FlavorAware: The Rye-Grass Files

Flavor in Space: Ch 53

2010-07-12T09:01:00.002-07:00

How will i leave this room with the sand colored walls?
How will I leave this city of the night?

At some time in the early morning, already the sky is bright. Through the window, slid wide open, I see the fog and clouds moving by. Wind rattles the window pane. I sandwich a paper crane between the window panes. The crane was made from poetry paper when I served tea to my friends here. Once garbage, now a crane, it softens the banging of old window panes.

Hours later, rain is falling in, dusting into the room. Outside, sheets of water pour down. Closing, now it's only heat and sweat that I feel, and a personal silence.

Swarms of dragon flies cluster by the towers of the Truth in Hope temple. The stones of the temple walls are not the usual beige, but almost brown and orange in places, wet, and glistening.

The clouds will break into the old roof of curved ceramic tile, the droplets finding their way through the boards will become rivulets, and old walls will be torn down into sandy mud. Is that the future of this house? I won't be here to see it?

On the other side of the galaxy, having passed by a thousand worlds, I'll land in one far away. And what then of this old room, where I have slept, and awakened. What of this city of the night?

Flavor in Space: Ch 52

2010-07-12T09:01:00.001-07:00

At the New Post Station, the city of the night lies to the northeast, the devil's direction. The city here is called Ohcikubak, meaning both "the city of the bizarre" and "the city of song and dance." By one of its many kaleidoscopic colored gates, a huge phoenix splashes across building facades, the symbol of feminine power.

The streets are named for cherry blossoms, alleys and paths spin off at odd angles, lined with pink billboards, blaring multicolored light bulbs, thousands of technicolored doors, each leading to halls of perfumed parlors, each of these hawking fifty different methods of sweet intoxication.

Names on the signs parley double meanings or allude to sticky garden spots of someone's fantasies...

"Moth King/ Ego King"
"Ms. Crimson's Castle"
"Kangaroo Court Decision"
"Marsh/ Chat over Tea"
"Hamelin"
"Striking/ Diversion"
"If"
"Washing Boat"
"Waiting Dream"
"Apache"
"Southern Seas"
"Orange Prince"
"O2"
"Mana"
"Who"
"Hair of the Dogs"
"Baltimore"
"Desert Inn"
"Euphoria"
"Found Night +1"
"Buoy"
"Cat Root"
"Pony"
"Hide"

The rooms are run by women, women who spill out onto the street, glittering in red, pink, purple, and green. Their heads are layered with long loopy blonde locks. To the right, a group of white collared executives are ushered out blushing and laughing, followed by the crowing of lovelies. To the left, men, dressed in silken suits and robes, eyes beaming from bushy orange manes reaching nearly a foot high above the eyebrows, follow the women, trying to syphon off a section of the the lady's earnings in his own plush bar. "Men" are sexual objects here; if they are not passed up for the objects of the sex shop entirely.

This is the city of flowers, of beauty, of art. Those who work in the city of the daylight, rigid with service, status, and accounts; they come to the city of flowers for drunkenness, for equality, for kinship. They are with their brothers here, cared for by their sisters... for a price perhaps... and hence things are really no different here, just status taking another shape, the servants getting served:

One bar has its name written in fat black plastic tape, "Love and Peace: Life is a bitch but I Love bitch and bitch Love me. It's Your Choice."

The city of the night will only be a place for drunken fantasies bred in the oppression of the daylight, froth boiling over from the control of the pressure cooker of the towers of men, unless...

Unless there is meaning in art, in theatre, in play, real shadow and shade beyond the sparkles of color and midnight lights. This is the sober work of Toulouse Lautrec, Okuni, Picasso, Utrillo, Yoshino, Jakuchu, Rikyu....

Flavor in Space: Ch 51

2010-07-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

At the New Post Station the city of daylight lies to the west. A temple to men, huge metallic phallic buildings scrape the sky. Men and women, dressed in black slacks and white creased button down shirts stream through long corridors towards their planned work hours. At lunch, vast courtyards of grey stone and brick are populated by men and women sitting on mathematically spaced benches, apart, unspeaking. A few fellows puff cigarettes at the corners of long ashen granite staircases. In a far corner lies a marble statue in a house of brick: buxom and round, sexual, yet cleaved below thigh and above belly.

At the center of the district is a the Oykot Prefectural Metropolitan Government Office. It's dual pylons rise taller and grander than any other building around, a feat of engineering, a wonder of power made solid. And below it just to the east, beyond a wide, clean boulevard, lies the broad, oval, Prefectural People's Square and the low Prefectural Meeting Hall of Deliberation. The oval People's Square is lined by eight bronze statues, all of women, six of whom are naked. The ladies flaunt their metal flesh in powerful poses, facing, obstinately, without fear, the massive towers across the way. Aunties, mothers, and grandmothers squat and transplant primped rows of bright red flowers in the most black soil of beds prepared below the statues.

Beyond the stone monument of male accomplishment, just to the west, is the vast New Post Station Central Park. Hidden among the dense groves of oak and zelkova are the hundreds of blue tarp houses in the homeless' towns. Men sit about on benches, staring forward. The soft din of highway traffic is perforated by the constant sound of the crushing of cans, elderly men recycling the trash of public parks and town squares. Laundry- rags, old towels, old office clothes- dries under black umbrellas beside blue domed houses the size of large copy machines. These are the towns of the floating men without companies, without work, without status.

Flavor in Space: Ch 50

2010-07-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

Eventually it seems I have taken up the space man's offer: I venture to a foreign world. This craft, like a long boat, glides up the old canal of Otoyk, and now to the eastern mountains. With what power can we float over mountains? We follow a strange black river.

There are two rivers. This one we see and follow, black or grey, solid; it repels rain or snow, uninhabitable. And there is another river, running deeply in the earth, unseen, ancient, hidden, the final gift of a billion lives.

This other river is a river of power. We use it to fuel our crafts, to lift houses over mountains. Using this river, human dreams take flight as picture perfect realities, metaphor and language take on solid form, imagined heights of status become real physical distance.

The infinitely sided sphere of opportunity, on which, at any moment one stands at the exact center and the exact highest point, is stretched by the power from this hidden river.

Used, the river flows from deep inside the earth into a shallow human world manifesting mutative dreams of power, and then finally dissipating into the sky above.

Light, the intangible thread binding all beings in chains of life dangling in the darkness of space, meets this second river in the sky. The aged chains twist; many break and scatter. How can single generations, single links, handle the sudden encounter with the death gift of a billion lives?

Flavor in Space: Ch 49

2010-05-27T10:41:00.001-07:00

Sitting in the moss, I close my eyes. I see darkness, the void. I wonder if this encounter with the void is where dreams come from. Certainly, we all enter it to sleep, and certainly to dream.

The forest stretches on for a long while. Groves of various shapes and sizes. Suddenly, the forest ends abruptly at a cliffside.   And standing here, on this cliff, I look out directly at the sea. In the distance, waves are hardly visible, but I can hear them crashing into the rocks below. I feel like I've been to this cliff before, perhaps it reminds me of my home world where I was raised; a world, which, although still green, is now beginning to dry out and golden. Or perhaps it reminds me of other ocean-sides I have visited across the galaxy.

The wide, endless sea reaches the horizon, the curvature of the globe, the end of perspective. Only a small rocky path appears to lead down the cliff. Why not take it? The path is narrow, lined with fat succulents, green with purple and pink lining. There are blooming flowers too, in bunches, and sand has accumulated between roots and rocks. For some reason I imagine that if these little nooks were wide enough, they would be a delicious place to lie down in: sheltered from the wind, but within earshot of the beating of the waves.

The path ends right there on the cliff face. No where to go. I'm faced with space. Blue grey sky, hazy horizon line, and blue grey sea. No more flowers, no more leaves. The end of the land. Stretching out one hand I swap at the air, loose, fluid, nothing to hold onto. I grasp the roots and shoots on the cliffside for support. I hold fast here for a while, facing the space before me with the stone mountain behind me, trying to comprehend something un-comprehensible.

If I were to make a living in this little spot, sleeping on a nook of sand, I would go out to sea and wait for creatures to rise up from the depths and bite. I would clamber over rocks to find a few vegetables to add to my meal. Perhaps I could collect the eggs of seabirds who fly out fishing each day.

What is life like to face space on all sides? To rest on collected pebbles and sands on the eroding cliffside? Is it a drab world of rainy ocean storms, ceaseless waves, rivulets eroding the stone?

As I wonder, a space ship appears on the horizon and glides over to this spot. The ship beeps and flags to me. A savior, he thinks himself, perhaps. The driver opens the door and shouts:

"I can take you anywhere. In a day you can be anywhere in the galaxy. In minutes I can bring you anywhere on this world? Of course, every journey has a price. Of course, every mile has a time to cross it. All you have to do is wait!"

I call out, "You've given me an opportunity to travel space again. I can be a tourist anywhere. But how do I know you won't just fly me around up there for a while and then drop me in some nearby valley? I'll think I've gone across the galaxy but I'm really just in the thicket I went through yesterday!"

"Look Mister! Your in between a big rock and a bigger ocean. You're at the end of your road. If you stay there too long you'll starve to death, or maybe roll out of bed, if you call that a bed, and fall into the crashing waves one night. I'm doing you a favor. Take it or leave it. You spend all day looking out at the sea and sky, but now you can cross both in a matter of time. What was once endless is now simply a figure of time and money. My friend, you've got nothing here and so nothing is keeping you here."

I looked about my little crevice of sand. I had wedged some driftwood among the rocks and it formed a small half shelter from the occasional rain. The sticks were already falling down. My stove was wet from the dew and although still a bit warm, it no longer smoked. A few fish bones and egg shells lay nearby. Its true, there is nothing here. In a day, sand and all might very well slide away.

He went on, "There are space stations up there, sir. Fabulous rooms, bubbles, entertainment centers! From one of these stations you can see a million worlds below you, all you have to do is flick the channel. If you want watermelons you can see watermelons. If you want ladies you can see ladies.   If you want to see the streets of some city, I don't know why you would, you damn well could! All the knowledge of the world is at your disposal from up there."

"What is seeing a book if I don't know how to read its stories? Why watch streets that are meaningless to me?"

"Patterns buddy! Aren't you interested in beauty, in philosophy? In having a good time? Ride the patterns? Listen to the music that you personally prefer!"

"Sure, I want joy..."

He knew he was starting to win me over. I saw that the sky was not endless. It was a measurement of weather patterns, of hours of travel, of quantity of fuel burned. The sea was no longer a deep solid color with unknown depths. The fish too can be measured, and they can be caught for profit.   Space, it too is something I can cross to get to the next mall, the next job, the next time. The space man started to play some music on his radio. He urged me to find something I like.

Then I heard your voice. I felt the sorrow and joy of memories come to life. I don't know where exactly your voice seemed to be coming from: whether from the rocks, the succulent plants, the little red flowers that bloomed this morning, the forest up on the mountain, the sea, the sky, or the silence itself. There is nothing for me here, which means that I've got myself all together right here and now, and I suddenly decided to present myself in answer.

I turned away from the space man, and scrambled back along the little path, up towards the forest, the bogs, the insects, the people. The man flew off, back to some distant bubble I suppose.

Flavor in Space: Ch 48

2010-05-22T00:33:00.001-07:00

Some time ago, I made the decision to land here in this world. Having passed through clouds, I now let the swirling skies roll on high above.

On the surface, I started walking on grassy paths. The tips of green leaves didn't rise above my ankles and the pebbles lay beneath my feat.

Slowly, as I walked through meadows and fields, I entered thicker brush. Grasses rose to the knees or even the hips at times. Burs clung to my pants. Butterflies flew about my chest. Crickets bounded over my shoulders. In a marsh, cattails and long reeds began to rise above my head. My feet sank into a slushy brine of larvae and minnows.

Now, I walk in a forest. Long shadows have melded into one shadow with breaks of light. Branches curl patterns into the sky. Early summer leaves twinkle in the daylight and shiver in the breeze.

What I once thought was grass five inches high is now tall pines and a wide canopy of elms. I walk in this world and examine each magnificent tree, climb onto each great boulder.

I wonder if, in time, I'll sink into this moss as well. It will seem a forest.

Flavor in Space: Ch 47

2010-05-12T21:47:00.004-07:00

I awake in a bath of pale light and birdsongs. I lie in bed recollecting, and recollecting continues until finally I find myself again in this sand colored room.

I'm not sure how I got here, although I could probably find a story or a chain of happenings if I examined my memories.

I fold the blankets and bedding around me. Linens dapple with pools of shadow and cascades of light. I suddenly wonder if I've seen linens like this before. How can any experience (and people pay a lot for experiences!) compare with this simple encounter?

How many days has it been since I have been here? How many days has it been since I have returned here collected for such an encounter. So many days of waking with the next chore weighing on my mind: breakfast, work, or even a future plan- all without the sudden freedom of the present.

Flavor in Space: Ch 46

2010-05-12T21:47:00.003-07:00

The first thing one notices is the purple falls hanging about the delicate green that caresses the tree tops. The fuji plant dangles and twists. It cloaks the cedars and the oaks and a hundred other brothers and sisters who I can't recall by name.

The path becomes a canyon. The sky of deepening blues becomes a luminescent mirror path above. The fuji walls tumble down the tree top trellises. The purple falls tumble silently and motionlessly down the canyon walls.

These falls, the fuji blossoms, could also be compared to ephemeral grapes. They have the form and grace of grapes, but they will evaporate entirely in a few days, leaving only lonely grapestems.

It is somewhat widely known here that the fuji will soon wither if cut and placed in water. Its vines need roots in soil.

Beneath the green blanketed canyon walls wind a tangle of vines. Tender vessels lead to spindly half hardened links which connect to yet more solid woody tubes, and these become the thick vines that dance through the space between the canyon walls. The vines weave tightly by trunks of countless other beings, tying the fibers into a supporting net, and finally, these vines coalesce in the great trunk of the fuji: a mass of curling wood rising from the forest floor.

I came to the Place of the Spring Day in twilight. The dirt road is lined with a thousand ancient stone lanterns, unlit mossy sentinels making the way.

The Place of the Spring Day is the home world of the fuji. The paths and ways become the canyons of purple falls. I came to the red walls of the palace and peered through the blue green window slats. In the courtyard, light filtered down from the dusky sky, illuminating the curves of vine snaking along the trellises, lighting the delicate branches of ephemeral purple fruits.

The sky fell dark and the canyons of space became less defined. I could no longer tell what was space or canyon or soil, or stone, or person: they all became shapes of shadow between flickers of light. I traced the sinuous curves of wood-flesh, I followed the dances of vine lines, and I found the trunk and the root and the soil.

Flavor in Space: Ch 44

2010-05-12T21:47:00.001-07:00

Scents of cherry. The pink clouds fill the street and canal, exploding silently and slowly. From shrine gardens they unfold onto the banks of the river. Warm wind licks the clouds and sends wisps of pink fog up. A cross wind shatters them. They scatter, dancing down as pink snowflakes.

Birdsong echoes in my ears, permeating even the privacy of my sand colored room. The scented air, the saturated evening colors that linger all day, the pink clouds, the whole affair leaves a trace of sweat on the back of my neck.

How can anyone sell spring? How can anyone bring a blossom to bloom?
An idea, an energy, is ludicrous to sell.

"It's not just a season. It's a feeling, a state of life," says my guide, the woman living in the Great Heart Temple.

We had been discussing the hanging scroll chosen by her father, the venerable monk whom everyone refers to as "king." The scroll reads:

Flowers bloom,
From heaven,
Spring

By the poem is her arrangement, big black leaves, revealing bright white cherry blossoms, a frozen spring. She's a certified teacher of this art, but she doesn't want to teach it. "How can you judge someone's art?" she says. Her teacher loves green and black things; it is from these simple hues that "you can construct your world," she is told.

Like the other temples on the mountain of the Wondrous Heart, the entrance to the Great Heart Temple is stark: grey of stone, beige of sand, brown of the wooden gate. The first few gardens are also fairly stark, stone, moss, dark forests of cedars. There is one small courtyard that houses an old tree in a bed of moss. Wizened woody boughs with dark green leaves, each year it briefly blazes bright red, a wildfire of blossoms. I'll return to see it.

Hidden in the deepest garden, wedged in a grove beyond the secret tea room, rests a huge cherry tree. When I visited, it had not yet bloomed; it had not yet drawn the pink cloud.

Such is the style on the mountain: outward appearances are all grey stone, green pine, blackened wood; deep within there are hidden gardens of pink blossom, waiting to unfold a secret drama under the sky.

Flavor in Space: Ch 45

2010-04-28T01:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in the lonely black, words are sent out, long and slender, glistening in starlight. They adhere to capsules, floating junk, ships, and people. Strung together, they become lifelines, webs hanging, nearly invisible.

For some, these words are lies. Crawling along in the dark, they pull themselves through space hand over hand, foot over foot, clinging desperately to the web.

I found myself feeling my way across one of these webs. At the center the lines and patterns became a mesh, a mat, a sack, a blanket and there, lying at the center was a human being, a beating heart. The rhythm of the beating matched my own and, seduced by a kindred human spirit, I rested there, with my legs, hands, and back on that webbed blanket, sinking in. I tried to move but my legs were sluggish, my hands were entangled. The more I struggled, the more the I sank in, sticky web looping around my chest and neck, now slimy and glistening.

Now I cut myself free, and I'm falling. Back to my own world, back to the surface.

I land in this old garden. I sit in the half dark of the night on this old wooden balcony, black and smooth from generations of feet.

The sky is all grey and orange. Patter of rain falls into this gloom. When I came here first almost a year ago, I moved the rocks of the garden a bit. It was an old patch of mud and trees before, a back yard, an unused spot for the collection of broken roof tiles, planters, shells, rusty sheet metal, and half rotten wooden boards. I moved the stones to open up a channel for a river, a small piece of an endlessly flowing river. White water rushing soundlessly under the house, under the neighbors houses, slipping around rocks, boulders, stepping stones, mountains, ferns, and the old hairy palm tree that was once crawling with caterpillars. The soundless river slips by it all, and then on under the next house where the old servant lives and cooks delicious smells every evening. The river plunges down under screens and reed blinds. It flows over the bones of dead, hastily buried after the plague. The white river rushes by, endlessly cleaning the bones in the mud and gravel and the gloom and the half dark.

I long to leave my little perch and dive into the foam, dip under the surface, and learn the forbidden secrets. But I know, now my place is here on the old causeway, sitting in the garden, listening to the rain.

From the web in the dark above, my friend sends down a line. She climbs down to dangle on the silver tendril, on haunches. I don't notice her until she calls my name. Her eyes are wide, her face is innocent and she says she was scared, alone in the dark.

From my gloom I look across at those starlit eyes and I know that sitting here in the garden is not nearly as scary as climbing back into that web.

I draw some soundless white water and wash the glistening slime from my insides and out . I know I will have to bathe many more times. The guck of one web easily becomes a catalyst for more, spun from my own saliva coated words.

Flavor in Space: Ch 43

2010-04-02T22:47:00.001-07:00

I realize that art is free. An artist does not work for pay, she cannot work for pay. For pay, art will not come. If a great artist receives gifts or pay, it is a useful convenience.

There was once a woman who danced on the riverside. Her name was Okuni and she was once a shrine maiden, but for some reason she decided to leave the cloister and dance on the river side for a crowd. Okuni didn't dance for pay, she just danced. Her dances mimicked the powers of the day. Sometimes she danced as men with swords and egos. Sometimes she danced as cowards, sometimes as the vain or the young or the old. She could become anyone, and, I imagine, she just loved to dance. Her art became known as Kabuki, and it was eventually made illegal several times.

And so I live in the city of flowers, where art was once the currency. Flowers and beauty filled rooms and streets with dreams. The atmosphere was such a heady broth that even water could be sold here. People might pay to enter a room or see a show.

But to tread a path of flowers or walk in a gallery of blossoms, that was free. The whole main street, the Flower Seller's Street, was a great hall of cherry trees.

I wonder where Okuni is today. I arrange my flowers, fresh from the riverside, in the little red bucket by the street.

Flavor in Space: Ch 42

2010-04-02T22:46:00.005-07:00

A week later we talk about selling water. Water is, basically, free. But, there are places where the atmosphere is so beautiful, where customers experience such a good time, where the cushions and tables and walls are so stylish, where the girls are so kind... in such a place men will pay for water, and they will pay far beyond its normal value.

The chemist takes his friends from the capital there. They are rich and they buy water. "Buying water is for gentlemen," he says. "A gentleman is a man with strict morals, so only gentlemen should be allowed to buy water. After all, all gentlemen want to have affairs with beautiful women."

"There are those who don't have morals, and they are people who don't respect others. They should not be allowed to do this. They should not be allowed to buy water because they don't respect people."

"Rich people usually are gentlemen. Rich people tend to have good morals" he says. I disagree with him, but he tells me, "Perhaps, but there is a trend that rich are good, and that is why they are rich."

Flavor in Space: Ch 41

2010-04-02T22:46:00.003-07:00

I know a chemist who is interested in sanitation. Clean water for the world is what he wants.

He describes, "There are people in the Middle Kingdom who live near factories and are poisoned by bad water. They need clean water and I want to design chemical filters that will give them clean water." Forget that the filters are disposed of in the Middle Kingdom. It is a big place, in its vast factories, under its poison brown skies, workers assemble the parts for the whole galaxy. "They need clean water," he says.

I reason with him, "In Aidni there are many people who bath in water that you call dirty and they even drink this water, but they don't get sick. Each, in their own body, have helpers who break down the inedible things in the water. There are those who live inside the stomach and make the water clean. Was it not the same here in Nohin?"

"It is true," he says, "that at one time here in Nohin, here in Otoyk, we once had these helpers too. We each had a fellowship in our body that broke down the poisons and made our water clean.... But we don't have it anymore. Our water is cleaned for us in big tanks with many machines."

"So we have lost our fellowship, and we can't drink the water from the river anymore? How do you imagine the future? Will we develop these helpers again? Will we eventually be able to drink the water from the river again?"

The chemist stops his talk, and decides to come back in a week and tell me. He comes back with his decision, "It is much more efficient to clean all the water for all the people with one standardized machine. It is very difficult and very dangerous to develop cleaning devices in one's own stomach. To develop personally in this way would hurt one's stomach everyday for years, and maybe some people might even die."

Flavor in Space: Ch 40

2010-04-02T22:46:00.001-07:00

Towers rise up into the white air in the distance.

Cherry blossoms are blooming and I stop beneath a tree. It is here that I receive a call from my family back across the galaxy. My little black plastic box vibrates and pretty soon I'm chattering away in my native language with my mother and father.

At times like this, it's nice to float. To flutter in the air just a few feet from the ground, head high, listening to the voices of home come across waves of light and sound. We talked for a long time.

Flavor in Space: Ch 39

2010-04-02T22:45:00.002-07:00

Floating through the broad spaces of the 5th street boulevard, a vast highway lined with high towers and filled with bubble mobiles, one might catch sight of the huge concrete building complex. This is the Otoyk City Citizen's Institution for Sickness. Massive beige walls lined with identical, un-openable foggy grey windows stand at 90 degree angles. A fortress for disease, it's towers rise into the grey sky. I rarely pass it when it is not raining.

At night, a line of small black spaceships wait at the entrance. Each ship houses a lonely man, waiting to fly someone somewhere. But here, as everywhere else in Otoyk, there are 10 small black ships for each customer who needs to ride. To drive a little black ship is a life for those who have lost their "meeting grounds," their work, their reason. For a while I taught had a student who was one of these men. He was not interested in my Nacerima language; he was, at one time, an interior designer and we talked about design. Eventually, he came less and less frequently and even told me that he was losing his mind and spending time in an institution. Then he came no more at all.

I have a friend who lives in a bubble tower of aluminum and plastic across the street from the Citizen's Institution of Sickness. Climbing the stairs is like climbing a ladder into space. It's dizzying to look down at a small stream far below. The stream is coated with concrete and lined with fences, to keep people from getting to close to the surface of the earth. Beyond the stream sometimes I find my way into the old dyers quarter.

Between the abandoned workshops and dye factories, old market streets still wind through the clusters of old houses. I walk them sometimes, and I feel a joy doing so. Despite the emptiness that has fallen like twilight, the narrow alleys and curves make for exciting walks. Each store sells some hidden delicacy crafted by ancient hands.

At an old fruit stand an old woman, unable to stand, swivels her body on a low chair in the shade. She barks orders at those, a bit younger than her, who can still move and help the occasional customer. The oranges are a good price, and so are the golden fruit. I buy a bag of fruit halfway between lemons and oranges. An old lady recommends them to me; she says, "I like the bitterness."

Flavor in Space: Ch 38

2010-04-02T22:45:00.001-07:00

Those who lived by the muck of the rivers. Those who sipped tea in the old huts nestled in bamboo groves. Those who rose and fell like mayflies selling spring. Those who sold fish and meat and shoes. Perhaps they knew how to see a river pebble as a mountain, perhaps they knew how to expand a tiny space into a great hall. But to those who lived on mounds of earth they called mountains, to those who felt they were higher and deserved to be, to those people, the mucky beach pebbles were just slimy and needed cleaning.

There were those who preached about equality, and they, in flowing robes, donned the closed toed shoes of foreigners. Their children would go on to build towers that scraped the skies and eventually jet away in bubble mobiles. They decided that people in the north and the south, people in the mountains and the valleys, people who cut men and people who cut meat should all be proper citizens. They decided that crowded alleys and small wooden huts were not worthy of citizens, whether well established or newly recognized. Teams of bulldozers entered the old neighborhoods to wipe away the blood and toil and tears. Towers were erected in alignment with the sun.

And now they say we just shouldn't talk about it. Some things are better kept as secrets. "We all look the same anyway," they say. Take a new name, take a new job, find a new reason. Let's forget the surface and its rivers of tears. Face the sun, the stars, climb the white towers into the white sky.

Flavor in Space: Ch 37

2010-04-02T22:44:00.000-07:00

I live here on the surface, where the old walk the narrow streets, or a few children play ball in a distant alley, as if to hint at the swarms of the past.

Towers rise into the white air in the distance

I was placing flowers in the bucket in front of my house, working out messages with sticks and curves. An old woman walks by with her dog. She smiles, "What a waste, putting flowers in the bucket there..."
I said, "I was hoping people in the street could enjoy them. After all, every house has a bucket like this in front. It's always full of water anyway." But she didn't hear or understand me.
She said, "Yeah, there are not so many children here anymore. I have grandchildren but they live some place far away. There used to be kids everywhere here playing and running around. Its very quiet now."
"When was that?"
"About 40 years ago."

And so I find myself living on a surface, quiet and textured, like the old wooden boards of my house, or like the beige stucco that has aged with a few chips and holes. The wind rattles my old glass windows that slide on a rusty iron track. There is rarely sound of talk or laughter, although the walls are thin and papery.

I wonder when people will land and come back to the old ways that wind through this quiet city. And so I fill the bucket with flowers and imagine the festivals of the future.

Flavor in Space: Ch 36

2010-03-18T23:53:00.001-07:00

In the thicket of bamboo, light filters in, scattering blotches of shade on the slow running waters and soppy river banks. There are warrens of old houses, narrow paths, dirt lanes. Butcher shops are on every corner. I sit in the dewy shadow of the old thicket, watching the river plants blossom.

The poor, the outcasts, all kinds find a home on the slippery mud shores. The great central market sprawls close by. Creatures are busily being separated into meat and guts. Some men race about pulling big carts loaded with boxes of fish and hunks of meat. Many more fly back and forth in their sleek green-blue "cat-trucks," picking up big boxes of fruit or anything else.

At the edge of the market was once the huge public toilets. A cesspool of steaming crud. The children avoided this place as much as possible, perhaps because of the smell, perhaps because of the danger of falling in, or perhaps because of the men who frequented the place.

Across the toilets stands the back entrance to the flower city. From this perspective, surely the flower city is a dangerous and foul place, where women crawl about like spiders waiting for their pray to flutter in. A raucous quarter of night-walkers, half lit noodle shops, and rusty fences.

Deep in the bamboo grove not too far to the East, men and women are drinking tea. Their ancient practice at bending space speaks the language of plants and flowers; and it expands little corners in the thicket into drinking halls and philosophical clubs. For many, their studies take them to the hut of the Arrow Maker, a small woman with black clothes and a sly smile. She is of unknown age, she appears young, she is polite, and she pays for my education here. She teaches how to communicate with color and shape, how to carry on the ancient meetings in the groves, and how to tell time by watching living beings.

Rising beyond the thicket of huts and bamboo is the great Western Truth in Hope Monastery. The front gates open onto the ancient artery of the city, a canal lined with stone and crisscrossed with bridges. Today, the canal is a formality, although big space cruisers and cargo vehicles still buzz by in a constant stream. There are many tall buildings and towers in this area of the city today, although the Western Truth in Hope Temple is still a giant among them. Its pillars are massive tree trunks. Its halls scrape the sky. Huge gold prism lanterns line its balconies. In the center of its courtyard is an ancient ginko tree, fat limbs the width of hogs hang down to the ground. In fall, as pilgrims idle about, basking in the size and grandeur of the court, the broad branches of the great ginko shower gold leaves on the eager crowd.

The temple was built about a thousand years ago on the mausoleum of a fellow, Shinran, who started a new way of thinking about passing between worlds, a new way of thinking about human suffering. This fellow was once a monk in a high mountain monastery, seeking to climb beyond human suffering by way of effort and airy height. But spending each day at such heights, climbing closer and closer to the triumph of the heavenly void, he felt it was just an egotistical game. There were other teachers; Honen had descended the mountain and was teaching a different way for people to travel to the other world: not by triumph, but by trust. Shinran joined him. This new style was persecuted and the new teachers were exiled to far off places. There, in a cold far off world on the "shadow side," Shinran considered himself neither monk or layman and began to raise a family. He gave himself a new name: the Bare Headed Fool. He traveled through the fields and swamps, along the riverbeds and roadsides, teaching his doctrines of trust to everyday folk, and translating the ancient glyphs into normal understandings.

So today, the pilgrims come visit the grand court of the Western Truth in Hope Temple. They seek pure land. Some say it's in the West somewhere.

Ironically, just to the west of the Truth in Hope monastery, lies Shimabara, the flower city. A garden of pleasure for all fools, monk or layman.

In the flower city, trust allows the passions themselves to become a vessel, like an empty gourd floating in a stream. Trust turned ukiyo- "the suffering world" into ukiyo- the "the floating world." Here in the world of river beds and bamboo thickets, it makes no sense to crawl up a remote mountainside. Asai Ryoi, a visitor to the city 400 years ago, wrote: "If you live in this world, some things heard and seen are called good or bad, everyone is interesting, and you don't know what will happen beyond the space of time one inch wide. Your stomach sickens to think of something as firm as the thin flexible skin sliced from a fresh gourd. At this moment, to view the moon, or snow, or flowers, or crimson leaves, to sing songs, drink, and float along, now, small personal worries and foibles are not troublesome. Don't sink; be like a dry, empty gourd in flowing water. This is what is called the floating world. Listen to this, and truly, you can feel it."(Asai Ryoi Ukiyomonogatari trans. Waxman).

Here, within the willow guarded gate of Shimabara, many have found a home when they could find no other. Among the thickets and overgrown berry bushes, mud and fallen leaves, here ghostly spiders spin invisible webs that once caught brilliant butterflies of all shapes and sizes. Here, the women were once the greatest lords and they "brought castles of men crumbling down." They were the "boats" floating along on platform shoes a foot high. They floated through the "water trade," dancing in "fry houses" where men competed for a glimpse of their beauty. They could pull their partner to the farthest reaches of the void, to bob and dance on the river like the empty gourd.

Here, today, in the old mansion, I drink green froth with the monks of the Truth in Hope, learn to listen to the changes of flowers, and "linger in the beautiful foolishness of things."

Flavor in Space: Ch 35

2010-03-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

On the mountain the rain carried on, softly. Bright grey clouds were a white roof for the vast gardens of the Monastery of the Wondrous Heart. I stayed there for a long time, sitting on the wide balconies built of ancient wooden boards worn smooth and black. I looked out over the mountains, swimming in a sea of impermeable whites and greys. Each crag hovered like islands.

Some say the mountains were really the fins and spines on the back of a giant submerged dragon. There is one room in the Temple of the Peaceful Dragon, a room often closed and dark and cool. It is said that the dragon is frozen there, steaming among boiling clouds, caged. It is also said that there is another dragon, a huge beast, white with long tendrils and mammoth, wise, beady eyes. One man, the famous Looks-for-Seclusion Field-Hunter, was called upon to summon the dragon to the main hall of the monastery. For 7 years he waited, baiting the dragon. Finally, when he saw it, he captured the dragon and bound it to the main hall. I saw it looking down at me from the heights of the hall.

The monastery is a world of white, grey, tan, and black. Long paths of grey granite weave between sand colored walls. Short, stunted pines are dwarfed by massive black halls. Each temple is a monochromatic concentration, broken occasionally by a rainbow of blossoms. When each arrives, it is greeted with awe and joy, a conversation piece between early morning prayers.

For days and nights I breathed the warm air of the mountain- scents of blooming hydrangea, rain, incense.

Many climb the mountain of the monastery of the Wondrous Heart. Many stay at the Great Heart temple like I did. Many sit and sit, stripping down their mind, searching for nothing, or perhaps clarity.

At the very top of the mountain is The Hut of the Eastern Ocean. There, I once passed the highest monk of the mountain. He was dressed in purple robes and he had a bloated bulbous alcoholic's nose. He was on his way home and I was on my way out. I had entered to see the gardens, of which there are three.

One is empty. The garden of the mind. Standing on the balcony of the hut, looking out at this garden, all I saw was whiteness, waves and waves of grey and white. Perhaps it was clouds, perhaps it was sand, perhaps it walls.

A single rounded stone pool sits at the edge of the balcony. a few scraggly pines and electrical lines can be seen far below on the mountainside. Beyond this, there is nothing, just emptiness. The white void reaches out until it becomes the sky and the sky reaches out until it becomes empty space.

One is a lush. The garden of the body. I picked my way among huge stones wet with dew, dense forests, blooming hedges and overgrown fields. I passed fat stone lanterns and broad bulging stone washbasins.

The last, the garden that links the first and the second, sits in a courtyard of elegant wooden walls. It is the garden of the spirit.

At first, it appears to be a familiar scene: a view of distant mountains rising to the surface above clouds. Yet, looking longer and longer, the clouds look more and more like waves, waves rippling from each stone, each island, each mountain. Below the surface, surely, each stone is linked, like mountains rooted in one earth.

But in appearance, each floats in space, sending messages to one another with waves. I have seen this garden a thousand times, mandala become physical reality: drifting space bubbles, space ships, trees in the mist, friends scattered across the galaxy, communication by telephone, energy rippling through the universe.

Flavor in Space: Ch 34

2010-03-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

I slide open the window.

Along the little path by the house, an old, hunch-backed lady sits on the cinderblock wall. She looks down at her wrinkled hands. She wears a gold ring. She straightens her gnarled fingers, adjusting the ring, still holding fast amid waves of sinew and bone.

Close to my face, a tiny mayfly climbs the windowpane.

To be transformed into ephemeroptera, the mayfly; to shimmer and glow like the last light of dusk lingering in distant mountain haze; to forget the long day passed, and the long night ahead.

These are some ways to describe the word they call here "kagirohi." I saw the word, scrawled across an old book. Photographs of the Great Lord amid shadows and flickering candle light, or half hidden by thick black locks, facing herself in the salon mirror. Photographs of winter scenes on the black, wet streets, snow quickly becoming slush in the dark city while still pristine and bright on the distant mountains. Photographs of groves of weeping cherry trees, swaying full bloom in mists of grey dawn.

As I poured over the old pictures, the Great Lord told me stories of her youth, stories of the tangled web of time and encounter that make up this world. Stories of which many certainly lead down dark, secret paths. Paths that I did not have the linguistic skill, or nerve, to venture down uninvited.

In the sacred book from this world, the Tale of the Shining Prince, the prince describes the telling of tales: "the gap between enlightenment and the passions is, after all, no wider than the gap that in tales sets off the good from the bad"(Genji Monogatari, trans. Tyler, p.461).

Perhaps this spider-web-thin line is what inspired Asai Ryoi to enter and write about this neighborhood, Shimabara, when he, 400 years ago, changed the "sorrowful world of the passions" into the "floating world." In Shimabara, and the numerous "flower cities" that developed in its image, passions themselves become a vessel, like an empty gourd, floating on a flowing stream: "If you live in this world, some things heard and seen are called good or bad, everyone is interesting, and you don't know what will happen beyond the space of time one inch wide. Your stomach sickens to think of something as firm as the thin flexible skin sliced from a fresh gourd. At this moment, to view the moon, or snow, or flowers, or crimson leaves, to sing songs, drink, and float along, now, small personal worries and foibles are not troublesome. Don't sink; be like a dry, empty gourd in flowing water. This is what is called the floating world. Listen to this, and truly, you can feel it."(Asai Ryoi Ukiyomonogatari trans. Waxman)

The spirit: the lively butterfly, or the momentary mayfly, takes flight.

And what if you commanded an army of butterflies? What if, with your arts, your make up, and your silks, you could turn another dirty, leaf eating worm into a fluttering, dew drinking, pollinating beauty?

Those who managed to conduct the transformation, and reap the profits, grew wealthy and powerful. In a world of black, grey, white, and brown; flashes of color, and flutter of wings can make even a fallen blossom appear to return to the branch:

The fallen flower, to the branch,
Rakkwa eda ni
If I saw it return- oh!?
Kaeru to mireba—
It was only a butterfly
Kocho kana!

(recorded by Hearn, Kwaidan, trans. Waxman)

Now, nearly everyone floats, orbiting distant worlds, communicating along tubes of light and sound, mind to mind, the body a flimsy image.

But here, in the old empire of ephemeroptera, only the "Queen Bee" still flies with gossamer wings. Yesterday, she was transplanting her flowers. One little plant went from one small pot to another small pot, now in the company of two other little colorful blooms.

Despite the bright, reflective, glamour of her ancient wings; amid a vast forest of floating trees, the Great Lord appears small, and still.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 33

2010-01-24T17:30:00.003-08:00

The night was thick and heavy in the cold air of winter. A sliver of white moon peered out from the dark blanket. On the world of Bending Sight, Truth and I climbed the mountain of the Great Shrine.

We passed through the red frames. They start large. A huge crimson gate marks the entrance to the mountain. We humans likewise are small, our heads barely above the stone base of the tree trunk sized posts. And then suddenly, after about 40 large frames, we pass into a tunnel of small ones. Here, we humans almost scrape the top of the frame with our heads. After this, the changes are not so sudden as the frames wind up the mountain. Sometimes we walk tall, sometimes we walk small.

Each frame is a moment, like a picture in a story book. Each frame is a view of the past and a view of the present, erected by some business, admitting the power of the Great Shrine. Each business represents a world of customers, clients, and workers. Some businesses are old, holed up in some ancient section of a distant world. The same families have been working together, serving each other for generations. Their way of life seems as natural as the bends and waterfalls in the valley where they live, breathe, and die. Some businesses are new, representing some new market that has suddenly opened, some new power source that has been tapped, some new invention that digests that power into various conveniences before it becomes waste.

The frames pass away too. Mostly built of wood, they rot and crumble. The whole path is like this, frames in some stage of passing away.

I walk through many of these picture frames, tasting various views along the way and participating in various feasts. I walk here because I have wishes. I have dreams and wants. My own business is that of the Nacerima language teacher, but I have other business too. I am investing here. I am learning here. I don't forget the shape changers.

After all, the Great Shrine of Bending Sight is home to a shape changer, Lord Inari. This is his home world.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 32

2010-01-24T17:30:00.001-08:00

The Otoyk Central Market is a place where a great deal of creatures pass from life into death. You see them swimming around, breathing their last breaths, their scales shiny and twinkling.

And then you see them, often in pieces, lying about on broad metallic tables. The carcasses are preserved, I suppose, in various ways for various dishes and uses. I saw a man carting away some great skeleton, knotted still with bits of sinew and flesh. A few scaly cousins watched on from a small plastic box, breathing their last breaths of sea water.

Really, the market is not a morbid place. As men and women are bustling about in plastic boots and skirts, or warming themselves in front of fat outdoor heaters, or passing a box of preserved fish from some distant world, the smiles are unstoppable, the laughter bright.

I arrived this morning in the market from the space above, where huge carriers careen by lonely human beings at high speed. I made my way down to the market then, between towers reaching up to the sky, silver steel, pale glass, stone tiles. Drifting down closer and closer to the surface.

In the market, there is something about the rainbow puddles on the long concrete floor, and the look of fish eyes, blankly staring from disembodied skulls; there is something that clears my cloudy mind.

And I settled again on the surface here in my ancient neighborhood, among wooden houses with heavy black roofs. I came down from the grey sky of the morning, so unexpectedly cloudy compared to yesterday's cloudless day.

No amount of pondering can prepare oneself for an abrupt change in weather. The heavens swirl. Like a fish still in the sea, or a box, I am foolish to think I can choose one sky or another.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 31

2010-01-18T07:30:00.002-08:00

In autumn, the men of this old neighborhood in Otoyk take the portable shrine through the streets. The shrine, hidden for most of the year, is a small golden house. It is a center of this place, a center of gravity. Although it may have appeared as if we heaved it high into the air of our own effort, actually, we danced around it, drawn to its gravity at times, and, at times, orbiting in ecstatic free fall.

Early in the morning I went to the Base of the Mountain, the house of two elders. Here, I was dressed in white shorts, white shoes, a white festival shirt, and a white sash. Mr. Base of the Mountain and I posed for a picture. I carried a little smiling child in my arms, the son of one of my students.

Myself, along with a few other able-bodied men from the neighborhood were drawn here by the gravity of the shrine. We arranged the apparatus for moving the little golden house, we drank beer, and we ate fat, white, rice balls. The sun was shining brightly.

We walked slowly, holding onto the shrine. Slowly plodding through the streets, to houses old and new, to the temple, to the long black latticed Horn House, to the broad Correct Face street. We stopped often, heaving, cheering:
"WASHOE!! WASHOE!"

With us, wearing our white clothes drenched in sun, cheering and sweating, the gold shrine brought the center to each corner of the neighborhood. A new beginning, a new binding to ancient ways, unknown people become neighbors, neighbors become friends, friends renew bonds.

The party followed in a room with a long u shaped table low to the ground, big wooden tubs of raw fish and vinegared rice, and more than enough beer. People kept refilling my glass. People of different shapes, sizes, and status met. I knew just enough of the language of words, and fish, and rice to understand the important details. We meshed like a puzzle, pieces plugged in, we wove together a ring constantly refreshing itself, coming and going, dying and living. Here we are, home in the center, for a moment, weaving this ring of invisible, delicious strings.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 30

2010-01-18T07:30:00.001-08:00

Autumn comes back to me at times. The present pools lucid, but I can't quite dive in, held by memories, waiting to be told.

Old Awaziurak town square sits on the surface, but it lies half in shadow. The massive Awaziurak space station hovers about fifty meters above. The town has long been a favorite resort for the rich of Nohin. It's old station, frozen as period architecture, stands in the old square. The new station, towering above, is a reflection of the old, only fifty times larger. Instead of wood, it is built of glass, steel, and granite. A massive double staircase stretches from the hovering station to the surface below. The stairs alone are half the size of the whole town square. They cast a long, cold shadow.

From the stairs, a visitor can see the broad valley cradled in mountains dyed deep crimson. In the distance, massive Mount Amasa puffs away volcanic breath into the sky.

Being a resort planet, the people of Awaziurak prize their closeness to nature. The great landed estates are still there, each the center of some invisible fiefdom. Now, each manse floats just amongst the treetops. This accommodates the occasional spaceship when the masters arrive, fleeing some distant, stress filled world. As I walked, passing under the shadows of the mansions, floating just out of reach, I saw the occasional resident. On some jaunt across the forest floor, his feet pattered across colored leaf covered paths and thick carpets of light spattered moss.

Following the long straight paths through the crimson forest I found a stream lined with especially beautiful views. The path was narrow, just wide enough to squeeze by a photographer hunched over his tripod capturing red leaves.

At the end of the path stood a beautiful woman. She was dressed in a long white wedding dress. As she posed for her picture, she spoke in some dialect of the Central Empire, conversing with a flock of slim men in tuxedos. Blue sky above, red mountains behind, the long lake before her reflected crimson shapes. Her black tresses rippled down below her shoulders, splashing onto her sparkling white dress. Like a living photograph, she floated separate.

I had arrived in Awaziurak in early morning, riding above a wakening world. I climbed the staircase into the sky and left from the massive station of glass and steel and stone. I boarded a speeding metal bullet. Zip zip, black flashed by, perforated by momentary glimpses of small red, yellow, and then emerald worlds. Suddenly I was in vast Oykot, the Eastern Capital of Nohin. Here I would paint fat black cherry trunks in the High Field, beside a bustling temporary market of foods from around this Empire at the Base of the Sun.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 29

2009-11-30T19:45:00.000-08:00

How can we pass by a hundred worlds without noticing? Some notice. Some hear calls from these other worlds; and some, from their sleep, awaken.

I sat across from Truth and Grace. We were at a place called Gusto, a "family restaurant," floating in space just above northern Otoyk, outside the gates to the monastery of the Wondrous Heart.

We had parked our craft below the shop and then climbed the stairs up into the eating room. The cuisine was standard. In Nohin there are a hundred thousand other Gustos or Gusto clones- Friendly, Joyful, Seizeriya. They all offer flavorless meats in gelatinous sauce; rice polished, bleached, and gooy; colorful laminated menus; and of course, all you can drink soda.

Truth and Grace are artists, potters. They are learning the ancient arts of putting fire to mud: molding soil and mineral into stone of human design.

Truth used to work at a desk in Akaso, her energy poured into data processing for a big machine. Worthy, perhaps, but she heard the call of the worlds below and beyond. She remembered her talents, and she decided to answer those voices.

Grace has traveled the galaxy, working in space or on various planets. She has picked apples, cleaned houses, and now, she follows a spinning clod of clay, shaping it between slender fingers.

I was having fun and I told them they should "dig deeply from the well of shadow"- something funny. But really, it was the tea that said it, speaking through me.

Truth comes from a tea plantation, a place that refines its product like a fine wine, only using the leaves of certain fields on one big mountain. The green tea is bitter, astringent, tastes of vitamin C, like edible pine needles, yet as deep and as flavorful as grape wine. The lady of the house poured the tea, in traditional style, just enough water in the kettle, steeped quickly and shaken intensely three times for every last drop, although not one leaf is allowed to come through. Ice cream, of three flavors of tea- roasted, green, and the soft tips of the leaves- was served on wafers, thin and beige, that crunch and melt at the same time. I had seconds too: heaps of ice cream, bitter and sweet, on a waffle cone, dark green like the long globular rows that line the mountain fields.

Truth's mother remembers walking the old streets in the center of the town, Trust Enjoyment, in the world of Nourishing Joy. She used to buy goods there, and meet friends in the long yard of the old shrine.

The shop windows are boarded up now, the path is nearly empty. We floated through the lanes in our rocket, squeezing through its tiny human scale. A river runs through here, and with it, perhaps, hope for new life.

At the center of the town is the shrine lined with tall pines. By the shrine's tall stone gate, where 6 roads intersect, a huge leafless persimmon tree stands, heavy with orange fruit. Truth looks at it, so full and ripe. "It gives me a bad feeling," she says. Who will eat it? The square is empty, the persimmons will fall and rot alone.

We land here and step into the pottery museum. The rooms are filled with fantastic pieces of earth. Dipped in "medicine," they glow. Raw, they show the red baked soil of the land, streaked with melted ash, green and gray.

The pieces are here: lanes, river, bowls, tea, fruit, Truth, Grace. Where is the link?

This morning we stopped by a gorge, livid with red leaves, and climbed the long stone staircase up the mountain. We washed at a cool spring gushing out of solid stone. A small monastery sits, nestled among colorful branches, at the top of the climb. In the courtyard was a small bronze child, rubbed dark. A saint of mercy, Ojizosama. His red and white bib was draped around him like a cloak, his big eyes were nearly shut. Before him was a fan, singed by a small candle, and on a pillow, a big fat persimmon as round and large as his own head. He stood on a pedestal of stone and moss. As colored leaves fell in the courtyard, he seemed pensive, almost unforgiving. I walked around him counter clockwise and said a few words.

The monks were carrying big pails of water up the mountain on foot. As they went, they lit incense along the way. In the fresh mountain air, among the dark scents floating up, I had the feeling that I could really live at this temple, that I could land on this mountain and stay. But, under changing leaves, following a local guide, Truth, Grace, and I came back to the gorge by the river that cuts esoteric shapes out of the solid rock.

Back to our craft, we flew to the Peach Blossom Valley and the Miho Museum. The valley is home to the religion of Natural Agriculture. We parked amid bushes and moss. At the gates, we waited for a small car to pick us up at a circle of white bricks. The car took us through a strange tunnel of brightly lit metal and out across a wire bridge. The museum is designed by the galactic artist I. M. Pei. It sits in the saddle of a forested ridge. Its door is an automated sliding glass circle, always separating but becoming whole again. The grand foyer faces out onto the far valley. The vista is framed by a pine like an ancient painting.

The exhibition was titled "Jakushu: Wonderland." Jakushu lived 300 years ago, a time of realism and renaissance. He grew up the child of merchants in Otoyk, quickly mastered contemporary and traditional styles, and then injected a sense of mystery, a sense of the work of the "underthink." He created a wonderland. We watched Jakushu's cocks and hens dive about golden screens. Grace nodded her head silently to each painting.

I wonder if Jakushu brought the birds to life, if they brought him to life, or if he just captured the birds, alive, forever. Perhaps, in the last 300 years, they have inspired a thousand other birds to take flight.

The crescendo of the show was the the arrangement of the Whale and the Elephant. The greatest creatures of land and sea, frozen in gray shades, they appear colorful, pink, blue, white, soft, playful, yet almost brimming with mysterious power. Behind them, strange soft hills roll into the horizon. It is not clear if these hills are of sea or land. It had to be careful not to fall into that odd world.

And then, at Gusto; Grace, Truth, and I ate syrupy foods on plastic trays.

As I sit in this park now and write this, the memories float about me. The frustration of living in such separation dangles like threads. The pages of this notepad fall among fallen yellow ginko leaves on the skin colored sand, one leaf next to another.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 28

2009-11-26T09:48:00.001-08:00

I ate a camellia tonight.

Soft petals of pink encased pure white beans, liquified just enough to feel their original shape dissolve against the tongue. I closed my eyes and ate, breathing in the scent and sensing the texture. Mr. "Bridge Entrance" said, "You are really tasting it now aren't you?"

The word for this variety of pink camellia, sazanka, brought to mind a song, taught to me by the lady next to me:

kakineno the hedge
kakineno the hedge
magari kado turn around the corner

takibita the fire
takibita the fire
ochibata of fallen leaves
atarouka won't you warm up?
atarouyo let's warm up

kitakaze the north wind
piibuu piibuu
fuiteiru blowing

sazanka camellia
sazanka camellia
saitamichi blossoming path

takibita the fire
takibita the fire
ochibata of fallen leaves
atarouka won't you warm up?
atarouyo let's warm up

shimoyake frost bitten
otete ga hands
mou kayoui are already itchy

With the talk of frost bitten hands from washing every day in icy water and the sound of the wind blowing down a cold road, I could really feel the warmth of the room. We were not burning leaves, just drinking tea; but I could imagine a pile of leaves before us, smoldering away, warming out tired bodies.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 27

2009-11-26T09:22:00.001-08:00

The walls of my living room are also doors, dark wooden doors with visible grain. Although cut and aged, these doors can always lead to a new room.

Once a tree has been felled, or an animal killed, the woodcutter, the butcher, the artist goes to work to bring the dead into the human realm. The surface of this planet is writhing with those who would decompose and eat the newly dead, quickly turning them into a storehouse for life. And so, the artist must hurry to avoid rot. His workshop is a place of knives for slicing, peeling back, and revealing. Sliced pieces hang about. Straight regular cuts contrast with serpentine vascular curves, grain in wood and flesh. To become a part of a human home or a human body a creature must pass through this process of transition; it's grain is revealed. The butcher shop and the woodworker's shop are two places where creatures are turned into art.

I watch the walls of my living room now, dark and swirling with grain. Each panel is a woodcutter's painting. Together the panels create doors and a ceiling. The doors, some open now, some closed, become walls and a room. Combined with the woven reed mats, cushions, and table, these parts become a room. To eat here is to experience the harmony of many voices.

When our actions ring among a chorus of changing voices, daily activity becomes entertainment. Long ago, some fellow realized that people could derive this satisfaction of interaction through buying new things. Stores were collected, shops were designed. Eventually every human need was met by an ever changing world of brilliant objects. Products were even created to quickly become useless so as to encourage more buying, and hence, more entertainment, more enjoyment.

Yet, the old doors, stained and smooth by a century of hands, can also be entertaining. Cleaning the doors, I interpret the lines and grain in the current context of the room. The story can replayed a dozen times. It was played a thousand times before I arrived.

Many people have come and gone from this place, their thoughts and words filling the air between the old doors. Each time, in their opening and closing, the doors lead to a different room.

I will tire from this game when I no longer realize I am in a different room. Only when I am tricked, by similarity or in-attentiveness, into thinking that I have been here before, will the room not be remade. Then, I will come back to walls and closed doors, silent and old.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 26

2009-11-19T19:54:00.001-08:00

There is a place in my house where I sit and draw- the living room:

Tracing, following lines. A road of mud curves down the plaster wall. I follow it. The black leg of the table is a gentle silhouetted curve in front of the straight wooden window lattice. The two cloths of the old door hanging, connected at the top, fall a gentle beige, a hand's-width apart. They divide an image of a great tree, sheltering two little girls from a sudden rain. Another girl, caught in the sprinkle, dashes onto the cloth from somewhere out of sight. She's lost her sandal playing in the fields.

I follow the lines, winding my eyes around the room, showered by patterns. Standing in the rain, opening my mouth catches only a few drops, hardly quenching thirst. But my body is mostly water, a little soft bag, carrying liquid from one great river to the next.

The shower of pattern rains on me now. Like liquid, it pools, and my pen drinks from it. And then, onto the empty white field I draw the lines again. Consumed, digested, and given back, liquid pattern.

Sometimes I remember having tea:

Stop for a moment, the shower continues. We are here, dry, under this tree. A ginko, the leaves are bright yellow now. Many have fallen and carpet the ground. The reeds and thickets all around are walls of our hut. We build a small fire and begin to boil water. I can hear the rain falling on the old logs, branches, moss, mushroom caps. Steam curls from the kettle and disappears.

In a little black lacquer box, you carry green powder. Under the lid, is a mountain surrounded by darkness. In the ancient way, you trace invisible lines in the air, folding the kerchief, wiping perspirations away. Your hands work their arts and our little dry corner under the tree starts to stretch and bend. The closer you follow the ancient lines, the more you can play with them, pushing and pulling borders into curves.

You pick up an old spoon, a wand of bamboo. Uncovering the lid of the mountain, you scoop, and drop the green powder into the bowl. The bowl itself is rough, ancient, baked earth from this soil under this very tree. You dip a long bamboo ladle into the kettle and drizzle the liquid into the bowl.

A soup of patterns is whisked into a froth: fine bubbles of green, thick and creamy, milk of that mountain surrounded by darkness.

I have been eating; sweets: sticky, crunchy, and ripe; fruits fallen from the tree beside us; ginko nuts in bean paste. And now I hold the bowl, misshapen, rough, and cracked. It is my entire vista, a bright lake in an earthen valley.

I drink from the green pool, three times, and pull the froth down with my breath. The sound is like a thousand tiny bubbles popping, little worlds I can barely see and will never know.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 25

2009-11-01T08:15:00.002-08:00

Some say that the beat of the drum is like the beat of the heart. We humans resonate with the rhythm of the universe. Today, I came close to a loud drum.

We traveled together, "Wishes Come True," "Second," "Compendium," "Beautiful Freedom," and I. We flew there, of course. In a big jet we darted out high above Otoyk. The sun was shining and we slid through clear blue sky. Looking out our window, "Second" named a few old cities as we passed over them. Soon we left Otoyk altogether and reached the nearby world, Akaso. Akaso is an urban world, famous for its gaudy fashions and colorful personalities. In all of Nohin, the people of Akaso are said to be the funniest. I grew excited approaching this new world-- but we flew right over its vast cities-- we flew across the sea to a small island spaceport. Ringed by palms, Osigan is in a beautiful spot. The weather could not have been better. In every direction bright blue sky nearly met bright blue sea. In the distance we could see far off mountains and floating cities.

We were drawn by the beating. Amplified drumming and amplified joy shined out from Osigan like the sun shined down from above. Throbbing crowds, burning with the beat, yelped and rocked with the drums. We reached our hands to the sky, drenched our bodies in sunlight and swam in sound. The energy and music poured out of the huge speakers, washing over us. Wave after wave crashed by, resonating, running in every direction, and dissipating into thin air and beyond, into space.

So many youthful, smiling, joyful, beautiful faces I saw on that island. The joy burned bright; a globe, a star.

But what about the world below? What about Asako, and the other worlds from which these people came? The joyful dance and song is missing there today. The young people are missing there. Once they called from house to house on narrow streets, singing love songs; now they are only beautiful bodies, swaying to an amplified, universal, electronic drum.

The beauties of a thousand worlds burn here. But the fire does not catch, the way it would have, long ago. When the plug is pulled late tonight, when the battery dies, the fire will dim, and the dancing will stop, still, cold, and dark, in the vacuum.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 24

2009-11-01T08:15:00.001-08:00

In the dark, I rode for nearly an hour. I stopped in a grand book store for a while, then stopped and landed on the street in downtown Otoyk. Some say it is easiest to live on the surface when you live in the center of a city. I say it is easiest to live on the surface when you recognize the place you live as the center of a city. Either way, I only landed for a short while. I met friends and we clinked glasses of dark foreign beer. It was a Nacerima style bar with peanuts, stools, and high tables. I soon set out again, riding into the dark.

Eventually I landed at a small space station dangled above the forests, mountains, and rivers of Otoyk. My friend met me at the landing pad where travelers were refueling their vehicles. We walked through concrete and plastic tubes to "The Village." A few young people sat on the balcony peering out at the dark sky above, planet below, and steel bubble in between. They welcomed us with a smile, "take it easy, enjoy..."

The entrance was dark and dim, but loud music echoed out. A cluster of people stood about in the shadows, talking under the music. Four artists stood crouched around a large frescoed tablet. They were painting to the music, and we all watched. The painting, brilliantly lit, took various shapes and designs over time. Artists switched topics, areas, colors. Sometimes they sat on couches, sometimes they spoke to guests.

I spoke for a while to a carpenter-architect who knew the Nacerima language. He designed and built the interior for "The Village." He showed me a nook with rounded earthen walls, reed mats, a low wooden ceiling, and an alcove for flowers and seasonal artwork. As this party showed, his spot was a hit with the guests.

Now, he is working on a treehouse project. "There are no restrictions on treehouse architecture in Nohin," he said, "no regulation." He and his friends have complete freedom as designers. I imagined the treehouse: high up, but still attached to nature, a place to meet, a place to play, a place to a share a moment.

"The Village" reminds me of a city I lived in back in Nacerima. Both were full of young people, together searching for a way to live on the planet, a way down from space. "We want to live close to nature!" the architect said.

But, ironically, "the Village" is an orbiting thing. Or perhaps, it is like the treehouse, close to the tree, close to the soil, but still above it, still escaping the laws and rules of the planet below. If the world is full of treehouses then what will be left on the ground below? If we fly from tree to tree, then everything beneath the tree slowly erodes until finally, the tree falls.

After the show, I glided back home through space, high above Otoyk. If I had walked on the surface, it would have taken me all night to plod back through the sleeping city.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 23

2009-11-01T08:14:00.000-08:00

Living on the surface means finding amazing food- narrow streets, rich flavors, and friends.

Today I collected a sackful of oranges, and another of persimmons. As I filled a tall green bottle with bean milk at the bean curd shop, I chanced upon my neighbor. She was buying a mash of sweetened beans garnished with onions. The shopkeeper, my neighbor, and I stood about chatting. The shop doubles as factory and street facade. Factory worker, shopper, shopkeeper, and passerby are all fair game for hellos and friendly conversation. I finally gave in and bought a little tray of mash. The dish was a rarity- one can only stand around in front of a delicious treat so long before picking up a pinch.

At home, as I tasted a thick slice of orange persimmon and filled a glass with white milk, S. Pillier came over and settled across the table, behind an arrangement of drooping yellow leaves. Soft white light filtered in from the the frosted glass of the old, south facing, kitchen windows.

He spoke, "So here you are, in this world, Otoyk. You have arrived. It tastes good to eat well, doesn't it?"

"But there is more to the world than just eating, tasting flavors. More than just sharing your table with friends, guests, and strangers. "

"You must do something with the food in your belly." He picked up an old Kazantzakis book I had been reading. His cunning eyes scanned the pages until he found a passage of Zorba's words:

"Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and others, I am told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men- I'm not the worst, boss, nor yet one the of the best. I'm somewhere between the two. What I eat I turn into work and good humor. That's not too bad, after all."

Sometimes in books we find reflections of ourselves. Sometimes we find reflections of the kind of people we want to be, cannot be, or simply admire. Here, reading the words of Kazantzakis, the character of that old book had come through time and paper to finally bubble out of S. Pillier's own fleshy mouth. That old voice became S. Pillier's voice.

As Kazantzakis' character began to dance, I remembered dancing on Machiit. It was a dark winter night. An old man was singing an old song, his voice bellowed, calling out to the Tital Tital people, waking them up. We would soon go and meet them in their villages to dance with them and eat with them. In a line the men were dancing, I was among them. Across from us the women were dancing. We hopped, bounded, flew. My long necklace followed the movement of my arms, up and down. We breathed hard, you could almost hear the hearts beating, and everyone was smiling. The floor beneath our feet began to bounce. The whole house began to move, resonating. We traveled together, there and back again, screaming out with joy, waking the villages along the way.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 22

2009-10-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

I watched a film from another world, Grubsennahaj, also called Isnazm, far on the other side of the galaxy. I know nothing about this place except for what these recorded stories tell me. Orbiting Grubsennahaj is Otewos, a huge space station. The people orbit, disconnected, often without work. Many don't have rockets, they ride mass transit when they travel. The boys have taken to an extreme sport, "trainsurfing." The kids are acrobats who play with death. Who would dangle themselves outside a speeding rocket?! Clinging to metal, to a small window, or to the roof, they feel the rush of the void flying by.
Watch the film

Flavor in Space: Ch. 21

2009-10-06T20:05:00.003-07:00

A dryad has her tree. When she dies, so does her tree. And so people here in Nohin have their houses.

What is not passed to a child for his or her own use, passes away. A house is like an outer body and the body in this world passes from parents to children. From old branches spring new limbs. Where limbs don't continue, the branch stops, frozen, suspended until it dies.

I have had the privilege of living in someone else's house Our time together has been a pleasure. But, I am not a citizen of this world, nor a branch of this tree. Although I have enjoyed this brief meeting, this house is not a part of my body. I cannot save it from destruction.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 20

2009-10-06T20:05:00.001-07:00

Walking the path of the silver temple, one passes a field of sand raised to reflect the moon. Geometric patterns are carved in the sand, soon to fall away.

The path is narrow and paved in stone. Its banks are braced with moss, striped according to the flow of rainwater down the hill. The moss seems to be a living impression left by the touch and flow of rain, now dense and dark green, now thin and neon teal.

To my right I look out across a vast vista. I am above forests, above clouds. In the distance, the roof of the silver temple floats, geometric, crafted, and human. Beyond, the towers and roofs of the city stretch for miles towards far away green and blue mountain ridges. I feel like I'm flying, above it all, a giant.

I look to my left. Here I am solidly on the forest floor at the base of a huge mountain. I can't make out the tops of the trees, they are so high above me. In fact, I can't even see their higher branches, only trunks stretch up and up into a canopy of green. I am crawling at the base, like a shrew, or a beetle. What I think are trees might even be moss and I am the size of a flea.

My friend, a native of Nohin who studied with me in the Nacerima empire, says almost jokingly, "Here we are, in between- in the palm of the Great Boddhisatva!" We laughed.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 19

2009-10-06T20:04:00.001-07:00

Two years ago, when I came to Nohin to study, I was fresh off Machiit and I was unwilling to actually land on a new planet. Convinced that my way of life in space was essential and unchangeable, I tricked myself into believing in artificial gravity. I floated in space, but I mistakenly believed that my own space ship contained my own gravity. From high above I watched the beautiful worlds below longingly, frustratingly, without knowing why. I believed I didn't need a planet to orbit at all. This is a very dangerous belief and it leads to long lonely journeys with extreme space sickness.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 18

2009-09-27T08:24:00.001-07:00

Tonight I rode into the dark. I have been staying for a few months on the surface here in Otoyk. Living on the surface we are constantly reminded of loss, and I was tired of it. I had been alerted to the fact that this small piece of Otoyk would soon be obliterated. I tried to retain what was here, but bound in my own contracts and relationships I can only pull so many strings before my own web begins to unravel. I must choose wisely and the stress had me frustrated.

I set out. Gliding by vast rumbling cargo vessels, gliding by brightly lit bubble stores, I came near the night side of a planet. I hovered above the surface for a while, just a few meters up above the forest canopy. I could hear chirping crickets and wind rustling the foliage below.

Then off again, through the dark. I saw a cluster of bubbles in the distance. They were houses, a small orbiting space station. What they were orbiting I couldn't tell, so I rode closer. I squeezed by bubbles and capsules. Nestled there is a small globe, a small patch of earth. It is bordered by a gate, tall, broad, granite, and hung with white paper tassels.

I parked, hopped off my vehicle, and walked through the gate. Several ancient trees tower, their roots holding the soil. Built on the land between them, an old wooden stage stands. In the distance, under a floating florescent lantern two youths rested. One balanced on his vehicle while the other sat on a bench, his head was in his hands. This place is a shrine. At its center is an enclosed granary, a box of spirit. This granary is raised just off the ground and hidden behind trees and veils. I approached the inner shrine and looked through the fence. Light filtered through illuminating white streaks in the thick mat of leaves on the ground. Standing there I looked up. All around this little bit of earth, houses rise up, tightly clustered like barnacles.

I had arrived here randomly, cutting through the silent darkness. But the roots of the trees go deep, they are timeless. This timelessness makes this place a center, the center of its own world. It gives it gravity.

I decided I had better take off, so I departed. Leaving a center is disorienting and I mixed up my directions. What I thought was East was South and what I thought was South was West. I tried to go home but I flew in circles. Passing floating restaurants and shops, brightly lit and flashing neon in the dark, I wanted to land. I saw people inside big fish bowl windows laughing, eating, drinking. Momentarily I wished I never knew what it was like to live on a planet, I wished I didn't know the sadness of passing wisdom, obliterated. Finally, seeing big floating metal signs, I found my way.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 17

2009-09-27T08:23:00.002-07:00

It was evening when we arrived at Imihsuf. The road from the station goes past small shops, now closed, and snakes up the mountain towards the Great Shrine.

Here they worship the fox. And here, at the great gate, there are a two foxes that keep watch. Sitting on their haunches they stand taller than a grown man. One holds the jewel of wisdom encircled by his fangs. In the jaws of the other is the scroll that contains the secret to his teachings.

Foxes are not dogs and they don't easily give their treasure away. It must be bought or earned. And so the businesses of Otoyk pay handsomely. For each, there is a red gate erected on the mountain. The gates, built of hopes and dreams, create paths and tunnels that wind up to the summit.

As night fell, we dove through the gates, climbing the mountain. We numbered 8 and for a while I walked by a friend named "Wishes-come-true."

There are many stories of the mountain, stories of fox's tricks, stories of men and women possessed who tell fortunes, and stories of those who seeking possessions.

We reached a clearing in the trail. Looking out beyond the trees, the darkness of sky met the darkness of earth. The fox was playing a trick. What was once earth, dark and silent, was filled with lights like stars. What was once a sky bright with moving celestial bodies was now only a paste of pale grey black.

We summited, entering a small shrine with a small mirror high in the boughs of the roof, paid our respects, and descended. We descended into space, black and filled with burning globes, satellites, and buzzing rockets.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 16

2009-09-27T08:23:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I don't know if I am in space, or on on the surface of a world. Space elevators, stations, capsules, and pods rise in chains through the stratosphere and deep into the black beyond. Likewise, spindly towers, orbiting platforms and airships float above and below.

Sometimes I reach what appears to be a solid patch of earth. Park like, grassy fields, stately trees, all quiet and serene. I might wander here for a while. To my surprise, I suddenly come to the edge. It was not the surface of a globe, but only a wide veranda on a high tower.

I might find myself in a grove of trees indistinguishable from the neck of a vast forest. Then, jetting away, I see the grove from a new angle. It was only a ball of mud and stones cradled in wire suspended by vast metallic cables hooked to sky scrapers.

In search of the planet below I descend- into clouds, smog, past rainbows of technicolored vehicles. I land on numerous floating islands along the way.

On one, by a strip of sycamores and junipers, I take a bit of soil in my hand, a few twigs, flowers. By pulling up these weeds, have I just created one more separation? One more island? Or, by touching these beings and directing them, do I build a conscious bridge from one ledge to another?

Perhaps there is no planet at all, I wonder. Just swirling sky, above and below.

But time still passes. Each day the clouds pinken and the sky darkens. I can only go so far in each day. I measure islands in days and stories.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 15

2009-09-17T08:27:00.003-07:00

Walking in the forest as a child I longed to be able to read - to read meadows, grasses, trees, bark, footprints, moss. Many years of coming to the surface of the planet Dumbe gave me a keen sense of recognition. I could walk in the forest without being bitten by insects or breaking out in a rash. From time to time, I even ate a few plants by the path, fellow space travelers scattered from the other side of the galaxy.

I knew the characters of the forest, I listened to their songs, but I could not read their story. I did not know their drama. Here in Otoyk, I am learning to read and the write, learning to compose.

I live and work in the home of my teacher, a famous artist. This weekend, I went to a show of her work. It was a fantastic exhibition of botanical arrangement housed on the sixth floor of the Great Circle, in the heart of the commercial district.

Artists from across the city attempted to tell a story with nature. Some works were glamorous, others outlandish. Some harnessed the wildest and weirdest creatures of the forest for display.

My teacher's work was a small globe sitting in a dark wicker vase. Reading from left to right, it told a tale of summer and fall, with hints of other seasons to come, a story made of wispy dreams blowing away and delicious temptations, ripe for taking. It began with translucent dandelion puffs on graceful stems rising out of a sphere of dense green clover. This became punctuated by rough green leaves that, reading further, burned yellow, red, finally jutting confidently into the air. These ardent branches revealed gobs of juicy red berries. The work was assembled from seemingly ordinary creatures and would have seemed quite natural in the woods.

My teacher used the language of nature, the language of these particular beings as they express themselves, in order to to write the story.

So I study the characters, I learn their drama, and eventually, I hope, I too will learn to write a play complete with a chorus of voices.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 14

2009-09-17T08:27:00.001-07:00

While floating in space, there is an inclination to "plug in." Without bindings, there are no strings to strum and devices deliver music to our ears.

Sealed in ship, pod, or the velvet silence of the space walk, humans desire a bit of entertainment. With the click of a button, music flows into our ears. It comes from artists across the galaxy, "superstars" mostly. With a potential audience of billions, artists rise and fall with their country's economic and political tide.

Drifting in the void, with no fellow traveler, blaring the seductive tones of a superstar deep into our eardrums makes perfect sense. Yet, even on the planet's surface, even when surrounded by buzzing strings and singing choirs, I sometimes "plug in." For the space traveler, the voice of a distant star is comfort.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 13

2009-09-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

"Po-kko-ri..."

In this perfect early fall cool with soft chirping of crickets and night clouds above, I can almost hear the faint echo of high platform shoes clicking on the stone cobble lanes.

"Po-kko-ri..."

-The sound of the tayu as she carefully steps. My neighbor, now an old woman, is a tayu.

The dark slats on on my own house tell a story, as they do on Sumiya banquet hall, or Wachigaya, where the rings overlap as two umbrellas might, for a moment, in the rain. To some, these slats were bindings.

There are many bindings in this world. The reeds are bound into the mats under my feet. The blinds are grasses bound with strings. This room is bound with beams of lumber doubly bound in plaster. The picture is bound in a frame. Even the hanging scroll, delicate, is bound in silk. The garden fence, bound spicebush, came undone long ago, its reeds tatters now. When the bindings of this house are finally undone, it too will crumble.

What are my bindings, I wonder? Those who worked here years ago were bound almost in cages. Beautiful things pacing behind bars, like tigers, or laughing, fanning themselves, like monkeys. The flowers in the vase too, cut and bound, bloom fantastically and then wither.

Space is supposed to rid us of bindings. An endless void, natural, beautiful. From space, our planet is a flawless blue-jade sphere.

We brought our human ways into space: families and passions, but the void always calls from beyond big glass windows in plastic frames- "Run! You can be free! Depart!" And so many make their lives on distant planets, distant cities, and distant space stations. The price we pay, of course, is risk of a kind of space-sickness.

The tayu here on this planet represent a refined aesthetic. They have the beauty of nature, but it is prepared as entertainment, suitable for human tastes. They manifest the other world of ecology, of mysterious happenings, of spontaneous blossoms, encounters, and they present it, to be consumed.

In space there is a similar practice, one no longer attached to place and season. Girls gather in fancy space age bars, dim blue light, plastic tables, seats, glistening ice in cylindrical glasses, over which delicious liquors are poured. Customers come because they suffer from space-sickness.

In this sickness they have not dreamed in weeks. If they do dream, their dreams are lost on the long commute to the space station, or they dry out in the void, just before waking, never pooling in the mind like morning dew.

Those with space-sickness seek a friend, a conversation, anything. The girls serve a concoction of make up, primped dresses, and giggles. In return, they make more money in a month than they would in a year, and they only work nights.

With this money and time they can fall through space, weightless, floating... The black depths with pinhole stars swaddle them, or swallow them. This darkness might come to resemble bars, black slats, like the ones here in this old neighborhood, on this planet.

There is a story of two lovers who free themselves from such a prison. I saw it in a film called "Sakuran." At the end of the film, when the fox god's old cherry tree finally blooms two small white blossoms, the heroine and hero escape. They were bound in beauty. She was a worker who started low, but became a high tayu. He was the son of the company owners, just as much a slave to the industry. They found freedom in love, unbinding.

So in an old house, still bound and intact, in an old neighborhood, its streets tied as ribbons between black tiled houses, I hear the click clack of high platform shoes on stone cobbles, binding and unbinding in autumn air-

"Po-kko-ri"

Flavor in Space: Ch. 12

2009-08-31T20:23:00.002-07:00

We walk surrounded by death. Only a fine, invisible line separates our worlds.

We all have the power to kill, and to die.

As life goes on, a million packets of life, "beings," cross that line. A million contents of those packets are exchanged.

Our life, our memory, is incidental, and an incredible blessing.

Thank you God.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 11

2009-08-31T20:23:00.001-07:00

The old shape changers of the worlds were not totally erased.

The machines that build and maintain the space stations need fuel, parts, energy. And so the planets are scourged, the mountains toppled, the forests cut, the marshes drained, and the shape changers living in these worlds are changed too. Their bodies are broken, their hearts and minds stupefied. Yet their powers remain, although in pieces. Re-animated by the lust and greed of people similarly beaten, the shape changers become golems.

The golems take many forms, and they can infect anyone. They prey on the young and old, the robust and the sickly.

Blasted worlds, writhing with hordes of sick, hopeless people- these are the golem's breeding grounds.

When space people leave their ships, touch soil, planet, and folk, they risk encounter with these golems. I risk such encounter.

I should have read the signs. Signs of ghosts. The fan at the festival drew a strange smile, fearful. The gift I brought from Nacerima had triggered some memory of a golem in a childhood game I used to play. And most of all, I had been sensing ghosts lingering nearby.

I played too close to the mouth of the demon and I was bitten. I waited to see the affects of the poison. I waited, praying not to die, knowing the work left to be done.

This time, there was no poison.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 10

2009-08-21T20:06:00.001-07:00

Riding aimlessly through the 7th street market I found a video rental shop. With nothing in mind, I chose two videos, "Che" and Yamamura's depiction of Kafka's "Ein Landarzt" (The Country Doctor). In both, I see the tragedy of sacrificing humanity for service.

Che is about a determined man who finds purpose in guerrilla war. "Kill or be killed." His life ends futilely and tragically. Kafka's "Ein Landarzt" tells a similar tale:
On a cold of winter night, a doctor is called for. However, his horse is dead. His beloved Rosa seeks another horse, but who would loan a horse on a night like this?! She finds a groom who kisses her outright. But, since he offers the horses, the doctor has no choice but go take the horses and go. The groom sends the horses away and quickly breaks into Rosa's house.
The doctor arrives immediately at the house of a strange family. Here, he meets the patient: "Thin, without fever, not cold, not warm, with empty eyes, without a shirt, the young man under the stuffed quilt heaves himself up, hangs around my throat and whispers in my ear, 'Doctor, let me die."
Noticing the girl in the house to be holding a bloody handkerchief, he analyzes further. The boy has a strange wound. He thinks of Rosa and blames himself. Meanwhile, the family forces him, naked, into bed with the boy. After telling the boy that the wound is not fatal, he flees. The horses, now tired, return slowly and he merely "crawls slowly through the wasteland of snow men." The story ends with this line, "A false ring of the night bell, once answered — it can never be made right." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Country_Doctor_(story))

The "country doctor" and "Che" are both used as tools. Both operate in the country and both are trying to help people. They serve, but where is their humanity? In both films, their humanity seems to come from their confrontation of death, and the pain that they find in this.

Here in Nohin, the spirit of service is very important. People will die to get the job done. Indeed, there was once a famous class of warriors who were called "servants" because of how they embodied, lived, and died for the service of their lord.

If one lives and works in the same breath, if one serves and creates at the same time, in the same place, then there is no problem here. For example, if a shop keeper's business is his home, and his company is his family, then service is also an expression of his humanity. His purpose as a man and his purpose as a servant are united.

When one's work is also an exploration of their creative humanity one can embody this life and death service and also embody their humanity. But to do this requires a very strict sort of life, and it requires a certain kind of social, living, and working system.

When living in space people live in isolated capsules far from the station where they work. Their families and their friends are likely even farther away. Trying to join work and life requires even greater commutes.

Here in Nohin, the strict standard of service, combined with living in space, requires people to channel their humanity through text messages. Friends, values, family, all become memories; the rest is dropped into the void. Life becomes a series of commutes, silent travel through space, alone.

As we walk down a dark road, I confide in S. Pillier, "I fear I am waiting alone, I have lost faith in others." He says, "Let your humanity become your service. Fill it with your being, and then in being, you will see the others. They are all around you."

Flavor in Space: Ch. 9

2009-08-18T07:21:00.002-07:00

To be independent is really to be in-dependence. Every object one calls his own is made of a thousand parts coming from a thousand worlds, was assembled by a thousand hands, and has changed a thousand times. After its brief stay in the space capsule, it will become a thousand more things a thousand more times before the end of the galaxy.

Relation can be symbiotic and not parasitic. In the web of being, each knot is a meeting. To live on a planet, in a world, not just visit one with a backpack and an ideology, is to meet each string of being with an open heart. It is to tie something together out of your beings that will become the part of a string of other beings that will in turn be knotted again. In this way, work is art.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 8

2009-08-18T07:21:00.001-07:00

In space there is a fantasy of independence and freedom. Sure, looking through big clean windows at an endless void gives these feelings. In space there is the tendency to be believe that one has everything one needs on his or her own space ship, station, or pod. It is wonderful to believe that everything one needs is enclosed within his own walls- his air, his bed, his computer, his TV, his food, his drink, his toilette. "I bought all this. It is mine. I made this world by myself, I can thank only myself. I am so proud of myself."

Space travelers tend to enjoy their fantasy of independence wherever they go. Sometimes they land on some beautiful planet and, taking only a bag on their back, they go hiking into the "wilderness." "Everything I need is right here! Right on my back!" They love to say. They tread into the planet. Some leave only footprints. Others leave trash. Yet, rarely does a space traveler take part in the native dances and celebrations on the planets.

For centuries, people have arrived on some new planet and decided to make it become a mirror of their own world. Unable to see the new world for what it is, they simply tried to remake it into their own old world without taking part in the old celebrations and meetings. Almost always, however, both worlds persevered. The shape changers changed or moved or consolidated their stories.

The movement to space was supposed to end the destruction and replacement of worlds. Yet, by moving into space, the very perpetuation of all worlds is threatened. With nobody left on the planet nobody knows how to bring together the peoples there. Nobody knows how to create meetings.

The goods that a space traveler carries in his backpack or his apartment capsule came from some world, but without knowing where or how it came, the means become dubious. Indeed, the cheapest method is almost always used- mountains leveled, villages and cities crushed into their mineral components- worlds are robbed of their wealth and beauty.

The idea of independence that a space traveler carries is the most dangerous of all. Uncaring of the consequences of his actions, he becomes a parasite. Uncaring of the consequence of his words, he becomes foul mouthed. Work becomes a means to earn money. Money may give momentary satisfaction, but it usually just perpetuates the means to work.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 7

2009-08-10T08:19:00.002-07:00

The Imperial scientists and their drones know that every thing, every creature, and every person in the galaxy has its own energy, its own being. They also know that the human mind and body needs to be fed, excited, and sedated. Especially after floating in space for a long time, deprived of live-able refuge and rest, the human mind and body needs treatment.

For this reason, the Imperial scientists have designed special means of sedation. Trifling entertainments can be quite fun when they are augmented by great light and sound. One song, one rhythm, one story, raised to a magnificent volume and brightness, properly piped to the eyes and ears of millions can be quite satisfying and sedating.

Augmenting and piping one central story to billions of human minds and bodies across the galaxy seems easy today. In fact, it is incredibly common. However, it comes at a cost. Even considering that the infrastructure of central Imperial entertainment is already in place, augmentation itself requires a great deal of energy.

Light and sound is released when one being meets and is consumed by another being, taking a new form. At each scale such a release is satisfying, but to someone of larger scale, it is hardly enough, to someone smaller it could be blinding or catastrophic. The sun lights an entire star system, and while a man cannot read a book by the light of a glow worm, a child can enjoy a summer night in the presence of one. To the glow worm the reading lamp is confusing and dangerous.

The power plants of the Galactic Empire crush the existences of billions of tiny and ancient beings so that men and women, deprived of interaction at their own scale of humanity, can be excited or sedated- cool air on a hot day, bright lights at night, an out of season tomato.

I was eating some mint ice cream under the neon lights out by the space port in Otoyk and S. Pillier warned me: "Although fantastic, such things are a waste," he said. "If we meet the a summer day appropriately, say, in the shade of an ancient tree, the heat and the cool are gifts. To burn the tree to artificially cool the heat would soon leave us with barren space. I would rather make a place between me and the tree and dwell there for a moment." By sharing these gifts, meeting each at his own scale, S. Pillier expands a live-able place; I, with my ice cream and air conditioning, expand barren space.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 6

2009-08-10T08:19:00.001-07:00

In the galaxy today, with the presence of space always close by, we always have the chance to simply drift off, at relatively little cost, and cut loose from gravity. With space trenches crisscrossing the planet, with a short flight up into boundless weightlessness always at hand, how does one stay grounded?

It is necessary, under these circumstances, to expand place, expand live-able human ground. This is done, not by simply engineering larger and larger space stations; indeed the large space stations are clusters of detached human lives strung like glass bouys in a fishing net, dangled in the darkness of space. In the space stations each person in his or her own globe commutes for hours to seek his or her own personal satisfaction. Expanding live-able human ground is done through encounter.

S. Pellier is infinitely old. His great age comes from his ability to always change, slip into various shapes and sizes, beings. He is capable of meeting any other being or creature at its own scale, and that meeting becomes an infinite moment, ecstatic and delicious. This is the power of the shape-changers.

We mere humans can only live our simple short lives. In the delicious moments we find our living platforms, our places of rest, refuge from the vastness of space. With songs, stories, and memories, these moments, these encounters, come to enrich and lengthen all the moments that they come into contact with. In the songs, in the stories, we seek timelessness.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 5

2009-08-08T08:26:00.001-07:00

About 7 generations ago, a long time before people entirely jetted off into space, inventors figured out a way that a few people could draw thousands to them. By cutting a trench of space, about 10 feet wide and as long as possible, people all along the trench would be drawn like magnets to whoever could muster the most power along the trench. If one was willing to give up his original location, he too could have a chance at drawing others to him along the trench. Of course, existing governments and headmen already had the most power for miles around. The sirens call of the powerful trench drew thousands into these places. What was once simply one place among many became the powerful capital of a whole planet. A small group of people that before only represented the tip of a pyramid of reciprocal relationships now actually came to wield direct control over vast populations.

Governments and powerful companies of people cut these trenches long and deep across whole planets. Everything that stood in the way of such a trench- groves, houses, shrines, temples, even mountains, all - was eliminated, erased from existence.

Imagine jumping onto a train of cars floating in such a trench. The moment the doors close, you leave behind the tangled emotions of family, village, visitors, reciprocity. Within minutes, you zip across cities, continents even, soon to arrive in a super-city! Here nobody knows you. You are what you can buy. You are what you can sell.

About 7 generations ago, the central Imperial government of Nohin sought a way to unite the people of the Empire. They sought a way to draw together the diverse peoples of the Empire into one functioning body, a machine of interplanetary proportions. Using these trenches of space, a million villages, a hundred worlds- vast masses of people were attracted to a few super cities. Here, people were fast at work building machines, fertilizer, bombs. These super cities were flattened in the galactic war three generations ago. Thus, the Imperial efforts ended in tragedy.

Yet, following the leadership of the new Galactic Empire, the space trenches were rebuilt with an even greater gusto, and accordingly, the super cities were rebuilt even larger than before.

Today, a traveler, lucky enough to find himself on the surface of a planet, is rarely farther than a few minutes walk from one of these space trenches. Their magnetic pull is always close by, keeping the machines of the Empire running smoothly.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 4

2009-08-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

I am a bit afraid. There is a festival fast arriving. It is said that for one week, the souls of the dead return from across the river. They come back to the homes, welcomed by their family. Together they feast and enjoy each other's company. For the natives, this is a joyous event.

I find it a bit frightening. As far as I know, I have no deceased relatives in this land. Indeed, if my deceased relatives are seeking my company, how would they know to cross the river at this point, to enter this world? Do they need to know the language of Nohin? Do they need to know any language at all? Or do they simply creep across, lonely, blindly from that vast other world of darkness. Their presence already leaks into my consciousness. As I write this I am sitting wrapped in shadow in an old house on surface of this planet. Perhaps I am already surrounded by ghosts. Yet, I don't know them, and they don't know me. We are beginning to acquaint ourselves with each other- see! the dim electric lamp just flickered.

In my classes, as I teach the language of the Galactic Empire, there are noises. A creak there, a knocking there. Once there was a kind of crying in the garden, although we found nothing. The students notice these things. Many have lived on this planet for most of their lives and so they appreciate this sort of thing, contrary to those who live in antiseptic space capsules and would not recognize a ghost even if they met him face to face in the street. I too I am listening, and watching. But perhaps I am trying to avoid their beaconing. I don't want to travel to their side. If I were to do such a thing, I want to do it following a strong person- somebody who knows the way back. I just checked the gas stove, no leak. Yet, still there is a bead of shadow in my room, floating about. I rub my eyebrows, an itch. Why?

On my home planet, there is no specific day or night when the dead come to visit, I think. Or perhaps this is just what I was taught in the government school. Yet, always, they were there, in my parent's actions, in their hearts, in mine too. Just by living, whether in space or on the surface, their lives animated our spirits. By eating, I eat the dead and I live. By breathing I breath the breaths of a thousand generations. By washing and drinking we share one river, always flowing...

They say that on this one night the lanterns, lit at temples around this ancient city, are let loose on the rivers, sent back to the pure land. Perhaps. And I wont' see it.

I'm going to the Eastern Capital, a huge metropolis, the biggest in the Galaxy. I will visit an old friend. But I'm worried because of the spirits traveling the roads, to and from their homes. Surely I may have to cross a river or two. And on the bridge? What about the man who rides next to me on that night bus? What about the girl at the station? And even more dangerous- what about the girl I am going to visit? A friend holds the key to places into which others are not allowed, what if a spirit should also enter?

I could avoid the whole thing. I could stay in this ancient city guarded that night by the five great fires on the mountainsides. I could watch and enjoy the festival as a foreigner would, alone, an observer. I could sleep, clutching my assumptions, my answers and my ego.

Or I could go, face the dark road, the dark rivers, bridges... women... and hold my energy, my cool. I won't come unarmed. I'll have the beaded mirror Pat'a Tootsie gave me on Machiit. I'll have a ward for the evil eye too. And all this to what end? To have my wits. Wits, cool, energy. Life is a long road and the mountains cast deep shadows. Every journey requires careful choice of stepping stones, to cross the streams, to cross through the deep moss, to pass through the forests, the fields, the cities. May each stepping stone be its own mountain, with its own spirit. I'll meet it with my own, as an equal.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 3

2009-08-01T20:56:00.001-07:00

I am living in the most ancient city of Nohin, Otoyk. Otoyk exists on the planet's surface. Hundreds of neighborhoods fill the city, each with subtle and ancient character. From the fields and mountains of the planet many arts are created in Otoyk. 1000 products of individual nature can be bought in the shops here. 1000 foods can be tasted, each changing with the seasons. In the summer one can find meat of the bony eel, long white noodles, and cool Jellies served on leaves, to name a few. However, even here, among the ancient lanes and ancient houses, space people drive their huge noisy rocket ships. The space people think their shiny metal ships are sleek and beautiful, but how can they be anything but clumsy in this ancient city of dark wooden slats, soft door hangings tumbling in the wind, and gardens that beacon directly to the human soul.

Yet the allure of space continues. Most of the ancient city is inhabited by the very old, those who keep to the old ways. Younger people and families choose the space life. Yet, many don't entirely take to the skies. Instead, they bring space down to earth- they destroy the old houses, the old shops, the old inns, and gardens. In their place they bring the void, dark, black, grey; for the void of space is the only place they can park their big metal space ships.

Slowly, as the old people die and their children come to claim their planetary homes, these homes are turned into space. Empty, nonhuman, space.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 2

2009-08-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

Now I have traveled to the other side of the intergalactic Empire. This side of the Empire is called Nohin. Everything here is similar to the Nacerima side, but different. This side of the galaxy developed in its own way and most things are nearly opposite from how they are on the Nacerima side. It was once independent, but ever since the galactic wars, now the whole galaxy has been united in one Empire.

Technically speaking, my job is to teach the Nacerima language here, but I have another mission. I am seeking, with S. Pillier's help, the secret to reawaken the shape changers. Together, we will heal the planets and make them places where people can live again.

Flavor in Space: Ch. 1

2009-08-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

There is beauty in space. As long as we are human we will see beauty, even in the vacuum of space.

I grew up in a space station. Long rows of houses, bubbles trimmed and primed to resemble the various gardens and architectural trends of Earth, each with its own spaceport. I enjoyed short spacewalks, drifting through the void, occasionally avoiding passing rockets.

I often looked longingly at the planet below. With each season it would change, green in the winter and golden brown in the summer. If possible, after school or on vacation, my friends and I would descend to the earth and spend long days walking on lush grassy hills or under groves of oak and bay. We filled the quiet valleys with imaginary tales of what life was like for the people who once lived there. Ironically, although I lived high in the association of bubbles of the space station, it was by the creeks and groves of the planet below that my dreams really took flight.

Children have the fantastic ability of filling any place with life. For me, that planet, Dumbe, and the space station of Agarom were places that I loved and filled with life. This space lifestyle is not richer or poorer than living in any other way, although I didn't know how different it was either. It would be a long time before I realized what it might have been like to actually have lived on the planet below, or what it really means to live in space.

At age 18 I flew away to a far away station for college. Still a creature of space, I hardly understood the implications of such a long journey. Indeed, I greatly enjoyed it. On this new planet, Machiit, and it's stations, the people were of a little different hue and the buildings were of a bit different design. But, for the most part it was the same. Indeed, this planet, like Dumbe of my youth, is in the intergalactic Empire. The people of the Empire come in different shades, and the buildings occasionally are of different design, but almost all the residents of the Empire speak the same language and eat fairly similar foods. These foods are produced by vast factories, managed from the skies for utmost efficiency. They stretch, at times, across whole planets- rows and rows of manicured fruit trees and corn, or vast warehouses of quarantined meat and milk producing machines.

As for people on the planets themselves, there are some survivors still living on the surface; some old old people eeking away an existence surrounded by the ghosts of the dead. Occasionally, the relatives of these old people come and visit, spend time on the surface, learn some of the old ways and perhaps enjoy some of the ancient pleasures and foods, totally unique in taste and procurement. Yet, the weight of death usually weighs too heavy for these visitors and they return to the skies and space stations. Going to the surface to live is a very serious move. Who wants to be constantly surrounded by ghosts of timeless generations, or constantly moved by the stench of life and death?

When I was 19 I met some surface dwellers of the planet Machiit. I was taken to a feast by a guide, Mary, who eventually became a good friend. The people were celebrating the arrival of relatives, the Tital tital people. Coming together we sang and ate and danced. I quickly realized the uniqueness of my experience, although I also saw that these people were living in a bricolage of space debris. Yet the joy and sadness in the songs and stories at that feast features much more prominently in my memories than the arrangement of fallen satellite parts on the front lawn.

Before I was 23 I knew the planet of Machiit well, its beauty and its pain. Slowly, I had found the key to travel to and from the planet. I had discovered the means by which to enter that world. It was not by calculation or by mission, but instead by means of an open mind and an open heart. By being silent and by listening, I realized that I could leave space and approach the threshold of the world below, now hidden. I met the peoples of this world many times, each time learning new facets of their cultures and language. It was in this way that I met S. Pillier.

S. Pillier is an old man, if you can call him a man. He is a shape changer. A member of an ancient species, almost entirely extinct. He is a priest of sorts, frozen in graphite many years ago, just before the intergalactic war, along with his relatives, in an attempt to preserve their potential benefit to the planet of Machiit. Indeed, without the shape changers, Machiit will slowly and entirely be converted to massive rows of food factories like so many other planets.

S. Piller explained to me the great problem that the galaxy is facing. For a long time people have been trying to enforce their will on others, but after the intergalactic war two generations ago, seduced by the power they had briefly seen during the war, flying rockets and jets across space, people bought their own civilian jets and rockets and left the surface of the planets all together.

I have a picture of my own grandfather from that time. A young man with brilliant thick red hair, he holds my swadled baby mother while standing in front of his green rocket ship. They were still on their planet at that time, the same planet his people had always lived on. Yet, he, my grandmother, and my mother were about to leave the surface for a brilliant adventure in the skies. They would visit many worlds, but never would they really return to that old planet. Indeed, once you leave on a rocket ship, it is hard to come back to and live on the surface for long.

Most people stopped being born into life on the planets. Those people living there simply aged and aged. Now, S. Pillier explains, as these old people, keepers of the old ways, pass away, the hope of unfreezing the shape changers and healing the planet of Machiit, and every other planet like it, passes with them.

For this reason, S. Pillier was thawed and brought back to life. The surviving old ones sung him out of graphite and, with song and the beating of medicine sticks, they sewed back together his life and spirit. I was witness to this happening, there in the darkness, on the surface of Machiit, in a house surrounded by ancient spirits.

Holy Books

2009-06-07T23:06:00.000-07:00

One day, as winter dusk settled on the wooded streets of Eugene, I wandered into an odd corner of a University of Oregon library.

I found shelves lined with ancient, holy books.

Each was a collection of stories housing the tenets of reality of another world. Running my hand across the spines, I was at once attracted to a book the shape of a rectangular prism, a box.

... the world of the Nootka ...

Opening the cover, the lid, I began to hear the voice of an old man, long since passed.

He spoke a language I didn't understand... told of wolves and men, and men who became wolves, and many other things...

Eventually, remembering dinner waiting for me at home, I returned to the library.

Nanotechnology and the reinvention of the world

2009-05-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

By Alan with the help of Jassem and others.

In American English class today a number of students and I from around the world discussed how we might imagine the future economy. Despairing over squandered resources like steel and petroleum, we envisioned a future economy where people provide for each other.

In the future....

Nanotechnology will engineer people who can breath water and live in the sea. Maybe these people will lose their ability to speak or we will forget that they are people. Perhaps, someday, we will call these people "fish" and maybe eat them.

Nanotechnology will create people who have chlorophyll and who can breath carbon dioxide and create oxygen. Maybe these people will lose their ability to speak or we will forget that they are people like us because they look so different, move so slowly, and live so long. Perhaps, someday, we will call these people "trees" and maybe we will chop them down, burn them for heat, and build houses out of them.

Far in the future... there might someday be a world where all of these adapted and carefully engineered people support each other in a brilliant and infinite web of life and death.

Three Human Cities

2009-04-26T17:10:00.001-07:00

By Alan Waxman

A human city could be defined by the frequency and quality of meaningful encounters on a human scale. The following is examples from three kinds of cities: an East Bay park (EBMUD), San Francisco, and a suburb.

Walking in EBMUD or other large East Bay parks is an experience full of meaningful encounters at a very high frequency. The whole scene is constantly changing all the time: wind ripples through grass, trees shake, clouds move about the sky. Throughout the course of one day, shadows stretch across the ground and temperature changes (although that is true anywhere in the Bay Area). Paths are not straight; always there is new scenery and perspectives, colors, shapes and textures. The whole scene changes with each season, from green to yellow to golden brown to gray to green again. With each season there is a different smell. I encounter various plants, animals, and rocks that have meaning- oaks, redwoods, pines, tule, grasses, coyote brush, bays, poison oak, seasonal flowers, cows, turkeys, coyotes, bobcats, crows, rabbits, skunks, stones, cliffs, mud, barbed wire fences, and buildings, to name a few. These encounters become more and more meaningful as I become more educated about them and encounter them in different contexts. My means of experiencing these things are visual, auditory, and also bodily. I walk everywhere, up slopes, down slopes. I have to avoid poison oak and bushes carefully. Every few feet requires me to remain riveted. These are all reasons that EBMUD and the East Bay parks are a city of the most interesting kind.

Likewise, San Francisco is also full of meaningful encounters. SF is effected by changing temperature and weather constantly during the day and according to season, just like the East Bay parks. Also, there are many different buildings, each with posters and people near them, the people change according to time of day, and their clothes change according to season. Some people wish to speak to me, sell things to me, or even rob me. There are foods and smells and music in and around the buildings. There are also bookstores and libraries, among other things. Since most of the time I have to walk around the city, I feel slopes of hills in my muscles and the texture of pavement and grassy parks.

The suburb is a city with more distance involved. The house I might live in has seasonal plants, shapes, and colors. The television or computer also provide constantly changing pictures and stories. Drive- the streets aren't so interesting up close, but from the car window I can look at large vistas. I can no longer feel the air in this state except for on rare occasions, so weather is not such a meaningful encounter, only an obstacle. Danger is much more of an issue, so stress level is higher and it is more difficult to enjoy distant scenery. Watch the road at hand. Arrive at the supermarket. The supermarket itself is not so interesting a building but it is full of sounds and smells and people. However, these do not change according to season, only very vaguely, like with Halloween pumpkins or Christmas trees. Arrive at the office park. The office park has some plantings, lawns, and a few deciduous trees. The trees do change according to season, but the lawns don't. The building itself is not so interesting. Inside the building is an environment that actually never changes. Tinted windows obscure the view of the changing world, if I are lucky enough to have a window with a view. Air conditioning keeps a solid temperature, no need to change clothes; in fact, there is a dress code. Depending on my job, I might never actually do different tasks, only vaguely seasonal ones: data entry during the winter, cataloguing and phone calls during the summer. Most of the time spent experiencing this city is from the sitting position- in front of the television, in the car, at the computer or maybe even in an occasional bus. There is very little actual tactile experience of an interesting kind, only at the park or at home while cooking. The muscles are rarely used except if I go to the gym.

No wonder that when I grew up in a suburb I spent as much time as possible in the East Bay parks. EBMUD was located only a 5 minute walk from my house. I can also understand why so many suburban kids spend as much time as possible in cities like San Francisco or Berkeley.

Waste of Humanity

2009-04-26T12:55:00.000-07:00

By Alan Waxman

At the University of Oregon there is currently a demonstration going on about slavery. On the grass in front of the Knight Library are hundreds of little flags, each meant to represent 6000 slaves. In total, demonstrators claim this represents 27 million slaves, the number of slaves in the world today. But as I experienced by watching Gomorra at the Bijou theatre, perhaps the number is far higher. The recent award winning Italian film, Gomorra, is directed by Matteo Garrone and based on the non-fiction book by journalist Roberto Saviano. By demonstrating forms of modern slavery and modern waste, the modern waste of humanity is vividly explored.

The final scene of the film uses the revolting metaphor of wasted food to show the way current system has perverted relationships between people and the land. In the final scene, Roberto, working for a toxic waste disposal corporation, visits the home of elderly land owners because it is on their land that the corporation will bury the toxic waste. Roberto's boss, Franco convinces the land owners that they need to bury the waste in order to cover their debts. After the discussion, Roberto wanders outside where he encounters an old woman in her garden. She says, "Luca, Luca,"she says, "I'm not Luca, I'm Roberto" he says, but she continues, as if her mind were in another time, "Luca, this garden is so dirty, it needs to be cleaned." Roberto and all the viewers of the film know that the garden, literally, and as metaphor for the entire society, is very dirty and that the system is only making it more and more poisoned. The old woman represents human responsibility to one another, to the past, the future, and to the land itself. As Roberto and Franco leave, the old woman gives him a box of peaches. Driving down the country road, Franco stops the car and exclaims, "Throw out the peaches, can't you tell they smell horrible." Roberto, just a cog in a wheel, steps out onto the land and dumps out the peaches on the side of the road, wasted. For him, as a man, this is the final and most revolting act. He quits his job and walks alone down the country road, leaving his boss and the corporation. There were several truly revolting scenes in the film depicting abuse and waste of humanity, but for some reason this final scene is one of the most powerful.

I think the film suggests that modern life is just as much a form of slavery as pre-modern life was for serfs and peasants, only now coupled with modern waste. Living amidst the decomposing rubble of modern architecture, people are isolated and their only choice is what corporation to become slave to. In Gomorra, Roberto acts as slave to Franco's toxic waste corporation until the final scene; Pasquale, a tailor who sincerely loves his work, is slave to his boss until he survives an attempt on his life and becomes a truck driver (another kind of slavery); and Toto, a 13 year old boy, becomes slave to one of the warring gangs. The only characters who refuse to be slaves are two boys, Marco and Ciro, who youthfully fantasize that they can be boss. As result, they are eventually lured into a trap and murdered. Modernity originally caught on among average people because they saw it as their way out of slavery as serfs and peasants. But as this movie vividly shows, people gave up one sort of slavery for another. And now, the organizations themselves, corporations, have become monsters of global proportions with incredible and poisonous waste.

I think it is fitting that the slow food movement originated in Italy. In Italy, love for food, land, and people is truly palpable for many, natives and tourists alike. But, as Gomorra details, what needs to be conserved in the slow food movement is the relationships between free people. This sort of democracy is one based upon care for people and land. But, is this different from corporate care or the care between master and slave?? You can taste the difference, and that is what slow food, and real democracy, is all about.

Perspectives on Green-isms

2009-03-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

I recently answered these questions for an interview. I'm republishing them here.

1. What is the state of the modern day environmental movement?

The environmental movement today is moving past its former emphasis on a strict black and white dichotomy of nature and culture towards a multi-centered vision with a global focus on climate change. There has been an explosion of local environmental groups and there are as many different varieties of environmentalists today as there are distinct personalities, value systems, and environments in the world. Despite differences, people everywhere are coming to the realization that in the recent past a great deal of resources and energy has been squandered and somebody must pay the price. We must all work together to make sure we have a stable and lush garden to offer the next generation.

2. What is your favorite book or article that you have read about the environment? What take-away message did it give you?

Although familiar with great books like Walden and My First Summer in the Sierra, I will introduce the Japanese author Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) and his work, The Legends of Tôno. Yanagita worked directly at odds with the strong centralizing powers of global capitalism to celebrate the unique ways and knowledge of local people as a part of local ecology. The Legends of Tôno are a collection of tales that illustrate the wisdom in the old stories, songs, rivers, and mountains. In one story, a man descends into the dark depths of the river to encounter a dead girl who shares with him a secret to personal wealth. The lesson: one's true wealth is one’s sense of self-awareness and place, and this comes from one’s knowledge of folkways and landscape.

3. The U.S. accounts for 4.6% of the global population, almost 25% of global CO2 emissions. Who/what is to blame?

Everywhere in the world, people live full lives of happiness and suffering; the US is no exception, yet the system by which Americans live requires huge expenditures of energy from fossil fuels, releasing dangerous CO2. Fossil fuel, thousands of years of sunlight compressed into a powerful source of energy, is an extremely valuable and non-renewable resource that probably could have been safely used for thousands of generations. Unfortunately, well-meaning people believed human-kind could engineer a solution to any shortage. The result was the design of our current system of highways, commutes, SUV's, industrial agriculture, and the list goes on. Today, most Americans can barely scrape together a normal family life without squandering fossil fuel. We must come together and redesign our entire system to tackle this sad situation.

4. Do you consider yourself a radical? Why or why not?

I definitely consider myself a radical. One definition of "radical" is "of or going to the root or origin; fundamental" (Random House 2009), and in terms of chemistry, a "free radical" is a molecule or atom with an unpaired electron that is extremely reactive and which may serve in an enzyme or catalyst. I see myself in this catalyzing role. Dealing with the fundamentals of an issue, I don't seek to change the situation in my image, but to provide antagonistic parties a chance to interact and trade perspectives. During this catalyzing process, more balance can be brought to a potentially explosive situation.

5. David Brower, Chair of Earth Island Institute and often considered the "grandfather of the environmental movement" once stated: "We should never compromise. That's what we pay politicians for." Do you agree with Brower?

With so many environmental woes and so little time to address them we no longer can afford to be stubborn. I believe sincerely in the rights of humans, animals, plants, land, and atmosphere, but it is because of the interconnectedness of all creatures and places that everyone must compromise to ensure our basic rights. In today's environmental movement, every person must be an environmentalist; we cannot afford to alienate anyone. If a fisherman were to follow Brower's advice and continuously over-harvest fish because he is unwilling to compromise, then neither fish nor sustainable fishing would benefit in the long run.

6. Write a Letter to the Editor about an environmental issue you are passionate about.

Dear Editor,

Standing by the Columbia River, I dip a kupins digging spade into the native root field, or xnitpama, and lift out a full piyaxi plant (Lewisia rediviva or "Bitterroot"), one of the sacred foods of native plateau people. As with all of the sacred foods, the roots and their habitat must be carefully tended. Unfortunately, many root fields are converted to wheat farming; forever destroying native plant communities and eroding huge quantities of soil into streams each year, raising temperatures and impeding the life cycle of returning salmon, another sacred food. Because the wheat farmer rarely turns a profit or tastes his wheat, this change leaves little lasting benefit to local people, ecosystems, or economies. The next time you buy bread in the supermarket, consider the distinct flavors you might have tasted from the root fields now plowed under.

Sincerely,

Alan Waxman

First Encounter with the British Museum

2009-01-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

(Check it out on www.FlavorAware.com)
By Julia Somit

I sit in the grand hall at the back of the first exhibit, unable to walk any farther. The bench I slid onto is tucked away at the end of the long rooms. The hall is filled with broken pieces of Antiquity; it flows and ebbs, emptying people like the great tides of the oceans- swaying in echoing noise and muffled by sheer grandeur and magnitude. The height of the ceiling is awe-inspiring.

There is something here, seeped into the stones, the floor, the bench I sit on, and transcribed thickly into the air. A mixture of subsequence is a fog that melts slowly inside, like a slow sweet poison. A wonderful mixture of fear slides through like a shiver in the cold as ghostly as lives of those who’s work is before you on the walls, and those who have walked these halls for so long surround you. The breath of the past seems thrown upon you and drenches your insides with every breath.

The insignificance and short span of life is so easily displayed before your waking eyes that inspiration leaps into my mind and my pen begins to work out these words.

The majesty that is history, the very art of it, is so strong. In a subtextual and subconscious way it flows out of my hand through ink.

The Walla Walla Food Scene

2009-01-08T13:16:00.000-08:00

(check out this article at www.flavoraware.com)
By Karlis

The Walla Walla food scene is defined by three major factors: the conservative industrial farming traditions of the area, Seventh Day Adventist dietary practices, and gentrification.

Very little of the pre-settlement Walla Walla influence is present now. Damming of the Columbia and its tributaries have decimated the fish population, including the flooding of the famous Celilo Falls fishing site near present day Dalles. Remnants of that tradition, however, can be seen on the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla reservation near Pendlton, OR. Root feasts and other festivals are sometimes open to the public.

The Walla Walla river valley area is a major food agriculture area and the first center for Pacific Northwest's ag-finance. Several large agricultural banks are still based and located here. The valley also early on developed significant industrial size orchards and vegetable gardens to provide food for the miners at the booming Idaho silver and later also coal mines.

Several immigrant ethnic groups have shaped the Walla Walla ag industry. The Italians brought the sweet onions to the town. They also brought the initial wine industry here. Several Asian families have been growing vegetables for the local market since late 19th century. Most large landowners growing wheat are Anglo-Saxon protestants, but there are exceptions and there are farmers here from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Roll out on the small roads around Walla Walla to see the wheat, alfa-alfa, and onion fields, and stop at the numerous farm stands. Bicycles can be rented in downtown Walla Walla.

Seventh Day Adventists are a Christian denomination with roots in the 19th century. With the founding of the Walla Walla College (now, University) Walla Walla and College Place have become a major SDA center in the US. Among the main considerations for the Adventists is treating the body as the temple of God and consequently sacred. It should be protected and maintained well.

Good stewardship of the body includes not only abstinence from intoxicants, stimulants, and promiscuity, but also a healthy diet, particularly vegetarianism. Although the Adventists are not required to be vegetarian, the wast majority are. As a result, there is plenty of great vegetarian food available in the town. It is often meat substitute-heavy. His Garden Bakery, for example, offers almost only vegan baked goods and other goodies. Except for the wiener kiosk on First and Main, I can't think of a place that does not offer decent veggie options.

There is also Andy's Market, which offers a large selection of vegetarian bulk foods. Great food for bargain prices. And for a special experience, head to Washington's largest vegetarian dinning hall on the Walla Walla University's (“quad u” for the hip) campus.

And the last of the three factors- gentrification. The town has become quite some hip spot over the last two decades, and the food scene has been affected too. Whitehouse-Crawford offers you the over a hundred dollar dinner experience, if you feel like it. Safeway upgraded a few year back. There is even a farmer's market in the downtown on summer weekends, with live music too.

Wine industry drives the gentrification. The region strives to produce medium and high priced wines, and attracts the people with the means and the lifestyle.

Gentrified Walla Walla has also brought about changes in ag. Farms offering high-end products are cropping up ever year, but CSA still have waiting lists.

FlavorAware

2008-12-08T13:53:00.001-08:00

Dear readers, please see the new Rye-grass website: www.FlavorAware.com. I'm posting all of these articles there, but there is more!
FlavorAware acts as a guide to experiencing the stories of local flavors. You can be a flavorologist (someone devoted to writing and studying the life and death journeys of food and flavor)!
If you would like to be a flavorologist in your own location start a blog and email me the update, or I can subscribe the blog. I'll build a profile for your city in FlavorAware and post your articles.
Best of luck,
-Alan

Eugene Sunlight

2008-12-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

Crystal clear day, Eugene, OR. Sidewalks have a rough texture; rocks and pebbles wedged in solid sand cast small shadows. Empty lots become beaches soaking sunlight. Graffiti on pealing plaster walls is a metropolitan art show. The fairgrounds of Jefferson Westside lie between Amazon Creek to the south and 13 avenue to the north, a reservoir of sunlight.

A number of buildings make up the grounds; the most prominent is rectangular. Its primary doors open to the west- average sized glass doors under a broad awning. Far above is a large cube shaped glass skylight. If the fairgrounds has a tower, a rotunda, a sparkling dome, this is it. Notably, this one is translucent and, today, heaven's light spills into the exhibition hall. This hall is, usually, where the Holiday farmer's market is- lively stalls, free samples, friendly smiles, and brightly colored produce. In front of the main building is a large plot paved with black asphalt. Closest to the building, tall trunked maples in square plots lined with yellow paint stud the asphalt.

If Eugene has a broad plaza, this "parking lot" is it. In many old cities there is a former palace, converted into a modern civic space. The Fairgrounds in Eugene would be that palace. Over the last 160 years the ancient landed people lost much of their land and history tells of the free-for-all that followed. Whomever could cut and process the most timber, grain, grass seed, these people became wealthy. But today, at the fairgrounds I encountered a different kind of wealth.

Under that great big glass skylight, the merchants are accountable. As they invest time and energy living here, they are slowly taking what the landscape gives them- milk, cheese, wood, beets, inspiration- and they offer these gifts to me with a smile. By talking to these people, I learn where they live, where their animals live, where their trees live. Someday, perhaps, I can even visit. What I'm buying here, albeit transformed into different shapes, is a little piece of Eugene, OR, sunlight.

Victory Gardens For All

2008-11-30T16:38:00.000-08:00

November 29th was a beautiful late fall day in Eugene. Blue sky stretched from Butte to Butte and the city of Eugene shined like an old barn that, after being hidden by fog for weeks, is suddenly exposed to brilliant light and sunny skies. Looking for adventure, I found my way to the Fairgrounds in Jefferson Westside. Following the sounds of drums, flutes, and Celtic violin I happened upon Eugene's Holiday Market- a tangle of shops selling woodwork, ceramics, tie dye, hemp clothes, pad thai; as well as the farmer's market where I listened to mycological tales and ate samples of fresh chevre. The path out of the Market lead me to Monroe and then to Blair street in the Whiteaker neighborhood. At the Whiteaker Station I met Charlotte Anthony, founder of the popular community garden phenomenon, Victory Gardens For All. Anthony, like many I have met, values community, living with the landscape, and sustainable agriculture, but something makes her outstanding. She is willing to work and get her hands dirty doing it.

Sitting in the sunlight out behind the Whiteaker Station, Charlotte, a woman who composes herself to speak but often lets out a big smile and laugh, began to explain the world of perma-culture. "Perma-culture can mean permanent culture or permanent agriculture, definitions vary," she told me. In a perma-culture, the whole community of organisms is involved in the process of living. "Stacking functions' is one of my favorite terms." She went on, "Many things coalesce, energy from the water, water from the water... compost in a greenhouse heats the greenhouse. Making the systems inter-digitate, we're part of it, it all works together, like a house facing south for solar [heat]." Many groups discuss these ideas and ideals but don't take the necessary steps to make their own local system operational. Charlotte Anthony started Victory Gardens For All so that people can actually make a little bit of these ideas into a reality.

"A lot people were buying houses in Eugene so they could garden, and then every year, instead of gardening, they bought a gardening book." For $50 Anthony and her team installs a fully operational garden, complete with healthy seedlings. The catch is that the homeowner agrees to help with 3 more gardens, and so becomes part of the gardening team. Victory Gardens for All has installed 350 gardens in Eugene and the group is currently looking into building large scale gardens with the Youth Eatin' Project and Food Security as well, other food oriented community groups in Eugene.

Victory Gardens For All applies the ideals of perma-culture to real life situations where residents and neighborhoods can benefit. The mission is to build a "neighborhood synergy of resources. [For example,] using algae and fish ponds to generate heat and electricity. Take everything- we can do it at a local level." She explained how we can harvest and store fruit from the trees in town instead of just letting it rot. Laughing she said, "No Child Left Inside, everyone gets out and enjoys and encounters nature... [we're usually] trying to fill our needs by buying, rather than being with nature, a world we can participate in." Victory Gardens For All provides people with a little piece of that participatory world.

Charlotte Anthony hopes to be "inspiring people by trying to show how food is grown." Seeing space come alive as a garden is inspiring -neighbors big and small, bacterial, mineral, vegetable, and human, become recognized as members of a community, each with their own important part to play.

All American Holiday

2008-11-29T12:22:00.000-08:00

As I understand it, Black Friday is a day of unrestrained capitalist greed, a day to wake up at 4 am and stampede the greeter at Wal-Mart. Such was not the Black Friday I encountered. At the food court of Valley River, Eugene, I found a warm hearted American holiday sweetened by frozen yogurt and temptations of Cinnabon.

Waking from a tryptophanic turkey coma at 11 am, after nearly 13 hours of sleep, the family convened to discuss the days shopping. Cell phones falling apart, jackets zippers broken, and a host of other small needs criss-crossed the breakfast table airways. Stacks of Consumer Reports ignored, internet consulted, and a phone number called, we settled on going to the Valley River mall. As is usually the case with my family, we managed to buy little, but strangely, we did enjoy our visit.

"All American Ice Cream, Frozen Yogurt, and Smoothies" was destination of choice. Like most vendors in Valley River, All American is brightly backlit. Brilliantly dressed young people with creamy skin and well kept hair serve with a smile. I went with white chocolate macadamia nut, dutch chocolate, and black berries on top. I was hungry and I was overdressed, dressed to walk around in November temperatures, not season-less mall temperature. My belly met frozen yogurt, and enjoyed it. As to the flavors, I can say that they did taste like macadamia nut white chocolate and dutch chocolate- if these things came from flavor tubes and were made out of sugary-syrupy substances. The blackberries were reddish and sat in a syrup of their own. The overall mixture was both tasty and satisfying. Thank you, All American. We then watched, entranced, the Cinnabon artisans roll dough and sugar. If only the Lipitor salesman had been there too, he could have been handing out free samples.

In the food court people were genuinely enjoying themselves, and not only the usual 15 and 50 age group- whole families filled the food court. Couples and kids young and old forked teriyaki sauce, rice, and meat into grinning mouths. I wonder if the satisfaction of Thanksgiving, that holiday we devote to family, cooking, and sharing, had rolled over into Black Friday, the one we usually give up to greed and capitalism. Perhaps this is the silver lining of the crashing stock market- we can still shop even if we don't have to buy buy buy; we can still stroll through palace-like malls devoted entirely to purchasing power, even if we don't purchase.

For the first time in quite a while, my folks and I walked through the mall as if we were in a mediterranean town, to see people, shops, and to relax. Thank you, All American.
-Alan

Oakway Center, Chapala, hauntings?

2008-11-24T10:34:00.000-08:00

In the little town of Oakway Center there is an alley between the main square with its venerable oak trees and the large asphalt blacktop where cars are parked.
In the alley a group of people have set out booths, tables, and chairs. On the walls electric candle lamps shed soft light. This alley, called Chapala Restaurante Mexicano, is a very pretty and soothing place to have a meal or a drink.
Here, they serve Mexican food. Perhaps the food is meant to be inspired by Jalisco where lake Chapala lies, or, perhaps the alley is meant to feel a bit like an alley in the city of Guadalajara located near lake Chapala.

I ordered a chicken enchilada and a chicken taco. Nestled beside them were "ranchero" beans, and a little brown sauce too.
I don't know their source, although they did have that distinctive Costco flavor. It all sat in a big yellow fiesta plate.
What does the food tell me about the place?
It tells me that the "owners" had access to rice, beans, chicken, iceburg lettuce, tomato, and chips. It tells me that as a customer I didn't need to know where it came from and maybe there is a reason I am not supposed to know.
But the dining environment could not be more peaceful...

There are a few things you should know about this alley and this town.
The alley closes every night; it is very regulated. There are only two entrances and nobody can come in who is not going to eat at the tables. The main town square with the oak trees is owned by the McKay Investment Company and regulated as well. Filled with the excitement of having found a little town like Oakway in Eugene, OR, I called up Oak Leaf Property Management and explained how great their public space is. I was told, "The important thing to remember is that it is not really public space. It's owned. A lot people think it's public and it's not... Most of the businesses are open from 10am-6pm although most of the national [chain stores] stay open until 9... We don't allow panhandlers." They are having a Christmas tree lighting on Sunday and they provide music in the summer. Yet still, even the owners don't live there. There is no castle nestled in the Center where the McKay family lives. The kind and polite people who staff the tables and kitchen in Chapala don't live there either.

In fact, nobody lives in the town of Oakway. In the festive alley of Chapala there are windows on the walls of the alley, even images of people looking out of those windows. Closer analysis, however, will reveal that these are only drawings of people. In fact, behind the windows there is nothing but empty wall. Empty.
The town clears out at night, and it seems there is some reason that nobody lives in town. Is it a haunted place? The owners have created laws that keep certain people away and regulate visitors. Why? Is it to protect them from ghosts, zombies, or those similarly afflicted?

Perhaps there are answers to these questions tied into the stories of places all around this place near the Williamette river. Perhaps, by peering into the shadows of places like Oakway, I can find the ghosts and zombies that the McKay Company and so many others are afraid of...

Valley River Center, made in China

2008-11-24T00:02:00.000-08:00

Here in Eugene, Oregon, I decided to go on a little walk down by the Williamette river. Throughout Eugene the Williamette is flanked by large parks and community gardens right? I imagine it as the core of the city- it is geographically located between 3 of the city's largest shopping districts, Valley River, Oakway, Downtown, and further up the river it is close to downtown Springfield as well. At the Williamette I expect to see the best of Eugene's past and present meld into a bright future.

I headed through the Whiteaker neighborhood where smallish homes built of wood often stand in small gardens with picket fences and wild yards. To my inexperienced eye, I would say some of the hippie spirit remains in the Whitaker. I also saw a couple of gardens marked as "Victory Gardens" and I wondered if people had caught onto Michael Pollan's call for a vast new change of American food producing habits by planting gardens. He writes of it in his letter to Barack Obama.

I cut by Lane Community college down a bike path towards Sladen Park. There I saw a mysterious man trudging through the fir trees and I decided to continue to the river. At Jacob's Park along the river there is a beautiful stretch of beach filled with white water birds and a few ducks. I wonder if the birds come there to bathe in the patch of slow current or to ask for some food from people like me. The grass was spotted with green droppings. That is more than reconstituted bread, I thought. People seemed to be choosing the earthen path close to river rather than the asphalt bike path so I followed it right through some muddy spots and a carpet of yellow fall leaves. All along the river, here, there are tall deciduous trees and many still have brilliant yellow leaves that twinkle and twist in the wind. Many paths lead to private spots along the water. Later, i saw a man standing next to the water, and another fishing.

I crossed the foot bridge and found myself at the back side of Valley River Center. Rather, I found myself on the edge of a large parking lot. A few cars were parked closer to the buildings. Walking along the side of Executive Parkway, the access road to the parking lots, (there are no sidewalks) I wondered where I could find the entrance to Valley River Center.

The large cars zipping around were disorienting after the walk on footpaths by the river. In fact, the whole outside area of the Center was built on the scale of cars. After passing the large black monolithic empty seeming buildings sitting in the parking lot next to Keefer Mazda I found my way to Goodpasture Island Road, another street built on the scale of 10 foot long people powered by gasoline (cars). Finally, the entrance to Valley River.

Valley River is owned. I once tried to register voters here, and was asked to leave. I left, after all, it is someone's property. It was built, as a lord would build a castle, in 1969, and "heralded as the largest shopping mall between Portland and San Francisco". It still is and, in 2006 it was worth $187.5 million. Beyond it's walls are "over 130 national stores and restaurants." It's owner is the Macerich Company which owns 95 malls in 19 states, one of the largest such owners in the US.

I enter JCPenny, a large store with beautiful clothes in tight professional packaging. I notice that a shirt is made in China and I wonder- how much of the cost of these clothes comes from shipping costs?

Flannel plaid, made in China.
A hanger of shirts made in India.
Even the "Oregon Duck" sweatshirts are made in Pakistan. Is the "Oregon Duck" worth it's weight in petroleum fuel costs?
A childs "Fast Track Pinball" set, made in China. The clerks eye me.
Union Bay Bronco loose boot- Hong Kong.
American Living. A western style corduroy American Living shirt with an eagle and flag on it. Made in India. Hat with similar eagle- Made in China. A sweater with the eagle and flag knitted into the material all across the chest. Surely this is made in America. Nope, made in Hong Kong.
Havanera Guayabera shirts, made in China.

Finally, I ask a clerk, "My uncle is a patriot and I was looking to get him something made in America. Do have anything made in America here?"

"Maybe Levy's? Naw, not Levy's," he looks at another clerk. She agrees. He recommends I speak to a manager at customer service in their office.

I meet an older woman who says, "I don't know, you can check the tags, we don't order. Not much is made here anymore."

As I check a lamp stand made in China, a young lady in an American flag themed shirt working the floor says, "Everything here is made in China or Vietnam. You can check the 'Made In Oregon' store in the mall?" She smiles.

On the way I stop at a booth selling Hickory Farms sausage and cheese. I ask her where the sausage and cheese comes from. The lady finds a magazine somewhere in her booth; seeing the mailing address, she says, "Ohio!"
I ask where the food actually comes from, like, "where are the cows?" and she just shakes her head and says, "I don't know."

Inside this mall I could be anywhere in America- among the "130 national chains and restuarants." In fact, with all those clothes made in India and China I could be almost anywhere in the world- if the Macerich Company owned places like this outside America. Santa sits with a brilliant smiling little child on his lap. I know he and the elves live far away. I just didn't think they lived in China.

The Made In Oregon store is full of nicely wrapped transportable gift ideas! 2oz of Gary West meats Oregon Elk meat from Jacksonville, Or, $8. The beef is $6. 2oz of Tory's Smoked Sockeye wild salmon from Oregon City, $11 (I don't think you can catch Sockeye in Oregon city anymore, I might be wrong. It said, "Pacific Salmon" on the box, so I imagine it was from Alaska, although on the box there is a picture of a native man dip netting in the river.)

At the back of the store are the Pendletons. A Pendleton "trail shirt" that is "good for life" has a tag on its button saying "Exclusive Pendleton Fabric woven in our USA mills." Another tag reads "Oregon heritage of quality that is woven into every product. So when you buy a Pendleton, you're buying a part of Oregon." $98. You're also buy a little part of a factory in Mexico because the "trail shirt" is assembled in Mexico.

Only the Pendlton Blankets are actually made in the USA. These may be the only article of clothing sold at the entire Valley River Center that is made in the USA. Their tag reads "Pendleton Indian Friendship Beaver State Indian Blankets. Made in the USA." $110-$198. Another tag reads,

"Long before there were white men in America, there were blankets. Some were stitched together from fox or wolf pelts. Some were woven or twisted from thin strips of cedar bark fiber, bird, beaver or rabbit skins. Some were loomed from wild cotton and colored with native dyes.

Then from Europe, came wool and still more colors for the native artist's expressions. And later came men from Pendleton woolen mills, who studied the designs, striding to capture their true spirit in blankets produced with modern machinery. the work of those men resulted in the first Indian inspired Pendleton robes and shawls.

Today, that tradition of complimentary creation lives on in Pendleton Indian Robes and Shawls, still woven from the finest fleece wool, meant to be used and cherished from generation to generation."

Oregon's minimum wage law is $7.95 an hour. For someone earning such a wage it would take over 23 hours of labor to buy one 64'x80' blanket- the only article of clothing one can buy at Valley River that is made in America. (I suppose that is less than the perhaps 350 hours it can take, including preparation of materials (sheering sheep, cleaning and carding yarn, spinning yarn, dying yarn, and weaving), to weave a Navajo rug. These rugs are sold for $700 to $4000 each.)

Back over on the south side of the Williamette, in the George Owens Rose garden, there is a large Black Tartarian Cherry tree, perhaps the largest of its kind in the state. It stands approximately 161 years old this year. I wonder how many dollars I could pay for one cherry. Yet, I imagine, if this tree still bears fruit, most of it probably just rots in the grass.

Life as meaning in narrative, for metal and fleshy creatures

2008-07-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

This weekend I saw Wall-E, an animated film by Pixar, in which a small brave-little-toaster like robot, Wall-E, saves life on earth. Humans, lead by the Buy N' Large company have consumed all of earth's resources and by the year 2110 decided to leave the planet a literal waste-land of trash and tour the solar system on a cruise while "Wall-E" robots clean up the mess. 700 years later, Wall-E is still doing the job crushing trash into cubes and stacking these into mountains. However, the little robot collects various other inanimate objects of interest who are his friends, along with an indestructible cockroach that survives by eating twinkies. Out of the trash Walle also finds a film of humans dancing and singing in live action. This little piece of recorded life becomes the narrative by which he recreates the living world through meaning.

A robot named "Eve" lands on the wasteland of earth in search of a plant specimen, evidence that it is possible for the humans in their cruise to return. Eve, who looks like an egg with computer screen eyes, is given the plant specimen which Wall-E has found. She then shuts off, impregnated by the plant, until a pod from the mother ship comes to get her. Wall-E chases after her, inspired by the old film recording of humans holding hands. He too longs to recreate this vision.

On the ship, humans have become nearly indistinguishable from inanimate objects, except that they are the lords and the metal robots are their slaves. The captain of the human race eventually comes into contact with dirt which inspires him to look up "earth" on his computer. Tapping into the narrative of life, he finds meaning in his existence, just like Walle already has done. Together, with Eve, they manage to return the plant specimen to earth and, in the process, come to life.

The film is a creation story in which all beings have the potential to live, if they are inspired by a narrative to LIVE. Like the book, The Giver (Lowry: 1993), living is a not simply continued existence, but the ability to see life through the inspiration of a narrative. One could call this tradition. The Giver was written before computers and robots became a central focus of American life, yet the message is very similar. Walle is a creation story because it is about the beginning (or re-starting) of intelligent life. It contrasts with other animated films like The Brave Little Toaster (Disch: 1980, Rees: 1987)) and Toy Story (Lasseter: 1995) because in those works the inanimate objects are already animate, as are the people; the conflict is that they live in a world in which people do not see or recognize the meaning in their not-so-fleshy lives.

Wall-E discusses the idea that the difference between "humans" and "robots" is really one of life and narrative, not of shape, size, or body type (metal versus flesh). Metal creatures can be "human" by way of meaning and narrative and fleshy bodies can achieve a state of in-animation much like objects. Life itself, as discussed in Walle, is about meaning. After all, within the world of animation, computer generated images, like drawings, animate into meaningful narratives. Perhaps the real issue here is the perceived divide between the "real" world and the "virtual" world. In Wall-E's (animated) world inspiration came from a recorded live action film set in the real world. The reverse of this would be real world people deriving inspiration about life from an animated "virtual" film.

M.I.A.

2008-06-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

I want to bring attention to Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, the artist of M.I.A.

Arulpragasam only recently has been living in Brooklyn, before that England and Sri Lanka(wikipedia.com), but she captures a lot in her flurry of pictures and sounds that her video "Paper Planes" encapsulates. "Paper Planes" is really genius because it captures the role Americans have in "terror".

The character she plays is an American image, a beautiful young immigrant Indian woman working in a hot-dog truck and convenience store. At one point she wears those popular big black sunglasses as if she were high in public. There is darkness and shadows elsewhere in the video too. A black cash register, small dark rooms, the dark city, twilight, black and white city streets, a black skull and cross bones UPS truck, dark clothes, dark blue eye shadow. The girl counts money, wears gold chains, and dances; readily accepting money from the customers at her sandwich truck. She smiles and dances in the truck, in the convenience store, and through the streets.

The video begins with an image of many small paper planes flying into New York City. Lines about planes, visas, bombs, and records conjure up immediate thoughts of "terrorism," but they are skillfully intertwined with images and references to "American" ideas so much that it is difficult to differentiate the two. She sings, "Sometimes I feel sitting on trains/ Every stop I get to, I'm clocking that game,/ Everyone's a winner, we're making that fame". References to city life in America are paired with images of New York. Arulpragasam's song brings home the idea that as we are "pumping that gas" and delivering like "UPS trucks" we are actually pumping "lethal poison through their system." She describes "All I wanna do is... take your money... some I murder... some I let go." To carelessly take part in this system of poison, money, and terror, is to "fly like paper, get high like planes" and the result is the current state of "third world democracy." Or perhaps that first image of paper planes flying towards the towering buildings of New York refers to the thousands of immigrants that come to New York each year, for whatever reason (maybe for freedom), people who did not want to leave their countries but were forced to because of world forces beyond their control, often powerful forces that today emanate from NYC. Each paper plane flies beautifully, with American freedom, but as I watch them flying down dark streets towards towering buildings, I can't help but think of planes flying into towers, a terrorizing expression of global freedom and murder.

The lyrics are as follows(metrolyrics.com):

I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name
If you come around, I make'em all day
I get one down in a second if you wait

(repeat)

Sometimes I feel sitting on trains
Every stop i get to, I'm clocking that game
Everyone's a winner, we're making that fame
Bona fide hustler making my name

(repeat)

All I wanna do is
And a, and take your money
All I wanna do is
And a, and take your money

(repeat)

Pirate skulls and bones
Sticks and stones and weed and bombs
Running when we hit'em
Lethal poison through their system

(repeat)

No one on the corner has swagger like us
Hit me on my banner, prepaid wireless
We pack and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going hell, just pumping that gas

All I wanna do is
And a, and take your money
All I wanna do is
And a, and take your money

(repeat)

M.I.A. Third World Democracy
Yeah, I got more records than the KGB
So, no funny business, are you already?

Some some some I some I murder
Some I, some I let go
Some, some, some I, some I murder
Some I, some I let go

All I wanna do is
And a, and take your money
All I wanna do is
And a, and take your money

(repeat)

Music by M.I.A.
essay by Alan Waxman

United We Stand, Divided We Fall

2008-05-30T23:32:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day Weekend I took the train, the Amtrak, from Eugene, Oregon, to Emeryville, California. For the first time in my experience it showed up in Eugene on time. It arrived in Emeryville only 1 hour late. The train is a fantastic way to meet Americans. Much like on the Greyhound, everyone sees everyone else and for those who choose to talk, everyone gets equal airtime. If automobiles separate Americans into groups and the mass media privileges the voices of a few, then the train is one method by which, for about 12 hours at a time, the opposite is done. On previous trips I rode down to California with a man who once was served as part of the US occupation of Japan and then rode back to Oregon next to a woman from Japan. This time I rode next to a US servicewoman currently in the army reserves; her story shed light on the state of the war and the role every American plays.

Suzanne (this is not her real name) has five children, looked around 35 or 40 years of age, and wears a t-shirt that says, "Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Self-less Service." When I sat down next to her she was trying to sleep. She was on leave from the reserves and had just spent a short stay in Portland with her kids. Now, she was taking the train down to Chico, California, to meet her boyfriend for 5 days. She is a polite woman and she really didn't want to make me move when she got out of her seat momentarily. The most striking thing about her is her passion for speaking. Once we started talking Suzanne talked and talked. Then when I went into a different car to eat and chat with a friend, she started talking to the Frenchman across the aisle, for hours. Obviously she has something to say.

When the twin towers were hit, Suzanne was flying with her two young boys from the East Coast to Portland. When she landed every flight in the country was cancelled. Realizing that she and her boys could easily have been turned into a bomb to destroy her own country, she enrolled in the reserves. She wanted to do her part for the values that she cares about.

"They treat their women differently," she says. In Iraq, "our boys walk into a room and there is a woman strapped down and beaten up, surrounded by men raping her. Our boys aren't allowed to stop that. They come back different. We don't treat our women like that. When I get deployed I'll have to stay in the safe zone because they shoot for women. They don't care if they kill a woman, in fact, they want to." As she says this I am thinking that this is not Iraqi culture; that's not a culture. She is wrong. But, I came to realize that she was not saying that Iraqi's are evil, but that they have a different country that we should not be messing with. In fact, she explained that the war has exacerbated the maltreatment of women over there; and the maltreatment of children. Adamantly she told me, "My daughter was never her father's property nor will she be her husband's. I will fight with a war cry! Woo Woo!" Later she told me about her mother who at 67 broke her pelvis barrel racing, but she got better and she is still raising horses for pay. He mother is a horse whisperer from Las Vegas who now lives in Chilequin, a small Oregon American Indian community, and works for a cowboy and riding camp. It is no wonder that Suzanne values the power and freedom of American women.

Suzanne has a 12 year old son. She repeatedly mentioned how "they train 12 year olds to fight. They desensitize them to violence. How does one of our guys shoot a 12 year old. He's holding a gun at you and will kill you. You've got a 12 year old kid yourself, but you have to shoot this kid or else your not gonna see your kids at home. You come back changed. We are on the cusp of another Vietnam - shooting kids with laundry." It became clear that in Iraq, 12 year olds are being trained to fight because the men older than 12 are already dead. "They have discipline" she said. "They know they aren't going home ("they are home," I added and she smiled), so they'll die to kill us. They are training the new breed of Taliban."

"This war has the lowest American deaths, but the highest rate of other kinds of casualties" she explained. Service men come back changed. Many are missing limbs and many more have psychological problems. She told the stories of a few friends of hers. Here is one: " You come back and you can't live a normal life. My friend was 17 when he joined and now he's 28. He can't live a normal life. he worked with the big guns. he used binoculars and told his best friend, 24, to shoot. He shot, they shot back, and he watched his friend's head get blown up. Now he has a twitch in his eye. The cost is too great.

When I ask her when we should have gotten out she tells me that she probably should be not speaking against her government but she thinks we should have gotten out five years ago. I expressed some surprise and mentioned that more Americans should talk to people in the service. She told me, "People should definitely, definitely talk to people in the service. While you're bitchin' about your food being too cold there's a guy in a foxhole opeing up his last food ration so you can bitch. He's killing people and you know he doesn't want to. It is time to bring them home." Needless to say she supports Obama or Clinton.

"United We Stand, Divided We Fall," she said.
"Every American needs to do their part... Stop Driving." With a smile Suzanne tells me, " I rode the train because I wanted to save gas... do my part."

by Alan Waxman

Rye-Grass

2008-05-30T23:29:00.001-07:00

Rye Grass holds fast
loose Palouse soils.
if we search the roots about us,
we too will not be blown away in the wind.

This blog is devoted to research of the world in which we live, each place has its own rye grass, here we write about it.