. . .

slow motion nomadism

a whiskey sour

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

. . .

nothing exists,
and everything proves it.

next

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

dream

"Simple should be pride."

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

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

of

the metal of the knife is named "stainless."

able

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

hot lava

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

the mother vacuumed.

abandoned

"i vow to build abandoned buildings."

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

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

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

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

altering

the most powerful mind-altering agent is patience.

overlay

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

summer bug

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

tenjo-ji stones

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

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

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

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

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