Need for novelty

I took a couple of hours out from nursing Pero last night to go to the men's choir practice. It is the first time I have made a rehearsal since August: we only meet once a month as a rule and there was no meeting in September for reasons I forget now. Anyway, everyone was pleased to see me back.

I say 'everyone' but we were two tenors down so 'sensei' have to double up as one of the group. We are thin on the ground these days and we certainly need lots of practice! We are also working over a lot of pieces that we learned long ago and that feels like a bit of a problem to me, if we don't get any new challenges then we go on making the same old mistakes again and again. It surprises me how choirs he can just rehearse and rehearse the same old music on the unspoken assumption that you go on getting better and better. It 'aint so. Apart from the fact that you can sing something a million times and still be out of tune if you don't get a challenge in what you do then you aren't going to learn anything. Your underlying ability doesn't grow.

I suppose it is the same in everything you do. Japan is a culture that still puts a lot of store by the value of a lifetime's skill in one craft. On TV here I see lots of programmes about making lacquer ware bowls or wooden screens or thatching old houses, people love the idea that there is magical skill deeply embedded in someone's hands. And of course there is a very profound relationship between these people and their craft, objects just 'flow out of their fingers' and they are special. What Lefebvre would refer to as 'oeuvres', the difference between mass production and hand crafted objects.

The difference between this and amateur singing is that typically the people that develop these skills spend years perfecting in detail the basics of their craft. Professional musicians do the same. But in singing you need both technique and experience, the experience comes from trying many 'tastes', setting yourself problems to resolve, being a bit ambitious. Do you want to sing 'Polly put the kettle on' perfectly or a piece of Palestina badly? Or both?

Holding firm

We had to give Pero and intravenous drip this morning. Luckily we have a hook in the ceiling near the kitchen table (perhaps someone had to to it before eh?) to hang the drip bag from and Edera had instructions from the vet so let's hope we got it done OK. To be honest she seems no better, I think it is all very 'touch and go' and maybe more 'go' than 'touch' today. You just have to stay calm and get on with it. It was my job to hold her still, easy enough at the start because she's exhausted and in need of a cuddle. Later, as the liquid dripped under her skin, she started to feel uncomfortable then not so easy. You have to partly 'go with the struggle', let her feel subconsciously that she's won a small victory, is not being used like a lump of meat. And at the same time keep her steady so that the needle doesn't drop out. It amazes me how completely she trusts us, no reason not to, we are her 'parents' in this situation after all, but cats are so instinctive. I suppose we trust her, too.

This question of 'holding firm' is an interesting one. If we didn't hold each other firm in all kinds of ways then where would we be? It is the essence of a hug, putting your arms around someone and hugging them is such an important reassurance, a reminder that whatever else happens that 'I'm here for you' and that fundamentally under the transience of things there is a quality of enduring respect, compassion, that you 'matter'. There is indeed a foundation, you find it at extreme moments. There may be the potential for a latent sexual aspect in hugs between men and women but for me it isn't usually so direct, the warmth of someone else's body simply makes me very aware of their presence, humanity, even vulnerability. Hugging isn't the norm in Japanese culture, we bow (and that is very caring too). But I must admit amongst my friends here I hug without fear or favour at important moments like greetings, departures, celebrations. I always knew I had bear blood in my veins somewhere. "Know me and get hugged" is my motto!

For Pero at the moment it feels like a kind of relief for her. What else can I do except give her the medicine, try and get her to eat lightly or drink water, and give her some confidence by holding her tight so that she doesn't feel alone?

Pero home

Pero came back home from the vet's yesterday. She has been hospitalised there for three days and with some success. Her kidney function is better and she is taking a little food and water now with encouragement. But she still has a mountain to climb, she is suffering from anemia and the inside of her mouth is badly inflamed which makes it very painful for her to eat and drink.

When Edera brought her back in her carrying box her first thought was of 'escape', she could not wait to get out of the house and do what cats do. We were there before her of course, every window in the place was already securely bolted and we are keeping the front door locked so that delivery men and neighbours don't come into the genkan and let her free. People must wonder what we are up to, front doors around here are not generally locked in the daytime. Why is it that a cat's first instinct is so often to do what is the worst possible thing on the agenda?

Pero is still pretty 'stressed out' - apart from the medical intervention all the emotional stress of being in a strange place she now finds herself companionless, a prisoner and struggling to eat. The other bad news for her is that for a while we need to take her back to the vets every other day for an intravenous drip, injections and blood tests.

Anyway, at least she's eating something now. And she's calmed down a lot, lots of lap-sitting and gentle strokes and cuddles for her and she gets to sleep on the big grey cushion on my dining chair. A positive 'queen' - you don't get much more luxurious than that. When she is awake she spends most of her free time complaining loudly at every locked door and window but at the moment she is sitting here quietly by my chair. Let's hope that she makes a good recovery eh?

Scary stories

Halloween this week. We have cancelled - or at least considerably 'downsized' - our own planned 'grown-up' party next Sunday but of course we've gone ahead with the parties planned for our younger students and it has been good to do, keeping our minds busy the energy in the teaching and all that. Oh! And scaring the heck out of loads of little kids, that is fun too of course.

I can't ever remember Halloween being celebrated much in England when I was a child, in fact I can't remember it at all. We had the spooky stories of 'All Souls Eve' and at school in our 'teens we sat politely through Mussorgsky's 'Night on a Bare Mountain'. But there was no 'trick or treat' or dressing up in witches' hats, that all came from America much later. Even in the nineteen eighties our local Anglican vicar in Lancashire was dead against a PTA Halloween Dance in the village hall to raise funds for the school. We might think it was all fun and nonsense but there was a definite satanic tinge to it all as far as he was concerned.

Anyway being big kids ourselves we have a pretty formidable array of flying bats, witches' hats, plastic pumpkins, cackling fibreglass tombstones and the like for student's parties stashed here and also we are pretty 'dab hands' at being scary too. So for the first party yesterday for our elementary school kids Edera made the place super creepy and there were lots of things to eat, lots of games to play.

Of course kids try to tell themselves that it is 'all a game'. Whatever THAT means eh? Once the lights go out and everyone hides and there are weird noises coming from the hall then more primitive feelings start to emerge. The layer of civilisation is always about ten centimetres thick at best, the lake isn't frozen as deep as you think! And underneath in the dark water are the 'wild things'.

Interesting. I couldn't spare the whole time for the party but once the hide-and-seek got underway I snuck silently half way downstairs and I was just kind of there in the darkness, behind a curtain. Kids can sense your presence - well, A PRESENCE - and even the boldest aren't about to come looking. 'Like one that, on a lonesome road ...' as Coleridge put it.

Then, when E had them all corralled back in the schoolroom at the end for cookies and they were all just relaxing after the ordeal I CAME IN VERY SUDDENLY AND SILENTLY and all those kids screamed and took off about twenty centimetres fro the floor, just like little helicopters. My! How we all laughed!

Yep! It is fun to be scary, fun to be scared. Let's have more spooky stories.

Cremation

So, Tora's cremation yesterday morning. We took him over to a temple near the Yamada highway interchange in Togane. It is only about a twenty minute drive from here along the lanes and it is where we took our dog Kuu to be cremated back in 2006. They were great friends in life so somehow it felt right that they might both be cremated in the same place. One of our friends, Y-san, came over with us as she's always been very fond of him too.

We recited some scriptures for him here before we went. You can get one of the monks there to do a recitation but it didn't feel like the thing to do. What would it have meant for him? Someone he didn't know in a place that was completely strange. Better at home by people who loved him. Anyway that is what we did. It struck me that his journey to the animal crematorium was the furthest trip he had ever made. During his lifetime I don't think he ever went outside of a three kilometre radius of here. He was born in a wood the other side of the Sakuta valley and his three homes have all been within sight of there. Cats stay in one place.

At least in Japan it is easy to get a sensitive animal funeral and cremation. I'm not sure how it works in England now, the last twice I needed to do this there has always been somewhere suitable for a burial. In general Christian traditions still seem, however gently, to work on the basis that man has dominion over animals which have 'no souls'. Here the feeling seems to be that we are all sentient beings together, the same distinctions aren't drawn at all.

No surprises for me this time anyway, I'd been responsible for an animal cremation before and it was much the same. It isn't as 'sanitised' as a cremation in the West, here you really do accompany the deceased, human or animal, to the door of the furnace. Actually I find it rather dignified, there is no deceit or dissembling about it, you do consign to the flames, it is a proper 'goodbye' to the corpse.

Then you wait and have tea and talk for about an hour in a waiting room until the bones are cool. They are brought for you on a small tray, and you carefully pick them up with special chopsticks and put them in a small white urn and bring them home. That feels good. There has been one kind of a goodbye and also something has been properly returned to its place, especially perhaps for an animal that knew only this horizon.

So Tora's ashes and photograph are now on our family altar where we had placed his body on Saturday. He'll be there for a while, still 'in the family' as always, until it feels right to inter them in the garden near his friend Kuu by the gate.

Tora dies

Tora died peacefully at 8:40 this morning. He has been placed on our home altar and will be cremated in a local temple tomorrow.

Thank you for all your love and support.

We got Pero to a Sunday veterinary clinic in Yachimata this morning. She looks alert enough but it seems that she has contracted whatever virus Tora was suffering from this last couple of days, and she has problems with her kidneys, white blood cells and mouth inflammation and is badly dehydrated. She has been hospitalised there for three or four days and is still at serious risk so please offer merit for her.

in gassho

Tora very sick

Tora is very sick here, I don't think there is much chance that he will recover. I commented a couple of days ago that he was becoming very frail but then on Friday he took a nosedive. He came back from a short walk exhausted, perhaps he had been in a minor fight. Later in the day he got himself overheated sitting in the sun on the small table next to the front door and by the evening he was looking really sick. It was then that I realised that this wasn't just old age, that he seems to have a really serious virus.

Yesterday first thing he went and sat by the gate but he crept back in after an hour and retreated into the ofuro exhausted. Since then he's just declined quickly. He seems like he can't move but then next time you check on him he has managed to move from one mat to another. At the moment he's laid on the plastic cover of the bath, a place that seems really important for him.

I didn't think he would last the night. Yesterday evening his body seemed lifeless, just barely breathing and a slight response to stroking. But every time I came downstairs to check on him he'd managed to move a little. We'll just have to see what today brings now. He's fifteen - a good age for a cat.

Pero seems sick too with the same problem but nowhere near as bad as Tora. The main problem with her is keeping her indoors, every window has to be almost riveted shut to stop her opening it and escaping out into the cold and rain and making her condition worse. A trip to the vet for her first thing in the morning, today if we can find one open.

Circuits of capital

I spent quite a lot of yesterday reading "The Urbanization of Capital" by David Harvey. Not an easy book to get hold of. Although it was only written in 1985 like many academic 'classics' once it has gone out of print you will struggle to find a copy anywhere, such books become like gold dust. I was reduced to paying sixty quid for a secondhand copy withdrawn from Huddersfield Polytechnic Library. My only consolation is that it will be worth more when I come to sell it - I hope.

It is the classic Marxian view of how modern cities develop. To summarise a very complex work in a couple of sentences the picture Harvey paints is of three 'circuits of capital'. The first of these is the one Marx wrote so much about himself in his book 'Capital' - the relationship between capital and labour in the process of producing all the things we use and consume in daily life, the cost of materials, wages and machinery. The second 'circuit' is the investment we have to make in infrastructure to make all this happen - factory buildings, homes, roads, drains and the like. Once you have spent this money it is gone, you can't move a road somewhere else. The third 'circuit' is the social context - how much you spend on education, welfare, police forces etc. to improve productivity one way or another indirectly.

The really interesting thing is the subtle way in which capital - 'wealth' - finds its way between these three 'circuits'. If you own a 'widget' factory don't spend all your money making TOO many widgets or there will be a glut, the price will fall and all the widget manufacturers will go broke. Better to spend your surplus cash on a nice house, then the builders you employ will have money to buy widgets. Or send your kids to university and they will have more ideas.

I don't disagree with any of this. I find Marx very interesting, one of the most visionary and profound thinkers of the nineteenth century. And Harvey has taken his basic ideas and applied them to urban space in a convincing way.

But there are two lurking reservations here for me and they are closely linked. Marxists (and I'm not talking about the silly caricatures that sometimes parade under this name) always seem to pursue the central concepts of Marx with a kind of religious fervour. Once they have 'got the idea' then they just can't put it down. 'Capitalism' is defined as the 'problem' to which there must be a 'solution'. And here they miss the really key point which is that all this is just an analogy. It is a 'model'. It isn't reality, it is an image of reality, reality often follows the patterns identified by the model AND is 'something else' and infinitely more complex.

I think that this is partly what the old koan about the 'painting of a rice cake' is about. Don't ever paint yourself into the corner of believing that an image, an abstraction, is the same as the 'real thing'.

Cat's lives

If you don't watch cats closely you would think they just get on and do 'their usual thing', they don't usually stand out from the background much unless they are hungry or want some loving. But my studies have really fine-tuned my senses to observing change and so I really notice how patterns are transformed over time. Cats may be creatures of habit but their 'routines' don't persist long. Their lives are forever on the move, mainly driven by the weather, the seasons and their human 'parents' and friends. Sometimes the reasons are obvious, the weather gets colder so they stop sleeping in the cool ofuro and start sleeping near the warm kerosene heater. Other times it is impossible to tell. Pero used to be a positive alpinist traversing the North Face of our house at night to get let in via the bedroom window or making gravity defying leaps via the computer printer paper tray to sleep on the top shelf of the bookcase in the kitchen. But she hasn't done that for a year, she's a bit scared of heights; my guess is she took a serious fall we weren't there to witness.

Tora's pattern of living in the mornings has varied a lot too. He used to insist on going out first thing but now I have to gently crowbar him out of the house for some fresh air even on warm days. He's a real astronomer, he perfectly understands the movement of the sun around our property. First thing in the morning you will find him daydreaming on the little set of drawers on the schoolroom window sill, the first place the sun finds in winter. Then over the next few hours he has a repertoire of half a dozen places you will find him successively 'hanging out' in as the sun moves south, then west. But you have to watch him hard to spot him moving between them.

Tora is getting old. By inches. Basically he is the same old lovely old Tora, my most devoted friend who starts to purr the moment I enter the room. But I can really feel it now. He moves slowly, is more querulous about small things, has less confidence. He has many more 'senior moments' - long pauses half way down the hall and in the middle of the schoolroom while he tries to recall why he's headed in that direction and what it is he was planning to do. And frailty too: the chestiness gets worse, he is all bones and fur, one of his ankles is a bit 'wonky'. I find I've tuned into his behaviour now in the same way I have with geriatric pets I've nursed before. Second guessing what his intentions are, making sure he doesn't get himself into bad situations, always keeping an eye on his food bowl and water, making sure that his electric blanket is turned on OK. That sort of stuff.

Aspects of Training

A hectic choir practice yesterday evening. We have a small event all of our own looming in early December, just before I return to Britain. It will be out in the country kindergarten where we regularly meet. Wanna buy a ticket? The idea is that it will be a star studded evening - well, one guest appearance anyway - and that we'll jig up something a bit pretentious in the comestibles arena. If not cheese and wine then at least cakes and coffee. Japanese ladies just love their glucose, and especially in sophisticated forms, you would need to take out a second mortgage before you go into some of the cake shops around here.

We are going through a period of adjustment as a group of singers and it is a bit painful. Sensei is determined that we should take a more serious attitude towards music and performance and she's right, we have too great a capacity to just take things easy and 'have a laugh'. At the same time this also strikes me as a bit of an asset, far too many singers around leafy Chiba-ken are far too serious, they look like deputations from the City Tax Office dressed up in curtains or upholstery material.

But we don't have the flexibility of youngsters. Sensei says we are like hens - we can't remember anything for more than the time it takes us to take three steps - and sadly I'm starting to think it is true! No amount of pencil marks on the score about breathing and phrasing can make up for actually 'internalising' the interpretation and your body making it a natural thing. Also once we move away from common intervals between notes I find myself struggling to make an accurate landing in a strong cross-wind. Just what exactly does C to A-flat sound like again? I don't think that this has anything to do with getting worse - we just never spotted our weaknesses before.

One way or another we need to 'shape up' - musically, organisation-wise, physically. Cast away some lazy mental habits.

At the Abbey we often speak of 'Buddhist training' and I once remember a visitor out of the blue suddenly asking "training for what?" It quite flummoxed the person who was showing them around the place. I sense the same thing lurking in this choir training, probably in most other patterns of training too. How do you keep the right tension there, keep both the spirit and structure in place? Your body and mind need the discipline but this discipline is not the end in itself. In choir work we train body, mind to and heart so that our voices are enabled to COMBINE to reproduce music together. A whole different level. Our harmony is based on the harmony we feel in our relatonships with each other AND we each have to function as competent instruments.

And all is different

Was dreaming this morning about NOT being at the centre of things. I don't mean in the sense of not standing in the spotlight in the middle of the stage, at least not literally. That is something that I do occasionally to sing and it is fun, but I hope that I'm not addicted to the adrenalin. No, this was one of those pre-dawn visions which are so vivid at the time but then melt with the rising sun and you are left grasping at air. One of two words seemed to pin down the essence of it for you as you passed from one state of consciousness to another. If you had had a pencil and paper on the bedside table then you might have fixed something more precisely. Who knows?

This was something about the experience of being somewhere off to the left or right of 'events'. For example the typhoon comes and the river floods and the primrose yellow house on the bank near the dentist's is surrounded by a lake of dark water and this is a kind of 'reality'. If you go to the back of our house and look out of the study window you can see the place. And (not 'but', this is an 'and') at the same time just a hundred metres away maybe we are playing a word game with some students, feeding a cat or looking for the nail clippers in the box in the ofuro.

These events are simultaneous, they share a temporality but not the same co-ordinates. So individual experience is a product of co-ordinates, the content of things is relative to X-Y-Z. Put this way hardly a profound discovery eh?

AND you can turn this one around. The mental construct that finds rational form in the X-Y-Z of Cartesian co-ordinates - our understanding of where we are - is one expression of the experience of our senses, knowing that we are feeding the cat and not baling water out of the kitchen. One of an infinite number of expressions. What separates 'you' over there from 'me' over here.

I'm making this sound more complicated and 'grander' than it was as a dream experience. In the dream something was 'banging away' centre stage and yet 'here' was my experience, something alive, discrete, wonderful. I wanted to share it with you. Logically you could set out from 'here' to 'there' - at the mundane level it would be a specific number of paces in my size nine shoes.

But we are not talking 'mundane experience' - I think this is much more about 'all is one AND all is different'.

Flat Dwelling

I was scuttling around yesterday trying to cobble together the last of the numbers I need for Chapter 9 of my thesis. One of the 'tables' I was drawing up shows the changes the the number of dwellings in the city by TYPE of dwelling between 1993 and 2003. Heck! Maybe I should put all the figures here eh? - then you can have hours of endless fun! Oh! OK - but let me tell you about a couple of them ...

Detached houses - here of course built of wood - only increased in number by 14,000 during this period. Of course a lot were torn down and replaced too, timber Japanese homes don't last for much longer than thirty years on average. But the net growth was around one percent a year. Apartments on the other hand increased in number at three times this rate, 45,000 new ones were built over the decade. And two thirds of those were in blocks of over six storeys - fire and construction regulations here make it more economic to build up to eleven storeys once you have gone beyond five.

So increasingly Chiba becomes a city of apartment dwellers. Now 60% of people live in one.

You have to stop and ask what is going on here don't you? I've never lived in an apartment, I know some people with nice ones and one lady down near Mobara with one with a great view I could sit and look at all day. And in theory at least - earthquakes permitting - they should last longer than cheap wooden homes.

But is it what people want? From the point of view of corporate Japan - steelmakers, construction companies, real estate agents and banks - producing more and more apartments is a classic 'circuit of capital' - a way of using resources to generate more money. Their power to purchase some sites puts them out of the range of alternative builders looking to build traditional housing.

If people prefer to live in high rise apartments that is fine. But if you have kids, where is the garden to kick a ball around? Surely we should be using the limited space we have to deliver what is best for the people who will use it throughout their lives rather than those who benefit from supplying homes.

'Townie' singers

A stressful day yesterday but at least it had one bright side. One of sensei's 'other choirs' - we are her third - was the guest performance at a local choir festival near here and they came over from Sakura from the day. For a couple of hours they took over the 'log house' kindergarten that we use for a base for their own pre-concert rehearsal and we had the pleasure of sitting around listening to their final practice and sensei's coaching. Seems like we are not the only people she shouts at eh?

Thirty of them came down from the 'big smoke', just over half of the total complement but still three times the voice power of our tiny ensemble. The all caught the train down to this part of leafy Chiba-ken - it is Japan! - and then Keiko-san's husband collected them from the local station in a beat-up old bus he has the use of and bought them over to the kindergarten which sits out in the fields a couple of miles from the Pacific coast, crowded in amongst rows of onions, poly-tents and rice stubble.

Interesting to see them all coming off the bus - what a bunch of 'townies!' Blinking in the sunshine, crowding together in the big open space of the dirt yard in their city clothes. I know several of this crowd from a course I did with sensei in Yachiyo a while back but this is the first time I've seen them in a rural setting! And our rustic rehearsal room, which looks a bit like the Seven Dwarves' cottage on a grander scale, gave them something to smile at. But we soon feared for the roof as thirty voices opened up, interesting to hear such a volume of sound in a space that ten of us can just comfortably fill with singing. Outside the barking of dogs, unaccustomed to the noise and also an occasional contribution from the lone sheep that lives here for the kids to play with - the only one I know of in this part of the world.

Later we ferried the Sakura 'gang' to the performance venue and took over the middle of the front row of the balcony in the hall to clap and cheer them before seeing them safely back onto the train bound back to the city. Lovely day out - I hope we will have more of them!

Top of the pass

Good day yesterday. Well, good-ish, let's not get to effervescent about it eh? One problem that had been blocking the road ahead in my studies - my inability to be able to understand at all what the writer of a crucial text was 'getting at' - slowly dissolved after about the seventh reading. I THINK I understood what he meant and that's good enough for me! I had reached the metaphorical top of the pass, no reason to linger on those heights any more. There was nothing especially sophisticated about it in the end, just poor writing. It is often the case. You can read people like Bergson and even their most complex ideas spread like soft Lurpak spread because they take care to write well. So you should if you want to be understood. Other people write about nothing much and you might think they were toiling with Principia Mathematica.

I realise that when it comes to reading I have some innocent assumptions lurking there about the 'reality' of book content. We give them the benefit of the doubt - if someone went to the trouble of doing all that work it must be good. But there are as many labyrinthine turns and worm holes in the contents of books as there are in our own stream of conscious thought, perhaps more because in the act of putting stuff on paper we edit and revise. The illusion is that this actually 'improves' what we write but probably often it just compounds the confusion, makes it all more opaque.

Fridays are good study days because Edera goes and helps a friend out in a restaurant near Narita so it is pretty quiet here. Yesterday was warm and sunny so once the cats were fed I chucked them out for some fresh air and had the place to myself. It gets still, focused, I can marshal the energy for the kind of frontal assault I so badly needed.

Reaching the top of the pass. It reminds me of once when I was travelling in British Colombia in March or April. We were held up at the top of a pass, waiting at a red flag, until they blasted some overhanging snow off the mountain above the road. One member of the road gang headed up the slope with the dynamite while the other - a native American woman at least two metres tall sporting a long pigtail and a bright check shirt - waited by her big caterpillar digger to shift the avalanche from the highway. She was built like a bull 'grizzly'. When she leaned in through the window of the car in front to pass the time of day with the driver, that vehicle went so far down on its suspension that I was afraid she would tip the whole thing over. I could have done with her bulldozer and high explosives this last few days.

Metaphorically speaking.

Early 'doors'

It has been a lot cooler this last few mornings. A combination of residual jet lag - I'm not actually 'lagged' any more of course, just that my sleep pattern has made some long term change - and sheer terror at all the intellectual work I have to do - is getting me out of bed before five every day. It is a nice time, very quiet and it starts to get light just after I settle down to some reading or writing. The first train of the day towards Chiba runs through the village around 5:30. I've caught it a few times when we have been making long distance trips, it is fun to hurry down the lane in the gloom, feeling like someone out of a Japanese Lowry painting.

Suddenly much cooler here too, which is also a treat. The friendship of sweaters. In the early afternoons when I sneak a post-lunch nap the hot sunshine is streaming in through our bedroom window but at this time of day there is a mist over the little Sakuta River and I wouldn't want to sit here long without a sweater of some kind. No central heating here. In a week or two I will get the two bar electric fire out of the closet and put it on for an hour in the mornings and then the paraffin heater will be out of the cupboard in the hall and we will be existing in full 'winter-time' mode.

Early mornings I often think of the old Zen masters of legend awake before dawn for the first zazen of the day. Nothing like being very still while it is still dark. Your imagination can't fill in the details behind the images in the old scrolls but I know now that what they must have chiefly noted in the pre-dawn dark is what I chiefly note - the chatter of the neighbourhood hashibuto-garasu, the 'jungle crows' that wake up around dawn and seem to be lurking in nearby tree tops or on roof ridges wherever I meditate in Japan. Noisy beggars! Pre-dawn 'sitting' at our Abbey in northern England is sometimes punctuated by the cry or cough of a sheep, but here it is crows I notice.

One thing about this focus on study is that it has made my life, if not more 'peaceful' (certainly not that at the moment!) then more 'monastic' somehow. No time for trips and diversions, a strict daily routine, following my own schedule. It is not all bad is it?

Someone asked me recently if I was 'content'. And that is exactly what I am - 'content'.

Left for the day

I've lived outside Britain for long enough now for some of life's local colour in the old country to have slipped from memory. But a couple of calls yesterday reminded me of Blighty at its best - the joys of life back in 'Homesville UK'.

I wanted to talk to my solicitor about some aspects of my house purchase - but chiefly of course to ensure that his professional finger was still somewhere near the flickering pulse. I've used the firm several times before and generally they are good but recently they have merged with another firm, not a promising sign in my experience. Still, I'm prepared to trust them to do a good job. But not much.

The customer (sorry, 'client') literature asks us not to phone before ten because they will be opening the post so I phoned around ten fifteen and got the predictable "computer it says no" bored eighteen year old that solicitor's firms think is fine to leave in charge of their entire incoming business. 'Mr. X' it seems was "at the dentist's". He'd "just gone out" and "wouldn't be long", none of which was any use to me as I was about to head off to choir practice. I said that I'd ring back after lunch - last thing at night for me.

Two thirty I rang again and a different bored eighteen year old told me he had "left for the day". His secretary "did not work on Wednesdays" either. And this is a 'good' firm of lawyers - good grief! All completely unimaginable here in Japan, if someone is open from nine to five they are there, ready to do business with you, no one has ever "left for the day"

But it is Britain isn't it? Can't whinge, I've even been there and done it myself. In the big scheme of things does it matter of we slope off, spend our time "in meetings". Working hard is for mugs, much more satisfying getting paid for doing nothing. Our dream is to win the lottery, no more work, go on holiday, sit in a deckchair with a beer. Matsushita Keiichi, the founder of the electronics multinational, used to have a calligraphy on the wall of his office which read "Life is Work". But no risk I suggest of Mr. X or any other English solicitor dying of karoshii (overwork).

It's not our culture.

Re-writes

Heavily into editing and re-writing two chapters of my study here to incorporate some new material. Mostly the work is about 'positioning my research' in respect of 'contemporary urban discourses' whatever THAT means. It feels a bit artificial to me. Essentially it is about conformity, trying to pinpoint my sad little efforts within a bigger structure of thought. Not easy, actually much more difficult that doing the original research.

Some of this 'positioning' has involved going back and re-reading work by the geographer David Harvey. All very Marxian, surplus value and circuits of capital leap off every page. About a million miles away from what I've been doing. For him - most of his research was done in Baltimore in the 1970's - the city is all about profit, power, conflict. He critically and forensically analyses the dynamics of American capitalism. He dives under the surface of the city to reveal the way in which banks and developers use the urban to make profits.

I don't disagree with any of this stuff. Cities are very much about the 'use value' of space. Most people don't build themselves the dwellings they live in, somebody else did it for profit. The movement of capital, ever seeking a 'spatial fix' - greener grass - is fundamental to the ways in which cities change.

But then so is so much else. And here is the fundamental issue when it comes to 'understanding reality'. There just isn't any one perspective to be discovered. There is an endless choice of perspectives out there, everyone has a different one. Return on capital employed is neither more nor less significant than epidemics, butterflies on the buddleia, smells of cooking, lovers walking hand in hand. Reality isn't just complex, it IS complex. You have to rely on the basic truth of all your senses all of the time if you want to REALLY study 'reality'.

No wonder I'm struggling with this re-write

This morning another one of those wormholes in the Emmental of my brain. I was talking to Edera about 'nonsense English' and a name just wouldn't jump up into pratcical consciousness, it was just hanging off the edge there. I thought for a minute that it was going to be a case of appealing to some of the veteran English readers here on 'Little House'.

Got it in the end though. It was Stanley Unwin of course, a name I'm sure totally unfamiliar to almost every reader unless you are British and 'of a certain age'. He died in 2002 aged 91 but to be familiar with his act you would need to have been watching UK films and TV back in the nineteen eighties or earlier.

Checking his biography I see that he was born in South Africa but was orphaned and brought up in a children's home in Cheshire. He became a technician at the BBC and he developed the language of 'Unwinese' as a kind of antidote to listening to endless technical jargon at work. That was all he ever did on stage - talk in this crazy version of English - and you either liked it or you didn't. But looking at some of his 'clips' on Youtube this morning I realise that he had an extraordinary genius for it - try listening to this. You could almost call it a discourse on the conventionality of expression. Some of the sketches that he did of small town mayors, bureaucrats and accountants of yesteryear are so well observed that you could be watching the real thing with the reality turned down. Actually to be honest I've met solicitors exactly like him. I once had an interview where I asked one five times to explain something more clearly but it was quite beyond the guy's ability to do so.

Maybe I'll try him out on some of our students. Listening to him really is a bit like my grasp of Japanese - there is an 'outline' there somewhere and that comes in and out of focus but what the heck is all that other stuff going on? Yep! He should be the patron saint of all language students. I see that his epitaph on the tombstone he shared with his wife is "Reunitey in the heavenly-bode - Deep Joy!" Me too.

Sawara evening

Up to Sawara last night with a car full of ladies from the choir to go to the Sawara no Dashi Gyouji. It was the last night of this matsuri when fourteen dashi - the massive wooden carts pulled through the streets in some large Japanese festivals - were due to be manhandled around the town centre all evening by crowds of local residents.

Indescribable really. You are lucky if you ever get to attend just one night like this. Big city festivals are exciting spectacles but in a small country town like Sawara it is all much more intimate and spontaneous somehow, hardly changed at all from the days of the Edo period. Good friends under the stars, the October mist creeping up from the Tone River, smells of food cooking on street stalls. In Japan as in Europe festivals of this kind always offered an opportunity for excitement and spontaneity, the possibility of breaking out of conventions for a few crazy nights of carnival and mis-rule. The focus at Sawara is the movement of the dashi themselves around the town, heavy two storey high wagons almost as large as some of the old timber houses moved by the residents of each town quarter. In front men, women and children hauling on long ropes and then around the vehicle itself the strong men of the neighbourhood pushing, heaving and lifting. On the 'first floor' of the ancient cart is a band of about fifteen musicians playing shinobue and percussion instruments and then high above on the second storey next to the deity being paraded through the steets three or four fearless boys perched at the corners with sticks to make sure that the statue doesn't get entangled in overhead electical wires and tree branches.

The din is terrific, every cart with its own band of singers, dancers and lantern bearers. Sometimes at street corners the haulage ropes are disconnected and then the crowd 'shows off' and physically manhandles the cart to spin around and around, only just avoiding the neighbouring buildings in the narrow lanes. Everyone knows the dance movements. Amazing spectacle

Our links were with the group heaving around a dashi carrying the image of Yamato Takeru no Mikoto, a kind of 'Arthurian' figure in Japanese mythology. His grieving face is represented at the moment in legend when his wife, Ototachibana-hime, throws herself into an ocean storm in the hope of placating the angry deities.

I 'borrowed' the two images here because I didn't take my camera with me. There are some things that you just leave unphotographed eh? Better only to have half an image, or none at all. Once you take a picture then you are an observer and no long a part of it. Don't you think so?

"SD&AE"

Over the years I have built up quite a few shelves of books on railway history to relax with at bed-time. One of my favourites is Robert Hanft's book 'San Diego and Arizona Eastern: The Impossible Railroad' published back in 1984

This interesting line was built between 1906 and 1919 and it ran due east from San Diego on the coast for around a hundred and fifty miles to join up with the Southern Pacific Railroad at El Centro in the Imperial Valley. The idea was to provide the city with a direct link from the east, avoiding long detours north via Los Angeles.

Amazing that this railroad was ever built because it faced not just one but four major problems. Firstly it had to cross the Jacumba and Languna Mountains and the only possible way of building a railroad there was to blast a right of way high along the sides of the beetling Carriso Gorge. That track required so many high trestle bridges that it looked more like a fairground ride than a real railway. Secondly on the west side of Imperial Valley the rails had to run through a landscape of sand dunes and 'dry washes'. The combination of these two problems led to the third, the line was very vulnerable to 'wash outs' where track and bridges were routinely swept away by freak thunderstorms, desert cloudbursts and the occasional hurricane. As if these dangers weren't enough the line ran across the Mexican border twice, there was no option but to build through Mexico between Tijuana and Tecate. The construction of the route was delayed by the 1911 Mexican Civil War and ever afterwards every train had to stop at the border fence for inspection.

The SD&AE kept going somehow through until 1976 when Hurricane Kathleen wiped out long sections of the desert end of the route. The west end between San Diego and the border at San Ysidro became part of an urban tramway scheme and the track in Mexico was sold off and that seemed to be that. One of those railroads that I always regretted never having seen.

But yesterday while checking up something else on the internet I spotted that the whole route has been re-opened as a freight line again in 2004 by the Carrizo Gorge Railway Company. Extraordinary how things change. The burgeoning economy in the Mexcian border region has suddenly made a rail route to eastern US markets a high priority again. The SD&AE is back in business and a lot of investment is in progress to upgrade the line.

So it looks like I should take that trip to southern California and Mexican Baja California after all.

An encounter

Amazing how vivid some dreams can be. There's a word with two quite distinct meanings - or are they? One essentially 'phenomenal' - the dream as an object, apprehended through the senses, dreams as 'things'. And then dreams as longing - I don't like the volitional implications of the word 'ambition'. What is referred to somewhere in the sutras as "the thirsting heart of hope" is what I have in mind here. Of course these aren't the only two aspects of dreaming, there are many other familiar angles - for example 'day-dreaming' - the rather formless desire of dogs lying in the sun with a bowl of food on their minds.

Just before I woke in the dark early hours I was dreaming of meeting an old friend and showing them "my present life" which already seemed to be filling up with the packing cases and cardboard boxes required for moving my stuff to a new base in England. Rest easy! - this isn't a departure from 'Little House' here in Japan, more a rearrangement of my life during the time I spend in Britain. But it its certainly filling my mind at every level at the moment as if I don't have enough to worry about. So I can see why these looming changes are appearing in my dreams. Maybe the act of intimate explanation to an old friend was a metaphor for explaining to myself.

There are aspects of this kind of "and how are 'things' after all these years" dreams that don't occur in real life. I remember once going to a funeral of a great-aunt and meeting many family members that I hadn't met for twenty five years. It was an exhilarating if bizarre experience. Like ships passing at the harbour bar, inbound and outbound, part of a great fleet, joyfully blasting on our fog horns as we emerged from the mist. We were part of a bigger frame of reference for a moment, could see how our lives had fitted into Indra's Net before the vision evaporated and we chugged away.

Dream encounters that matter don't seem to be like that. Things become profoundly proximate but in a much deeper place, at the level of social intercourse everything seems conventional, stilted awkward, painful. "Do you like the colour of the carpet we chose for in here? Cuppa tea?" You blab on listening to the hollow echo of your voice bouncing off the mocking walls, that familiar sense of shyness and then a slight sense of panic; can the important things be said before we all wake up and are out of here? What are encounters even for? Oh my! - the "important things" - how is that for a slice of attachment red in tooth and claw? It is only a dream for goodness sake!

Early Reading

Awake at three this morning and by a quarter past I was up and reading, that familiar sense of panic creeping in. "Only hard work could save him now" runs one of my favourite lines in Kafka's book "The Trial". It sums up my existence at the moment. Just forty three days and my completed and revised draft has to be back with my supervisors.

I've been trying to catch up with a couple of theoretical angles and inevitably my reading has brought me back to the writings of Henri Lefebvre and especially his book "The Urban Revolution" published in 1970. I don't find reading his stuff much easier than I did when I first started six years ago, in some ways I think he is over-rated as a thinker. Or perhaps it is just that I'm a plodding empiricist, ever concerned with how many angels really CAN perch on the head of a pin, who moves through life with a calculator in my hand. He is the ultimate theoretician, floating around in the cirrus clouds and never within a million miles of the ground. I can read three or four pages and for me it is just verbiage, the product of a self-opinionated Marxist motor mouth. And then some deep flash of brilliance looms up, some amazing insight into the reality of city formation and you think "Yep! That is why I'm reading this one more time!"

Something that caught my eye this morning was some of the ideas he had about 'habiting' and the important of 'plasticity' in our human nature. Our greatest strength is our ability to adapt to new patterns, and it is bought at the price of a long stage of infancy and adolescence when we are simultaneously incomplete, weak and educable. "Plastic" in other words. Lefebvre suggests that one consequence of this is that sexual maturity doesn't follow overall maturity, whether psychological or social, but precedes it. In other words we mate and breed before we are mature, our potentially best years of insight and strength follow the time when we for form relationships and become parents. It is one reason why pairings we form in our twenties are potentially so unstable.

It often strikes me too. That sense of "if only I had known then what I know now." But you don't, do you? When we died in our fifties after a short life of physical labour it wasn't such an issue, we just muddled through till the grim reaper showed up. But it sure has become one. What is the best mode of existence for us 'greying' people with so much to offer? Where do we fit in?

'Melor' come and gone

Typhoon through here last night - TY0918 'Melor'. Actually it pretty well missed leafy Chiba-ken, heading north west from Kansai up towards Toyama and then along the Sea of Japan coast. We got the eastern edge of the storm for a while. It rattled our windows in the 'small hours' and brought lashings of rain but by dawn the eye of the storm was already somewhere between Niigata and Akita on the other side of Japan.

Won't stop some of our students going missing today I guess! They'll be taking precautions "in case the storm comes back". You can't play it too cannily when it comes to typhoons is their watchword I'm afraid. The news media hype it all up of course, we had around 20 minutes of neighbourhood busybodies with clipboards sandbagging schools on NHK last night.

This "end of the world is nigh" stuff has been a trend in England too. The police especially just can't resist making dire warnings along the lines of telling people to stay indoors 'unless their journey is absolutely necessary'. Whatever that means. Few people take their dog and Frisbee to the local park in winter Atlantic storms and blizzards. But how about going to work for example - is that 'absolutely necessary'? Or are we just talking rushing blood plasma to critically injured persons when we use the phrase? I can't help but think that they often only say it to hear the sound of their own voices. Well, it is just an opinion. But I can't help feeling they would say it a lot less if, say, the State had to accept responsibility for loss of earnings of all those people it was advising to stay at home.

Naming no names but once I worked in local government in England where absolutely nobody turned up at the office when the police advised against travel because they were, of course, getting paid for sitting at home by the taxpayer. One guy I recall managed to string a warning about "avoiding journeys" on snowy roads into more than a week's absence from work, until long after the last snowflake had melted and the swallows were making their nests. He was only doing his public duty by sitting in front of his TV drinking beer and avoiding unnecessary journeys it seems

Imagine

Just at the moment I feel like I should be auditioning for a starring role in some zombie 'B' movie. Mr. Marshmallow Mind of Drowsy Dell. Well, I often wonder if that is my regular 'true vocation' these days but the first day or two after landing back at Narita I'm seldom at my best. I keep hearing all kinds of fine theories about getting over jet-lag but for myself I'm a believer in the tried and tested weak-willed "give up and go to bed" approach. There is no shame in sleeping the clock around, even sleeping it around twice, your body knows how much rest it needs, what business is it of yours? If you want to drink a gallon of orange juice and graze your way through the contents of an entire greengrocers then away you go, I'm a great believer in freedom of choice.

I was just flicking by the MSN site earlier and one of their features caught my eye. It began something like "Imagine what the world would have been like if John Lennon had not been shot, if Margaret Thatcher had never become Prime Minister and that third goal in the 1966 World Cup Final had been disallowed". The last one is a peculiarly British obsession of course, we imagine the whole planet not only recalls but routinely replays grainy videos of the last time we beat the Germans at anything. "They think it's all over but it never will be!" is our watchword. Our lives are even measured by recalling what we were doing at that exact moment (I was cleaning lots of toilets at Gatwick Airport, it was a muggy, thundery day and the 'Brighton Belle' still ran down the fast line every hour from Victoria to the coast ...)

Well - go on then! Imagine it! what would that alternative Lennon filled and Thatcher free world have been like then? Me, I dunno. There was a time when it was fun to snuggle down under the duvet at night, throw an arm over some snoring companion and dream of different worlds, parallel universes. "What would have happened if ..." Roads not travelled and which never will be travelled. Often you pass partings of the ways and don't even notice them, you might have taken them and it would have made no difference at all, you might have lived in the house next door instead, driven a blue Ford Escort rather than a green one. Others look innocent enough and then suddenly there you are a million miles from where you meant to be on the other side of the Grand Canyon. A bit like following the thread in a tapestry when you can't ever see the big picture, it seems unpredictable, without any kind of sense or logic. But it isn't. Sometimes we come face to face at last with that awesome realisation that there IS a big picture, that events certainly aren't random. Co-incidence fingers our collars, we would be dumb to deny it.

But I'm not into "what if" questions. Sometimes painful, always irrelevant. The imminent and 'now' aspect of things is much more interesting, fertile. Even if you have jet-lag.

Memsahib mentality

Back "Out East" after a rather bumpy flight from Heathrow. Typhoon season of course, it is surprising how far into Siberia their influences linger. Arriving in Japan was fine but we really got chucked around crossing the Aldan Plateau west of the Amur River. The seat belt sign must have been on for an hour, no trips to the loo for me! It is at such times that I realise how like the character Godfrey in "Dad's Army" I have become these days.

Long long haul flights are always a good opportunity for a little bit of 'manwatching' whether you want to or not. Or on this occasion 'woman-watching'. There are some strange people around in this world and most of them seem to want to fly from Europe to Japan eh? My neighbour was an American lady who took against the cabin crew when her in-flight entertainment system didn't work. The attendant offered to move her to another seat but she baulked at the idea and then spent eight hours sulking behind her eye shades. I'd have expected such childish behaviour from a man but somehow a woman doing it was shocking to me, I must stop putting you lot on pedestals so much.

But the one that really took the cake was the Scottish woman sitting in the row behind me. Actually I'd noticed her bell-like voice long before we boarded because she was in the 'security' queue at the airport in front of me. Her neighbour was an Englishman in his twenties, a bouncy extrovert Bertie Wooster type who seemed never to have been anywhere further east than Yarmouth. Or more probably he was just taking the p!ss.

This lady talked without apparent pause for breath from around Windsor to somewhere east of the Urals, and then from Khabarovsk until we were inside the terminal building at Narita. Amazing that someone could bang on for so long, if there was an Olympic team she'd be in it. How can someone's mouth motor for seven hours and yet gain so little traction on 'reality'? They must do professional courses in it somewhere. I had her entire biography from her childhood in southern Edinburgh to horse riding with her school friends in the Ochil Hills to life on a base here where her American husband clearly held a post of some importance in military procurement, probably negotiated the entire 'weener' contract. Boy! how she was looking for this tour of duty in this poxy country to come to an end so that she could head back to some base in California where the schools were better and you didn't have to import your saddle to go riding or cope with alien cultures. We were treated to the opinon of the base wives on everything from Japanese schooling to Tokyo Disneyland.

And it seems they don't do at all well here! These Japanese need to shape up in so many ways!

Amazing really that she could say all of this within earshot of at least twenty Japanese passengers around half of which I would guess understood every word she said. But there you go, the classic memsahib mentality is alive and kicking and thriving in Bonnie Scotland it appears.

Hypothetical cake

Round to see my mum after tea this evening. I'll get a chance to get over there tomorrow evening too but then I'm on the plane for Tokyo early on Sunday morning. It will be good to be headed east for a while, I've been away for a month already. Want to see Edera and do some serious cat stroking.

I gave my mum a small railway magazine containing a photograph of the staff at Barnard Castle station back in the 1940's. She was a regular passenger then and I wondered if it would prompt her memory. "Oh! Yes!" she said. "There's Percy Wainwright!". I looked at the key below and this name wasn't there, but I didn't think it was worth debating it.

Then she asked me to write 'For mum - with love from Iain' on the cover of the book but as I fished a pencil out of my pocket she changed her mind and said "No! Write 'For mum - with ALL my love from Iain'!"

I laughed. "Love isn't like a sponge cake you know!" I said. "You don't cut it into slices do you? I don't have just a certain number of slices to pass around in this world! It is more like the sea really, or air, there is an infinite supply of it these days, no need to say this slice is yours and that slice is hers."

It isn't like a cake is it? When you are young and have far more hormones than is good for you it is all about "my beloved", first 'you', then 'us' and then 'all of us' as the kids come along. So it starts off a bit like a cake, but after a time the limits just begin to evaporate, you can't hold onto them, the clouds get a bit higher on the mountain. Pure Scotch Mist, your heart is always warm, you are content to be happy to be around anyone and everyone, you see the beauty and quality in each person without discrimination, like light transcendent through crystal, brilliant rainbow colours.

Of course it can be very confusing, this stuff isn't without hazard, with such wide open views and big spaces there are a few beetling cliff edges to watch out for when your heart is always hotter than a three bar electric fire. But better that than worry about who has which slice of a small sugary sponge cake with some sad brittle iceing, don't you think so?

'Little House' will be out of circulation until I touch down in leafy Chiba-ken

Small-Time badness

Sometimes the idea has crossed my mind that if I ever wanted to be a bad boy it would be best to be a REALLY bad boy, in for a penny, in for a pound. But usually empirical observation doesn't bear this out. In Mark Anthony's famous speech Shakespeare argues that "the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones". This is true if you are a died in the wood confirmed big-time baddie; Hitler was a vegetarian who loved dogs and Genghis Khan was said to be a very loyal boss, but who remember these things now? Minor baddies one the other hand are very often later remembered with affection for their 'good side'.

Down in Chichester Cathedral last week I couldn't help but smile to notice that they now had a stained glass window dedicated to the musician Thomas Weelkes. He is one of my favourite madrigal composers, especially since he wrote lots of three part compositions which is all we can sing down in leafy Chiba-ken until we find ourselves another tenor! He studied music at New College, Oxford and became organist and choir master at Chichester in 1602 when he was only twenty-six.

The muse seems to have given Thomas Weelkes a tough time in his personal . He survived at Chichester as a professional musician until his death in 1623 by his fingertips, but only because he was a very talented and creative composer. He was forever drunk, a womaniser of epic proportions and seems to have kept vanishing up to London when life in darkest Sussex became too much. In 1619 he was sacked for being dead drunk at his organ and swearing at the choir during a service but he was later reinstated. To all 'authority' in his day he was nothing but a problem. The patron saint of alcoholics.

And now here is a stained glass window dedicated to his memory. Four hundred years later all that bad behaviour is forgotten and only his beautiful music is remembered. So it seems that if you are going to be bad it is probably best not to be TOO bad after all.