Down in Mandalay

 

Few things spur the traveler on like a difficult-to-reach place with a poetic name.  That the name Mandalay was straight out of an actual poem by an actual poet added further zeal, despite the fact that the poet himself had never actually been there.  As it was, my own road to Mandalay was essentially a water route, followed by a small-prop plane that traced a simple arc high above during its quick thirty minute flight.  A fitting shortcut I suppose in an age where a quip holds far more weight than even the most masterfully crafted verse.    

And on first glimpse, the city seems to be resting on its laurels.  It was always a city prone to fire, and a series of fires during the 1980s wiped out whatever charm Kipling imagined it to have.   It has been rebuilt by the subsequent waves of Chinese immigrants,  along lines more practical than aesthetic.  Even the great palace that was the city's heart was destroyed during the war, and it could be said that the final king who ruled from there hadn't a heart at all, having arranged for the murder of seventy-two of his relatives in order to consolidate his power.  

Despite all this, the city still held it charm, in a way that a similarly sprawling Chiang Mai does.  In both cases, the residents lived at a far slower pace than their brethren in the larger commercial centers to the south. It was a city of life lived out on the streets, of bicycles, vendors, and ambling monks.  The subdued hues of the garb of the latter found a counterpoint in the young boys who were to soon join their ranks.  These aspiring novices were ushered out of the world of attachment with great aplomb.  Dressed in the finery of the ancient royals, they were paraded around the city in the back of pickup trucks, perched atop cheap plastic chairs.  Their female counterparts were similarly dressed up in metallic pink, ready to undertake an ear-boring ceremony, the idea of  which I found great ironic glee, at this Buddhist act of attachment.

Many of these pickups wound up at Mahamuni Paya, home to a Buddhist image supposedly constructed during the living Buddha's lifetime, which would contradict his very teachings. Regardless, this image was considered to be the most sacred in Burma.   As at Golden Rock, men were allowed to affix small sheets of gold to the image, in the hope of accruing spiritual merit.  Many generations of applied gold had given the Buddha a somewhat lumpy look, yet somehow, the ungilded face (lovingly washed every morning at 4 a.m. in a ceremony open to the public) has maintained its proportion to the body.  Far more interesting to me were the unadorned statues elsewhere on the temple grounds.  These were the ultimate travelers, having been carried from sacked capital to sacked capital, bearing such poetic names as Angkor Wat, Ayutthaya, Mrauk U.  Rather than good travel stories, these statues offered the power of healing, with believers rubbing a spot corresponding to their own physical ailment.        

We headed next to where Buddha's gold leaf was manufactured.  It was a noisy place, due to three bare-chested men swinging their sledgehammers down upon small nuggets laid atop large stones.  It looked to be brutal work, bent forward at the waist, their heavy hammers coming down again and again in perfect syncopation.  Their foreman seemed oblivious to the noise, sitting nearby reading a newspaper.  It was as close to a vision of slavery as I've ever seen, though I know that there are far worse working conditions out there in the world.  I made my departure after only a few minutes, unable to take any more.  There was a young woman out there, standing in the sun with her crying infant.  She wasn't a beggar per se, and I generally don't give money to beggars anyway, but something in me made me hand her five dollars.  The woman seemed positively thrilled.  I wondered if, in the watchful eyes of the Buddha, my actions deemed me greater merit that affixing small pieces of precious metal to a goddamned statue. 



While Mandalay had served as Burma's final royal capital, three former capitals had existed on the city's outskirts.  The most impressive of these was Inwa,  which like Bagan, was simply a mere collection of ruined stupas spread across a dusty plain.  But there was a more lived-in feeling here, with small villages tucked between the brick towers, and the abundance of swamp and canals bringing more color to the land.  Here too were the obligatory horse-carts, but here they served as traffic of their own, long queues spreading along the narrow lanes that wended their way through the towering brick pyramids.  

Another capital was Sagaing, whose main feature was the temples spreading across the hillside, interconnected by covered staircases.  I was most impressive with Umin Thounzeh, a narrow cave that housed a crescent of thirty Buddhas that was devoid of life but for a sleeping caretaker.  It reminded me somewhat of other similar temples I'd seen on the Indian subcontinent, bringing home yet again just how Indian Burma was, little surprise considering that the British had ruled this country as a province of its larger neighbor to the west.   A very interesting place Myanmar, with people somewhat resembling Thais, with an South Indian culture, and an undefinable Chinese element flowing beneath.   

The third of the former capitals was Amarapura.  The town has essentially been swallowed up by greater Mandalay, with little of the old capital remaining.  Most notable was the U-Bein bridge, a masterpiece of teak stretching across the waters.  I had been exposed to teak before on previous journeys to SE Asia, but it was here in Burma that I truly fell in love with it.  One of the old Mandalay palace buildings had been recycled into a monastery nearby, and the carvings upon its beams and doors were truly magnificent.  Here at the bridge, these carvings seemed brought to life, in the  figures crossing its length, backlit by the sun.  Watching the sun set behind its spans is quite popular here, but I'd already been let down somewhat by sunset the previous night atop Mandalay Hill, as the hazy air diminished its glory,  unable to penetrate this dust globe that is the dry season in Myanmar.

It was far nicer to contemplate the sunset from the pool at my hotel,  and the musicians warming up for that night's show somewhere beyond the swaying palms.  To me, the name of Mandalay are syllables blown upon the wind, a whisper.  And with a similar light touch, a bird suddenly swooped down to drink from the pool, leaving behind a handful of feathers to drift across the surface of time.



On the turntable:  "The Library Of Congress Archive Of Folk Culture: Anglo-American Ballads, Volume One"
On the nighttable:  Rory MacClean, "Under the Dragon"

Where it all Bagan

The door of the plane opened with a burst of heat.  On its heels came a sense of relief at being on tarmac again, for I am not a good flyer at the best of times, and had been a bit nervous to violate a maxim that had until today been etched in stone:  'Never fly third-world airlines.'

I had flown with the newest of Myamnar's nine (!) carriers for a short 90 minute hop out of the Yangon haze.  The pilot seemed to be following the Irrawaddy north, and it was little consolation that his view of the river had been little better than my own.  In fact, the sky over the whole country was filled with dust, and for the rest of my time in country the air never seemed to clear. 

The sky above, the land below.  All was a dull brown, with rainy season over two months away.  The aforementioned heat was pretty miserable -- 38 to 40 degrees most afternoons -- an unfortunate reality around which my days were built.  Rise early to take in a few sites, struggle through the endurance test that is lunch, nap through the afternoon, then back out for sunset.  This first morning I made my way to Ananda Phato, considered the most important of Bagan's nearly 4000 temples.  Over the 230-year reign of this first of Burma's many dynasties, it is thought that one new temple went up every two weeks, a rate perhaps met by the construction of present day Yangon. 

Unlike the city down south, in Bagan, life moved at the pace of an ox-cart.  Shops lined the corridors leading to the main Buddha halls, but their hawkers seemed too defeated by the heat to push their wares too brusquely. (The Burmese in general hadn't yet caught up with the rest of Asia in pushy sales technique.) One old woman sat on the cool earth, sucking a cheroot of a size that would impress Bob Marley.  The towering statues within (and in fact all across Bagan) were newer, one pair from the 15th Century and the other from the 19th.  The older ones had much kinder, more refined faces.  No one is sure what happened to the original 12th century statues, but they may have been destroyed by the invading Mongols.  

Bagan was infamous for 'vandalism' of a more recent sort.  The 1975 earthquake did a great job in damaging the majority of temples, but it could be argued that the restoration had done greater damage in that many of the frescoes had been concreted over, and that the over 1300 stupas completely rebuilt from former piles of rubble (an admittedly admirable feat) are not necessarily historically accurate.  

Vandalism of a more political sort has also occurred. To the eastern end of the plain stands a tall viewing tower that looks quite out of place, built by a former general and now completely shunned due to those same military connections.  It is perhaps a subtle act of revenge for the abuses the locals have experienced here.  Over the subsequent 700 years after the dynasty's fall, they had lived in and around the old temples.  Yet with the restoration, they had been forcibly removed to the swampy river banks, an area infested with snakes. My guide had refused an offer to buy land here for that very reason, but was now kicking herself as land values have risen ten-fold over fifteen years.         

Despite all this, Bagan is absolutely mind-blowing.  It was well worth the time exploring those temples both famous and anonymous, and I was glad I had brought my torch in order to observe the subtle details of the artwork in the former, and to look out for the snakes that sometimes curl up in one of the latter to escape the heat.   

Though at times I felt that I'd chosen the wrong season to come, that very heat contributed to some pleasant sights. Of a trio of sparrows squabbled in the shadow of a crumbling brick wall. Or the bamboo thatch shelters that offered shade to a cow herd, the young cuddling couples, and the foreigner enjoying a sandwich and a good book.  Other foreigners made their way around the plain by rented bicycle or motor scooter, though the preferred means of transport by far was the covered horse cart, which of course, made its own mobile shade.

The rise and fall of that generator of heat helped germinate the best memories.  For one sunset, I climbed atop Shwesandaw Paya, along with a few hundred other foreign tourists and monks.  Most faced the river, snapping away, in particular the monks with their selfies. But the light to the east was even more spectacular, framing the temples far and near.  The lazy shuffle of a bullock cart added the right touch.

 A good alternative choice was to cruise the Irrawaddy up river.  A few of the larger tourist cruise boats had moored while on their way to or from Mandalay.  One boat had set up tables on a sand bank for sunset champagne.  Amidst all this,  working boats steamed upriver, the coal from their boilers adding streaks of color to the sunset.  As I went along, I found myself once again comparing everything to what I have already seen on previous journeys, and wondered if I wasn't getting a bit jaded.  As I tend to think of my life in Japan too as travel, I suppose I have been on the road for over twenty years.  This thought made me suddenly feel weary, as I lazily rode the Irrawaddy's flow, atop water turned orange in the fading of the light.  

But perhaps the best thing about Bagan was the balloons.  To ride over the temples at sunrise is pure bucket-list material.  The old buses we rode to the site added to the charm.  These buses would also serve as balloon chasers, accompanied by young men in identical T-shirts.  This was a massive operation, as each of the ten or so balloons had a team of at least a dozen in support.  They cheerfully waved at us as our baskets lifted from the earth, their smiles helping me forget for a moment just how terrified I am by heights.   But soon the views from 1000 meters helped sweep away even the fear.  It was magical to swoop down upon a temple, or drift horizontally toward another, rising at the last minute above the poiny brick spires.  The normal ride was about 45 minutes, but we wound up with 30 minutes more, having been forced into a low altitude well beneath the winds, due to the impending arrival of some government VIP at the nearby airport.         

Upon landing, we were treated to champagne and croissants by our support crew.  Our descent had also attracted various hawkers, who prowled about our seated circle, pressing, but never pushy.  Some of them were quite young, picking up some additional cash on their school holidays.  They seemed to favor T-shirts over traditional blouses, and their smiles were less the shy grins of their parents, and more the practiced, flirtatious grins of Hollywood.       

Then they moved on, hard at work, going from place to place until regrouping again at Shwesandaw at day's end.  I too, hard at travel, went about my own routine, which like theirs, followed the arc of the sun.


On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Irish Folk"
On the nighttable:  Emma Larkin, "Finding George Orwell in Burma"

Freedom Rock

How is it that a precariously balanced rock has become the symbol of stability for the spiritual life of the Burmese?  Whatever the reason, the number of devotees here was incredible, many having come in family groups, with those unable to secure free lodging now camped all across the grounds, tucking into simple meals as the sun receded to the west.

I'd set off when that same sun was just making its way into the morning.  After three days, I had been happy to be leaving Yangon behind.  I had grown somewhat bored with the city's run-down look.  To be fair, if my memory were better, I'm sure I'd recall a similar city-on-the-grow look to Saigon during my autumn 1997 visit, and the forest of cranes that had defined Shanghai earlier that spring.

It was the traffic though that really fueled my exodus.  I didn't mind sitting still, provided it was on the cool concrete floor of a temple.  I'd already had that privilege during a half-day meditation course the day before, one of the few people still sitting upright during the heat of late morning.  I had followed the fall of my breaths while everyone else in the monastery had fallen into sleep in the cool of the concrete buildings scattered across campus.

So it was that my hired vehicle added to the morning gridlock as it crawled toward the outskirts of the city.  Once free, I enjoyed the film entitled Rural Asia.  It was the latest in a series of films I'd viewed many times before, but it always had a new cast and a slightly different mise-en-scene.  Tall palm trees and huts of bamboo thatch.  The pendulous movement of hips wrapped in longyi, a garment that seems to slow time.  The animals moved even more slowly: the dogs completely still in the dust; boney white bullocks grazing lazily in the dust.  Further on, a cow herd drove his animals on into a slow, bucolic stampede. Not much faster were the vehicles.  A tall truck piled high with musicians and their instruments made its way to the next stop on the temple festival circuit.   Young girls sat sidesaddle atop motorbikes, demure in their fresh flowery longyi, hands making light contact with the waist of their boyfriends. Small pick-ups  packed their cargo beds with passengers.  One vehicle contained only monks, their bobbing bald heads finding a nice parallel in the watermelons for sale in the makeshift stands that lined the road for dozens of miles.  The vendors were without exception women, chosen perhaps to flirt with the male bus and truck drivers into making a sale.  Most of these women were hard at sleep beneath woven fronds that formed roof and wall, a necessary escape from the heat of the day.  Beyond the stalls, watermelon deemed unworthy of sale were left to rot and bleach white in the sun. And beyond further still, the golden chedi of Bago rose out of the dusty plain, and after a quick visit, receded again. 

At the base of the hills leading to Mt. Kyaiktiyo I took a journey of another type.  I was herded into a old dump truck of sorts, whose bed had been fitted with long benches onto which about 50 of us sat.  Once aboard, the driver raced as fast as he could toward the top of the mountain, as if he was in a race with gravity itself.  Our truck was a near loser, for a number of times the gears wouldn't catch, and after emitting a series of harsh metallic sputters, something would engage and we'd continue speeding along, our bodies whipped back and forth on the turns, praying that we wouldn't meet another of these vehicles moving downhill with gravity as an ally. It was a white-knuckle ride for sure, but that seemed okay, as this mountain Kyaiktiyo was a pilgrimage site, and in Asia, white is the symbol for purity.  Then again, in Asia, white is also the symbol for death.

When the truck came to its final and complete stop, I headed down to my hotel, finding a simple room that was clean and offered a great view of lesser peaks rolling off toward the Andaman sea.   It reminded me somewhat of my temple digs atop Taiwan's Shihtoushan, except for the French food and the nice Australia wine.  I'd return to these later, and set off to discover how well the famed rock could compete with the gold of the setting sun.  

I joined the flow of pilgrims through the simple hilltop town, which consisted of a dozen or so shops, and perhaps the same number of small hotels.  In Burma, I was finding it difficult to tell rich from poor, since most people seemed to favor the same style of clothing of simple shirts or blouses over longyi.  The majority of those around me looked like tourists off on a pleasant holiday. Nowhere were the usual cripples, beggars, or pariah dogs that tend to form a sort of society around similar holy sites across the world.   There were a few exceptions to these generalizations, mainly in the Kayin women with their simple black silk garments and colorful scarves folded atop their heads.  There were also a pair of curious well-heeled parties who came through separated by gender, the men in the lead, of course, accompanied by a dozen bodyguards who aggressively told us to clear the way.  I was later told that the VIPs were high ranking members of the Thai government.  As their women came past, a Burmese acquaintance suddenly leaned in to scold them for wearing socks,  a pretty brash act considering the armed guards flanking them.   Then again, my acquaintance was the daughter of a Burmese military officer.      

I did my duty of pressing small sheets of flattened gold onto the stone, atop the narrow rock shelf that was the Rock's perch.  Being tall, I stuck my gold high up on the rock, where I expect it to stay for all eternity, or at least until the rainy season.  As it was, small flecks fluttered away in the evening breeze.  It was only men who accompanied me in this act, with the women left to kneel and pray on the clifftop behind. Again, I was moved by the sight of the devotion, the hands of the old women pressed together in prayer, and entire families sitting quietly in meditation, as if oblivious to the thousands milling around them.  I saw no holy men but for some Thai monks patiently taking turns to be photographed.  There were also the obligatory young people wandering around in small groups, finding a glimpse of the opposite sex to be far more uplifting than that of an ancient holy boulder.  A number of these younger people took photos of me on the sly, which I found amusing since I had been doing the same with the monks and the hilltribe women.  If I caught someone in the act of shooting me, I'd quickly go up to them and throw my arm over their shoulder for a proper pose.  One family even had me lift up their small children. I appeared to be one of the few foreigners around, but for a handful of Italians, and one poor woman nursing a painful spider bite.  The perils of a barefoot culture. 

The warm spiritual vibe here was beginning to lull me into a sense of peace, as it always does.  Faith of this caliber never fails to move me, devotion completely devoid of any separation from daily life.  The institutionalized zen and commercialized yoga that I occupied myself with for two decades felt quite hollow at times like this.  And it is the search for similar scenes that drives me far and wide, walking ridiculous distances, or putting myself through punishing discomfort in order to seek the holy within the mundane.  But why is it is that I've never been moved by the same sort of faith found in my own Catholic tradition?   I've been told by high-level teachers from both East and West that doubt is important in spirituality, a sentiment that suits my somewhat non-conformist character.  But now, perhaps I am finding that faith is simply a synonym for maturity, a weary acceptance of life in whatever form it takes.  


On the turntable:  "Mali"
On the nighttable:  W. Sometset Maugham, "The Gentleman in the Parlour"

There Once was a Man in Rangoon...

As my plane rolled the tips of its wings toward the earth, I saw the morning light flash from golden pagoda to golden pagoda, a sudden dash of color that burst from the dusty soil surrounding the city.  This image, a single glimpse seen almost twelve years ago, was how I had ever since defined Yangon in my mind.

Today, however, if you were to say the name of the city, the first thing that would come to mind is traffic.  Since opening up in 2012, foreign investment has begun to pour in, most notably from Japan.  And Toyota appears to have led the way, as the majority of cars bear that logo.  The affordability of these hand-me-down vehicles, coupled with the banning of bicycles and motorbikes from the downtown area, has clogged an already overwhelmed infrastructure.  New streets were badly needed here, yet the labor and resources seemed to be instead going into the dozens of new high-rise hotels and service apartments being built across the city, dwarfing the quiet leafy residential areas below. But as the Japanese have a certain genius for turning yen into concrete, I doubt it will be long before we see the city's first elevated expressway. 

I suppose if sitting for hours in traffic has an upside, it is that you can get a good look at things.  Billboards announced business both new and upcoming, most of which were of Japanese or Korean origin, the Chinese money of the past thirty years lesser in evidence.  I noted this as the taxi radio played a muzak version of "House of the Rising Sun," and boy oh boy was this city on the rise, lifted by cranes toward a sky that appeared for the moment to have no limit, potential wise. Ironically enough, the previous song had been a similarly watered-down version of "Yesterday,"  shades of which could still be seen.  A few three wheeled bicycles puttered around, carrying a cargo of bottled water piled high, or transporting well-dressed women shaded by parasol and thanaka paste.   Monks clad in scarlet strolled barefoot along pavement growing hot, carrying the morning's beggings in stacked silver tiffin.   The drivers sped around them, along the right side of the road, where the Burmese have driven since 1952.  The newer Japanese imports however steered from the right, which further added to the chaos. There was no apparent urge to conceal their previous owners, and my eyes took in small vans emblazoned with the name of a hotel in Kawaguchi-ko, or a former patrol vehicle from  Suita; my ears caught a familiar high pitched voice telling me that the truck in front of me was about to turn left.   

The buses were the worst however, beat up wrecks from which both limbs and parts protruded, looking as if they'd driven straight out of "Road Warrior."  The doorways of these doorless buses opened directly onto the road, making for a perilous disembarkment.  I smiled at the irony of the use of the honorific "U" in male Burmese names, since a large number of drivers would trace that same shape in the attempt to avoid a traffic snarl, but which would only cause them to become yet another obstacle.  That said, there was a strange politeness to the driving here.  It was the usual Asia chaos, though with turn signals.

We inched across a flyover, as a number of walkers strolled at a slightly faster pace along the railroad tracks below.  Above them, a billboard written in the swirling curlicues of the Burmese script argued against the use of child soldiers in combat.  (Nothing much was said about about the beating and jailing of student protesters not much older, though I wouldn't hear about that for another week.)  Walled compounds marked where the moneyed generals lived, men who'd paved the way for the new wealth and the inevitable changes that this wealth would buy.  A shrine outside one of these compounds had been spray painted with the words, "Hip Hip."   Some of the newer apartment towers bristled with satellite dishes, encrusted with guano that served as a subtle comment on the quality of what was being transmitted out the other end.  But I suppose it was a necessary evil in order to drown out the near constant honk of traffic below.

I decided to pass my first night at The Strand hotel, once a bastion of the colonials, and currently Chinese owned.  I wasn't to enjoy its comforting aircon for long, before I headed back out into the heat, finding eventual reprieve at the Union Bar and Grill for lunch.  Thus fueled, I wandered around what had once been the colonial heart of the city.  Ironically this area was the most decrepit, as the previous military government had quite definitively turned its back on that period in the nation's history.  The husks were there, and just when I decided that a building had been completely abandoned, a head would pop up in a window frame.  Along the side streets, young boys played soccer in the shade, while the older men sat and gossiped.  Those ages in between could be found in the Mahabandoola Garden, abustle with friends and young lovers on a holiday afternoon slowly cooling into evening.  I moved beyond to the booksellers selling knowledge once forbidden, as the face of Aung San Suu Kyi popped up frequently within the stacks.  


My stroll continued for the next couple of days, along a street that blended from Chinese to Burman, Indian to Muslim, the sidewalks ever crowded with stalls, as if the city itself was a vast market.   Spices, flowers, incense, fish.  The dull grey of jade, the bright palate of longyi.  My feet and the overload only really came to rest within the confines of a temple:  the rectangular neon gaudiness of Tin Hau, or the more circular chedi of Botataung Paya across town.

The crown jewel of course was Shwedagon.  I made my way there as a full moon was pushing the sun out of the sky. Its tiled grounds were alive, yet bustle is far from the proper adjective.  There was a slowness here as the people made their perambulations, stopping to pray at the altars corresponding to the day of the week upon which they were born.  Small structures housed Buddhas of concrete and gold, before which the devout knelt, their feet bent out to the side like the fins of a fish.  Smiley young monklets posed for smartphone cameras.   Walking amongst this, I began to feel the place beginning to work on me, leading to the first true mental quiet I'd felt since arrival in country, as my own footsteps continued to slow and I let myself be washed over by the faith that surrounded me.



On the turntable: "Complete Keynote Collection"
On the night table:  Norman Lewis, "Golden Earth"

With a Rose

In the past, I've posted excerpts from my unedited Ireland journals in order to mark St. Patrick's Day.   Those previous  entries can be found here:  Part 1,  Part 2,  Part 3,  Part 4.


On the ride back to Dublin I realized that I'd been on the wrong side of the bus the day before.  The view from this side was magnificent, of large farms, ruined churches, and the high towers of castles.  This area was famous for breeding horses, and more than a few riders were galloping across the landscape.  Small creeks bisected these massive tracts of land.  Off on the horizon were the Slieve Bloom range, "towering" above the small farms and towns.  In Kildare, a market was in full swing.  I wish that I had had a chance to thumb through the CDs piled upon one table.

Back in Dublin, I crossed Ha'Penny Bridge's stack of steps, then cut through an arch onto Temple Bar.  I again found the Porterhouse Pub, and tried a few of their stouts.   I talked myself into an expensive trip to Christchurch Cathedral, which I'd foregone visiting two days before.  Due to its age, I'd hoped for some pagan or Viking imagery, but found mostly the usual Catholic hits.  In a far corner, there was a chained heart in a cage, brought back from France when its owner died.  It was tradition in those days to let the body lie where it fell and bring home only the heart, giving birth to the expression, "Home is where the heart is."  The crypt too was interesting, with its jagged posts of stone.  In the back was a moving figure of a woman grieving over her fallen man.  

Back on the street, I wound around the backside of the fort, peering through it's arched gates.  I found a music shop back there, and had to be buzzed in.  It seems that they had had to install this security system last year as the neighborhood was falling apart.  I checked out the drums, none of which thrilled me, and blew a few notes on the low-toned flutes.  The quality of the instruments attest to the fact that the shop supplies most of the city's top musicians.

The street led on to St. Stephen's, where I stopped to have a cappuccino.  My body by this point in the journey had become used to a well-established pattern of coffee-beer-coffee-beer.  Head abuzz, I admired the Georgian's lined up to frame Merrion Square, each identical but for door color, or the carving around them.  Would be an easy mistake to enter the wrong one after a few pints.   At one corner stood Oscar Wilde's childhood home.  Across the street in the park was a  statue of the man himself, in a slightly pervy-looking pose.  Upon the base were some of Wilde's more renowned witticisms, no doubt said with a smirk similar to this one carved in stone.  Rounded W. B. Yeats' house and headed down to St. Stephen's Green, where I sat and read from the book Trinity.  Though the sun had come out today, it was still cold, a cold like that of Japan which sinks into you.  I hadn't felt this over in Britain.  To escape it, I pressed on, up Grafton, the newer tourist tat crowding out the few olde shoppes remaining.  The street here was cobblestone and closed to vehicle traffic.  A few side streets had small stands selling flowers or hippie clothes.  At the top near Trinity College was the statue of Molly Malone, showing an awful lot of boob.  A woman leaned against Molly's cart, playing a harp.

Nearby, I found Grogan's Pub, long time favorite of the city's artistic set.  It was a true pub, quite old, and definitely not one for the tourists.  Strangely, there was a wall running through the middle, with drinks being cheaper on the far side.  Behind the bar was a beautiful stained-glass picture of the pub.  I sat and eavesdropped on a few conversations, then wrote awhile.  I was sleepy so nursed only a half-pint, but I felt self-conscious about it.  

Moving along, I found a covered street which housed a warren of alterna-clothes and CD shops.  Surprisingly, this was all non-smoking, despite being a proper street.  Then back out again, through the now growing pedestrian rush hour crawl, in search of live music.           

I found some at the Celt, but didn't stay long due to an somewhat unfriendly vibe.  Around the corner was a place called Spirits, where I found a duo on a stage.  I grabbed a pint and sat next to a framed poem written about JFK.  The music was good, the first few numbers being simple acoustic ballads which spotlighted the voice of the female singer.    There  was an extremely drunk young guy seated on a stool beside her, who'd shush everyone, then clap out of time, or sing along to the wrong verse.  It wasn't long before he was hustled off.   What followed was a repertoire of covers -- Johnny Cash, Van Morrison, Jeff Buckley, Cowboy Junkies, and a lot of Dylan.  I walked home through the busy streets, the pubs now releasing groups of young drunks in twos and threes, all holding on to one another and talking loudly in what was almost a parody of the drunk Mick...


On the turntable:  "Kill Twee Pop"
On the nighttable:  George Orwell, "Burmese Days" 

Sunday Papers: Shunryu Suzuki

"True nature is something which is eternal. True nature will not be lost. And through suffering you can have direct experience of your true nature, how strong it is. Your true nature is much stronger than the suffering you created.  True nature is incomparably greater than small mind. "  


On the turntable:  "California Ska-quake"

(untitled)

Golden mushrooms sprout

From the dusty earth.

Burma by air. 

On the turntable:  Allen Ginsberg, "Holy Roll Jelly Roll" 

Sunday Papers: Norman Lewis

"Art is sometimes protected by poverty, and civilisation can be the destroyer of taste."


On the turntable:  Willie Nelson, "Always on my Mind"

Eluding Closure (Ise Sangu Kaidō II)

The forty five km I'd done the previous day had seemed to come easily.  Or at least while vertical.  When I lay down to sleep, the pain began, mainly in my right instep.  There's a good reason I don't walk those kinds of distances anymore.  But even more bizarre was what was happening in my mind.  The brain was a-babble with a monologue without any real point, just adrift in the seas of the subconscious.    I began to wonder (among other things) whether certain reflexology points in the foot are stimulated by long distance walking, causing, say, the pineal gland to trigger a fight or flight response.   And the two glasses of a very fine Malbec weren't doing their job of shutting it down.   

But a bad's night sleep isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the brain slowed some and I could keep a better focus on what was before me, rather than on lunch, logistics, and other distractions.  It was easy then to note the birds warming up their voices, and the few flowers that, though potted, added not only a bit of color to the world, but offered a tease of the olfactory delights to come.

It didn't take long to walk out of Tsu, where I had stayed the night upon completing my Ise Kaidō walk the day before.  I was back then on the Ise Sangu Kaidō, which I had begun walking last August.  Hot and stormy weather had prevented me from finishing the walk then, but I had hoped to cover the final 38 km today.  But already my legs were heavy, and the sore instep was beginning to worry me.  Were those extra km I'd done yesterday in search of lunch coming back to haunt me?  

I took a long rest on a river bank, sipping coffee, and watching a trio of men fish.   It was about that time I decided that I would finish today at the walk's midway point of Matsusaka, and return sometime later in the year.  

This seemed a wise choice as the last five km were spent trying to distract myself from the pain in my foot.  One such distraction were the occasional stele denoting where the Meiji Emperor had stopped while on his own pilgrimage to Ise in 1869.  What was going through his mind as he stood before the most holy of shrines to Amaterasu, his mythological ancestor?  Much of the scenery I was passing through was right out of his own journey, as the countryside looks to have changed very little out here, in the old homes and reasonably unspoiled rural landscape.  Yet I had comforts that the Emperor hadn't, in the form of a nice coffee drunk in a warm train carriage, and the view seen from  the train window, of my footfalls rolling backwards.



On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Tex-Mex"

Waiting on the Sun (Ise Hon-kaido VI)

It was a day too warm for February, and the birdsong was in the key of March.  I'd wanted an early start, so had come down to Matsusaka the night before, in order to catch the first bus of the day.  My feet hit pavement not long after 7:30.  

The road on which we'd ridden out here to Kakinō was a busy one, but luckily I was walking a smaller road just above both it and a river that was quiet today.  In former times, the latter must have raced through this gorge with great power, scarring and twisting the rocks in the riverbed into phantasmagoric shapes.  These, and the mist hanging between the hills overhead, lent itself to the cliche of a Chinese landscape painting. 

This smaller road was leading me through the remains of a post town, the location of the old inns designated by paper lanterns hanging in the eaves of what were now modern houses.  The oldest house in the village dated from the Meiji period, but rather than lanterns, Christmas lights hung from  its cracked and faded beams.  This lingering holiday sentiment was refuted somewhat by the sight of plum blossoms that exploded into view a few steps on.

Before leaving the river, I climbed up above a Shingon temple whose twin waterfalls hinted at esoteric practices, to an overlook that was becoming hemmed in by the untrimmed pine branches that blotted out the view.  I imagined an older priest here, no longer interested in undertaking tough manual labor for the sake of a dwindling number of parishioners.  As the day went on, I noticed that the few temples I did pass seemed to be all Shingon.  I was closing in on the Ise shrines, and imagined the pro-Shinto fever that must have purged this area of all signs of Buddhism as State Shinto raised its snake-like head in the Meiji Period.  These Shingon temples had Shugendo roots, so were therefore deemed Shinto enough.

The river now behind me, I found myself walking a straight line throughout the day, village begetting village, with only rice fields between. Kadomatsu New Year's decorations hung from many of the doors, making it feel as if my previous walk in January was still going on.  

Villages, farmland, villages.  The one forest I did enter was flat, along a track that bisected a thick bamboo thicket that must be rife with snakes of its own in warmer days.  At the forest's far end, I heard what I at first thought was gunfire, but was merely a pile of bamboo trees ablaze, their air-filled chambers bursting as the heat escaped. 

Lunchtime came, and it brought with it hunger.  In many ways this was a dream walk as the path kept me far out in the countryside.  However, the walker tends to grow reliant upon the small cafes and convenience stores found just about everywhere across Japan.  I eventually came to a small yakuniku place, but the owner told me he was finished for the day, despite it only being just past one o'clock.  A bit annoying.  

Earlier while walking the river, I had tossed a fist-sized rock into a pool of very still water.  I was amazed at just how wide and for how long the ripples traveled.  I thought this a good metaphor for those who complain that a single individual has no effect upon a large and complicated world.  And in the same spirit, this fellow's refusal to serve me had ramifications throughout the day.  The ripples of my initial annoyance growing eventually into full blown anger, as my energy waned and waned.  I just couldn't find food anywhere.  More than that, I wanted an excuse to sit awhile as I was now about 25km into my day.  

Around 3 pm, I finally decided to detour off my track to a convenience store a few km away, not far from where the Ise Kaido meets a lesser traveled section of the Kumano Kodo that leads south toward those grand shrines.  I finally got my lunch, and as I sat I noted that I was just on the outskirts of Ise City proper.  Not long now.

When I rejoined the path, my laughter cleared out any anger I was still carrying when I came upon a food shop a 100 meters on.  Then another.  Spirits high, I walked on, trying to ignore my eyes made runny by the pollen that is always an unwanted companion to the welcome warmth of spring.  The farm villages continued for an hour or so, then crossing a broad river, I was in Ise proper.  

The kaido took me past the Inner Shrine.  I debated going in, but it was past 4 pm now, with the light fading.  Plus I'd recently paid my respects a few months before.  So I carried on the last four km toward the inner shrine, which I found more important anyway.  

This section was quite fascinating, as it had once been lined with brothels and inns.  Had this been 150 years before, I expect it would have quite the lively scene.  Today, all was quiet, just a few school kids cycling home.  One of these inns was the scene of a multiple murder that soon inspired popular entertainment. But it, and most of the other inns, were now replaced by bland new suburban homes.  Only Asakichi Ryokan remained, stacked up in a jumble of wood upon the side of a hill.  

I hadn't expected that I'd finish this walk with a climb.  Thanks to my lunch detour, I was clocking about 45 km for the day, far more than I'd walked in the last decade or so.  But incredibly, I felt fine, with none of the aches I usually get after about the 27th km.  But I could have done without this last hill. And along the descent down the far side I felt the pull of momentum, leading me through the mock Edo frontages that are a large tourist draw these days.  All were shuttered and closed by now, the punters having moved on.  

And at the far end, the bridge led over to the water to where the Sun Goddess awaited, just as her spherical form was beginning to leave the heavens.    

  MAP: http://latlonglab.yahoo.co.jp/route/watch?id=4cc9415e09dd2d174d0d38987812e0fb


On the turntable:  "Skankin' 'Round the World"

Sunday Papers: Antoine de Saint Exupery

"Life creates order, but order does not create life."


On the turntable:  "Cafe del Mar Volume 9"

(untitled)

The sun goddess
Welcomes me with a day
Far too warm for winter.

On the turntable:  "Repo Man (Sdtk)"

 

(untitled)

Changing her make-up
As the clock ticks toward night.
Winter splendor.

On the turntable;  "IndiaRama"

Looking for the 'There' There Pt. VI

I quit my walk at the perfect time.  The rain grows heavier and heavier and it is with great relief that I find a bus stop.  An hour later I drive past this same spot, in a rented car I picked up back in Sendai.  As I pull onto the highway on the edge of the city, a sign tells me that I can expect to get 1.2 microsieverts of radiation if I were to race through the exclusion zone at 80 kph.

But for now, that is far away, yet growing closer as the car points south.

And to the east, the sea walls stretches on and on and on.  Although it is being built at a more human scale than up in Iwate, I have yet to see the water, despite being only 100 meters from the sea.  There doesn't appear anything for miles around to protect.  This shoreline is a series of lakes and canals, most of the land beneath being swamp land.  It didn't look farmable, not a place of habitation.  But anytime I wonder if there had ever been anyone living out here, I'll come across a gutted house, an abandoned school. Beside one of the latter is a 'thousand year' memorial stone.  I'm 350 kilometers south of where I started this walk.  The scale of the waves, of the destruction, is enormous.  

I keep driving south on Route 6, into areas whose names I recognize from the news.  I'm not sure how far I'll drive.  I'll turn around the moment I begin to see people in masks, or god forbid, a Hazmat suit.  And while the number of obviously abandoned homes and businesses was increasing, a good number still had lights on, beneath which people went about their day.  

Not much later, I'm getting into areas that I know are within the exclusion zone,  open to residents to spend the day, but not the night.  Workmen wave their traffic wands, without masks.   Few drivers coming from the other direction are wearing masks either. The smiles of a trio of policemen are visible as they investigate a minor accident.  A handful of people eat their lunch in a small restaurant. Yet amidst this is the view of tsunami damaged businesses, including one with a sign saying 'open year-round.'  A Family Mart has been abandoned, its fully stocked shelves visible through the windows.  At a Lawson's a block away, it is business as usual.  

One entire shopping plaza has been barricaded, and policemen stand at the turn-offs to residential areas, both to deter looters I suppose.  Police cars slowly cruise other roads off in the distance.  Here and there are signs warning us of cows or other livestock suddenly entering the road.  The town hall has a large sign offering free radiation screenings.

I plan to turn around well before this.  I will drive right up to the barricade, manned or unmanned, telling me that all beyond was unsafe and off-limits.   That is how I have already scripted the true end to this journey. 

And I'm wondering just where this checkpoint is going to pop up, when I notice the name Fukushima Daiichi Reactor slide into the corner of the car's GPS.   Then the towers themselves well up out of the grey mist.  My heart, already wary and nervous, nearly stops.  I calm myself somewhat in remembering the article about the bus services that recommenced just three weeks before. (What I hadn't known was that this Route 6 had reopened to all thru-traffic last September.)  Riders were expected to receive 1.2 microsieverts per trip, which is what I assumed I now got.  To put it into perspective, I received a hundred times that dose when I flew from Tokyo to New York last autumn.  At any rate, a quick check of the Geiger counter back at my hotel later proved to read far less. 

But I didn't know that at the time.  I wheel the car around as quickly as possible, using the main driveway that leads down to the stricken plant.  The snow begins to fall thickly and softly upon my windshield, blurring somewhat the view of the guardman waving his baton, the diners happily munching away in the restaurant, and other scenes in what is now the new normal.  



On the turntable:   "Martin Scorsese Presents Jazz"

Looking for the 'There' There Pt. V

There had been no initial clue as to why the train had been delayed.  After a half-hearted attempt at hitching, I found a taxi driver willing to take me to Morioka.  It was along the way that I learned about the earthquake.  And as my Shinkansen sped its way south, I learned of the tsunami, which at a mere ten centimeters lapped at a pair of harbor towns that had been scoured from existence nearly four years before.

How ironic than that I have chosen this day to continue the walk of the Tohoku coast that I had begun in June.   Due to some incorrect bus information, I wind up in another taxi, headed out to the small village of Onnagawa, nestled between a long low valley and an extremely craggy coast.  Berms are being built up along the former, which I presume had held most of the homes of the inhabitants.  Those who survived are being housed in a long row of shelters that must hold a hundred households, the sounds of which carry out over the rice fields that had for centuries heard little more than the hushed whisper of rice stalks. 

My driver tells me that this cab is one of eight donated to Ishinomaki by Okayama Prefecture.  When I had entered the taxi, he asked why I wished to go out to Onnagawa.  Last summer I had been too sheepish and ashamed to tell people why I was doing this walk, but today I apologetically confess that I am thinking about writing a book about the region's reconstruction.  So he drives slowly and thoughtfully, narrating along the way.  Where all I see is empty expanse stretching toward the east, he sees six decades of memory.   The pair of schools, the shops, the neighborhoods, all peopled by those now gone elsewhere.  I don't have the nerve to ask his story.  I don't dare.    

As we drive, I keep changing my destination. Part of the reason is that it has begun to rain, which had been a constant during those few days I'd spent walking in Iwate.  It seems fitting somehow.   And I'm again beginning to question my motives for coming.  Somewhere between last summer and today, I no longer remember the point.  

So I ride on, both road sides empty and green; the right side all neat rows of stubbled rice paddies, the left a twist of weeds and the odd squared foundation.  Will anyone ever return to claim this land?  

I arrive finally at a train station, serviced only by a few buses daily.  We parallel the rail line, past the air base that is the home to Japan's Blue Impulse air demonstration team, their bright and shiny machines parked atop high berms of their own.  On the outskirts of town, I see a handful of men squatting atop a new bridge, putting the finishing touches on the Senseki Line which is due to reopen this spring.  All the new concrete hints at the ferocity of the water that had moved through here, shifting these enormous heavy slabs.  This long low valley must have served as a funnel, for as at Onnagawa, I saw most of the damage in such a terrain.  And as the introduction of the locomotive helped assert over man the importance of clock time, so do these railway workers endure in their metaphoric turning back of the clock's hands.
  
I get off the bus in Matsushima.  I've guided here numerous times so give the town a miss, but do want to visit Oshima, whose old bridge had washed away, severing the historic link to the poet Basho and the generations of monks who'd confronted life's mysteries in the caves that pockmark the island.  A newly built bridge leads the way. Below me, tour boats trudge up and back, up and back, sluggishly feigning enthusiasm on such a cold wet day.  

I too drag myself toward Shiogama.  This was a particularly nasty piece of road, devoid of any sidewalk or shoulder to protect me from the barrage of trucks racing past.  I could completely understand why Basho had chosen to skip this stage and instead take the boat.  The hissing wake of passing vehicles sweeps me monotonously to a small train platform, and here I will quit for the day.   I've walked most of this next section between here and Tagajo, and less a reprieve for the feet as for the enthusiasm, which never showed up today. 




In yet another taxi the following morning in Tagajo.  Out amongst the hills to the west lies the ruins of what had once served as a sort of northern capital during the Nara period.  Not far away is another row of shelters.  One spring afternoon last year, the sight of a young girl my daughter's age playing amongst them brought tears, as I thought of the lost promise of what could of been. 

Aside from that I see no apparent damage nor reminder of the tsunami, though I know that this town had a significant loss of life.  And again I ride on, ride on, repeated my mantra of "Further, further," like one of Ken Kesey's somnambulic Pranksters.  The continuously poor weather conspires.  My heart is no longer in this walk.

I get out beside Sendai Airport.  Beside it, they are building a park called a Thousand Years of Hope.  They've actually created two hilly berms that resemble the ancient burial mounds of that aforementioned Nara period, upon which people are encouraged to come and watch the project.  These same mounds also serves as evacuation zones built as they are, ten meters high. 

And here beyond them are the new graves shiny and black, tucked into the corner of a large empty space.  This is the third time in two days that I've encountered this.  On what had once been a tidy suburban community, there was now only similarly aligned black stones.  I normally leave them alone, but today I feel I want to pay my respects. Each stone was not for a single person, but for an entire family, all born over a span of decades. And upon a few, rather than surnames, I find sentiment etched in marble: "Hope,"  or  "Souls united for eternity." Most painful are the graves of the children, so many, so many.  And the tears fall again, washed immediately away by the rain.  

And suddenly I'm angry.  What is being done in the memory of these people?  Each stone has been dedicated by a surviving family member, but what is being done for them?  Where are the rebuilt communities, the promise of a new start?  Where can it be found beneath all the talk of the Olympics, of Abenomics, of taking tougher stances against China,  terrorists, or even against a world demanding accountability for wartime 'improprieties,'  for the erosion of a free press, and for nuclear reactors still out of control.  I usually consider myself somewhat pragmatic on the latter topic, but now all I feel is that any talk of reactor restarts is an insult to the memory to these people lying here, and an even greater insult to those displaced nuclear refugees who face the far bigger challenge of living on.  I want to ask these men in government, "Mr. Abe, I know you've visited these stricken communities as a politician, but have you ever once come as a human being?"

My heart is no longer in this walk because my heart is breaking.

And my anger stays with me, as the diggers continue to scrape away at the land.  The question is "What have they been doing all this time," as even this particular project didn't get started until last September.  I'm sure there must be a good reason for the delay.  I know that it has nothing to do with these workmen who have been suffering the elements of various seasons.  But I want someone to explain to me, why has nothing been done out here for the last four years?

And with that, I'm done.  There are no answers here, nothing left to seek. 

But there is still one place left to see...


(Postscript:  A sort of answer can be found here.)



On the turntable:  "The Complete Stax"
On the nighttable:  Kyūya Fukada, "One Hundred Mountains (Martin Hood, trans.)"

Sunday Papers: John Berger

"True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal."

On the turntable:  "The Rough Guide to Hungarian Gypsies" 

 

(untitled)

Steadfast as islands,
The monks maintain their silence
Beneath tall stone slabs.

On the turntable:  "Grosse Pointe Blank (Sdtk)"

(untitled)

The wind blows.
The snow falls.
The trees merely wait.

On the turntable:  "God Save the Queen"

(unitiled)

How can words capture
What even photographs
Cannot touch?

  

On the turntable:  "Texas Worried Blues"

 

(untitled)

From atop the ladder of stone,
The souls of Bandai return
As gently falling snow.

On the turntable:  "Putumayo Presents Italia"

(untitled)

Ruddy cheeks chilled
By winds from the north,
Yet Jizo keeps its smile.

 

On the turntable:  "Jazz Divas Gold"

Sunday Papers: Jonathan Clements

“Japan is still living five years into the future, but whereas that was once a breathless boast of oncoming technologies and trends, today it’s a warning of the crises that could also face the developed world as a whole.”


On the turntable:  "The Blue Note Years, Vol. 3"