Fragrant Delight

There is a line in one of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems: 'God explodes from his hiding place.' This same explosion happened in fragrant and delightful beauty right upon our dining room table!

Two Encounters with Pilgrimmage

Straw sandals traditionally used by pilgrims in Japan hanging on a temple gate. 

The Ancients well knew that the combination of energies, both human and divine, required for pilgrimage prepare the path to insight like nothing else. This sacred, time out of time journey, must be a marvellous zone of space-time for close encounters with ten thousand halos! The demands on one's attention, enthusiasm, body and the mind are surely concentrating, and loosening, and shaking up of the you you thought you knew. New dimensions of what it means to be human and alive are, by all accounts, to be anticipated.

So I believe. I'm also encouraged to believe it is a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour. I've done one memorably long walk on the Annapurna circuit  in the Himalayas, and I wonder if is it mere fantasy to dream that an added dimension exists on pilgrimage, drawing the heart to higher, deeper things? I felt myself raised by the experience of that long walk, but I have not put my mind to doing pilgrimage (yet?) despite my more or less regular practice of praying with my feet. I live a train ride away from a very well-known Japanese pilgrim trail and even nearer to parts of a lesser known walk dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon. Pilgrimage is, I think, a particular grace, a calling of a kind. And not, from all I have read, to be undertaken casually. Why on earth bother? It should be purposeful. Still, I suppose there are as many reasons for the journey as there are pilgrims.

In the past week I have been reflecting on a terrific interview with a pilgrim (Ailsa Piper) who completed the Santiago de Compostela in Spain and wrote a book about her experiences. The interview, done by the inimitable Rachel Kohn on the Australian Radio National show called The Spirit of Things, was, as usual, excellent. I highly recommend a listen. It runs about an hour.

There's something very fragile about describing a spiritual journey to a general audience for there are hazards aplenty in autobiographical writing. Not the least of them being the temptation of self-deception. I have recently finished a book whose author ran crashingly into many, if not all, of these hazards while recounting her pilgrimage (run) around the 88 temples on the island of Shikoku. The final straw came at temple 88, the final and symbolic point of Enlightenment, a point she used to regale us with the (humourous?) cat & mousing of television crews trying to get  footage of her approach to 'Enlightenment'. Certainly, and perhaps unconsciously on her part, we are left in no doubt about who the star of the show was meant to be: HER! The writer had made occasional reference to the dying necessarily involved in pilgrimage. But the most apparent form of dying that she shared occurred in her frequent references to blisters. The whole 'dying to self' appeared to have been a hastily swallowed but poorly digested insight.

I'm trying to work out why it felt cheap and disappointing, quite apart from its rather obvious self-aggrandising bent. I had high hopes. I suppose one reason could be that, when you read a book about pilgrimage you want to feel like you are traveling with the traveler/writer and sharing in some way in their experience of transformation. Being lifted somehow from your own daily cares and carried along. I did not connect with the folksy tone the writer adopted at times including interjections like "Whoa Nelly!" and "Shit! I forgot to pray for X-san", the constant name-dropping (nice for those involved, but with no context, actually meaningless for the reading public) and nor did I get the point of untranslated lines of prayer peppered in the narrative, particularly concentrated toward the end. (I suspect there was some kind of superstitious 'seasoning' going on here. If it was, the magic dust failed to transport me beyond the jejune character of the narrative.)

The end of the road in this book was one Great Relief.

Good autobiographical writing, like the painted icon, points beyond the writing itself to deeper truths that allow for the weaving of insight. There is something immensely powerful and positively transformative about a likable and trustworthy narrator who bears the heart and bears it humbly. This seems to me to be particularly important to the pilgrimage narrative. I don't know if this kind of writing can honestly be done in a secular way, or via an adopted practice (Esoteric Shingon Buddhism in this case). Anyway, I am looking forward to reading Ailsa Piper's book when I can get my hands on it.

I'm not going to mention the locally written book by name because it is hard work to write a book. However, if you are into a sort of Japanese da Vinci Code cracker set around the same areas in Japan and taking in a good bit of the 88 temple journey, I did enjoy Hidden Buddhas by Liza Dalby. She has written a couple of very enjoyable novels centered in Japan which I can heartily recommend.

June firsts

People In The Know, know that, among many things, one of the things the Japanese do best are the seasons. Students will proudly confess, as if no one else in the world had ever experienced seasons, "We have four seasons in Japan." Truth be told, it is quite possible that outside of Japan, you probably have not experienced the particulars of each season with quite the attention and love in which they are celebrated  here.

My favourite name for the season we are in presently is Bai-u, the 'plum rain', and I had occasion to see, for the first time, in the Plum Grove in the garden a few days ago, the ground sprinkled with a good number of the small golden fruits fallen from the trees. Most of the green, unripe so-called 'blue plums' had already been harvested for the early summertime activity of making the delicious plum cordial called ume-shu. 

We have just emerged from 3 days of typhoon heavy rain into a beautiful cool morning, for which I am most grateful. I was out early for a walk and to take some snaps. I do love the adornment of raindrops on flowers, don't you? Yesterday, browsing through the Sasaki Sanmi's great manual on Chado: the Way of Tea, I was transported into reverie by this:

. . .  the sound of rain falling from the eaves and the singing of the kettle calm your mind. Isn't it fun to hear the occasional falling of ume (a plum) to the ground?

Just passing the time of day during the early summer rain is apt to lead to joy in the pleasure of tea and the way of tea . . .

Here are some of the gifts of June that have done my spirit good:

• For the nose: 
• the first good wafts of roadside gardenia and a promising pot plant with buds waiting to burst             
• on dry days, an evening coolness descending with the rising of the fragrances of the twilight
• strains of incense burnt to lift the spirits after the rain
• For the mouth:
•  the first cherries of the season
• the first (ever) ripened golden plum fallen from a tree in the Garden's orchard
• oka-hijiki
• For the eyes: 
• Hydrangeas all over the show, in every possible hue and variation, and a weekly bouquet from Mimi's garden
• Irises in best bloom
• Lush, voluptuous greenery
• For the ears:
• Whispering fans and softly roaring air-conditioning vents
• Singing and 'quacking' frogs and crickety bugs at night
• Rain slapping wetly down 
• For the heart:
• Rice sprouts are planted 
• Lotuses have begun to bloom
• Dashing and darting swallows after the rain & the sight of an osprey outside the window at breakfast this morning
• Clear/er skies for the solstice weekend supermoon 

Also, wonder-fully, I begin another year of life walking the earth, DG!

What are your June firsts?

From my Deep Pocket, this week

I have a wonderfully/woefully stuffed Pocket App, that gets fatter and fatter as weeks pass. What to do, what to do? A visit to the dentist last week and I was informed that Deep Pockets are 'undesirable,' contrary to what the dictionary tells me about deep pockets symbolising 'abundant financial resources'. Here is an effort to put my deep pocket/s (app) to work! (If it all gets a spot overwhelming: try some Mental Floss ;).

Here are the articles that I am going to attend to in the next week. If anything tickles your fancy, I'll be glad. I might even work up a post about one or two of them. Perhaps we could 'conversate' in the comments or on email?

It's commencement season in the U.S. and it's impossible not to notice the humanities picking up the gauntlet and facing the seductions of Technology or at least saying, 'hang on a minute'. To humanize is one of the most important functions of the Humanities. For that time is needed; thought is needed. Humans are needed! (Apply within! ha!)

Here are the 7 links:

• Physics's pangolin
• The Humanities in Transition
• Richard Kearney on Imagination and Catharsis & Evil, Ethics and the Imagination
• Donald Kagan on Liberal Education
• Another defense of the Humanities from TNR
• Listened to a rather disappointing interview of Tom Sheehan on Entitled Opinions (one of my favourite podcasts) about Heidegger and Technology a week or so ago. All was not lost, however, as my interest in Hannah Arendt was reignited by the great host of the show, Robert Harrison. Also, Jason Goroncy, one of my most visited Antipodean bloggers is excited for the film. (Might be a while until it gets over here, alas).
• James Gleick's review of Lee Smolin's latest, entitled Time Regained.

Enjoy your reading homework. 

True Recreation

This great description from A Thomas Merton Reader,* which speaks to that great exercise of unclenching the fist of the mind:

"It was wonderful, the silence, and peace, and happiness that pervaded this sunny room, where so many men were together without speaking. Far from there being any sense of restraint, of awkwardness, of strain, you felt flooded with a deep sense of ease and quiet and restful well-being. There was absolutely no kind of tension between those who sat together in silence: they were all absorbed in their books or their thoughts or their writing. And their very activities were marked by a kind of restful quality: they were not imprisoned by any fierce concentration, not driven before the face of some storm of hurry and anxiety. Their eyes rested on the page with a quiet, detached attention; or else they looked away from the book, in thought; or they entered into themselves, or wrote something down." (148)

To be so absorbed and effortlessly in the flow -- how beautiful!

* Edited by Thomas P. McDonnell

Platinum skies & The Grand Frogs' Chorus

It had only just been announced on the television set above the counter in the old sushi shop where we were celebrating the Master's 70th birthday, that the official start to the rainy season had begun, almost 2 weeks earlier than usual! The frogs, of course, felt it in their waters.

Walking home after dark

Along a garden path,

From an unseen amphibian amphitheater

The sweet, squelching song of summertime frogs

Squeaked and swelled.

Rainy season!

The scent of sandalwood blossoms.

It did not occur to me until I set down the words, that the noun for frog and the verb for 'homing' (coming or going) sound the same in Japanese - kaeru-  but looks different (frog = 蛙, and homing = 帰). I should get out my brushes in honor of their little ditty shared with me.

D'où parlez vous?

Where do you speak from? The question - intriguing, knotty, gnarly - (note the silent unpronounced letters) has been on my mind for months now but, like those silent, unpronounceables, I have begun to notice that there is quite a bit more to it than meets the eye. I am no expert in French, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed important to set the title question down as such - 'original' of course to Ricouer, but foreign, if not exactly alien, to me. Richard Kearney, student and translator of Paul Ricouer, opens his book Anatheism with this question and describes it as one that has haunted him. Like the ghost letters of the adjectives I used to describe it, I find that it too has had a haunting effect on me.

It is a question that requires a willingness to look closely at the threads of one's life. It doesn't mean "Where do you come from?" or "What is your mother tongue?", questions frequently asked of foreigners which can be answered factually. (And, often, if not usually, filed away in code. In Japan, at least, this is true to my experience. As a white African, I don't fit so well in the file cabinet.) Ricouer's question, however, asks for something truer than fact.

I was at last granted a release and an insight into what had begun to seem like a cumbersome koan-like question listening to a dharma talk by Mary-Grace Orr taking a lush green early morning walk recently. In the talk I was given to understand that the self is made up of a collection of stories that we are more or less attached to. Ah ha! Thinking about stories allowed me to re-gain a sense of spaciousness around keeping the question company.

It seems you apply the question to a position taken. Kearney applies it to the question of returning to God (after God). It asks: what are you speaking about, who to and from which angle are you coming at it? What is it in your sense of self, your identity -your story- that is animated in your speaking? I have thought that in our shrinking, hyper-connected world the question may serve as a role as clarifying as smelling salts.

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell, too, has shed some light on my preliminary explorations of the question, linking philosophy and autobiography, and demonstrating a model of a self that is like a nexus in a network whose arrangement shifts and adapts with each change to it, its sensitivity reminiscent of the influence of the flapping butterfly's wings in the Amazon causing storms in far off places. (Yes, chaos theory!) In Cavell's view, there is a sense of improvisation, that is appealing, an ongoing 'process of self and language in translation'. [You could read Naoko Saito's article on Cavell available here as a taster, as I did. My copy is liberally scribbled over. It's interesting, quite technical but I know I've not quite digested it sufficiently. I may return to it here another time.]

The notion of translation drew me, quite naturally, embedded as I am in a language community far beyond my youthful imaginings. Much of my life is lived quite literally in translation, improvising and between the worlds, and this is but one of the reasons why D'où parlez vous? has felt like a bit of a snake in the grass in some respects. Nevertheless, in principle, the serpent might be just the critter to assist my thinking on the topic, looking as I tend to do on the whole Apple Incident as an opportunity to enter into the adventure of full humanity.

Thoughts circumambulating this question have been roiling since Pentecost, that great feast of comm-uni-cation. You may expect further notes and queries: the language question is central to where and how I make my living.