Anyway. Hi Laura!
Edit: Bit of a ramble. Jump to the good stuff.
How are you readjusting to Toronto after months of systematic de-adjustment? Are things fitting differently? Do you find yourself at a certain philosophical distance from pre-trip Laura, with her pre-trip ways and thoughts? Or are you pre-trippier than ever? Have you moved out yet? You’d best’ve, is my thinking.
Here's a picture I took on Nature Day. It makes me think of Russia. Of photos of Russia, anyway.
I got your magic wine bottle balancing stand the other day in the mail. It is an outstanding utensil for when you and guests want to get a little tipsy and, um, not fall over? Anyway, thanks. I will enjoy many opportunities to "dazzle my friends and impress my partner" with it, exactly as the brochure enclosed with it suggests!
I am a noted fan of both wine and balance, especially where dining is concerned. My parents can confirm that I really dove into balancing things at an early age. My mom, in particular, might recall the times I pulled out all the pots, tupperware, bowls and cereal boxes from their respective cupboards and gingerly Jenga’d them in to a stately mid-kitchen tower. For some reason I called the resulting sculpture a “fire engine.” Psh. Kids.
I want to set the record straight that, no matter what Andra said, I wasn’t jealous of the possum-skin map you sent her, though. In fact, for the first week, I thought you’d sent it to both of us, and was showing it off with the pride of a new proprietor leading tour groups. When I realized I had it wrong, that it had never been mine, I went ‘aw,’ like a kid who gets taken to the local ice-cream parlour only to watch his parents have dessert, which Andra found funny, because it is.
Damn, that is a straight record! It has probably never even looked at another record of the same sex, is how straight it is. It wears only pink, or only blue, but I respect its privacy and won’t check which. Also it only enjoys certain kinds of movies and either loves or refuses to dance.
Speaking of that, a few days ago I started writing you a letter about dance breaks, but that evolved into a detailed probe of dance breaks’ official and carnivalesque aspects and cellular dialogic structure. It seemed right up your alley, but I’m going to have to do some more research, so I’m afraid you just can’t have that letter, at least not for a while.
Instead, I’ll tell you about Koyasan. It’s where I went on Nature Day. Nature Day is a made up holiday that creates a four-day ultraweekend in Japan. A word on Japanese holidays: as you might suspect, having toured the country, Japan becomes in-fucking-tolerable when everyone has a day off. City streets that are vacant in daytime become so stuffed with fleshy bodies that it becomes impossible for anyone to go where they are going. They still bump around all over the place, but it’s more of a jittery, Brownian motion than anything we properly think of as moving. From overhead, all the pointless kinesis must look a little static on TV.
Oh man, I just realized those static channels will be a thing of the past once the digital broadcast switchover is complete. I used to have a friend who called it “the battle of the black and white ants.” Being a well-adjusted, normal kid, I recall pressing my face literally right up against the screen so I could be fascinated by the tiny lines of color inside all the crazy black-and-white static. I can remember the smell of the screen, of dust and electrical charge that made my hair stand up just a little until mom came and told me not to do that or I’d eventually hurt my eyes or something.
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That was relevant, but here’s something different. Koyasan is a remote spot high up in a circle of mountains, and it is a great place to go on Nature Day, not only because of its nature, but also because you won’t find yourself jockeying with ungodly human swarms just to walk down the sidewalk.
It’s also one great big artifact of the history of Japanese civilization—a testimony, in the form of real estate, of an age when the emperor could set aside eight whole mountains for the purpose of religious retreat, meditation, and devotion to aesthetic works as a path to enlightenment.
The site was chosen over eleven-hundred years ago by the monk known in death Kobodaishi. By the way, using “death names” to distinguish between a person’s living existence and their state of posthumous influence were traditional in Japan for a long, long time. In fact, saying that a woman knew the death names of her whole family’s ancestors was once a way of joking that she needed to get a life.
Kobodaishi (Kuukai in life) came back to Japan from Tang-dynasty China after a diplomatic mission that had lasted many years, during which time he became the head of the Chinese school of Shingon Buddhism. On returning home, he must have been pretty enthusiastic about spreading the good word. So how did he end up with an imperial bequest of eight mountains in perpetuity? Well, there’s a story involving lots of wandering and an encounter with a pair of gods resembling a white dog and a black dog, but the main reason is that, seen through the eye of a creative ninth-century mapmaker, the elevated valley in between eight peaks resembles a sacred lotus blossom. Since Shingon Buddhism is concerned with how the experience of certain kinds of beauty prepares humans for enlightenment, Kuukai had no trouble deciding that this was the place. It also helped that he had considerable pull with the political classes.
It is encrusted with temples, many of which have stood so long they outdate the old-growth forest all around them. Aside from the Shingon analogue of St. Peter’s Cathedral, from which the sect’s other thirty-six-hundred-ish temples worldwide are administered, the site is occupied by so many other abbeys, temples, sub-temples, holy spots, shrines, adjunct shrines, holdout shrines, wartime bunker shrines, and shrines on wheels that there is a great pilgrimage route—a lengthy psychogeographic tour that normally leads one along a chain of temples hundreds of miles long—that takes place entirely within the valley, coiling along past a huge number of sites. You can recognize the people walking this route by the ceremonial hiking gear they wear: thick wooden sandals and conical sun hats, and a kind of white ninja costume with a full-body apron that ends up covered in calligraphy as monks in each temple sign the outfit in brush-painted sutras and adages specific to each stop on the road. These practices have developed and sustained for an unimaginably long time. A lantern in one of the temples, called “the lamp of the poor woman,” has been kept continuous aflame for nine-hundred years.
But the heart of the place is in the cemetery woods. I know that probably sounds a bit morbid (which may actually be a draw to you, Gothicky McPoem-Sketch), but deathly is the one thing it is not. It overflows with liveliness in a slightly paradoxical, probably Buddhist “let’s-not-get-too-attached-to-living-or-dying” way. And it’s beautiful. As in visually drop-dead gorgeous.
The woods, which are equal parts pine forest, Lost City, and statue garden, are constantly filled with people just strolling around, free of the usual graveside associations that hang over burial grounds in Japan just like they do the Christian parts.
Instead of a sense of mourning, spookiness, or even light-a-candle remembrance, the place radiates signs of a tremendous amount of ongoing commitment, membership, and belonging. Part of that is in the coral structure of the site. Ancient grave lanterns half-consumed by the woods stand on top of the buckled granite surfaces of even older, positively primordial tombs. Next to these agglomerations, which can be as big as a row of houses and incorporate a half-dozen different styles of monument, sit shining new marble stones, whose resemblance to fresh young sprigs in a forest of old giants is hard to miss.
For years, sometimes many decades, monks will place colorful robes and hats on the new jizo buddha statues settling into their perches amongst the avalanche of resting places. After a while, these clothes stop being replaced and fall into earth-toned tatters before dissolving completely and being replaced by moss and roots. I saw a jizo whose head had been cracked off by some disturbance, and on the weathered stump of its neck someone had placed an ordinary rock from the path, so long ago that the rock was welded to the statue by a bushy seal of moss and caught soil out of which grew a few hairlike shoots of a tree that had recently found a foothold there.
The cemetery began with the death of Kododaishi, who was buried in a cedar grove by the river that ran behind the main temple that he’d established. Over time, disciples and devotees added their tombs to what became an accretive neighborhood of funerary mounds, lanterns, tall wooden markers, carved grave stones, shrines, torii gate-fronted enclosed courts for family spirits, multi-armed brass Buddhas that slowly turn green with age, and jizo sprouting up like mushrooms. On foot, the approach to the temple now takes the better part of an hour, and that’s if you press on directly, without stopping to explore the forest, the millions of pieces of evidence of constant human care, and the off-path mausolea tucked into odd places and concealed by hundreds of years of tree growth but still showing faint colors of faded paint.
Koyasan is serviced by a cable-car connected directly to the Nankai regional train network, from whose bustling Osaka hub you can reach the retreat in about eighty minutes. You used to have to wind your way up a long path up one of the mountainsides, which took all day. Women weren’t even allowed through the main gate until 1872, but instead had to take a precipitous route along the edges of a series of cliffs. They were surely a committed bunch.
It also hold a sleepy but basically modern town, which has the odd property of not bugging the hell out of me, even though I despise little countryside towns with a passion seldom equalled in this world. The mountains’ centuries of essentially closed existence, barred until recently to anything but religious traffic, is part of how Koyasan developed its identity, not to mention its stunning concentration of temples and pagodas. But it also seems to have had the effect of giving the local one-horse town an unusual character and welcome character.
What I normally I can’t stand about small towns isn’t just the lack of options they present, but the atmosphere of folksiness, the ingrown lines of organization they form along, and the constant presence of the repetetive, massively boring and possessive, as though the place doesn’t want anyone to leave, or move, or change, just stay stuck in place.
With that in mind, something about the little town with its storefront pharmacy, its one (Chinese) restaurant that stays open after 7 p.m., its wooden “international” café that also sells crafts by local artists, and its three-hundred souvenir outlets seems natural, balanced rather than glued in place. I’m sure it has much to do with the fact that the whole town’s life and that of its visitors revolves around the religious function of the mountain, and not just in a commercial sense. In a way the whole town is just another sprawling temple ground, with secular rituals repeated day-in, day-out, in observation of the same ideals that permeate the monastic grounds. The organic, overpowering feeling of simultaneous newness and age in the cemetery woods spills into the town. Anyway, it’s a nice place, and if you duck into the back alleys or that one café I mentioned, it’s full of a restrained kind of vivacity that is both wonderful and no threat to my cherished prejudice against the average stupid middle-of-nowhere hamlet.
And now I think I’d like to end the letter, since I’m putting off having lunch and two-thousand words is probably enough for you for the time being.
Also: dance break!
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