Shadow boxing on Kahekili

The man in black--black baseball cap, black Raiders sweatshirt, black pants, black running shoes--usually runs down the other side of Kahekili from us, stopping occasionally to use the guard rail as his gym equipment. Other days he runs on our side up past the cemetery entrance, boxing with the flexible bollards. Thwack thwack go the bollards. 

 

Daniel, for that is his name, is one of the very few people who remember mine, but not Lilith's. It's because his father had a girlfriend named Susan. I said she must have been born in the 1950s or 60s, before the name died out, and he nodded. We talked a bit about the cemetery, the cut trees, the cut employees, the cut community.

 

I asked him what he does when he's not out exercising. "I'm my dad's caretaker," he says. His father is 80 and has Alzheimer's. Daniel is his sole caregiver. It's hard when they don't recognize you. But he's a healthy man! 

 

I tell him about my dementia books. He says how good it is to talk to other people who've had similar experiences. I take some pictures of him, his lined face, his big smile. He heads off to the district park, past the blue couch that was dumped there the other day. Lilith and I walk toward the cemetery, heading for the ritual grooming by O and H. Lilith is training the new guy to pet her, too.

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Job openings

"The bishop--he was one of a kind--," O said, when I asked after the Buddhist clergyman who used to work at the Temple. "He watched me and my sister grow up" (he held his hand out to the height of a child); "took my sister to McDonald's all the time. My mother worked in the gift shop; the whole family worked here." He remembers bon dances at the Temple.

 

In 2014, I read, the current management wanted to tear down the main building near Kahekili. Designed by a resort architect, George Pete Wimberley, whose work was "'exuberant and odd,'” says Mike Gushard, president of the Hawai‘i chapter of DoCoMoMo (Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement)." (I quote from _Honolulu Magazine_ from November, 2014, on-line.) It was slated to be replaced by a 30,000 square foot funeral home. 

 

"When did the new owner buy the place?" I asked O. He didn't remember, though he did know that the previous owner also had a "Star" in the name. He thought it started with Red, but I find an abandoned web site for Right Star funeral home, with the VOT Kahekili address. The domain is possibly for sale. Their Hawai`i address (they still operate here in Nu`uanu, I find) contrasts with the current owner, whose corporate headquarters is located in Houston, Texas. Go to the corporate website and you find that "Empathy meets Opportunity." "A culture built around people." The photograph underneath these words is a view of Valley of the Temples "heart" feature at the top, close to the mountains, the place with good Feng Shui.

 

The leadership team on the website of the Houston business features 12 white faces, only one of which belongs to a woman. Closer to home, I find this notice of available jobs: "Current openings around Oahu include positions in Kaneohe, Waipahu, and Honolulu, with hourly rates ranging from $16 for reception/gift shop roles to over $28 for licensed embalmers." The CEO's salary is not listed publicly, but the corporation, I find, pulls in between $100 and $500 million a year. You try living on $16 an hour here.

 

On Indeed, I find the following 1 star review of the corporation. "What is the most stressful part about working at the company? Toxic work environment due to poor management What is the work environment and culture like at the company? Toxic because of egotistical managers. Management is to money focused What is a typical day like for you at the company? You help families and fight for your right with management"

 

Lilith and I walked in gentle--then less gentle--rain this morning. The mountains were out of scroll paintings; the place was quiet. It really did feel like a sanctuary (before opening time). We met a couple from Arkansas in the parking area. She was carefully examining plants. "Oh yes, she's VERY interested in them," opined her husband. They have a family cemetery in Camden, Arkansas, which they maintain themselves. I point out the ex-trees nearby. Ever the bearer of bad news am I. Last I saw them, they were climbing the stairs to the Cambodian/Chinese altar. Someone still puts incense and oranges there. Tinny music emerges from a small speaker.

 

Money and death, a meditation

Lilith and I took a shorter walk than is usual this morning; my knees and hips hurt last night. Lilith has been a bit stiff-legged of late, too. Yesterday at the cemetery I was hailed by a Cardinals fan and later by a couple who wanted to know if Lilith is a Swedish Vallhund. Humane society, more like, though the Vallhund does bear a resemblance to her, when I look later. Two people in recent days have reached out to Lilith because they miss their dogs at home (Orlando, Arizona). As a walker, I'm also a tourist, despite my "eh, Ola, get one pony tail?" at the top of the hill. Better put, I'm the liminal space between visitors and workers and other walkers, to whom I tell my stories. And, of course, the dead. 

 

The Byodo-in Temple at the back of the cemetery used to provide a strong link to the local Japanese Buddhist community. An on-line guidebook, dated 2021 but undoubtedly written years earlier, reads: "Other ongoing events and activities offered at Byodo-In include cast paper sculpting each Tuesday, the art of making ribbon lei on Thursday, sumi-e or ink painting each Friday, and ikebana or Japanese flower arranging and tea ceremony on the second Saturday of the month. Visitors may also enjoy Jorei, a cleansing body and mind therapy, offered by practitioners who visit the temple regularly." The guide book tells us about "the wizened reverend of Byodo-in," Rev. Fukuhara, and the "events coordinator, Nancy Kreis." She was in charge of community engagement, I find, and also a "sales consultant," based on her referring some of her friends to the business (of "death care," as their website calls it). 

 

Rev. Fukuhara died in 2019. Nancy Kreis is no longer associated with Valley of the Temples cemetery. They appear to have been the last links in a chain between the local community and the temple. Some days, most recently Memorial Day, the cemetery is full of local people, bringing flowers and plate lunches to their ancestors' graves. I talk to them when they--and their restless small children--notice Lilith. We chat over their small hands on Lilith's head. That this demographic is changing is clear from a new job ad at the cemetery for "bilingual" sales people. I doubt if that means they're looking for Ilocano speakers. Instead, I suspect that the monstrous Christian nationalist tomb at the top of the hill, developed by a Chinese man who wants his tomb bigger than that of the good general farther down the hill, presages what's to come. Ferdinand Marcos's ex-tomb seems modest, by comparison. 

 

This place of "deep calm and peace" (see the website) now exists only in corporate language. It's now the land of huge tour buses, bright rental cars, and omnipresent orange cones. The woman who used to sell tickets to the temple quit, replaced by employees from the gift shop. The security guys are all gone, replaced by cameras on tall sticks, each with its own solar panel. The golden phoenixes on either side of the temple roof are better described, as one worker put it to me, as "fighting chickens." Money and death, as you like it. The Temple stands, empty of ritual, but full of visitors.

Gas lighting delivered by underlings

There's always a reason, often delivered by the workers. Increasingly, they speak softly, indirectly. 

 

"The trees were cut because of the storms." All storms? The most recent storm? The storm of money to be made from newly cleared sight lines? Because the trees were less beautiful than the view of a new golden sign (with arrow pointing where to go to see more sites) on the new water feature?

 

"They have to bring in a lot of tourists to pay for upkeep of the temple." Wouldn't there be less required upkeep if they didn't have 300,000 people a year tromping through?

Lilith and I get surveilled

 

"That's funny," I told the Filipina woman who emerged from the back of the Temple area to shoo me away, holding a shaka to the side of her head like a phone. "There are cameras all around," she gestured, "and I got a call." It was 7:45 a.m., 45 minutes before opening. I told her we walk in the cemetery every day, and she softened, a bit. "It's a corporation," she said, indicating her lack of responsibility for what she was doing, and I told her I understood. But I did tell her that I didn't like what was happening to the temple and the cemetery. Looking around, I saw a flimsy white deck with fencing, where tourists can pose for pictures with their lei; a shack (what they sell unclear at this early hour); I heard no clanking of bamboo in the wind, because the bamboo were bulldozed months ago. Behind the "sacred bell" and up a hill beside the temple, there's a meditation hut. A sign suggests that you can go there for silence, to get away from the crowds. But the path that led there was blocked off. If you want to feed carp in the pond these days, the food costs $6 (according to Hoku), as much as the new parking charge (and they know if you park near the cemetery entrance for free and walk up, without paying).

I told her that I had a student at UH whose grand uncle was resident minister at the Temple, back when it was actually Buddhist. He sent me this information a couple of weeks ago. I'm uncertain of its provenance, but he would know. He had been the first and the last resident minister.

 

### 1. It is Dedicated as a Sacred Space

Even though the temple does not belong to a single exclusive Buddhist sect (like Jodo Shinshu or Soto Zen), it was still officially dedicated as a sacred, interfaith Buddhist space when it opened in 1968 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japanese immigrants arriving in Hawaii. To maintain its authenticity as a sacred temple rather than just an empty theme park attraction, the creators wanted ordained clergy on-site.

 

Lilith and I left the way we came, over the short bridge and under the yellow rope. Looking up to the left, we saw a surveillance camera staring at us; on the other side of the bridge, we saw another couple of cameras, attached to the small building where tourists buy tickets. The prices had gone up recently. But before leaving her, I asked to "please say hello to Rex for me." He da boss.

 

_____________________________

 

My former student also sent me his grand-uncle's obituary: "The Rev. Egen Iwasaburo and Mutsuko Yoshikami, husband and wife, of Enchanted Lake will be remembered in services 6 p.m. Tuesday at Hosoi Garden Mortuary. He was a retired resident minister at Byodo-in Temple, aged 93, and his wife, Mutsuko, was a retired Shiatsu practitioner, aged 80. He died Sunday Sep 26, 1999 in a head-on collision on Kaneohe Bay Drive."

Simone Weil again

I just splurged on a three volume set of Weil's Cahiers off ebay. I wrote a short book about ten years ago, based on quotations from her notebooks (a translation of which I found in our university library). I'm also watching Benjamin Braude's lecture on the ways that her editors misrepresented her work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnaAQRIJm_M

 And I found this generous selection of my Weil work at seedings, from Jerrold Shiroma's (late) on-line journal through Duration Press. (He also published a generous selection from Caroline Sinavaiana's mother elegies, which I go to quite often these days.) You can read her work here: https://durationpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/seedings-7_c-sinavaiana-gabbard.pdf

So here are some of my Simone Weil memory cards: https://durationpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/seedings-2_s-m-schultz.pdf 

 The book was published by Rod Mengham's Equipage Press in the UK.  https://equipagepress.weebly.com/

 Attention--not self-promotion--is a form of prayer. But herewith a promotional prayer . . .  

WAR DIARY: post-blurbs

My newest book, WAR DIARY, has no blurbs on or in it, but I've gotten some lovely responses from writer-friends. Spuyten Duyvil has put their remarks up on the website, here: https://spuytenduyvil.net/War-Diary.html