Round One: Abandoning Reason

Well, it appears its time again to hook the sky, my spear for an ear and a horse for my eye (as I think the kingdom of the good book says-- of which the better has always been fettered; feathered to flee, for it lost its home when we took its tree.)

They worship trees here, you know, in Japan. And good thing too, because someone should. I suppose we still worship trees as well, back in America, but the trees we worship are already dead, cut up and printed green to invoke a semblance of life, just how we paint the faces of our dead, who ironically often show up in print on our money. So in a sense, it appears as though we have built a culture that worships death, institutionalized by our worship of money. And yet, we are so afraid of it we surround ourselves with enough other dead things to somehow draw away the cold lips of the ultimate lover. Don't beleive me? How many trees died to make your house? How many animals lived in those trees? And the plastic bags for your lunches? The children who stiched your shoes? It is true, then that we walk on the very faces of death, attempt to put a layer of death between us and the earth, for fear that it will swallow us alive. And, fortunately, it still does.

Well hell, we just started and I for one am already hooked. We've obviously wholeheartedly taken the step off reason (both as individuals, here, and as a culture on a larger scale) but its still there in the background, still seeping there in the shadows, climbing back up and reaching its hairy knuckles around the roof of our hideout. Doesn't say much for the sky though, the open blue with eyes like a mouth full of teeth and teeth like fistfulls of sand, dollars of course (we know its planned), this losing the instruments and gaining the band.

But enough now for this playing on words, (to watch on a letter is far more worth its paperwait in gold, and thus far more agreeable, though it may take more than it gives... in terms of time at least. And rhyme at best.) And as for Now?

Now! The open door to the future, the room from which you can both see, and not see yesterday and tomorrow. Now is a serious (local) time for serious (local) people, as here I sit in the shokuinshitsu (teachers room) at an Elementary School in Kyoto, the capital of ancient Japan, a realm beyond and step above, a city where, in the early hours of the morning, one can climb the clouds that rise from the mountaintops and stroll directly into a Shinto world of Mountain Gods and make love with women born of trees in forests with an ancient sense of style, where you can listen to the very riddles of androgenous old Time itself.

But I get ahead of myself (as I often do.) I am a teacher you see, of English and the finer arts of perception. (At one point I was a simple busboy (not to be confused with busybody), and even then, I blessed each piece of silver as I polished it, praying that the people who took soup from my spoons, who used my knives to cut their steak, who stabbed at their greens with my forks, would take a step towards happiness, towards the sweet fruit of contentment by the simple act of eating. Through the water I poured the subtler energy of a contemplative future into their glasses, wanting nothing more than to help people, to wake humanity up to ourselves. (Perhaps it is true that I give myself too much credit in these realms of the spirit, but does not the tiniest of flames burn like a star in the darkest realms of midnight?)

And now it appears I have gotten behind myself by getting ahead. (See what I mean about the Now?) Back to it, then. The Now, where I have spent the day finding beetles with children a third my age, discussing in Japanese the relative pros and cons of being a superhero, snarfing down kyushoku (the equivalent of a Japanese school lunch) while making funny faces and dancing, all while trying to finish eating before the homeroom (read: real) teacher gets upset. And all of this only in the time between "my" classes, when I teach the kids rudimentary English through the use of flashcards, listen and repeat, and using an arsenal of games that I have either collected from my colleagues or developed on my own in the past almost three years (Damn!) I have spent teaching English in Japan.

And there is a truth here, an element of Truth that I have found among children, among youth, the joy of being new again even as an adult, being in a new country and learning a new language as a child does, sharing that language and learning from my students as I teach them. And when they lead me by the hand to show me a new bug, or ask me questions with obvious answers like "Do you speak American?" or "Are there clouds in your country?", it jolts me a bit. It makes me step away from myself to wonder what it really IS to "speak American," makes me wonder for a moment if the clouds back home are the same as here, and if they are not, then how is it that both can still be called "clouds," it makes me wonder if naming something in another language makes it a different THING, and part of me thinks it does. Part of me knows that Ma-tin Sensei is a wholly different entity than Martin the Busboy was, and different still than MagDef, the man of infinite meaning (less) poetry, who chases a wisp of chaos on a dragon constructed of words, through a city built entirely of ones and zeros. But before the thought can bud, before the dragon can catch its breath, I am whisked along again by a herd of third graders to look at a tree that has just sprouted from an acorn, that spreads two tiny green leaves out into this world that sometimes seems to want nothing more of it than the money that can be harvested from its inevitable fall.