Sunday Papers: Ethan Hawke

 

"Human creativity is nature manifest in us."

 

On the turntable:  Ennio Morricone, "Complete Sergio Leone Movies"

 

Mitsuhide's Wild Ride

 

Shōryūji Castle stands near the confluence of three rivers, which run through a narrow gap in low mountains between Kyoto and Osaka.  For two centuries this castle guarded this gap, but it could do nothing to withstand the encroach of suburbia.  Little surprise, as it fell in the Battle of Yamazaki in less than two hours.  Its defender, Akechi Mitsuhide could do little to hold

back the forces of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who sought Mitsuhide's's head for the murder of Oda Nobunaga less than two weeks before.  In panic, the thirteen-day shogun ran.

As I stand atop the rebuilt ramparts I too think about attackers, though in 2020 this means coronavirus.  I'd wanted to follow Mitsuhide's path when I first read an article about it back in the winter, but then, like most people, I sought refuge rather than flight.  By October the situation in Japan seemed to be calming a little (or the lack of transparency deluded us into believing so), and it felt I could brave the short train ride to do the walk.  

I have a quick look at the exhibit inside the rebuilt castle keep, which in a PC-style sleight of hand veers away from Mitsuhide's historic betrayal and focuses more on his Hosokawa family relatives, whose tutelary temple now houses the world-famous rock garden of Ryozan-ji.  Yet the Hosogawa too aren't above criticism since it was their family feud that started the Onin Wars, abetting in the complete destruction of Kyoto and 150 years of civil war that followed.  Those wars were coming to an end in 1582 when Mitsuhide did his runner.  I'd forgotten though that his wife was a Hosokawa daughter, Gracia, Japan's most beloved Christian convert.  Many times I'd noticed her grave in Kōtō-in, but what I never realized was that her "assisted suicide" on the eve of the Battle of Sekigahara had turned the tide of sentiment in favor of Tokugawa Ieyasu and had perhaps contributed to his clan becoming the Shogunate.     

I am not thinking of any of this as I walk toward Shōryū-ji temple, along a tarmac colored differently than the others that cut through this otherwise nondescript suburb.  And located in suburb, the temple itself is equally non-distinct, but for a worn statue of indiscriminate age.  It is a short walk from here to the the 1600 year-old Igenoyama burial mound, its unknown occupant no doubt a powerful ruler during a time when Japan was just beginning to settle into a sedentary society. 

And suburbs are the ultimate sedentary legacy.  The mound too has been hemmed in, so I descend to follow the rivers northeast.  I am not sure the exact path Mitsuhide took, but I am sure he was spared the bland chain stores bisected by Sunday traffic, spared the towering concrete migratory path of the Shinkansen, spared the factories whose commonality was concrete, sheet metal, and bizarre smells.  We may have shared the view of weekend farmers busy with a late rice harvest.  One massive field has been sheared at the edges, with the middle left to resemble a bright green mohawk.  

Fushimi brings a bit of traditional respite.  I've both visited and guided here many times, and inevitably seem to come across something new.  My path today is deliberate, in order to visit Yamorido, a new craft beer brewery I'd heard about.  I sit safely at a table that is as much outdoors as in, taking a long break over lunch and a flight of beer.  Tokyo has just been added to the infamous Go To Travel campaign, and the street outside feels somewhat busy.  I haven't been out in public at all over the last eight months, and it reminds me of the old days of domestic tourism, with nary a language besides Japanese heard anywhere.

Following the narrow lanes out of town, I am nearly run down by a guy who has obviously not been looking out the windshield of his car, his eyes probably pointed down at his phone.  I give him a burst of Japanese of my own, all blunt verb endings mixed with some colorful English thrown in for good measure. 

I crest the hill that bisects the tombs of the Meiji Emperor and Russo-Japanese hero Nogi Maresuke, then descend into suburb again.  It is dull going for the next hour until arriving at Honkyo-ji.  The temple is of a modern construction, the oldest thing about it being the memorial stone to Mitsuhide beside the main hall.  The famed bamboo thicket behind has been severely shorn, cut back at least a hundred meters from the hall.  A broad earthen avenue remains, for the convenience of the machinery to harvest more in the future.  I see a handful of blue flags waving above a sparse patch of thicket down the hill.  This is Mitsuhide Yabu, the site were Akechi was speared to death, allegedly by bandits in Hideyoshi's employ.  It is truly hard to find much romance of the old here, with the dearth of forest and suburbs ringing all.  There are no bandits today either, but one old farmer working nearby directs me down a narrow path that drops me into the midst of the housing below.   

I walk more north than east now, angling toward a gap in the mountains to my right.  I remember that Daigo-ji's impressive Kami-Daigo temple hall is up there somewhere, and I feel happy that I'd visited before the 2008 fire that damaged a number of its structures.  For the next hour I move through a comparatively bland landscape of suburban sameness.  

My own fire of enthusiasm is beginning to die down.  I'd planned to walk all the way to Mitsuhide's Sakamoto Castle, the intended destination of his flight, but I'm fast losing interest.  I'm meant to veer east again soon, but I have an escape route in Yamashina station not far ahead.  On long walks such as these, I never look at how many kilometers I've done until I finish.  Otherwise, to realize you've done more than expected leads to a psychological fatigue.  But today I check the mileage, and am surprised that I've done 23 km already.  With 12 more to go.  I'd estimated the total walk at 27 kilometers, which I am prepared to do, but I'm not at all prepared to do 35.  Minutes later I'm sitting out front of the station, iced coffee in hand, killing time until the train.

 

It is at that same station that I detrain a week later, the chill in the air a far cry from the muggy heat that accompanied what's written above.  Cars pass too closely and too frequently as I walk the Tokaidō awhile.  Eventually I enter suburb again, accompanied by the feeling that I've seen all this before.  Beyond an expressway-shaded temple, a narrow trail leads me to Kozeki-koe, which I know I passed when doing a parallel journey in reverse 7 years ago.  And rereading that particular post I find the same sentiment I feel today: the highs of the quiet shaded neighborhood around Mii-dera; the annoyance at being denied views of Lake Biwa by the military base, the chain stores, and the towering apartment blocks that colonize the shoreline.  

Isn't until I'm Karasaki that I can truly enjoy the waterfront, beneath the trees that shade narrow patches of park. I get a surprise in the signs warning of vipers.  A trio of men fish from beneath an unusual torii with pitched cross-beams, and families enjoy the fading of light beside the gently lapping waters.  

Akechi is here too, standing bronzed and proud, looking in the direction where he lost his life.  This was all part of his castle, and I spend the next half-hour playing connect the dots with the historical markers that denote it perimeters.  Under the final fading light of the day, I find his grave (or perhaps one of many, as the bodies of warlords tend to be spread around a bit).  It is a nondescript site, just a small grassy mound tucked between houses, a resting place cramped for a man of vision vast.

On the turntable: Jacques Brel, "L'intégrale-- La boite à bonbons : 25ème anniversaire"     

 

Sunday Papers: Sebastiao Salgado

"With each dying person a piece of everyone else dies."


On the turntable: The Groundhogs, "Hog's in Wolf's Clothing"

October 14 Elegy

 

Sunday Papers: Paul Salopek

"Why is impatience signaled by the tapping of a toe: a gesture that telegraphs walking away— hoofing it, laying tracks, leaving, shoving off lickety-split?  Why is movement the default solution of our species? What’s wrong with standing still? Why even ask such questions? Because we are restless. Because we always ask."


On the turntable: The McCrells, "The McCrells Live"

(untitled)

Drinking beer

Alone on the grass

Is the highest barometer of freedom

On the turntable:  Mount Eerie, "Live in Copenhagen"

Sunday Papers: Fisher Unwin

"It's very hard to earn a living by writing.  Writing is a very good staff, but a very bad crutch."
       
       --(Quoted by W. Somerset Maugham in introduction to Liza of Lambeth)


On the turntable:  Miles Davis, "Milestones"

The Moon in a Sake Cup

 

My piece on the autumn moon...


https://www.kansaiscene.com/2020/09/the-moon-in-a-sake-cup/


On the turntable:  Jimi Hendrix, "Blue Wild Angel"
  

Sunday Papers: John M. Barry

"Emotion is not the absence of reason; emotion corrupts reason."


On the turntable:   Miles Davis, "Unreachable Station"

Further Down the Spiral

Twentieth Century terrorism was political, therefore, intellectual.  Twenty-first Century terrorism is predominantly religious, and therefore, anti-intellectual.  


On the turntable:  Miles Davis, "Portrait"

Sunday Papers: William Wordsworth

“A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”

On the turntable: Bee Gees, "Mythology"

The Journey to Mt. Koya

My piece on climbing a pair of pilgrimage paths up Koya-san:

 https://www.kansaiscene.com/2020/09/the-journey-to-koya-san/


On the turntable:  "Palermo Shooting OST"

Sunday Papers: Christopher Rush

"[T]he most interesting people I'd ever met were those who had never travelled but had stayed in one place, and by coming to understand it had come to understand the universe; [...] this was because travel narrows the mind and is for those who constantly require external stimuli, lacking sufficient inner resources of their own. Travel, in a word, is for people who have nothing better to do."


On the turntable:  Miles Davis, "Bluing"
 

Semi concious

A cicada lays on its back, legs wriggling in the air.  There seem to be a lot of dead semi today. These little bodies are the symptoms of the mortality of summer.

 

One has affixed itself to my front door.  I'll leave it there for awhile, not only as a lesson in impermanence, but as a reminder of how to live life:  short, but screaming loudly to the fullest.


On the turntable:  Tenor Conclave,  "Four Tenor Saxes"

Sunday Papers: Steve Dublanica

 

"Deep in my bones I’ve been reminded, over and over again, that I am a created thing –  that I didn’t will  myself into existence. In seminary, I was taught nothing, no person, planet, black hole or atom can explain why it exists in and of itself. Everything in the universe is contingent or depends on something else for being here and, if you wind back the clock and examine the great chain of causality, you’ll eventually arrive at a point where there must have been a first cause – that which created something out of nothing. Since that “prime mover” has no cause it must simply exist in and of itself – uncreated and beyond time – and makes everything that is real, well, real. That “something” is what every major religion, despite all their differences, calls God."

 
On the turntable:  The Misfits, "Box Set"

 

Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand

The universe is a construct invented to define the infinite. Man’s mind can’t grasp the idea that there is true infinity. It’s too intimidating.  It also reflects the whole Brahman Ishvara split in ancient vedantic philosophy.  

 On the turntable:  The Muggs, "The Muggs,"

Sunday Papers: Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

"A little wind cleans the eyes."


On the turntable:  The Who, "Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970"

Over Naccho, Grande

Cheers to Wes for writing up our recent expedition up Mount Naccho.   

The link is here.


On the turntable:  Mogwai, "Kicking a Dead Pig"

Feet in the Clouds...

From the air, the landscape takes on very different characteristics than on the ground.  The walker orients himself to objects man-made, which strike an odd balance between the comfort of a familiar human scale, and a dehumanizing disregard for his presence.  But from a great height, one encounters a landscape that goes well beyond the chauvinism of time.  The grandeur below was formed over generations, over centuries, over aeons.  Man's presence in it is incidental.  I think of the great forest cover of Cambodia, of the dusty angles of India, of the battle-pocked cones and grids of Laos.  But nowhere on earth I believe has the grandeur of Siberia.  All is tabula rasa, the twisting rivers bringing life onto the slate.  Canyons are as grand as that of Arizona, the mountains are areoli that rise from the tie-dyed steppe.


On the turntable: Drive-By Truckers, "The Unraveling"

Sunday Papers: Peter Fleming

"To read a propagandist, a man with vested intellectual interests, is as dull as dining with a vegetarian."


On the turntable: "Happy Songs for Happy People"