Thursday March 29, 2018
I’m in the APA Hotel in Tsuruoka, Japan, up around 4:30 AM.
up before the sun
in the Land of the Rising Sun
what does that make me the land of?
Last night I went to bed around 7:30 PM. My jet lag seems to begin to show in the late afternoon, and so far I’ve capitulated each day when the going gets tough. I was reading Spring Snow again before going to sleep last night. It is the first of a four-part novel series about reincarnation. I’ve been thinking a lot about reincarnation lately. And ghosts. For a few weeks I believed that maybe nothing about death releases the soul into whatever afterlife. Rather, the sobbing of loved ones was the password that unlocked the next phase for the soul in transit. And unmourned death is a ghost. But now, looking at the first pastels of this new day, the sun about to rise over Mount Gassan, which is pink with Spring’s predawn snow, I see that that is wrong.
The soul of a recently deceased person rushes into the body of someone new and already alive. We are each, therefore, some invisible speck of essence, clung to by dozens or hundreds or millions of dead souls, like the countless water droplets frozen around a speck of dust, forming an intricate and beautiful snowflake. Mount Gassan, however, provides no clues as to how much of myself, my words or actions or observable nature, is my own, or how much of the shape of my snowflake is due to the souls of the dead.
And the birds in Tsuruoka begin to chirp around ten after five.
The sun has risen, flanking Gassan to the north. I have never seen such a pastel sun, fulfilling the pastel promises of the pre-dawn light. I am used to squinting to avoid the sun’s violence, not squinting to make out her boundaries at all. This is the sun in the moon’s borrowed hakama, I suppose in the same way that the moon will often appear during the light of day, hanging bravely against the invisible stars.
I am on the bus toward Haguro-san, the five storey pagoda, the 2,446 stone steps to the top, and the ancient cedar forest. The bus drivers here wear microphones, and are constantly mumbling serpentine fricatives into them. I suppose that a person who understands Japanese may understand more than I do, but I somehow doubt it. They give the distinct impression of an old Catholic woman, Latin American, holding her rosary before her face, whispering secrets into it.
On the slopes of Haguro-san, I am both in awe of the beauty of the giant cedars, and flusteringly reminded of Basho’s Mount Fuji haiku. Throughout the 2,446 stone steps up Haguro-san are 33 hidden images. It is said that if one finds each of the 33, her dreams will come true. In late March the stone steps are still almost totally covered in snow. I will climb to the top, but despite my effortful climb, my dreams have no chance of coming true.
Go-Jyu-No-Toh, the five-storey pagoda, sits at the bottom of a creek-caused wrinkle after a short descent from the street, across a creek with a beautiful waterfall, Suga-No-Taki. The pagoda is made entirely of unstained, unpainted wood. As it sits among giant cedars, the gaze drifts from tree to pagoda to tree, realizing only two or three giant trees on, that the camouflaged pagoda has gone unnoticed, as least unnoticed as the pagoda it is. There is a kind of joy in snapping the eyes back to the building, realizing it for what it has become.
it is what it is
no longer
a tree
I stand underneath the pagoda for quite some time, looking at the ornateness of its eaves and doorframes. I spend another considerable chunk of time flicking one-yen, five-yen, 10-yen, and even some 100-yen coins into the offering-box that sits beyond the small fence on the pagoda’s entry steps. I hope my prayers are received.
Turning around back toward the forest and the path up, I see the Grandfather Cedar, Jiji-Sugi. It is the tallest and the oldest cedar on Mount Haguro, probably over 1,000 years old. It is girded with a thick shimenawa, or enclosing rope. What a pair they make, the pagoda and the cedar, two millennia of experience in wood between them.
The path up is unbelievably pleasant. The snow is hard-packed and still some three feet deep in places. At times the stone steps peek through in a place where a fallen sugi pine sprig has brought the sunlight with it to melt through the snow. There are stretches where hundreds of steps are visible. I bound up these so excitedly that I don’t bother to try to remember to look for hidden images; thereby assuring, I assume, that not even the smallest part of my dreams will be fulfilled.
Sitting atop Mount Haguro is Sanjin Gosaiden, a massive shrine with a thatched roof 2.1 meters thick. It is one of the largest wooden buildings with such a roof in Japan. As I’m arriving at the top of the hill, with Sanjin Gosaiden in view, I have to trudge through a few more snowdrifts. Kagami-Ike, the mirror pond, is entirely buried in snow still. Around the final walkway up to the shrine, the snowdrifts are 10, maybe 15 feet tall. I can see little rooves poking above the snow here and there.
I approach the enormous bronze bell that sits just East of the shrine, in protection from a Mongol invasion. A small pick-up truck sits at its base, and men in bright orange vests scurry about. I stray to the other side of the wide walkway, trying to stay out of their way. They pull a thick rope across the connecting path that goes between the bell and the reception center to the front of the shrine. I again regret having read Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, as Basho has again blocked my path, trying to convince me that, in a way, it is fun to not get photographs of Sanjin Gosaiden’s terribly thick thatched roof from directly below it.
I am nervous about making cultural faux-pas, especially in places that are considered, and actually feel, sacred. I walk between the shrine and the parking lot, which sits maybe 100 meters away. After walking out and on my way back, the truck full of workers passes me, on its way off the mountain, I presume. I can now poke around unencumbered by the watchful eyes of people who know what to do. I find out that one can go into the reception office, and through there, enter the shrine. I do so.
The shrine is very quiet, and despite its wooden floors, does not squeak. There is to be no photography inside the shrine, and I suppose that this means that descriptions of its interior are frowned upon as well. What I will say, though, about this place, is the feeling of sacredness that it radiates. Not unlike the Five Storey Pagoda and the Grandfather Cedar. I, who have spent so many years now actively dismantling what I once held sacred, am not sure if I am allowed to feel purified by contact with any sacred place anymore. IStill, I wander out of the sanctuary with some small feeling of purity resting in my palm.
Outside the shrine, in the decorated corridor leading back to the reception office and my shoes, I notice a beautiful painting of Mount Gassan. I stand there admiring for quite some time. I sense movement in the mountain. In the glass which protects the depiction of the mountain, a priest in a colorful kimono walks across the hall, bows before a small fountain, and retreats whence he came. While I am aware that this occurred behind me, having seen its reflection in the glass, to my eyes it all took place inside the snowy mountain. I suppose that this is a part of the Truth in the Ritual, and I am grateful to have seen what I’ve seen, and how I’ve seen it.
On the bus off the mountain, with a pamphlet about Haguro-san in my hand, I read that inside the five-storey pagoda there is suspended column, called a shinbashira, made of sugi pine, or Japanese cedar. These damper pendula which exist in Japanese pagodas have incredible earthquake resistance, and have provided inspiration for earthquake-resistant architecture in the modern world. Including in the Tokyo Skytree, which I saw from the train between Narita Airport and Kichijoji Station. And more importantly, as a hanging thing, though invisible to me on the outside, it provides the entire structure with that special elegance imbued by the hanging.
The shinbashira, which I did not know about an hour or so earlier as I contemplated the pagoda man-to-man, much less in my hotel room this morning thinking about Spring Snow and reincarnation, seems to have already pulled my mind into its gravity as I had those thoughts.
Isn’t the sugi pine column, which sits inside an intricate and ornate wooden shell, which sits among thousands of living, breathing sugi pines (whose genus is Cryptomeria, Greekly meaning ‘hidden parts’), the exact model of reincarnation I was blessed to understand as I looked at pastel-Gassan this morning out my hotel’s window? Do the other sugi pines know that they may also one day put on pagoda-armor and hide their true essence?
If, as I’ve begun to suspect, that a perfect poem is required to exorcise each additional soul (be it a human soul or a tree one) in order to reach one’s true soul-speck, does this suspended sugi column understand how many poems it owes to become free? It is no small wonder that the haiku became so necessary. It is the most efficient of exorcisms.