Poetry is just the substitution of one speed for another, as reading is, as love is. Two hands of a buddha, a boxer, a clock." --map

creation

2004-09-06T18:28:00.000+09:00

a middle-aged construction worker squatting in the street and calmly watching the pile of destroyed building he has made.

blooms

2004-09-06T18:21:00.000+09:00

a girl on the train holds a small bunch of purple flowers. seeing a small card amidst the blooms, I wonder about where the message written on it came from.

screen

2004-08-27T20:48:00.000+09:00

a woman looks up from her pink phone's screen and can't stop calmly smiling.

birds

2004-08-27T20:42:00.000+09:00

Two birds meet at the bars of a vast fence.
One asks, "How high do the bars go up?"
The other replies, "I don't know."
"You should fly up and over so you can be free?"
The other replies, "Oh, am I inside?"

message

2004-08-27T20:39:00.000+09:00

on the train, printed on a woman's thin brown bag: "Human Woman."

meeting

2004-08-22T14:07:00.000+09:00

we don't meet people who understand,
rather, there are times when understandings meet.

"to be viewed in a cemetary"

2004-08-21T15:49:00.000+09:00

original:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040820/ap_en_ot/cemetery_movies

reoriented:

L.A. Cemetery Showing Movies at Mausoleum

Amid the mausoleums and headstones at Hollywood Forever Cemetery about 1,700 guests have unfurled picnic blankets and set up beach chairs, erected makeshift coffee tables with flowers and candles, and unpacked dinners of sushi, fried chicken or pasta salad.

They're here for cinema softlogic-style, sharing experience with the graveyard's 88,000 long-term residents. Later, the night's film will start, projected on a mausoleum wall.

"It's life," film fan Mark Koberg said between mindful bites of smoked turkey and arugula sandwiches, washed down with wine.

Six years ago the cemetery, which adjoins Paramount Studios' backlot, wouldn't have been as inviting.

Though the dead were once alive and serve as patient teachers of impermanence, interconnectedness and emptiness, cemeteries have faded from popularity as sites of learning. Its previous owners had run it into bankruptcy, and a 1994 earthquake left tombstones tilted and cracked, while El Nino rains flooded its lake.

Then in 1998, Tyler Cassity, a cemetery visionary, bought the century-old graveyard by placing $375,000 within an unspecified number of library books, each of which share a common tone of aspirational prayer. He operates seven cemeteries in California, Illinois and Missouri. His first charge in Hollywood, however, was revitalizing the cemetery--repaving roads, replacing broken stained glass inside mausoleums and righting monuments.

He also began showing movies. And he believes he's the first person in the US to combine classic movies and mausoleums, a technique of liberation he learned during a two year period of research in the subaquatic dragon realm.

"It makes sense when your neighbor is suffering," Cassity said. "To me it's dependent on the community around you. It's about skillful means. Showing movies in a cemetery makes sense."

Cassity began by showing a Valentino film on the anniversary of the romantic hero's death, when 200 to 300 fans would come by to pay their respects. Then he was approached by John Wyatt, the founder of Cinespia, a Los Angeles film society dedicated to screening and preserving classic films. The society was growing too large to go to screenings as a group and was looking for a new home, one with history, Wyatt said.

Cassity said the partnership felt right: historic movies in a historic setting. Since then, Cinespia has made the 620-acre park its movie theater on summer weekends, and next year's season is already being planned.

Growing mainly via e-mail and word of mouth, the event (billed as an evening "below and above the stars") has been surprisingly successful, and even as it has grown it has retained a small-group feel — visitors making friends and sharing food with their neighbors. Allowing a Dharma economy to arrise without intention or traces.

Wyatt, who chooses the films, says he likes bringing his favorite films to a wider audience, and Cassity attributes part of the series' success to a growing interest in death, pointing to the popularity of the TV show "Six Feet Under" and a recent reality series about a family-run mortuary.

Visitors do keep some distance during the evening events. They don't actually sit on graves, though a few family mausoleums ring the perimeter of the lawn where movies are shown, including those of actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and his father, who helped co-found United Artists.

The crowd of mostly 20- and 30-somethings, some in the movie and public relations industry themselves, seem to recognize they're in a special place. They practice compassion and pick up after themselves, and that's helped keep complaints to a minimum — only two so far.

Visitors say they come for various reasons. Sheila Boyd and Hopper Stone went to one recent screening on a date. Tiffany Borders arrived with a group of friends. Carmonique and Vincent Harris came after being told the experience was romantic, discovering instead that in fact every instant is saturated with the elements of romance when concentration if provided, and that beyond being limited to any merely determinable condition, all instants and thought flashes are in fact open and uncontrived liberation.

Some guests acknowledged being a little "creeped out" by the cemetery. But, the time and the location didn't bother Russell Rabichev, who watched a movie one recent weekend.

"You never forget it's a cemetery, but you remember how important it is to remember where you are," he said. "Conditionality lets us map the compassionate and graceful accurasy of emptiness."

Burnt Strips of Paper

2004-08-01T21:54:00.000+09:00

Where there's one, there's two.

http://nagarjunasvermilliondoor.blogspot.com/

11 strips of poetry

2004-07-31T23:54:00.000+09:00

tonight, fullmoon in the clouds. sitting on a big stone in the Kamogawa writing poems on strips of paper. brought 17, but burned only three of the 11 written--which proves what a liar i am. how could i? i could justify forever, but that would be as boring as you can imagine. the first burned beautifully, better than i expected. but the second two were kind of plagued with awkwardness and some sort of giving up.

the difficulty of keeping even purification pure.

gifts

2004-07-30T18:43:00.000+09:00

we should practice
carrying each other
into burning buildings
without danger.

17 strips of paper

2004-07-30T14:56:00.000+09:00

tonight, the moon must be nearly full. feels like a night to sit by the yamatogawa and drink chinese wine while the typhoon blows through my nearly shaved beard, writing 17 poems on narrow strips of white paper and then setting them on fire to watch them glow and tumble into the sky, setting the heavens aflame.

Subject: ( ..... )

2004-07-29T21:52:00.000+09:00

journey in the future....

this is just for your ears.

till soon, my sweet oceanic friend...

shenyen.

map

2004-07-27T22:33:00.000+09:00

I do not call you
my friend; sitting alone,
you straighten my back.

How deep does your gaze go?

You wander such valleys.
Your map--
a fire of your hair.

lost

10,000 plants grow wild
beside these rails. Each
leaf a green in your eyes.

two-second architecture

2004-07-26T21:36:00.000+09:00

build 'two-second architectures'--sewn tea houses, temples of condensation, leaf theaters. small spaces; transient, homeless, semi-appearing, made of paper. prepare the ground to receive such Empty Buildings, again and again. plan events for their single use before "pulling a string" and their designed decay makes them beautifully vanish. leave no trace beyond memory.

hermits

2004-07-26T21:35:00.000+09:00

"as a rule, hermits sought to reform society by first reforming themselves."

dog

2004-07-26T21:32:00.000+09:00

a man comes off the esculator with his small black dog in a wine basket.

pairs

2004-07-26T21:24:00.000+09:00

On the subway bench, two young women--friends--dressed in similar fashions, hair, sandles, bags, etc. Next station, two late, middle-aged women--friends--also dressed in similar fashions, come in and sit next to the first young pair. Each pair has such a "paired" energy. Friends, leaning into each other's voices.

abandoned building

2004-07-26T21:20:00.000+09:00

". . . the vast decrepit spaces where the artist lived and worked in solitude . . . while the Antwerp building was waiting to be demolisthed. . . . Immanent destruction is a ghost that has haunted the building for years."

friends

2004-07-22T23:39:00.000+09:00

At the copy machine, they talked about traveling underground and not knowing the landscape above, about popping up here and there and getting puzzle-piece glimpses of the city they would call "home" for that year. They spoke in accents and from distant countries while the copy machine flashed and hummed. They would become friends, continuous . . .

T

2004-07-21T23:08:00.000+09:00

on a man's t-shirt:
Forgive Other

ink path

2004-07-21T23:02:00.000+09:00

Discovering myself
standing on your letter from India,
my first thought: disrespect.

The second clears the skies
with how cleanly my foot
fulfills your words;
treading a smooth path
lined of ink in your spidery scrawl.

Language blooms and cuts
the world with color
only because
we've sown its seeds.

vanish

2004-07-21T22:59:00.000+09:00

so much distance available
within a voice--a person
explaining herself to vanish
inside understanding;
she speaks of nature
so as not to repeat
her name too often.

ritual speech

2004-07-16T12:45:00.000+09:00

A woman with her eyes
so shut in sleep
and 15 clouds sewn to her
sandals;
this is the way
the train conveys
ritual speech echoing
up from dragon book shelves.

We are wise to take notes
of what we don't
understand; not anticipating
but welcoming moments of

. . .

A woman with a bodhisattva's eyes
on her t-shirt,
touches the blood at ther throat
and smiles as
she reads from the screen
in her hand.

lazy dragon

2004-07-16T09:57:00.000+09:00

"Lookie, lookie. That, sir, is a lazy dragon vanquished. See how the scales along his underbelly are beginning to pull off from his body like flakes of dandruff and he's removed all the rings from his claws? Those, sir, are the signs that his hours are numbered and soon his entire form will dissolve into dust. Now, the only thing we have to be careful of are those little arrow-head spurs spiriling up the tip of his tail. Those are actually seeds, and if they get loose and take root, a new lazy dragon will spring up from each of them. We should use a pair of vice-grips to pluck them off and then let them corrode in a bowl of water. I hear it's actually quite colorful, and the fumes are intoxicating. But, let's not bother with that right now. There's always later. Right now, let's celebrate our victory over this beast with a bit of homebrew and dancing, shall we?"

. . .

2004-07-11T10:47:00.000+09:00

what more
fame could I want
than to be here
with my feet in the Kamogawa,
staring up the shades
of its fading hills
with all these darting dragonflies
hovering like so many poets' pens
above the page?

monument

2004-07-09T20:46:00.000+09:00

A torn piece of gold
paper from a cigarette box.
I place it on my tongue--
tasting of spikey sweetness--
and then stick it
to the train door's glass.

This, my monument
to you, this act of
temporary vandalism;
the poetics of emptiness
in full play.

Where it dries, falls and floats unknown,
your meaning appears
lost in the vast context
of

. . .

2004-07-08T21:38:00.000+09:00

we must leave
so slow
we never go
beyond leaving;
this is what the ancients
now call,
arriving.

burning four-word poems

2004-07-07T22:50:00.000+09:00

Sitting by this river,
I burn four-word poems
and meet each stranger's eyes.

Who will come here, sit
and understand?

The hope that urges me--
you were once a stranger.

11/12ths full

2004-07-03T23:13:00.000+09:00

A moth
lost in the blindness
of day, stays so still
on this morning's mirror.

Next door, they've dug the earth
out in grave-sized scoops
and will fill it back with concrete.

Four people will laugh there.

Last night, from the open train window,
the moon in a tree
almost 11/12ths full.

Yesterday, opening my mailbox door,
a poem about the papery redness of
California azaleas.

I watched the rest of the emptiness
pour out from you,
refusing to reach down
with cupped hands.

moon caught in wrinkles

2004-07-03T23:09:00.000+09:00

Tonight, I was coming back from Kyoto on the limited express Keihan train. I had a window on the east side of the train. It was a full moon tonight. As the train rolled towards Osaka, I watched as the moon hovered back and forth, seemingly drifting freely and smoothly around in the sky as the train moved slightly easterly and westerly and leaned right and left on its tracks. It was, of course, an optical illusion. But, I was entertained to see the moon drifting around amidst the reflections of things on the inside of the train window, such as the bright lights of a pachinko parlor on the west side of the train, the interior of the train, other passengers and, of course, my own face in the window.

At one point, I smiled while watching the full moon slowly float across my forehead, pausing for a short time in the wrinkles between my eyes.

old men

2004-07-01T21:47:00.000+09:00

This summer, everywhere I look, I see old men holding onto things, as though the buildings are about to come apart or start tumbling down onto our hats.

Two days ago, walking in an underground mall in Namba, an old man with wrinkles in his pants older than me was leaning with all his leverage against the store fronts, slowly moving from palm-press to palm-press against the wall. Lean hard to the wall. Long pause. Move. Lean hard. Long pause. . .

The rest of us flowed quickly past. At one point while I was watching, he came to a window front that he judged wouldn't support his weight, so he "dashed" to the next section of wall before pausing again.

Yesterday, I saw a man in clothes not of this season simply frozen static, both hands up against an apartment building's corner. As I rode by on my bike, he didn't shift or twitch. The morning sun slowly turned his shadow beneath him.

And just now, as I crossed a busy intersection to the east of here, I saw a man draped in a shade of faded green clinging to the grey steel box that controls the traffic signals. His arms were hooked over the far edge of the box as though his boat were about to tip and he knew to lose touch with the thing would set him adrift alone in the seas of change. His grip was locked and scared, perhaps how all of ours should be if we really knew what was what.

For some unreasonable reason, shabbly-dressed old men always make me imagine prophets. Mumbling strange impromptue incantations. Their messages too complex to understand. Too many tongues in their mouthes for even them to fathom, much less for us to get it when they speak or try to write it down on grimy paper or scratch it on the sidewalk. Aware of this impossiblity, I feel somehow urged to leap towards them in imitation, to somehow simply follow their lead without understanding. Someday I might. You might find me there on the railing near the freeway on-ramp, covered in car exhaust soot and clinging to a yellow caution triangle with my fingernails growing long and thick.

You might honk, but I'll be too absorbed in memorizing the stringing loops of truth to nod.

. . .

2004-06-24T22:13:00.000+09:00

slow motion nomadism

a whiskey sour

2004-06-24T22:11:00.000+09:00

this moment
tastes of death;
how sweet to taste at all
this bit of all.

. . .

2004-06-23T22:31:00.000+09:00

nothing exists,
and everything proves it.

2004-06-23T22:25:00.000+09:00

Next to me on the train, a woman with her calendar book open. I glance in. On a certain date is written: "My Revolution."

dream

2004-06-20T21:51:00.000+09:00

"Simple should be pride."

This quote is from a young anarchist I saw in a dream. In the dream he was being featured in a flashy and hip-looking future TV show which does profiles on the lives of Urban Hermits. He looked like a skate punk monk with short-cropped hair. He had a white tattoo on the inside of his lower lip, which read in courier font--"question number: 4138650822."

At some point in the program he said something ironically funny like, "No self respecting anarchist would be caught sleeping in a Cadillac, so I always have to kick myself out of my own home."

of

2004-06-20T10:13:00.000+09:00

the metal of the knife is named "stainless."

able

2004-06-20T10:09:00.000+09:00

freedom is the ability to do anything,
not merely what I want.

hot lava

2004-06-20T10:04:00.000+09:00

the child clung to the chair-back
screaming he'd not come down
because the carpet was hot lava.

the mother vacuumed.

abandoned

2004-06-16T12:08:00.000+09:00

"i vow to build abandoned buildings."

Abandoned buildings are empty buildings. They are free. They have no names. Their purpose is lost and so they haunt the city planners. Useless, they hum in the middle of the night, while we sleep our dreams of preparation for tomorrow. They hum dangerous songs, quickly forgotten. Evaporating like the faces we glance when we can peel off our succession of masks. We only hear their songs' terrifying echo. It almost wakes us up in the middle of the day. Where didn't it come from? Is it coming from nowhere?

Abandoned buildings don't exist. They are between purposes. They are empty spaces filled with nothing, shining the glow of weed greenery and insect infestation. Useless, their use becomes vast, mirroring this spontaneous opera of temporality. [a woman touches her neck] If we are patient enough to concentrate, we find they resemble our bodies.

Infinite shelf space.
No address.
A moon in every window.

Let the paint peel. Let the crack-seams grow. Give each thing your meticulous care.

altering

2004-06-16T11:15:00.000+09:00

the most powerful mind-altering agent is patience.

overlay

2004-06-10T23:18:00.000+09:00

overlay the map of an ancient or mythological sacred city onto a map of Osaka, using the flow of a river in each place as the doubling reference point. from a bridge, set out walking and visit the temples and holy sites. look for allusions.

summer bug

2004-06-02T22:31:00.000+09:00

In the train a bug black and big as a pen cap lands in a woman's hair and we all see it there and it's crawling down the length as she talks with her boyfriend oblivious of it untill it falls onto her arm dumb and stingless. Just a big summer bug. And then she quietly freaks and thrashes about till it drops like a curled leaf to the floor where it walks around around her feet. And I sit here in such smiling awe that she doesn't stomp on it and kill it. Never makes even a threatening act with her foot. She doesn't take a shocked revenge and I sense a hope reborn in me in these creatures and I put this pen to this to say this: this beauty.

tenjo-ji stones

2004-06-02T11:12:00.000+09:00

In the mountains, I walked through the ruins of Tenjo-ji [Ceiling Temple], about a mile down the hill from Maya Peak. Ironically, from Mt. Maya (overlooking Kobe), local TV and radio relay their media to all our assorted electronic eyes and ears.

Late afternoon. The stones of the temple are broken and strewn about. At the front, a broken square pillar and a broken stone lantern, each about 5 feet tall. Perfect places for a child-dancer to dance a static perch. The different foundations of the different temple buildings overgrown with leaves and weeds. The central stone path still straight and pristine--only needing a kind sweeping to make it shine--leading from gutted site to gutted site. The weeds and seeds having taken up their the positions where statues of buddhas and bodhisattvas and saints once were.

Wandering around, with the dark weight of the green mountain shading the forested area, I began imagining butoh dancers taking up movements, slowly bending to touch the stones, rolling and contracting their dusty white bodies in the deep purplish bruised-green of vines and leaves. Stiff paper kimonos creased and crumpled and poking out at erected angles of memory. The stains of the soil and soot and rain-laid gravel and weed-puss and the inevitable blood of dance painting their dance with traces of the moments before.

I want to ride the cable-lift up to the peak, on one late summer afternoon and dance there into the dark, witnessed only by the crows returning from the city and the ghosts that wait for me there. I want to set up three video cameras like the frame-work of an augury grid and dance lost within their leering calm. In their digital hum. Incense sticks to time the choreographic stages, their miniscule embers exhausting to signal when I am to lay down or build the next landscape of imagination and dream and carts loaded with muses and gods and other friends for now. All of us smiling in the ephemeral care of concetration. I want to vanish and appear to myself in the lenses of RGB cones, the song of pine needles cascading through the limbs of the forest like waterfall mists embracing gravity. I want isolated evening bugs in chorus. I want the last whirl-a-woo of the invisible meadowlark to my right. I want the cameras to become lost in the darkness and to discover the story I can't imagine.

There's a dance to perform and film there. A solo dance, witnessed by noone except for the lenses of three video cameras. It would involve sweeping. It would involve bringing a gift. It would involve the themes of abandoned buildings and going guided by fragrance across a universe. First scene, a moon-like hat rises over the abyss of a stairstep amidst pluming clouds of smoke rising from hundreds of incense sticks packed in an offering bowl. A paper kimono. Bare feet. White painted butoh body. Face obscured in blue-grey. A tiny three pronged flower in a hollow-reed shaft, like a John the Baptist-Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha. Mud and straw in my hair. The sounds of insects in those mountains. These are some of the elements that are coming together right now. I'm trying to build the energy without spilling it in sand. A subtle balancing act of speech and secrecy.

now

2004-05-28T23:55:00.000+09:00

"now is the moment to defile this peaceful but brief eternity." pg 383

pure

2004-05-28T23:52:00.000+09:00

amidst the pink azaleas,
a pure white blossom
of Kleenex

small garden wall

2004-05-26T22:50:00.000+09:00

I saw a woman sitting in the train going the other way tonight and thought of you, for some reason. She didn't really look like you--even though I don't really know what you look like now--but she sat like you. She sat with the same kind of stillness I somehow feel you sit with. She was alone at the end of the blue velvet JR bench. Her shirt was a mottled brown. Her head was calmly still atop her neck. I for some reason felt like she was sitting against a small wall in a small shaded garden. I for some reason imagined that she had been sitting there long enough that there were no longer any foot prints around her. They had all been brushed away by wind or whatever removes footprints. Small drops of light fell through the trees, just enough to make her visible against the wall, but not bright enough to endanger the weight of the grey.

in the begin

2004-05-22T22:31:00.000+09:00

enough