I went and stood in an empty lot; coffee, cigarette, the last rays of warm afternoon sunlight. Weeds growing in a crevice in the concrete wall. Seeing it i thought, this is beautiful. I thought, I am a person who sees that this is beautiful. All of it, I suppose; the quality of the untended living, the quiet distance of the winter sun. The mechanism of my body as it swallows the coffee down, tiny halos and rainbows in my eyelashes, just for me as I stand turned towards the light.
My mission is to preach the gospel of love. My right, my reason; the power that rests in my hands and fingers. The endowment of life has given me this; to bear the vicissitudes, to hold the dream from the center until the last breath leaves my body. I didn't come here on a lark, from a whim, pin the tail on the world map. Discerning my path to the best of my ability, I chose this. The stars are a guide, yes; so is the newspaper, so are the men and women i meet on the street, so is the city as it rises ever higher into the air. Let's have laughter, yes, let's enjoy the full breadth of the wonders, but hey, this is also pretty serious. Sixty-three years ago here a plane flew high overhead and released a dazzling scientific achievement into the living air. This marvel fell down from the sky into the very heart of a city, and in the next moment the city was gone. We the people have developed the capacity to end ourselves. The apocalypse isn't somebody's abstracted vision anymore: it rests in the cool ground underneath midwestern cornfields, waits for the simple flip of a switch.
How you talk about things is important. The vision you inscribe, impart to the collective around you. So I stand in the empty lot in the quiet afternoon winter sun, I see the green untended living having taken root in the crack in the concrete wall; and I try to understand why it is beautiful to me.

Kindness

I'm living now in what's called a "guesthouse" here, more or less a long-term hostel; my own bedroom and then a kitchen and bath shared with six other boarders. There's a television in the common room, and I turned it on while cooking up my dinner of udon with mushrooms, tofu and vegetables. There's only a few non-japanese channels: CNN, BBC World, not much of substance, standard boilerplate news material. But there is one station that's commercial-free and generally has something good on, mostly german and french films, and for some reason, not infrequently, some odd claymation shorts.
While I was cooking I had the BBC World on; background noise to accompany the quiet sounds and smells of cooking food. Raining in the night, dark and cold and wetness surrounding the light and warmth of the small room. When I'd turned off the stove and filled my bowl I sat down on the couch and turned to the movie channel and found that it was about ten or fifteen minutes into The Straight Story. It's a movie I've seen a few times, based on the true story of an elderly man named Alvin Straight, who travels for over 400 miles on his riding-lawnmower to visit his long-estranged brother after hearing that he's recently had a stroke. It's a work of art that has meant a lot to me, that I've seen more than once for a reason. Just happening to come across it as I sat down with my bowl of home-made food, alone and thousands of miles, an ocean away from my home; as soon as I saw the familiar shots of rolling sun-lit wheatfields and felt myself recognize what it was, I also suddenly felt my heart; felt, suddenly, the full enormity of the gift and burden of being alive, of being able to love and be loved.
The movie is a simple paean to the kind of American life and character that moves me, that I sometimes lose hold of when I am angry with, and afraid of, the kind of monster that my country has in many ways become. It is a document of guileless sincerity, of acts of basic decency and kindness, and several times as I sat there alone I found my eyes filled with tears, my heart filled with the ache of sadness and wonder. I forget; the bustling multitude of the city, the stress of where I am and what I'm trying to accomplish, it accretes and piles up and I forget, lose sight of myself. And then something suddenly reaches straight in and touches it, suddenly fills it with light; and it's both the sweetness of remembering, of the clarity, and the sadness of the blind alleys I wander in when I get lost.
Alvin just wants to see his brother again, after ten lost years; to just sit on the porch with him and look up at the stars as they did on summer nights when they were young and still free. I just want to be able to close my eyes and remember that they are there. To remember that even as the city gazes inward, lost in its own wonders, the stars are still up there shining; even if invisible, the rain of starlight is blessing this place all the same.

Remember forever

Begatsabi.
A "meretricious" such-and-such, said F. Scott Fitzgerald.
well hell, F., I don't know what it means, but
I like it; I like the
sound, I'll grant you the use of
big strange words, I trust your
rhythm and tone: the shutter
goes 'click', and you've captured it exactly.
Today I wondered what F. Scott would've
made of Tokyo; wished
that he was here.
maybe it would've been beyond his
capacities; there's no
casual here,
no elegant wasted motion. The beautiful
and the damned are too
busy here, have no time to watch
the ice melt in their glasses of emptiness.
"Glasses of emptiness", that's overwrought. And
yet it isn't, and yet it's not.

Well.
Well then.
it would seem that I have arrived.
Tapped my first tentative but sincere
roots into the soil.
rain outside, almost my rain; getting me
wet in nearly the same fashion as
it wets those who have
long grown here.
It's a bar, in a bar, warmly and
christmas-lit. Their theme is hey,
we're all at the beach, so it's a rainy
holiday Japanese luau.
Tiki-riki samurai robot, trains
and trains and trains and trains
carrying the men in suits and the
women in skirts: the great metal
snakes swallow them and then spit them
back out, apparently eternally unsatisfied.
Relentless, in their uniform pursuit, and
who's feeding who here?
Behind the curtain (I imagine) there's
just a sort of black ball in the air,
a silently seething darkness.
In my dream I want to touch it, but
know I'm not ready; and besides, what
I really wonder is if that's the
right thing to want.
tricky, this business of navigating, and
you can't see the stars in the city;
so what is it, then well, that i am doing here.

Shinjuku Station begins here: The Beauty and The Beast

Black Friday. A frenzied mob stampedes into a Wal-Mart at five in the morning, literally breaking down the doors and trampling a 34 year-old store employee to death, crushing and killing him. That night I find myself walking the streets of Tokyo, the prince city of modern American-style capitalism. There are christmas decorations up, but there's no christianity, it's just a way to vary the commercial effect; different ads, another reason to shop. This isn't cynicism; Japan is not a christian nation, christmas here is just a seasonal holiday, bells and lights and whistles.

And besides, even within the American context, this is well beyond cynicism. A man died; a man was murdered by a sales-hungry horde, too busy competing with one another to stop and help pick a fellow human-being up off of the floor. Sad, beyond sad, frightening; indicative of something deeply wrong within the modern American social fabric. Oh, no, I said to myself as I saw the headline; Oh, no.
But then tonight, I was in Shibuya, probably the apex of the Tokyo sound and light show, a neon galaxy. On a pedestrian walkway above the road, isolated with this longing, ethereal music in my headphones, I watched this astonishing machine take apart the street below me. A long yellow arm laced with hydraulics, ending in a silver pincer; it drove down into the asphalt and lifted up great slabs, held them as it swung to the side and then suddenly crushed them into sand and fragments. It was the way it moved; with power, with subtlety, with intelligence and obvious intent. It could've gently plucked a kitten from a tree, or crushed a car with a single downward blow. The extent to which it was able to move as an extension of its human operator seemed unbounded, beyond anything I've ever seen.
So I'm torn; torn between the marvels and the madness. Market forces certainly drive innovation, give birth to amazing works of human ingenuity; they also push the notion of "goodwill to all mankind" down to the bottom of the pile. Down in the center of the earth there's supposedly a "molten core", right? Well, what is it, what is that; is it a heart of light, or is it just an empty fire?