The Imperative to Rehearse

Talking to a wall: you know the wall will not respond to you. But first, you will need to know that it's a wall. The wall is an inanimate object, and as much as it could protect you, and as much as you might look at, caress, think about it all day and all night long, the wall will not reply to you, nor will it think of you in any way. But you know, too, that you are rehearsing when you find yourself in front of a wall. Right now, you may be talking to a wall, and only to a wall, but soon enough, you will be talking to live things and people, who will, in some way or another, respond to what you are saying and have said.

It is always both too early, and too late, to give up.

In a Strange City

Meandris said: "Get used to solitude. Now."

Meandris continued: "Or else, how will you live?"

Oreo asked: "But is life necessarily so lonesome?"

Meandris did not reply.

An Intercepted Message

(The copyright rests with Compri.)

Dear Friends,

I've consciously chosen not to think about the nuclear situation too much, for my own mental health...but perhaps this is a bad sign. Maybe I should be protesting in the streets to demand that Tepco immediately borrow the robots from France AND bury the reactors under a giant concrete dome immediately (Tepco will go bankrupt, but who cares! it deserves to go bankrupt). Hmm..it's a thought.

I'm actually going to Vancouver tomorrow for an ACLA (American Comp Lit Assoc) conference, planned long before. I'm still on page 3 of my paper/presentation...and it's hard for me to concentrate but I'll need to finish this somehow tonight. I will be back in Tokyo next Tuesday. When I'm back, I will think about taking it to the streets (I'm half-joking, half-serious...) and let's have a meal together.

Warmly,

Compri

Three Lines

Illuminate, in the name of a candle

Surround, as a leafy afternoon might

Run, in the happiest moments of life

To Hope

to hope

In a time of crisis

Spilling Dua

Have you not heard of the compass, or seen a weather vane

On a roof?

Let us not ignore the thousands and millions of people who have traveled

Before us, eastward and westward, between north and south

In search for another world, old or new.

Their travels have shaped, whether you like it or agree with it,

The various connotations to which the compass needle must submit.

There are also eastward and westward winds as well as ocean currents,

That have defined trade routes and many a

Romance.

Alongside nature, there is history that spills out

Into our unconscious: footprints in the rain.

Spilling

How can you group together all the jostling and almost exploding

Nations within nations within nations into a hollow concept such as

East Asia?

Where is east for you? and west?

Up and down just mean sky and earth, for me, and

East and west just mean sunrise and sunset, for you, too

Because everywhere, there is sunrise and sunset.

Why, the milk spills over and over:

No time to cry.

Spring

Am I allowed to blame the pollen allergies for the fatigue:

Eyes glazed, phone uncharged, and incredible boredom?

Until the day I met you, pollen,

Boredom, I knew I had never experienced.

The reeling, lilting fatigue feeds my unfounded reluctance

For medical treatment.

And there, again, the headache makes me spin

Until I am so unsure of myself

I have just barely enough strength to sit and stare

At cold and unflinching spring.

Varnish

Drops in the ocean:

How many e-mails did I compose today?

émail : enamel or varnish, in French.

Did I manage to varnish my life, with my e-mails?

O useless questions, you are multitudinous

Like stars in the universe times the number of my e-mails

My backbone aches under the weight of bits and pixels

Lighter than dust, but so bright my eyes can never rest

Swing Dua

His whole being teeters

From sunset to sunrise

The swing in the park remains empty, though

And what teeters is just the invisible pendulum of timeless time

His whole being is never whole; it is simply full of being

No single swing can hold him - he is much too restless

Only amorphous things, such as time and being

Are allowed to teeter-oh-teeter

Fruit Opera

Mr. Lime sang, jovially: "How much you identify with a tangerine is a matter of taste. Tangerines, squeezed for juice and color. The tangy tangerines, which may be less ubiquitous than oranges, but for that reason, more precious and personable - la la! My computer's name is 'Dancing Tangerine.'"

The orchestra broke into a lilting, almost inaudible waltz.

Mrs. Orange interrupted the waltz with her deep, androgynous voice: "Oh Lemon, thou art great. You bless us with your scent, most of all."

A tumbling of drums.

Right away, Ms. Lemon, in a distant soprano voice, responded via Twitter: "Dear Orange, you are the king and queen of fruits. We submit to thee."

The orchestra rushed to a climax and suddenly fell completely silent, except for a lingering oboe.

When Tangerines A and B began a quiet and sinuous duet without words, the rest of the wind players joined in, mumbling together like doves from my childhood, your childhood.

Soon enough, a tangerine-like sun rose to shine on the city of oranges. It was early morning and most of the city was still asleep. Meanwhile, a glass of lime juice materialized in the nearby mountains and was quickly gulped down by an old lemon.

Proofreader's Pain

Intensity knocks on my door. What is this, what is this sound? I have lost most of my grammar. No words can say. My worst enemy is authenticity, and my sweetest friend honesty. Authenticity dictates; honesty loosens. When the grammatical universe falls apart, there is nothing but debris and oily water. How unsure of herself or himself can a person be? That must depend largely on the shape of one's linguistic universe. They never told me America, France, Togo &c. did not exist except as faceless egos jostling against one another in tears. I do not feel betrayed, but do feel bad for the globe, whose fate is to misrepresent continually the shape of the world and at the same time keep silent about its own fatal errors. Where art thou, proofreader(s) of the globe?

A Happy Wallflower

I am looking at an ongoing party from behind a doorway.

And I am happy that way.

The Urban Dictionary lists the definition of wallflower (with the most votes) as: "a type of loner. seemingly shy folks who no one really knows. often some of the most interesting people if one actually talks to them. cute." A charming definition. I was called a "wallflower" once, in high school. If only I had had the guts back then to say being a wallflower made me happy: not sad, not lonely, but content.

Please excuse the unsightly drawing.

Turtle Characters

Pippa said: "I wish to suggest that, fundamentally speaking, Chinese characters function much like the Greek or Latin word roots in English. But the crucial difference is that Chinese characters can theoretically bond with each other in an infinite number of ways, and thus it is simply impossible to come up with an exhaustive (or near-exhaustive) dictionary, especially for words in Classical Chinese, which is a for-writing-only language with lots of ellipses. There can only be reference books on the characters, which can only serve as compendia of etymologies, and vastly incomplete ones at that.

"A hyperbolic demonstration: 'It would look like this' would look like 'Quasi visus wolde' (that's three characters) or something like that in Classical Chinese. But the problem is that the same sentence could also be interpreted, depending on the immediate context and on the various historical and literary allusions surrounding each of the three characters as well as the particular text in question, as: 'I would appear almost visible to you' or '[Her face] used to look as if [the summer sun had burned it thoroughly - an obvious literary allusion, completely elided because every reader is assumed to be familiar with it].'

"Well, of course, I'm exaggerating, but do you see what I'm saying?"

Poppo yawned and said: "Maybe, maybe not. I'm going for a swim." Poppo jumped into the pond, startling a turtle and her school of fish.

Sarcasm

Sarcasm grows on you like a tree

Or a mushroom;

It rustles itself upward in noiseless sixty days

Topless

Topless: I am not referring to the nudists on the beach. At least, not for the time being. Instead, I am thinking of the way in which the world where some of us live somehow ends up equating striving for one's best with trying to reaching the top of something, whatever that thing may be. Top, in comparison to what, and according to whom? We may choose to ask, question, and argue, or not argue, but faith in stratification still exists and will exist worldwide, regardless of what we may think. As such, we have no choice but to go topless, rejoicing in being able to appreciate, at high noon, the beauty of clouds, whose stormy underbellies - the very bottom layer of the stratified ice and dust - watch over us with so much serenity and wisdom, that they sometimes come very close, extremely close, to bringing us to tears.

Feathers

Let me write you a song

On the back of a bulboa leaf

With jet-black ink

Seishonagon's Pillow

Before going to bed, I think of all my favorite people in the world, dead and alive, (many of them whom I have met only between pages in a book or through other media). Then I find that there are too many of them, and growing more content by the minute, I finally fall asleep, hoping to see at least one or two of my favorite people in my dreams, if only for a fleeting moment.

A-Mixing

I mix the young and the old, the high and the low, the sacred and the vulgar. I mix teh and kopi, mix chicken with rice, with chili and egg. I mix blue and white, vinegar and soy sauce, dirt and mirth.

Spring forth, flowers, spring forth. For time is short, but sunlight and water abound.

Early Summer

Silenced beyond words, stars fall, in the manner of tears, on a white field.

Ghoulish clouds fly, mysteries trickle down a pot's cheek, and an old flower arrangement sings, "Tomorrow will never come."

Despair floats in the manner of pink blobs, like a flock of sheep under a warm, but cold, sun.

Lettering

I keep waiting for a letter to arrive; I keep looking inside my mailbox, clattered with just old leaves; but perhaps the letter I am waiting for is a letter I must send and yet have not written.

A Restless Bee

A restless bee said: "I listened to Schumann's Liederkreis sung by Hermann Prey. I listened to the whole thing, in one go. Then I listened to Sena Jurinac's rendition of an aria in Eugene Onegin, an opera by Tchaikovsky/Pushkin. And then I suddenly remembered, not surprisingly, Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind - not necessarily the film, but more the novel."

The restless bee began to talk: "In the 19th century, in Russia . . . in the United States . . . but what about the Sinocentrism and its critics in Korea and Japan? Well, the Romantics . . . the center-periphery knot . . . why, Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism were never the same. But the process of nationalism . . . the hunt after the universe went awry . . . it began, not ended, with a deadly explosion. Who knew, that the world . . . had no fixed center . . . ."

The bee began to talk, but dusk was falling, and it had to go home. So it went home, and dusk fell.

Incertipede

Happiest thoughts for the new year, I say

But incertitude inches its way across

My windowsill;

I am happy the incertitude is moving

Like a centipede, it will grow into a butterfly

Bluer than the Blume flowering in Schumann's garden

A Sore Throat and More

Memoirs of diseases, records of ailments

Why do they abound in literature?

Notwithstanding the self-evident truth that all diseases must be averted at all costs, or even obliterated,

Notwithstanding the axiom that good health is the greatest of all gifts,

The state of being sick transports us to another realm

Transfixes us in an oblique light

Makes us float nude down the Seine, as it were

Turns us into rain, transforms us into an airy mist

As long as we survive the night, that is.