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 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 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.

Meditation Retreat Writings

Hey, everyone. I was re-reading the journal I logged on silent retreat week at Long Quan Monastery.

It lasted about 6 days and we had a vow of silence all day & all night. We did not speak during meals, during afternoon breaks. The only words we spoke in were Chinese sutras. We’d recite the heart sutra at the feet of three gold Buddhas–Amitabha, Sakyamuni, and Bhaisajyaguru–and go to sleep. We did not speak for 6 days and had only our mind for a companion. Make friends, or falter!

Here I’ll publish the few daily entries that lend value to you.

This was on Day 1, when I felt very, very good about my practice and the retreat.

Empty Cloud (above) was enlightened when he dropped a cup of tea after burning himself, and it shattered

Day 1

I realize the writings of my monastery stay amount to very little on the pages of this adept collection of scribbles. For one thing the sun is always shining or the rain is coming down in a deluge, so either way I’m free to love the moment and get lost in the world. We are now ½ way through our program at Long Quan Monastery. The immersion has been so thorough and overwrought that any consideration for the world outside this monastery and my conditions therein have slid by the wayside. Our days are packed to the rafters. It’s 12:30 PM in Taiyuan, China.

I realize now that what’s been keeping me from the present moment for so long is myself. I realize now it was no one but me suffering my own catharsis of time and its developments through its passing.

I’m about to venture into the sunlight of the ordinary days here. The ordinary mind. We—Alex, Me, Alex, Andrew, and Matthew (5 people / 3 names / 1 Love) are talking the Diamond Sutra in a great circle of yin discoveries in the grass. The Diamond Sutra is my favorite sutra and made me burst into tears one night on the stark summit of our apartment building in Seattle. It was March, and I was newly single. The sutra hit me so deep it washed these marrows in my bones.

It rained hard as ever in China today. I watched it come down. We sat patient in half-lotus darkness through the brood of the storm while it waged war on the plants and plain red walls of Long Quan.

My meditations have improved and declined in the same degrees. I can sink less deeply to the Samadhi swamps of luminous concentration and yet I walk the temple paths of my everyday thinking like they are freshly groomed in the first spring inside my mind of mildew. The morose nature of deep stillness is gone, and the utter spinnin in mud of letting-the-mind-go to thinking has really chilled out. I find these two in combination makes for a real balanced middle way for now.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Every single flash of an instant, flash of a second, and abhidharma, is meaningful. All this living ought to teach us that living is good. All aught ought to do is be aught. This painful shredding of my earthen world ought to be for a purpose. What I mean to say is the worlds of darkness I leave in my wake was all me running around in circles about the candle of truth with a fresh new candle made May 28, 1993 in my hand. What I mean to say is this whole world that is my life is self-created. What you think you are you are. What you believe on the topic of this stunted world of change is the world of yourself, too. What I mean to say is let life love you. You should go home to it. It’s waiting to hold you in the warm light of its arms.