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.

 

Taking sides

 

What should(n't) have surprised me.

 

Twice recently, while telling other walkers about the recent firings at the cemetery, they have taken the side of management. "Maybe they need the money"; "Maybe the workers have been there so long they make a lot of money, so they're starting over with new workers"; "Let's hope it's for the better." At best, a shrug and a "too bad." At worst, a defense of vulture capitalism's inhumane treatment of workers. And always, "I hope it turns out for the best." One walker kindly offered to tell me good news the next time she hears it.

 

Coda: last night on our last short walk, Lilith and I ran into a neighbor who named her black dog Betty White. A pert dog, often dressed in raincoat or sweater, walking with her person every morning and afternoon. "Where's your other half?" I asked her, walking by herself. "She died." Rather suddenly, at five years old, though several vets had pronounced her just fine in her last week. RIP Betty White. A good dog. While she and I talked, Lilith sat on her haunches, clearly aware. "I believe in God," our neighbor said.

The view from McDonald's

 

He was one of the pilgrims of Kahekili, more frequent these days. From the back, his sandals resembled those I remember from the book of Bible stories my father gave me as a child. If he'd had a donkey, he could have been Jesus. A man with a blue bed roll on his back, he carried a plastic bag in his right hand. He'd turned out from `Ahuimanu Park, was lucky the custodian wasn't there, who guards the place like a hawk from poor people and dogs. Wore a slight limp, turned to cross the highway toward the McDonald's on the corner. Having caught up to him, I said I'd spot him a cup of coffee, if I had any money on me, which I didn't. He was a worn looking white man with a white beard, who didn't look impressed at my imaginary offer.

 

At the end of our cemetery walk, Lilith and I heard a tour guide tell his flock (one of purple hair, another with orange, others more non-descript) that that was the only place where you could get spam and rice and look at such a beautiful view. "Are you talking about 'the most beautiful McDonald's in the world?'" I asked. "And where does that come from?" He told me it was all over social media. I mean, it's a beautiful place, but he's sure there are other beautiful places with McDonald's, too.