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.