She misses her furniture. Her ex-husband, late father-in-law,
childhood bric-a-brac. Anger’s sturdy as a plank; depression a
constantly popping balloon. Her blind dog grows deaf, his nose
banging against walls; he has his own issues with furniture, though
he still wanders outside and returns to see if she’s in her chair.
The word “clustering” was changed to “chair sharing,” marking
the diminishment of faculty and resources.
Meditation clears the one, if not the other. My bookcases were all
marked “dispose” on my last day in the office. Grieving stored in
my hips, I couldn’t walk for two months. The chair I lived in bore
witness to morning shadows, late afternoon light. I took photographs
of the lanai floor, snail trails, murky puddles, moss.
Kan`eohe would have been a nuclear sub harbor, according to one state
master plan. The master always has a plan, and this included industry
where the cemetery is. The dead lack industry, but landscape crews do
not. Cameras on poles watch them mow and whack and weed. The cyclops
is myth, but what it watches is not, is the history of late
capitalism, vision folded into threat.
Vulture capitalism. Buddha sits in his temple in the valley,
surrounded by signs that order you not to wear beach clothes in his
presence, and by others that beckon you to a cultural event of the
corporation’s construction. Bon dances have been replaced by photo
shoots of tourists in expensive fake Japanese coats. You can ring the
bell after the long line dies down. Sacred greed, release us.
Homeless (not the) wander like tourists down Kahekili. They are our
furniture, set out at the curb to be taken away. Old man end-table,
young woman torn blanket, dog tongue. We can’t set up house with
them, but once we clear them out, we see so much less through their eyes.
Even unfurnished, the rentals are extravagant, unaffordable.
Playing the changes. Dissonant ones. Bright and dull orange rust
barrel, fern shadows magnified in a pool of orange water. Circles
inside of circles. Metallic sunset that’s all sun and no set.
Forest battered into rock and dirt road; orange circles of cut trees,
laid down like corpses beside flat planks. At the back opening, a
rock strewn circle around a rock strewn hole in the ground, overseen
by yellow earth mover framing `ohi`a trees. To the right side, on a
dirt hill, two pigs sniffing. At the road, a pile of tires, shredded,
punctured, heaped up, a memorial of sorts. Behind me, a large rock,
positioned to be decorative, in front of the hole in the ground, gray
and rust colored.
At the road’s end, boat, large stuffed animal, and abandoned cars
gone. Abandoned house still empty, weeds installed in the gutters
like front facing cow licks. What was abandoned is now gone.
Nothing’s been restored, just cleared, except for cans and a card
that reads “Humility, Respect, Honesty” on one side, “Disorder,
Enemies, Distrust” on the other. Both bear a faded ALOHA at the
top.
The card had been a rectangle, torn on its right side (which was the
right side), or left on the other side (which is that of
“loneliness” and “suspicion.”) I had to flip it to reverse
the field. A less forgiving geometry than the circle, which might
ease the transitions, if not acknowledge opposites. Two cats sit on
the lanai, mother and daughter, one calico, the other black. They are
not abstractions.
Abstraction is reality cut out of context, which is what renders it
confusing. Do I see part of something larger that I cannot intuit? Or
do I see a pattern adjacent to another that might be a sign (like
Texaco) or the fullness of sunset (with the set). Do I inherit flat
rectangle or circle? Is circle a burnished orange or is it a rock
filled hole in the ground?
If one, or the other, there’s no moral to be taken. Momma cat cocks
her back leg, puts it down again. Motion is thought is my seeing of
it turning. I’d believed the words so long I couldn’t see the
evidence of smudge, orange, a morning light as vivid as Robert
Glasper’s tear, which is the music running down his cheek. The
black cat came inside and disappeared.
Sono contenta che sia stata pubblicata sulla rivista I Martedì, nella rubrica #Poeta in angolo, la mia nota allo splendido poemetto di Susan M. Schulz, tradotto da Pina Piccolo e Lou Vezzali! Auguri a questo libro ecologico, filosofico e originale nella struttura e nei temi.
Poeta in angolo
a cura di Loredana Magazzeni
Susan M. Schultz
3
Eucalipto ed io esistiamo fuori contesto; io sono
l’occhio dell’occhio della macchina fotografica
mentre si fissa su una goccia di resina rossiccia che
proietta la sua ombra come un’esca. Io e il testo non
siamo la stessa cosa, anche se io guardo la sua goccia
nera su una pagina virtuale bianca. Ma tutto il resto
vive nella sua luce. Non è una luce sacra, a meno che
non ci si inchiodi sopra una targhetta di bronzo con
un nome a renderla tale. L’albero è luce nella misura
in cui riflette; stamattina sono luce anch’io, a quanto
pare, col variare del sole. Ieri ho sperimentato una
simulazione d’eternità, immutabile sotto la pioggia
grigia. Stamattina i colori si distinguono. È tutto nel
contrasto. Una donna sta ferma accanto a un albero
(la sua cagna dal guinzaglio rosso strattona), scatta
foto senza capire il perché. Se si tratta di fermare
il tempo, l’eucalipto è già piuttosto lento. Se è per
commemorare il momento, il momento insiste nel
dichiararsi vivo in quanto flashback (termine tecnico
per memoria). Questa è l’eterna origine dell’arte:
l’essere umano che si confronta con una forma che
attraverso di lui vuole diventare un’opera. L’albero
è allora una forma con cui mi confronto? Oppure
la forma è la foto, che opera attraverso di me a un
secondo grado di distanza?
[…]
Da Io ed Eucalipto, traduzione di Pina Piccolo e Maria Luisa Vezzali, Diálogos, 2025
Susan M. Schultz, scrittrice, poeta, critica letteraria e docente di Letteratura Inglese, nata in Illinois, Stati Uniti, vive a Kaneohe e Volcano, nelle Isole Hawaii. Fra le sue ultime pubblicazioni Meditations: December 2019-December 2020 (Wet Cement Press), Lilith Walks (BlazeVox), I Want to Write an Honest Sentence (Talisman) e una serie di raccolte Memory Cards a cura di varie case editrici. Scrive di memoria e di oblio nel contesto di storie personali e pubbliche. Ha diretto la casa editrice Tinfish Press e ha fatto da portavoce per la salute mentale presso la University of Hawaii di Manoa. Io ed eucalipto è stato tradotto per la prima volta in Italia da Pina Piccolo e Maria Luisa Vezzali.
Un piccolo, innovativo lavoro di poesia e filosofia è il poemetto Io ed Eucalipto (edito da Diálogos), un’opera sperimentale della poetessa statunitense Susan M. Schultz, che intreccia prosa, poesia, fotografia come fonti di dialogo e conoscenza. Il rapporto intimo e filosofico tra essere umano e natura, tra civiltà e sua possibile dissoluzione per cause ambientali, fa di questo libro uno dei più potenti e innovativi libri di ricerca, che sa spaziare fra i generi e le arti per avviare un più profondo discorso su natura e umanità. La poeta americana parte dal pensiero di Martin Buber per riscrivere la dualità fra l’io e l’altro, dialogando con un albero, grazie a ripetute e lunghe passeggiate, dialoghi e silenzi, che mostrano anche la profondità e necessità per tutti noi di un diverso approccio alla natura. Il poema si articola in 21 capitoli, ciascuno accompagnato da uno scatto dell'autrice, e invita a una riflessione ampia e approfondita che attraversa il senso della vita, le relazioni umane, l’ecosistema, il desiderio di preservarne pluralità e bellezza, come unica forma possibile di futuro per l’umanità tutta.
We'd no sooner left our house this morning, then Raschelle called to say she saw us in the cemetery. Oh, a woman in a red shirt. One problem only: no dog.
Up the hill at the back of the cemetery, Lilith was getting her good attention from Ola and Hoku. I asked what the odd smell was. They pointed down the hill near the maintenance shed to a puff of smoke rising from the trees. The crematorium. To no one in particular I said, "it's my job to be observant, and I missed that for ten years?" "All day every day," said Ola.
H does not like to drive the gators/carts. Today he was driving with someone who is not his usual partner. When he saw me, he headed up past an arrow pointing the other way, and stopped. "Where's your dog?" he said, sounding worried. I explained that while she gets dental treatment, I paid $5 to get into the Temple as a walk-in senior kama`aina. He looked a bit drawn, said he was being trained in a new job that involved little flags (arranged at the back of the cart). I asked him to say hello to O for me and Lilith.
I visited the temple as a writer doing research, and as a Buddhist, stung by the commercialization of the place where Lilith and I walk most mornings. It was early; I only saw large tour buses on my way out, four of them parked backwards in the recently-expanded parking lot, nestled bumper to bumper behind the orange cones.
I posted photographs. The implacability of consumerism (as Rachel Blau DuPlessis might put it) confronted my every attempt to find a quiet moment, an unsullied image. Even at the meditation gazebo, which was open and--briefly--empty, signs screamed at me not to feed the animals or run or jump or make a lot of noise. I was not wear beach attire. The word "respect" came up more than once. Other signs screamed the availability of niches and plots at "the Eternal Resort." I took my shoes off and went inside to visit the Amitaba statue. Buddha appeared calm, seated on his still lotus. I lit a stick of incense, put it in sand in a bowl beside him.
Outside again, ads for having your photograph taken. You can be "iconic"! You can partake in a "cultural" moment! You can buy something "more than just a photo"! Inside the gift shop, I caught sight of yet another camera, like the ones on polls throughout the cemetery. Cyclops with an eye on you and you and you. Another sign indicated that bad karma comes to those who steal. Who was not stealing?
Her name rhymes with Michaela. She moved to Washington State a year ago to be with her daughter and grandchild, after years of working at Christian school here. But she's back, circling the "heart" (or cul-de-sac) at the top of the cemetery. We'd agreed once that our first impressions of one another were poor, I in my "Make Racism Wrong Again" hat, which from a distance could be confused for what it parodied, and she in her Christian themed shirts. "What's going on around here?" she asked me in her high, but not soft, voice. "The vibe is bad! And where's Scott?" I told her about the trees, the bushes, the missing cats, the missing men, the untended scars on the landscape. She yelled. "But S's wife is here," she said, meaning his late wife's grave. "He comes very early to visit her," I said, so I don't see him. She saw rhinoceros beetles the other day, dead but; Makoa says they've attacked the palms. (Without the lines of palms this place would really have a bad vibe.) There's some guy who comes and injects one of the trees, I noted, but only one it seems.
She misses this place. The image is in her mind at all times. She can't imagine being a grandmother, but she is. When she's here, she walks many times up and down the last hill. After Ola and Makoa come up the hill, she reaches out to give Ola a hug. She'd given him a present when his baby was coming, but she gave it to the wrong guy.
We peel off, but she comes down hill after us, apologizing for saying "you've got to get rid of that cap!" No harm. She walks with us again as far as her late ex-husband's grave on the hill where an American flag flutters. There's a long story there, but clearly her visit isn't one of anger but of a more loving remembrance. Lilith and I walk toward the exit, just past where four cats lie under a gator to avoid the ever hotter sun.
I took a nice photo of Lilith with him the other day; she jumped up onto his cart to get his attention (and mine). At the back of his cart is an upside down broom and a row of flags of different colors. He's the worker who sets down flags before the graves are dug. A young man with a long tattoo down one arm, an earring in one ear. I see him either leaning over to put them down or zooming around not-quite-recklessly on his gator. Yesterday, we met at the back of the cemetery, where the large water feature makes the sounds of running water and revving machines. He asked where I live, and I pointed north toward the townhouses on the other side of `Ahuimanu School. "May I ask how much it costs to rent one?" he asked. "A lot," I said, only later telling him that a three bedroom went for over $3,000 a month. I told him that my kids have to pay nearly everything they make in rent in Seattle and Virginia. Then he asked about mortgages, how much the townhouses cost to buy. I told him that we paid off our mortgage after my mother died. We'd paid under $200K in 2001, but they're now going for well over $700K. He said his dream is to own a place.
The other day I took a photograph of a man wearing a shirt that read, in modified cursive, PRIVILEGE. As if growing through the top of his cap, a pole wore a Hawai`i state flag.
Recently, Richard Hamilton and I had a long discussion of my book, "She's Welcome to Her Disease": Dementia Blog, Volume 2 fromSinging Horse Press.Richard has put the conversation on his substack, which is worth visiting in any case.
The second volume of DB kind of disappeared into the ether, so it's good to see that it's getting notice now. It's the most formally inventive of my books, using bureaucratic forms, photographs, inventories, children's stories and other materials to tell the story of my mother's last years. It's also a portrait of an Alzheimer's community, one in which people have long conversations, fall in love, fall down, and experience emotions. I miss them.
"If I ever met Barack Obama," the retired airplane mechanic said, "I'd tell him how much I admire his oratory, but how much more I admire Michelle's." I told my story about Obama and the skinhead, and then about the time I saw Michelle leaning over to look at me through outstretched hands as she shook mine at Ke`ehi Lagoon. (I felt her husband's hand on mine, but he didn't peak.) Alison, with whom we were walking, counted the six degrees of separation she had from Obama, including a cousin who went to Punahou with him when he was Barry.
Up the hill from those stories, she and I ran into the woman who lives on the corner, her house always dolled up with flags and signs. A loud house. We talked about the heat, how she suddenly wished for the rain she'd wanted to have stop just the other day. She said she ran a lot of things in Honolulu, including the zoo, the Shell, the Blaisdell. She was really happy that they might make the zoo into a sanctuary for old elephants. Her expressiveness manifested itself several times in exclamations of "Oh shut up!!" as when Alison said she'd been at the circus when Tyke killed her trainer and ran out into the streets of Kakaako, only to be shot dead by police (1994). The police are still traumatized, she told us. Not her daughter, who was only two at the time. Her husband had told her to close her eyes when the trainer was killed, and she did. I said Tyke has a memorial stone in the pet cemetery nearby, though her body was disposed of in the Waimanalo landfill, which is somehow in Waianae. "Oh shut up!!" said the woman, who said she'd go look for it soon. She was pleased that the new zoo director used to run the zoo in DC; he also used to work for Obama, who made him ambassador to Australia. A good man, she said of the former president, whose 2008 campaign shirt I was wearing.
"I'm a senior influencer," the tall Asian man said to me and Raschelle yesterday, as he asked me to retake his photograph. It needed to include his feet, decked in bright blue Hokas. The hat he wore over his white hair and pony tail also read HOKA. His daughter works for the company in California, and the photo was for her. He lives on the other side, near Skyline (the billion dollar rail system on stilts). Everything's so noisy over there, he'd rather live over here. Now, if only the Japanese had built Skyline, it would go all the way to Hawai`i Kai by now, through Waikiki (in a tunnel under the Ala Wai), and to UH Manoa. Their speed trains were built in the 1960s and there have been zero accidents. What are they doing putting all those sculptures on the Skyline poles anyway? (I suggested they made them look a little bit less boring.) But with everything so expensive already, why decorate a pole? The trains are elevated so that they don't have to have drivers, he said.
Today, another walker told me that the Chinese man whose odd Christian nationalist patriotic American tomb sits at the top of the cemetery has been detained for a year now. She called up a story from Hawai`i News Now last week. "A Chinese millionaire who has invested more than $100 million in Hawaii real estate is fighting deportation by the U.S. government, claiming he fears retaliation for supporting democracy while officials say he smuggled aliens and has communist ties." You've gotta read it to believe it, and even then it seems fantastical. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/.../chinese-millionaire.../
I showed Bryson the photograph I took of him petting Lilith yesterday on his John Deere gator. "I saw it already!" he said, "Hoku and Ola showed me" He said he'd seen John, who is doing ok, better, somehow has taken a good turn. No, he doesn't have a new job but, Bryson said, as he stared off in the distance, "you've got to put yourself in his hands." He raised his toward the sky.
He was a storyteller. His sentences moved from subject to object and the subjects then turned into pronouns and the pronouns got detached from their subjects until I realized I could never tell the story back. We met him at the top of the last hill; his small white dog ran at Lilith from a white Tesla whose logo bore a Santa Claus hat. He was an Apache from Texas who'd grown up with Mexicans. San Antonio, El Paso. Now lives near the shore off Kam Highway. And he was here to visit his grave plot. It was up for 60K, but he'd bought it for 40K because he's a fully disabled veteran. I walked to the plot with him; a small red flag marked the space, and he leaned over to pull it upright. He wants a tomb, with a statue of the Virgin Mary on it that he'll design himself. And yes, they keep calling to ask if he wants an upgrade.
I asked how he ended up in Hawai`i. The pronouns gathered like a rainstorm over the Ko`olau, while he communicated the story of how he and his wife came into a lot of money. Land deal in LA was at the center of it. "She" paid off everyone's houses, including his and his wife's, and they had a huge party near the graveyard in Culver City, and the other one, where the Jackson Five are. They did the rosary up there. He also inherited responsibility for a Catholic community that sheltered abused women. And he gives to St. Ann's here (later, he'd say that he needed "to go feed the poor at 11:30.") He's not a materialist, like the Mexicans in his family, but so much material came to him through his trail of pronouns. He arrived at how he'd gotten to Hawai`i, but by then all I could think of was Catholicism and land deals in California.
We returned to an earlier topic, the large number of transgender people he sees here. Yes, I told him, they're mahu, and I read him the definition of the word on my phone. They have an honored place in Polynesian culture (if not, alas, in the state of Hawai`i) as third gender persons. He said he supposed it didn't matter much, he was simply perplexed. We exchanged names and took photos; I sent him his as he wandered down the hill with his noisy dog. Also part chihuahua, also a hunter.
Uncertain weather. Uncertain left knee. Lilith's supine on the floor, only half-expecting a long walk, her eyes drifting closed, then open, closed again. A season of new birds; the smaller, duller colored, Brazilian cardinals chase their parents for food, though it won't be long until they'll need to find their own. Mynas squawk. Doves do what doves do, coo. Other mysterious cheepers add to the not-quite-dissonant cacophony.
Valley of the Temples was opened in 1963 by Paul Trousdale, a continental developer who built tract homes on the windward side of O`ahu. Waikiki also bears his imprint. The cemetery pre-dates the Temple that sits within it by five years. I've already written about the Buddhist clergymen who worked at the Temple for many years, ending in 2019, with the death of Bishop Fukuhara. By 2001, the property had been purchased by RightStar, led by John Dooley, a funeral management company (now called "death care" by the happy euphemists who write PR copy). According to one source (yes, I'm doing investigative journalism these days), RightStar had links to a Christian music group, The Imperials. I've been told that there were frequent concerts outside the administrative building.
By 2009, Dooley, who'd been fired years prior, plead guilty to stealing nearly $51,000 dollars from RightStar's clients. After being indicted in 2006, he'd been picked up for speeding in Oregon and brought back to Hawai`i for trial. The fraud had been much greater than that. By 2012, none other than former Governor John Waihe`e had suffered the consequences of being trustees of RightStar. Waihe`e had earlier lobbied for the corporation. Jim Dooley wrote: "Former Hawaii Gov. John Waihe`e and three associates have agreed to pay $1.3 million to settle claims by the state Attorney General that they helped to illegally divert some $30 million from funeral and burial plans sold to thousands of Hawaii residents." Large amounts of plunder came from the trust funds set aside for upkeep of the cemetery, which were paid into by those who bought burial plots. You can see an extravagant pay schedule for Waihe`e and other trustees here: https://www.hawaiireporter.com/exclusive-new-allegations.../
The state controlled the properties (which included other Hawai`i cemeteries on Oahu, the Big Island, and Maui) until the business was bought by the current owner, NorthStar, in October, 2011. This is the corporation headquartered in Houston, with no local ties to this place, which is currently milking the Buddhist Temple for all it's worth (and more--or less, if you're a Buddhist--). The general manager--said to be very honest--who'd repaired RightStar's damage was promptly fired. Plans to raze the Modernist/Hawaiian administrative building were made, but fortunately never enacted. Instead, NorthStar renovated the main building.
When Lilith and I started walking the cemetery in early 2017 there was still a local feel to the place. The Temple grounds were mostly quiet. (I read somewhere that young Barack Obama liked to visit, which tells you something about the pull on local introverts. He and his family visited in 2009, as well.) The graves were laid out mostly according to ethnicity/culture: there are Chinese, Korean, Japanese sections, along with a large Catholic section. Up the hill farther, there's a "patriotic" section that tells the story on a large plaque of how immigrants made America great. Something about "tilling her soil." At the very top, a newer tomb, vast, including many as-yet-uninhabited niches behind black stone, fronted by stone (cement) images of the White House, the Capitol, and likenesses of Lincoln and Washington. Christian iconography is everywhere, as well. It's owned by a rich Chinese guy, young, I'm told.
Something about this last reminds me that there's a UFC event tonight on the White House grounds between fighters who yesterday walked down the Lincoln Memorial steps, flanked by a military honor guard. It's intended to celebrate America's 250th, but just happens to coincide with Trump's 80th birthday.
"Yes, you told me before," I said to the woman at the desk who only wants to live three more years. She's scared she'll live longer, because she's so healthy. Never had the flu, hadn't been sick in over 20 years. (But she needs new knees and had serious kidney stone surgery a few years back, remembers exactly how much it cost.) "It's so hard living in this body," she said, nodding at her walker. Her last roommate left such a mess that her friend's husband came over and cleaned the room out in two hours. It would have taken her days.
She did have two covid shots because she works here. "You know people spit on you when they talk," someone told her. Her face wrinkled. She believes in Jesus, in heaven and hell. Worries about her son, who does not. She prays for him. She left a small church (of 300) because they didn't do any social distancing. One woman died of covid. Now she's at Calvary, where the pastor preaches about the end times. 150,000 tune in on zoom to hear him.
The other year she stopped doing her Christmas tree; she'd collected ornaments for decades. She spread them out on the table, Macy's style, and gave them to her children and grandchildren so they could start their own Christmas rituals. One son is in his mid-50s.
Lilith and I moved out of the way of a woman with a large white flower display attached to a frame. There were lots of funerals today. Lilith and I wandered up hill. On our way down, we saw the man in black, showed him the photograph I'd taken of him, told him S was happy to hear about him, got a quick hug and hurried home in the hot sun. Lilith's on the couch now, nose on her blanket.
“Me and Eucalyptus” by Susan M. Schultz: the metaphysical relationship between man and nature in nature writing
There are books about trees that teach to
recognize species, others that tell the forests as places of salvation,
still others that transform the landscape into autobiography. Me and Eucalyptus by Susan M. Schultz belongs to a rarer category: that of books seeking a relationship.
In the great tradition of nature writing
— from Henry David Thoreau to Roger Deakin, to the most recent books
dedicated to trees as living, symbolic, almost interlocutory creatures —
Schultz chooses a very personal path. He doesn't cross woods, he
doesn't build a botanical atlas, he doesn't tell nature as a refuge. He
remains next to a single tree. A eucalyptus observed day after day,
photographed, interrogated, heard.
From this fidelity comes a surprising,
hybrid and luminous book, which continuously oscillates between poetry,
meditation, diary and philosophical reflection.
The author looks at the tree as you look
at a living being capable of presence. Not an object of the landscape,
but something that exists next to her, in the mystery of an impossible
yet real reciprocity:
“Eucalyptus and I cannot communicate, even if we are in communion.”
Perhaps this is the phrase that best
guards the heart of the book. Schultz knows that the tree will never
speak the human language, and yet he continues to turn to him. He
observes the bark, the resin, the colors, the wounds. He photographs it
obsessively, as if each image could bring it closer to something
essential.
And the images, in these pages, count as
much as the words. Photography is not just documentation: it is a way of
being in the world, of measuring the distance between what we see and
what really exists.
“Focus is presence.”
But the presence never coincides with
possession. Schultz understands it continuously: every attempt to
capture the tree risks turning it into an image, into an “object”, into
something separate. For this reason, the book dialogues underground with
the thought of Martin Buber and his distinction between “I-You” and
“I-It”. The eucalyptus always remains on the border: a real creature and
at the same time irreducible, near and far.
The writing proceeds by lightning,
fragments, intuitions. Schultz naturally passes from personal memory to
philosophy, from the contemplation of the tree to the violence of the
contemporary present. In the book enter the war, the media images, the
technology, the chatbots, the digital photography, the incessant noise
of the modern world. Yet the eucalyptus remains there, motionless,
almost to guard another temporality.
Some passages reach an extraordinary poetic intensity:
“Your silences don’t bother me. They protect me.”
or:
“The tree is broken (however it stands.”
In these sentences you can feel something
that goes beyond ecological discourse. The tree becomes a figure of
human vulnerability, of resistance, of memory that continues to live
despite the wounds.
Yet Eucalyptus and I never
indulge in easy sentimentality. Schultz does not idealize nature and
does not transform it into consolation. He knows that every look is
partial, that even photography can lie:
“To see is already to interpret, and to interpret is inevitably to lie.”
It is precisely this awareness that makes
the book so contemporary. The author does not seek absolute truths: she
seeks a form of attention. A chance to stay by the way without
dominating them.
As in Roger Deakin's most beautiful books,
here too the landscape becomes an inner experience; but Schultz is more
fragmentary, more philosophical, more restless. Where Deakin recounted
the cultural relationship between man and nature, Schultz stages an
almost metaphysical relationship, made of silences, images and
unanswered questions.
At the end of the book there remains the
feeling of having inhabited a space of rare contemplation in
contemporary literature. A place where a single tree still manages to
oppose the speed of the world, forcing us to look better.
And maybe that's what Susan M gives us. Schultz: not a lesson about nature, but an exercise in presence.
The frame shop on Sand Island is located in the grittiest (and that is kind) part of Honolulu. It puts the warehouse in warehouse district; the streets are flat and hot; battered mattresses and rusted metal, old buses and motorcycles seem flung down like dice. Go down an alley, ring a bell and you're ushered into a windowless space that's quiet except for the yapping of a small dog. It's like stepping into a bunker. One of two or three women give you a mask before you enter. There's a large table to the left where they measure photographs and paintings for frames. The last time I was there, the large table was nearly completely covered by a canvas that exploded into the dull room, awash in bright colors. "What's that?" I asked, startled. "That's a David Hockney; someone just bought the painting at an auction." RIP
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.
"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.
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.
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?
"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."
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
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
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.
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.
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.
