1. UJI

Cars flowing across Uji bridge at sunset
Fail to see the ghost of Yoshitsune
Grimacing in his exotic and bloodied armour.And here now appears Hideyoshi
With his long spoon dipping for tea-water
As in a moryoga painting laughter fading around him.The sighing wind ripples through tea branches
Fields once strewn like fruit with felled bodies
The mind hollows with the earthy scent of Zen.Like a sorrow-mad and tongue-uprooted stork
Mourning its dead lover, on the desolate shore
A girl runs back and forth aimlessly.The rapids swallow the restless sound of her steps
The spare and lonely trees gesture weirdly
White sand cools the fevered brow of Time.Above, the moon, like an enormous golden lantern
Byodo-in like a phoenix poised for flight
Its slender legs anchored in still water.As it pulls upward its perfect replica shadow
Prepares unceasingly for the plunge below,
Sleeplessly the Fujiwara nobles witness.Along the rim of stillness only their sentinel eyes
Behold the shimmering incandescent country
Spilling like dawn across the extended earth.

2. TAIKAN’S HOUSE

Tokyo machined without excess
Light and shiny as aircraft
Manicured to atomic precision.Patterned city of tamed matter
Standing still and speechless
With the erasure of personality.Ultramodernity
The aesthetic of machined minimalism
Machine no longer the braggart of yesterday
Shy machine which hides its name
Hides its process.Shy machine or sly machine
Submerges the senses the feelings
In pure visibility
Design that stops the mind
And conditions aesthesis.The city is design
Turning the still mind in unexpected constellations
Turning a corner a new pattern a new meaning
A new machine.Machine within machine
Clock within clock
Fractal within fractal
Taikan’s house a green ticking gear
A magic throb in the still heart of the beating.Bamboo and the wind of silence
Shino on the threshold human and ephemeral
Corridors shining with rain, fish, boatmen
The stillness harvests everything.Inside is outside
As outside is inside
Nature is painting
Painting is Nature
Nature is machine
Machine is painting
Catalog the fruit of amazing print technology
Green tea, plum and sticky rice on table
Boy-haired red-jumpered Tokyo adolescent
Framed against the window
The textured trunk snaking upward
The cicadas’ raucous violins.Mono-no-aware
The anime of temporality
The touch of tears in transient things
At the foot of Mount Fuji different actors
The same play – interminably.The slow hour aches to its close
Shino walks me through Ueno Park
Tall unruly sedges and lotus leaves like elephant ears
Nod and sway
Ducks glide aimlessly children play
The deafening cicadas from Taikan’s house
Claim the day.Blue sky above
Patterned clockwork the houses the cars the traffic lights
The street clean as a whistle
The call of the superfast train
The waiting aeroplane
The kaleidoscopic turning of the world
Taikan the avatar of painting
Masks, unmasks.

But if Truth is like the sun, we have all heard stories of how dangerous the attempt can be to fly too closely. – Rich Carlson

We sit in a suspended cage
surrounded by bandaged and numbered forms
cured cadavers of the past:
only instead of the macabre
flashes of beauty escape in scintillations
exotic fragrances and momories instead of formaldehyde.
your soft and disinterested
distant eyes in a breathing body
question my subjectivity
with some compassion some sadness.

peeling the feeling i read that language
compassion is yours for me and more
akin to the fractured golden
silences waiting timelessly around us.
but sadness not for me not for you
sadness of surfaces that refuse restitution
hurtling headlong in a time of terrible ambiguity
sadness of the incomprehesible
of words that crumble and dissipate
engendering looming monsters where once was beauty
like a pungent tea the savor of irony rises.

a century ago some silent men had walked through rubble
carefully with tender hands
a landscape sorted and pieced together from ruins
developed a language of preservation and reconstruction
transformed much maligned monsters into gods
made proud victors bow their heads
left the intuition of a global consciousness
noosphere, supermind or world of archetypes
touching down on the summits of cosmopolitan mind.
the white disaster of colonial racial violence
almost they turned to a blessing, dreamt of making
the universal terrestrial and material
sowed the seed of a confederacy of nations
to embody the legacy of intersecting human histories
cosmogenesis, christogenesis, anthropogenesis
the restitution of the body of the sacrificed Person
arising out of the human in the image of Viswarupa.

but the hour of god departs
time curls like a dog’s tail back to the archaic
the language of ownership like a resistant virus grows
the encaged structure endlessly proliferates,
the psychology of subject making, packaged desire
the colonization of time, days and nights of Corporation
the cosmos vanishing into information technology
endlessly formatted and reformatted.
the gods now shackled or dressed like cadavers
serve a world Empire, histories carefully ordered
in a Museum that structures the telos of Capital,
the god making enterprise displaced to the eugenics factory
the comfortable numbness of neo-liberal globalization,
death-dealing hidden in the exhibitionary apparatus of Civilization’s anodyne.

but this is also the hour of the rise of the rest
modernity’s cracks yield the swarm populations
identities narrowing and hardening to enumerable gestures
the classficatory mechanism of western hegemony gone awry.
the kamikaze return, the costumed traditions burn
in protest or bare their fangs and burn whatever escapes
comprehension. the gods return but hardly
godlike, riding their chariots of hate and popular frenzy.
the past returns, economic barbarism in a three-piece suit
pitted against the barbarism of lying priesthood.
the rhetoric of cultic blood-rites and suspicion
at the swiftly multiplying altars of the first god, the last prophet or the one who died for our sake
or the avatars without number oozing from the walls
demanding adherents and ethnic cleansing
in exchange for the Promised Land for the Chosen People
Matter the contested interior and exterior.

you are indian you say, and american
you shuttle between two countries, two continents
two time zones, two histories, two languages.
To wear two semiotic coats and survive
one must study construction i say.
trailing clouds of history we come
identity blurred at the interstices
between subject and self like water i pass
a spiritual anthropology opens its gates
sedimented signatures, author, authority and authorization
peeled apart, the wholesome brotherhood of clans
the us/them laughter turns phantasmal,
muffled like a distant explosion.
between two alien descriptions i shuttle
using one’s instruments to sound the other
cultivating a ear for the unstruck sound.
we piece together the hybrid vocabulary
prepare the subjective topography of the posthuman
in rhizomatic encounters we expand
deconstruction is an act of love
the other swells like yeast from within
like east within west, west within east
we secretly prepare the subjective topography
of the confederacy of nations, the return of the gods
recreating themselves perpetually like jazz.
blessed are those who take a leap towards the future.

He stretches the time quantum
Providing subjective space
Since space is time in the becoming,
The space of time
For consciousness to expand into
Bringing the human into proximity with the superman
Or perhaps questioning the boundaries of the human

The twang of the primordial sound
The one that every instrument, plucked, bowed, struck or blown
Remembers as its Origin
This is the slow hand godfather of slowhand
Merging of rudraveena and electric guitar
Cool fire.

Thus by shared experience of time
A reality and a life are born
The life of the larger beings
Those who share the expanded freedom
Even in this crowded here and now.

The well wrought urn of becoming
Attracts a high beauty of emotion –
Calm equality, deep eros and pathos –
Sringar and karuna stabilized by the gravity of shanta –
Form repeating patterns: the raga takes shape,
Specificity. Fiery lines come saturated with bhava
Without losing their peace or turning sentimental.
By the 20 minute mark, there is a beautiful prayer
Not a prayer of wanting but of human aspiring for the divine
The entire spectrum of emotions gathers confidence
Returning like the returns of the never-same
The eternal recurrence of difference
Increasing in strength and beauty,
Dancing to the background plucked-rhythm of the jod.

All seems alaap, but as the lightnings light the land
The patter of tabla like a heavy rain descends
As if called into existence by the intricate flashes
Like golden snakes or flashing anklets, clean and beautiful.
The miraculous divinity of the raga reveals itself –
The goddess in her body of sound –
The more apparent the less personal the expression
The more simply accurate the note sequences,
The rupa of the raga is experienced.

Remember, how the heard raga turned to image in the mind’s eye,
Then touch, smell, taste and finally your body itself was music
Each note vibrating in all your fluids, the watery element of subjective becoming?
Dead serious, wave upon wave of bliss expand from the center
And break upon the shores of the mind awaking memories
Personal and cosmic: Calm and intense,
Gold particles scintillate in the crucible of transformation
Rippling like primordial forces in the plane of immanence
Violent yet eternally still.