The Autumn of My Demarcation

This January marks 20 months What We Are Stepping Into has been up and running. Most of you have known me since that sunny May 25, 2015. We don’t see each other now. Or we just met 12 months ago and like Shakespearean lore this is all dramatic, coming from a man impossible to know, written at a chair and desk you’ve never known. I suppose this post is a goodbye and a conclusion to this blog. No word on the blog was ever written by me. This here now me. Only past me’s I cannot recognize. You whom I’ve known have my deepest gratitude. You’ve known me in my shortcoming, known my faults, vast and small-scale, of where I struggled to find my voice–in the place where all contradictions flow together. You were, my readers and friends, compatriots to a writer’s improbable evolution. I say improbable because impossible is broken in my thoughts. Beneath the impossible lies the improbable. And I broke through. But it was of no earthly use what I tried to do. I wanted to be both of the world and beyond it. Many of you know how I got lost in that. For a minute there I lost myself. Forwent my years and body.

So I copied this whole passage on the yellowed page of a tea house’s journal in Seattle, Washington. Some of you know very well how to find it. I cast myself within the bounds of a tiny scripture. I take solace in the knowing that every word wrings true with almost clear water, as if I myself had written it long ago beside a glacial lake with my grandchildren.

“I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”

-Jack Kerouac, 1957

Here in Kanazawa I write the final fantasy. Thanks for the innumerable lessons you’ve borne here at What We Are Stepping Into. For the immeasurable worlds you have all planted in me. Doubt not that you are teachers and catalysts of change. Sages of every possible way. This is the end of a by-gone self. The end of a wave on the sea. The end, even, of the thought of the wave, in a lonesome cabin. It’s quiet. Outside the deck lit with sepia. Port wine and linen. We only gaze into the dark above the earth. So Wave is too small a word for this. This moment. That’s all that matters. Here is the epilogue to my quixotic ideas. Here marks the autumn of my demarcation. Here in the woods, with Norwegian coffee and melted mud, wandering on the castle’s edge through the fog-draped morning. Here it’s ending not with a bang, but a whimper.

Sayonara to weary days,

Matthew Alexander Hobson

5/25/15 – 1/10/17

Konnichi Wa Haiku Series, Parts 8-End

Hello everyone. How the hell are ya? It’s a Friday night in Arizona and the cold is like a villain, riding through the town on its stolen horse. Here are the rest of my haikus.

 

Kyoto

Satori points far away.

The finger is no moon, really.

You are a person.

Satori is a word in Japanese Buddhism, meaning “awakening.” The goal of Zen is to produce enlightenment by forgoing logic. Zen has invented means for doing this. You may have heard of some, like the koans. An example: “A flag is waving in the wind. Which is moving–the flag or the wind?” If you fail to answer this question in more than 2.1 seconds, the master will slam his hand on the floor. You have failed. “Tell me what Zen is in one word or I will kill this cat!”

The cat was killed.

Another is about a Zen master pointing at the moon. He cut his finger off and then pointed at the moon, again. Just because there is no finger does not mean it fails to point at the moon. This is the way Japanese Zen logic works. But forging an a-logic, subverted mind, killing cats in the name of Buddha, etc. If water is not aware of wind, the wave will fear its own death. Are you starting to get this? Good.

Shiba Inu is the official breed of Japan

Osaka

We old lovers pray

delicious hearts arrive soon.

Markets near the Shinkansen.

I loomed on the topic of love over octopus tentacles and the burn of neon. My Western friends Jesse and Nile would say a word about old lovers, like Miharu in the Chuo Ward of Tokyo, or a bonnie lass back in Dublin. We came so near to falling in love with three Osaka girls. We walked through markets in search of affordable eats, like ramen & okinomiyaki.

 

The view from Osaka Castle. My apt was near the tower (right). 11/26/16

 

Kobe

Water falls down hill

to dresses, and restaurants.

You turn out lights early.

Kobe Bryant is a younger sister of Osaka. Only 40 minutes pressed between the constant apartments of Osaka on a train and you are all at once in Kobe. The ocean is right there and the prices are lower for fish, at least by a few 100 yen.

One day I was lost on the mountainside by Kobe and found myself at the foot of a waterfall. 3 retired Japanese women spotted me in the wood, and gave me pressed shrimp crackers. This is dried shrimp pressed into a thin salt wafer (3). Dusk caught me like a Disney character (most likely a male Pocahontas) with a smile on my face crossing the wet bamboo bridge and along the damp wood path into the light of Kobe. As I walked on foot through forest and then the urban glitter, I couldn’t help notice the dearth of each in the other.

Kobe and Osaka beyond, 11.28

 

Hiroshima

Crying in the maples

of old town Hiroshima,

the young birds are black.

 

An excerpt from my journals:

Hiroshima 1 December

Free of the burden of latitudes, I roamed to Hiroshima. The earth is scarred not. The people, scarred not. The ancestry is scarred, and the memory, like ghosts, endures only if you let it. You cast ghosts out like rocks from a glass house.

Hiroshima is heavy. Laden. The reminder is an elusive and almost omnipotent one. I can spot it in my head, a grandfather’s vein, and the streetcar along the bluing rivers. The Atomic bomb dome looms like your parents further down the road, so distant yet intimate and related to you through blood. My relation–the one who draws blood–makes the hospitality of Hiroshimites all the more repentant and karmically perfect, like a pruned branch resigned to transform into the pages of a long and trying story. 

71 years later, Hiroshima, 12.16.

Harajuku

“We weave your yearning.

You perceive our qualities.”

– note from your angels

There is a lot of long winded talk in the New Age community of guardian angels guiding every human on earth through the trails and travails of modern life in an effort to keep us aiming for the karmic completion and spiritual union with source that infinite religions around the world claim is possible. The idea is your angels send you messages in all forms meaningful to you. This can be numbers, song lyrics, a sign along the road, a quote you see online, auspicious opportunities. I was deliberately looking for examples of an angel speaking to me and glanced on a business sign from the 2nd floor window of a cafe in Harajuku. This appeared as I was writing haiku. It fit the 5/7 scheme I needed. “Note from your angels” was 5 also. This haiku was the note I ended up with. No joke.

Grandma and I end up people watching each other. Harajuku, Tokyo. 5 or 6 December 16

Shinagawa

Love is but a pond

on which my leaves make ripples.

Shipwrecks deeper down.

So my Japanese adventures came to a close as they began, in the labyrinth of Tokyo. Tokyo is a magical land that can both frustrate and enthrall you at once. It is like summer and winter, dusk and dawn, a mean woman and a kind man. No doubt in my mind it is a city worth a visit or two or three or five. Countless memories here in the most challenging year I have lived, and for this, Japan leaves an irreparable mark on my heart as a place of healing and bad news, of catharsis and escape, of somehow coming home in a far away place. Maybe in a past life, maybe a soulmate I didn’t end up meeting. In any case, I commend your urges to go. It is beautiful.

 

Shinagawa, On the Way Out. 12.7.16

Zen Garden, 11.25

 

Konnichi Wa Haiku 7

Kanazawa

 

Colored ducks flush stones

down their gullets for pleasure.

I can’t stand world news.

November 22

 

Kanazawa is Japan’s Seattle. They have a saying: “You can forget your bento, but you can’t forget your umbrella.” I only spent 48 hours in this village by the sea, wandering castle grounds and looking out on the sea hills of Ishikawa. It was so gratifying to stand on the summit on Kanazawa Castle in a radiant light. I had finally done it. Feet in the dirt on the far flung corner of Honshu. I was laden like an anchor with the news of Donald Trump’s victory. The civil rights eruption. Slurping hot noodles down my gullet. I wrote this haiku in a ramen restaurant.

Konnichi Wa Haiku Series, Part 6

Hagiwara

The hills and valleys of the Japanese Alps, in Gifu Prefecture

Hagiwara

Sun worn pines weave by

trains bound for Kanazawa.

Your last word a bark.

 

Hagiwara

I’ll be the first to admit my default emotion is melancholy. Such a burden as becoming is no stone to shoulder absent-mindedly. We are molding our backs with what we choose to see. Some invent rocks and myth. Others are born miners, woodsmen, sailors.

I rode a train to Takayama through the rolling hills of pine and cedar and who knows what else. I have no idea what tree is what, only that they are spirits anyhow. Waking up in the woods with hot mountain coffee in cold autumn was dreamed by spirits like H.D. Thoreau and Han Shan long before I lived this November. Still impossible to be grateful enough to follow in the game trails of hermits.

Free of work and free of worry, I wrote from a cozy bus seat headed to Kanazawa. I worked on a haiku the way you toss an orange. Japanese vowels have such vicious power. You can feel them cut the air like katanas. Kanazawa. Shinkansen. Okinomiyaki. Sharp as a buzz saw some words.

Konnichi Wa Haiku Series, Part 5

Dear Readers,

Takayama 

Zen-ji’s ginko leaves

have grown old and died

one thousand, two-hundred times.

 

I had stumbled down the valley in these Japanese Alps to the headwater city of Takayama-shi, the origin of Gifu culture. Takayama is a small, humble mountain town with a river winding cold by its middle. The red bridges cross this mahogany village in November. Hushed mouths whisper in the chilly, grey morning. The shade is an antique here.

Above is the haiku I wrote in Takayama. What a beautiful village. It’s like a Japanese Venice.

Ji is a suffix, meaning temple. A zen temple in central Takayama had a ginko tree that was 1,200 years old. The leaves were only falling after I left the town, shedding in my memories. It stood warm and green in late November. What a metaphorical object for reincarnation.

 

Konnichi Wa Haiku Series, Part 4

In a Market at a Station. 2016 29 10 Grocery store music is like Super Mario Kart. Great shopping experience is impossible not to have. Too afraid to buy bananas.

Shizuoka

Dew-wetted orange trees

drink the low-bent autumn light.

I brew tea for one.

1 November, 2016

Shizuoka

Shizuoka Prefecture is the tea capital of Japan. It sows the shadows of Mt Fuji into its magnificent gyokuro leaves. Out in Hamamatsu, the Sencha bushes are behind houses, at the end of a road, waking with the sound of low tide and slippers on tatami.

Shizuoka harvests 40% of Japan’s tea. This is a lot of tea. My time in Shizuoka was spent 70m from the sea at the Maeda family’s home. Masahiro is 41 and surfs his summers away while his wife, Junko, raises Momoka and Mako (13 and 7). Jesse Pegram’s adventures with me in the lantern streets of Kyoto are impossible to beat. But Shizuoka is close behind. The Maeda family treated me almost as well as the Blands of Maple Valley. The grandpa even had a picture taken with me. I ate breakfast with grandma. It was a huge success. They have accepted me as one of their own. I am deep uncover. Please send further intel asap.

I spent most of the week wandering the orange orchards of the Maeda’s 9 farm plots with my coworker, Bing-Li, whose English name is Billy. The inspiration for this haiku came from that landscape. I wrote it on a train to Nagoya. A good day.

Konnichi Wa Haiku Series, Part 3

Shibuya

Shibuya Crossing, 6 December ’16

Shibuya

Autumn has no bees.

I have measured out my life

with Japanese leaves.

23 October, 2016

Shibuya

Shibuya is one of Tokyo’s most famous neighborhoods. Shinjuku takes the prize thanks to Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation as the heart of Tokyo, but Shibuya is the soul. Tokyo’s infinite electromagnetism is bursting here at night, but in the day you can find it in the eyes of the cute baristas at Tokyo’s 2^nd best coffee house, Streamer.

Streamer Coffee Co. is a humble artist’s take on “Seattle-style coffee”, just up the hill from Capital Records. Take Shibuya Station Exit 14b & enter the wardrobe that is Shibuya, then turn R. Streamer is the #2 cafe for Westerners in Tokyo, 2^nd only to Shibuya’s Starbucks lofted 2 floors above Harajuku crossing (below). Streamer is the #1 place for anti-Starbucks hipsters, and far from the LCD-soaked woods (below) and the birch&brick neighborhoods of America’s hipster. I like Streamer’s sublime take on a matcha + white chocolate + espresso + milk at the outrageous price of 7.5 USD. It’s quiet enough, unpretentious enough, that you can sit on the sofa and close your weary foreign eyes, and you’re in Seattle. As far as the haiku: The Japanese leaves are matcha, and the reference from that English poet T.S. Eliot, his coffee spoons of years gone by my trees. It’s also about the impending fall season.

More soon.

 

 

Konnichi wa Haiku Series: Part 2

Skytree District

Listening to Bon Iver’s recent album, 22, A Million, I was especially stuck on Track 3, called 715 Creeks. 715 is the area code in NW Wisconsin, where Bon Iver’s frontman hails from.

You can listen to the song here:

 

I was sitting on a cold October morning along a creek just beneath the Sky Tree tower, in NE Tokyo. I had a persimmon and hot lemon tea, and was writing a haiku, with the lyrics of Creeks on my mind because of the river by my feet.

So I took the first line of the song and moved on.

Down along the creek,

I dole crumbs and dates to larks.

Freezing, that day we spoke.

October 22

Konnichi wa Haiku Series

Hey friends.

I had the ole trusted iPhone 4 on me in Japan for the last 6 weeks, and I tried to post blogs in Tokyo. I also tried to post in Shizuoka, and the app kept crashing.

Now I am home in the states and have a computer, so I will be posting a series of Japanese haikus I wrote abroad in the land of the Rising Sun. There is one haiku for each city I traveled in. There was so little paper in my backpack that the normal blogging & journaling was out of the question.

So I decided to try the traditional form of Japanese poetry–the haiku– only 17 syllables and 3 lines, in a 5-7-5 form.

I’ll be posting the haiku along with a photo, the date, and an explanation of the piece.

Here is the first haiku, from Kamakura, 40 km south-west of Tokyo by the sea.

In Kamakura,

I leave no traces at all.

The waves are so old.

October 23, 2016

Kamakura is the former capital beach town home to Japan’s 2nd most famous “Daibutsu,” or Buddha. I sat on the cold beach & ate sushi, and looked at the grey Pacific from the other side of the world. It was a real pensive day. I gathered looks from Kamakurans, at once being the only foreigner in sight and a blonde one. Blonde hair is a special trait in the Far East. It was also so quiet in my head that day. I walked along the seaside & stumbled through a conversation with locals about where to find the Buddha. Such an odd paradox. It felt like I was unnoticed in the landscape, a complete visitor, nothing more than observant. A true Buddhist pilgrimage to Kamakura.

The Only People For Me

I have written creatively for years now, and one thing I notice about the writing process is you must be mentally unhealthy or incredibly solid in order to have impetus to write. No sound person lends breath from their workaday to write quixotic notes on the chaos of their interior world. They are either content as clams and barnacles, or they have no time for the indelible arts of spilling your feelings into ink, paint, or charcoal. Hemingway summed it with hubris when he wrote, “All you do is sit at the typewriter and bleed.”

The sublime act of morphing vulnerability into consumable art is about as alchemical a feat as the modern artist can pull. In fact, most hermetic texts of old would nod their heady pages and say, “Watching our shadow selves arrive at the snowy train station of love, in their outgrown coats, ready for Christmas turkey, is what alchemy does–welcoming darkness into the home, allowing it to speak and so to fuel the fire of awakening, smelting lead to gold in the fireplace, the hearth a shrine of your transformation. And this vulnerability, this ball of molten emotion is nowhere more scalding than in Jack Kerouac’s infamous line from, On The Road :

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”

Scene from On The Road, 2010

This classic bastion of his novels stands on the pillars of sex and drugs and hedonism. Far from the winter river bottoms of his other novels, praying to gods over cans of campfire beans. The cliché tag on the spine of this, his prophetic swan song, is but a whimper from the spirit of our own times. The alchemy of vulnerability is a forgotten art of our age. As strange to the millennial ear as chaturanga dandasana, the sanskrit yogic word for plank pose. Vulnerability is old world for millennials. Their taut hearts build a cabin of rawness. And the pliable are so full of emotion they don’t know who they are. In a frigid world whose cold shoulder brandishes the warm soul of the artist, the pose of poetry is just that—poetry—and writers could imagine life without poetry as no small feat of courage and fortitude, if not plain masochism.

For the poets find meaning in the grey bed of weeds they sow behind their foreheads. Any poet knows this thorny garden you grow must survive, if you are to continue on writing–if you are to find the way through.

This puts the creative mind in a loop, spending all its time creating in order to heal itself, and looking for more raw emotion to inspire its reasons to create, gathering scrapes in its garden.

This is Nietzsche’s

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

Wait, wrong German.

You have to carry the fire. You have to bear a real burning in your heart to desire to create. Yet the only thing worth writing about “is man in contradiction with himself,” as Faulkner wrote, a liberal artist in the Jim Crow South.

Wait.

 

Indeed, this is the essence of all fiction—contradiction. We find it is the wedge which drives all plot, in every library of the world, and it is the land that sows the very authors who write it. These contradictions concluded would bring an end to our creative pursuit, and to man’s search for meaning, and to any writing whose purpose is more than to catalog, say, the news.

So what is the young and old writer to do, trapped in such a miasma of contradictions?

 “Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there’s a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody’s having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” – JD Salinger

Got him

I discover the only writing I learn something from is by people who have gone further down the rabbit hole than I. A love story is new to the child. A tale of violence to the housewives. And a tale of transcendence to the lost.

The end of the writing is the end of mystery. The madness can be mended only through art. The writer is still there, in a rainy room. The kettle is on, and the fire heats it.