Letter to Takashi Arima

1-29-103 Izunikawa-cho Dec. 29, 1996- Jan. 15, 1997

shimogam, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606, JAPAN

Dear Takashi Arima,

1/15/97: Happy Winter Holidays to you! I’m so sorry I didn’t write to you sooner, it was such a delight and pleasure to receive your wonderful book and letter upon my return to the US in Fall, but the whirlwind of returning, the myriad tasks to catch up on, and the pressure to finish a large article on the Poetry International translation project took up most of my time, and here it is, the end of the year, and I still haven’t sent this letter. 

As you’ll see by my journal entries below, we’ve been experiecing some weather and cataclysmic flooding, which will continue for at least a week in the Great Central Valley of California. Believe it or not, the cumulative damage from the floods is far worse than our big earthquakes; we’ve lost more roads, buildings, lives. And it’s raining again. At least this drizzle is not in biblical porportions, like the rain on New Year’s Eve!

I loved the way you describe the events of the day in Stray Dog in the Netherlands—I guess on some level, we all felt like stray dogs, I certainly did.

The book, International Poets, how may I send some poems to them, theorugh you, or to the Madras address? May I use your name as a reference? A friend of mine, David Moe, has a poem in the book!

I’m so relieved to be finished with my Breytenbach essay on translation. I can’t believe it took so long to write, but I didn’t have the background or knowledge necessary to quickly write something. Besides, if I knew what I was going to write, I wouldn’t write at all. What’s the point? The essay & footnotes (nearly 10,000 words—verbose), was very difficult for me. I hope J.L van Schaik Publishers (South Africa) will use it!

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(Takashi-san, do you remember Herman at Poetry International; he is the editor of Mother Earth Journal, he showed you the poetry film videos?) They say it takes a minimum of 1 day of suffering for each time zone. I remember how it took me weeks to recover from Russia. How long will I suffer this time? You must have suffered too from great jet lag, as Japan is probably equidistant from Europe—unless, of course you flew home to the east by going west. Someone said that in a Concorde jet, you travel so fast, you hypothetically arrive before you leave—earlier, that is, in New York than when one leaves Paris! Where’s Einstein when you need him?

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My cousin Sínead and I went huckleberrying the last weekend before the Autumn Equinox at our secret spot on Inverness Ridge near Tomales Bay, where we used to go berrying with our grandmother. Hard to believe it’s been 25 years since I hiked in the other Inverness, Scotland; here it really is like Loch Ness and we have strange white deer from China in the pine forest instead of the Irish red deer. Instead of Nessie, we have the San Andreas Fault and great white sharks. From the isthmus, we could see Point Reyes in the distance, like a comma against the shimmering sea, separating Drake’s Bay from the raging Pacific—a misnamed ocean! Offshore fog rising up like a vast wall where tiny fishing boats disappeared into its maws, made me think of a Chinese painting on a silk scroll, or something by the English painter, Turner. The wind-ravaged bishop pines, draped in long mosses, took a beating from last year’s severe storms—so many uprooted trees met an abrupt end—we used them as aerial pathways up the steep hillsides. This part, primorial as the beginnings of time, unscathed by the enormous 1995 Inverness Ridge fire.

Many shipwrecks along this coast—we once found square nails and pottery shards on the beaches. Because it’s all part of the Point Reyes National Seashore, we’re not supposed to gather anything—even huckleberries, so I took an antler. Short, thick branch, a fallow deer’s. Non-native, like us. We were hiding from the park rangers but we had Sínead’s 22-month-old nephew, Séan to lug through the undergrowth. He plucked each berry like a little king appraising jewels in sunlight, then greedily fisted them into his mouth until he was covered in deep purple juice. I had the odd sensation we were re-enacting an age-old ritual, gathering berries before the fall—no matter that our skin is white, not red. 

My aunt will make pies and ice cream, our teeth will be indigo-stained for days (like my fingers). How Pictish! The berries, so labor-intensive (cleaning takes longer than picking), we make jokes, compare them to caviar. But it gives us an excuse to be together, like in the old days. We’ll eat pie and have tea from the ancient blue willow teapot. 

Later, we’ll go to a party at the Straus farm at across Tomales Bay on the barren, grassy Marshall side & make gallons of huckleberry ice cream with their fresh cream for the children. Jungle-lush Inverness Ridge is part of what’s left of the granitic Pacific Plate, while Marshall with its thin soil and red Franciscan strata, is part of the North American Plate. Two continents divided by a thin bay, different as night and day.

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My grandmother and I used to come here to Inverness Ridge to pick huckleberries and to look for Old Man Ottenger’s white deer and the spotted fallow deer; but in 1964 the National Park Service took the land from them, parcel by parcel—destroying most of the dairy ranches in the process—gave it to the public, tore down historic farm buildings, killed off most of the exotic deer: non-native species. 

If the end result was tract-housing, perhaps they did a good thing, taking the land, but they destroyed a thriving community of farmers, for the greater good of tourists. No one wants to look at the moral dilemma: treated like the Coast Miwok Indians their forefathers displaced, ranchers were offered land treaties in the form of 25-year leases.)Tourists are definitely a non-native species. Rare now to see the white deer; once I saw a buck in the night mist—an apparition of white on white—his antlers framing the moon.

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When I was a child playing at the seashore, I imagined the Coast Miwok Indians wrapped in bright silk brocades, supping from celadon bowls and blue and white plates painted with scenes of China. Because when Drake the Pirate landed here in Nova Albion in 1579, claiming Point Reyes for the Crown, he left behind a strange legacy, English coins, glass beads, and his cargo of exotic silks and porcelain from China.

Perhaps a reason why I became a writer is because I ate morning cereal from a story painted inside a Chinese blue willow bowl: two birds on the wing. It’s spring: fruit trees bloom beneath a strange tree like huge grapes pointing skyward, near a temple—like the pagoda in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. 

Though a path of light invites us to the temple, a fence stops us because we are not Chinese. Though I am four, I know this, for my Irish grandmother takes me to Chinatown to buy new pieces. Old men in black robes with thin grey ques down their backs, kow-tow to her, offer me sweets. I stare, round-eyed at the rows of pale celadon melons glowing with mysterious resiliance beneath a grotesque curtain of plucked fowl hanging by the neck. Gateway to another world. Here, we are all immigrants.

But when no one’s looking, I can climb over that temple fence. (Later I will find a gate, learn the story of the lovebirds—once human—who find each other on the wing. A story that includes European colonialism and trade with the Far East—perhaps a Chinese interpretation of an English design by way of the Dutch? or Portuguese? Or was it the other way around? Evolving into blue willow pottery, ideas shipped back and forth across the ocean.)

My grandmother says the designs on the edges of the bowl are like heirglyphic Greek keys—a symbol for clouds, or, the Almighty. (She knows that I will search for celestial dragons in the mountains of the world for I was born a wanderer during the tail end of the year of the Dragon.) Every morning I’d wait for the two scissor-tailed swallows to meet mid-air. If they emerge through the thin layer of milk upside-down, did it change the story? My grandmother makes a pun urging me to finish the last two swallows of milk—because babies are starving in China. My eating habits become inexorably linked with the welfare of those babies.

I gaze deeper into the milky scene: A fisherman in a junk continues to cast his line into calm waters. Distant islands. No children. I am trapped within the white heart-shaped void between the island, trees and slender birdwings. I hardly notice three men dressed in robes on the bridge, who, after morning prayers, leave the temple, carrying the tools of my profession: a walking stick, a writing scroll and a lantern. 

As they approach the archway, so like a Japanese tori gate, the ancient willow, roots bared by time, weeps and leans into the east wind, small hands of branches clawing the air as if to follow them. Every day they will begin this journey but never reach the portal, the birds will never quite meet mid-air. Soon my grandfather will die, the dinnerware and our family will be scattered when we move north to the Point Reyes Peninsula. Only a platter and a teapot will survive the uprooting. My grandmother and I will drink tea from it for three decades. And the platter will carry the holiday bird at family gatherings. But 40 years will pass before I again eat from a Blue Willow bowl to remember this story.

Coda: From blue willow coffee mugs made during the reign of Communism, a slightly different story emerges. The two birds finally to meet mid-air, but they have grown heavy as pigeons, the fisherman still fishes, the boat is farther from shore. Three men are still on the bridge, they have lost more than their robes: the first one carries a rags bundle on a stick, the second carries a scroll, but the third has lost his lantern. The shining path to the temple is dark, the celestial gate is gone, and we are all that much closer to earth.

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What struck me most about returning home is the sharp, aromatic odor of bay laurel, poison oak pollen, and sun-burnt hay, flavored with the acrid, thirsty dust—the smell of late summer making me nostalgic (like Proust and his madelines?). Seeing all the lovely, steep hillsides against a cerulean sky, cloaked in tawny blond oatgrasses like sleeping lions, and the thick green-black oaks roiling in their crotches—so sexual, it surprises me anew each time I return. I’ll never forget how the mirrored San Francisco Bay and Mt. Tamalpais (our Mt. Fuji-san) from the fire-ravaged Oakland hills takes my breath away. The Sonoma-Marin Coast Miwok Indian word for the shining golden gate, Yulupa. All that’s left of the Bay Area Ohlone Indians’ stories of this landscape is: Dancing on the brink of the world. I love this landscape, but not the culture. I hate the vacuous American loudness, the lack of body awareness, the shallow chrome and Formica existence, the urban sprawl. . . the ultimate loneliness. I try to be somewhat tolerant, but I guess it’s not within my nature. And so I am alone, dancing on the brink of I know not what.

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