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 

 

 

A tree between us

I'd spoken to her before, the woman who'd stood beside a tree stump where the tree that had shaded her parents' grave had been. She was with a man this time, he solid with tattoos, holding an orange leaf blower. I mentioned the missing trees. "We complained about it," said the man, "but they didn't have any explanation." I suggested that the tree had come between the top of the hill and the new water feature with its loud gold lettering (in the early morning sun). Can't break that monetized line of sight. "They did respond," the woman said, "to tell us they could move my parents somewhere else; something could be arranged." "But we'd have to pay for it," the man added.

 

from Startles

It must have been those dementia classes I took from my mother that made me re-read The Memory Police, though there was little re- to it, as I can’t remember plots. I recalled the concept (authoritarian state demands forgetting on an uncertain schedule): characters are startled by disappearances. Birds, libraries, novels, you name it until you can’t. The plot lines: a novelist who writes about a typist whose voice was stolen by her instructor, who imprisons her in a room full of dead machines; a journalist hidden under the floorboards of the novelist’s house; an old man who lives in a half-sunken ferry; a dog. Novels require furniture, but that’s what I forget.

I did remember the box of things forgotten, hidden away by the novelist’s mother. I did remember that some characters still remember what everyone else has forgotten. They’re on the run from the Memory Police, who seem to remember what they’re mandated to make others forget. Everyone lives on an island, the better to symbolize their isolation. The ferry boat finally sinks, and the old man joins the novelist and her journalist friend in the house with the dog.

They’re like worry stones, these objects laid out on a narrow bed. To touch them is not to remember their purpose, but at least to know they existed. The day the birds flew away, I imagine their songs were pulled away like ribbons. Did the birds escape their being forgotten? And do they look under their nests for the old tunes to pull out like worms?

I dreamed I was covered with feathers, like a duck, that I stayed dry under their soft slick umbrella. Now I’m in a small room, as if hidden below the house, typing as it rains. A friend saw rain on the streaming video of Kilauea yesterday, but at least she witnessed the eruption. Afterwards, scarves of steam rose from the lava. Some evenings this is our screen saver, preserved by our distance from the “episode,” ash and tephra raining on black rock.

Plot lines bob and weave, run their patterns toward the basket; score and that chapter ends. Sentences are cords that bind the stories to pallets. Meaning’s the Matson liner that carries them into an introspective space that grows more bare. We might forget it soon, what with the pressures of reality that seem so farcical, or the farce that persuades us it’s real. The space of a small room with two narrow beds, one for each man afflicted by demons.

They love to play chess together, these two. We play medieval music, imagining knights, knowing ourselves to be pawns. The pawn philosopher types and types in her narrow room, feeling less like Wordsworth’s nuns, fretting more at the daily news. One paper would send you to the North Shore for pools of clear water. Another tells you about a mob that nearly killed a teenager and a lifeguard.

Bird songs sound inside the rain dropping on palm fronds behind the brown fence behind our upside down shirts on the laundry line under the eaves. I see no source for any of this, neither rain nor song nor palm tree. What I cannot see is as if forgotten, the lives we didn’t have before we were born. Every newspaper he ever read was the same, he told his son. All the news that’s fit to type.

 

Note: 

 In lieu of a review of Yuki Ogawa's The Memory Police.