A Word on Wordiness

Enjoy.

Actually I can't be content with just one. This section of the epic is the corniest and most forced one one there is (you will quickly notice the part where I most explicity and inexpertly wove in the theme of religion as senseless violence and fratricidal destruction), but, immediately following it is the one where Iesous goes into hell, and I'll be fucked if that one isn't hella awesome. So, perhaps the proper word on wordiness here is "gaman" which means, grin and bear. Suffer through. Stick it out. Nut up and be a man. All of the above apply to this book five (?).

(A brief refresher: Iesous recently talked to his mom who told him he was born for greatness, he nearly realized the true power hidden within him but then he left his village to sit in the woods for a while, and then Triton killed himself and his loyal sea nymph, Joanna. The scene opens upon Iesous in the woods, waiting for the apocalpyse of the Olympian Gods to fall on his head)

Time went by, and there was no retribution.
The little village in the trees held its lease longer
than any who lived there could have hoped, and
the storm they resigned themselves to bracing for
did not come. The woman in the house at the head
of the road had felt the great surge of energy that

was the release of Triton’s soul, and for some time
she feared the end was near. But as it became apparent
that the apocalypse was averted, again she hoped
that her boy would find his feet walk
them along his path into the sky.

What the woman didn’t feel, however, was
the assimilation of the energy bolts by the
amulet around the boy’s neck.

He was sitting alone, contemplating a means
of entering the netherworld of Hades’ Dominion,
when suddenly he was struck by what seemed
a giant wave quivering with electric
currents. An immense power rushed into
the amulet around his neck, and it overpowered
the symbols etched therein, glowing the deep
blue of the open sea.

Any lesser being would have died immediately,
as no normal mortal could successfully absorb
a god. The boy, however, was far from normal,
and what would have been a fatal seismic
oblivion to any other, he hardly noticed. So
deep was his concentration that he sensed
nothing spectacular until his gaze turned to
the pendant ‘round his neck and he saw it
burning blue. Seeing and feeling it around his
neck, he knew that Triton was dead. Nodding
to himself, he continued to puzzle out how he might
unbar the gates of Dis, and slay the keeper of the
dead.

So long he sat there seeking a means that
an observer might have thought him turned
to stone. Upon a rock he sat, elbow upon
knee and face upon fist like a piece of art. He
passed up plan after plan, each more impossible
than its parent, and still he had no idea how to
proceed. He was nigh upon ripping the earth in
two to create a clear path to the deeps when he
felt some persons approaching. Nimbly, he jumped
off the rock, and hid himself behind a nearby tree.

Proceeded by angry cries and cracklings

in the underbrush, two men burst into the clearing,
grappling and gouging and yelling incoherencies,
in between gasps for breath, harsh whisper
of a knife being drawn from a leather sheath, two
men entered the clearing, one advancing upon the
other with the offending knife upraised. The other
had a bright sword strapped to his thigh, yet it
remained secured within its scabbard. It was
clear that an argument lay between them,
and it came to the boy on their loud voices.

“ Would thee not see the light, however brightly I shine
it in thy eyes? Does not the glory reflected by the
tip of yon knife convince thee of thy folly?”

“ No blade could dissuade me. You are blinded
by the might of your gods, whereas I see
clearly through it. May they smite me where I
stand, I will not worship the despotism they represent.”

“ Still no, brother? Would thee not
change thy mind even knowing that thy
impiety will likely invite the wrath of god
upon our family? Would thee not change
for that?”

“What god worth praising slays believers
for the crimes of the wicked? Are
the bolts of Zeus so treacherous? So difficult
for him to aim? I should think not. He
cares not for those who love him, until
they disrespect him.”

“ I will stand for no more of this. Blasphemy
flows from thy mouth like poison, and
every word of it stings my soul. Draw
thy sword, and we shall see whose
position the gods favor.”

“ You would fight me, brother, for them?”

“ My god is my life.”

“ I will not draw. Strike me down if
you must, but I would not fight you no

matter how many hosts of heaven
stood at my back.”

“Then may thee meet thy scorned maker,
and suffer his most severe punishments for
all eternity. My lords’ wills be done.”

With this final utterance he drove the
wicked knife between his brother’s relenting
ribs, twisting it until it ruptured his stolid
heart. Before the black wind closed
his eyelids, the slain man said to his brother,
“ I hope only that your gods do not forsake
you like you have forsaken me. Eternity is a long
time to spend reliving a betrayal from one so dear.
Peace, my spirit quits it mortal casing, and I can fly,
at least for a little while.”

Just so, he died. His spirit fled the ()
hindrance of its flesh and hovered above
for a moment, bewildered at the separation.
The other man saw this not, nor the angry
rash spreading across his forehead like a brand,
and wiping his brother’s blood upon his coat
he walked away. The boy, young Iesous,
saw both though, snapping his fingers at the latter,
but in seeing the first realized his solution to
the puzzle of the hidden underworld.

Quickly forgetting its former limitations,
the tint flowed away from the scene
of it’s body’s end and flew out toward
the distant sea. Leaping up, the boy
pursued, his feet cutting the wind as he
outpaced it. The soul took, as his condition
made quite easy, the path of least resistance,
and the boy had to take the country in switchbacks
to follow. His feet nearly burning stripes in the
ground, he sprang over boulders and down
steep slopes in a furious effort to keep up

with the speedy shade. Closer and closer
the two came to a giant promontory over
a turbid sea, and still the boy followed,
fast as ever. Suddenly,
as it appeared the shade would plunge
headlong into the sea and down to some
watery end, it stopped and stood a modest
hole before the edge of the cliff. The boy
stopped to watch. After a moment, and with an
air of resignation, the shade entered the hole and
did not return.

It was clear to the boy that he had found the
entrance to Erebus, and so he made much
haste for the hole. Upon reaching it’s gaping
mouth he jumped in, landing on a stony floor.
There was no light in the cave, yet the boy
could make out a giant door of mysterious
metal, worked all in flames and bones.
At its center loomed a helmed god
on a sinister chariot, his hands reined to a trio
of dragons, their maws open in the act of a throaty
scream. In his other hand he claimed a sceptre
mounted with an obsidian skull. The gate to the ever-after,
firmly shut in the boy’s face.

A calm power rose again in the boy’s blood,
and for the first time since his father’s home,
he drew back a bit the shade over his spirit.
His eyes blazed like the apocalypse, and he
clenched two mighty fists. Like a savage
earthquake he struck the gates of hell, and
they crumpled before him as a child’s
castle will before the sea. They fell to the ground,
and the sound they made when they struck
was like a lone bell, dark and without an echo.
Once they had settled, he stepped over them, and
descended into the tangible darkness of Hades.

And scene.

Just a little Something to Pass the Time

It's a sunday morning and I'm sitting here in my apartment waiting to chat with my parents (for the first time in over three months, actually), and I thought I'd splash some random words onto the internet until Six Thirty Pacific Standard Time rolls around and I link up with the motherandfathership, so let's see. Hard to say what exactly I want to say, considering the biggest thing on my horizon right now(pretty much the only thing on my horizon right now, actually) is a little under two months away and furthermore nothing relavant to just about anybody who might be reading this blog (wink), but there are actually two kinda neat things coming up this week that I can detail some. The first is something the kids are doing, and the second is something I hope I can make the kids do. On thursday they got this "Talent Show" type thing, but I'm not expecting a small little affair in the gym composed of groups of kids performing sloppy karaoke or imitating Kojima Yoshio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1utN8BWudf0&NR=1) (this guy is fucking weird as shit, but was a total phenomenon over here for a while, which makes sense). Nope, there will be nothing impromptu or shoddily performed about this particular talent show, considering that the kids have been practicing for it for since about May, at least twice a day during lunch and after school. Not to mention the time they spend during fifth and sixth period studying recordings of themselves practicing.

Let me back up a moment to see if I can't get this to make some more sense. On Thursday, my school will have it's Gakkogei happyokai, which roughly roughly roughly translates to Talent Show/ Chorale Contest, and as my translation makes clear it is split up into two sections. The first part I am a little unclear about, but think that it involves individual students or perhaps groups of students performing something, anything, they've prepared by themselves and proved to the powers that be to be of high enough caliber to show to all the collection of parents, administrators, and local daimyo who are going to be filling up the 1200 seat auditorium they will be performing at. I think during this segment of the performance we will get to see anything from sweet guitar solos, to a performance from a band or two maybe, probably some piano pieces, speaches in English (shudder), probably speaches in Japanese, and maybe a dance or two thrown in for effect. That will be fun, but it's all just stage dressing for the second part of the show, which is what everybody is looking forward to. In Japanese middle schools, the kids are all divided into classes called kumi, and instead of traveling around the school to rooms occupied by different teachers, the kids stay in the same room all day and the teachers come to them. For this contest, each kumi is given a song to perform, and they compete against the other kumi to do perform their song the best and win points for their color. Let me explain this, there are five colors in the school, not unlik the four houses in Harry Potter other than the fact that there are five of them and they just have colors instead of the names of the schools founders, and each color group is composed of a kumi from each grade. So for example the Aogumi (blue group) is made up of a kumi form the first, second, and third year students. At various events throughout the year, they compete against each other and the different grades can win points for their color kumi. There's a board in the front of the school displaying the points. So exactly like Harry Potter, basically.

Well, I think this contest is one of the bigger point getters for the whole year, so the kids are bustin their balls to be the best. I, however, have to go put a shirt on some I'm decent for my family, but, check this link out to hear one of the songs they sing. It's called, Adventure in the Carribean Sea of Dreams (basically), and it rules. I'll translate it later. These aren't my kids, by the way, there is just a very select number of songs Japanese kids sing at these contests. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mngzBdQeDEs

I'll finish this shit later.

Jump into the Time Soup

Sometimes you go places and say to yourself, definitively, I'll never ever be here again. But sometimes you go back. What does that mean?

When I left Kansai Gaidai a couple years ago, it was lugging a pair of maroon suitcases into the Mid-December light, calling over my shoulder to a group of softly crying friends "This isn't the end. We'll see each other again, someday, so you don't even have to say goodbye." I hate saying goodbye. But even though I said I was sure we'd all meet again, was there a part of me pretty convinced that this sunrise was also the sun setting on Hirakata City, Japan? I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. I went home hoping I'd make it to Japan again one day, but I also went home pretty sure that even if I did, the Japan I'd make it to would be entirely different from the one I'd left.

Well, I made it back, and even though I staggered into the coutnry lugging behind me the same two suitcases I'd left it with, I guess I was bringing my baggage to a place that knew nothing about it. My bags were the same color of maroon they'd been sitting in the closet in my dorm room, most of the clothes inside of them were two years older but of the same stitch and thread they'd been sloppily spread out on the tatami of Sem II, but when I got it all out on the (wooden) floor of my new apartment, something just didn't look right. What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that even though I was mostly the same person I had been two years prior (and had all the matching stuff to prove it), Hamamatsu was not the Japan I had left, the Japan I had expected, and certainly not the Japan I had signed up for. Some times it didn't even feel like Japan at all. Finding out I was placed in Hamamatsu, the larger, optimistic part of me tried to say that it would be fun to see a new place in Japan, experience some new sights, sounds, tastes, what have you, but there was a darker part of me that knew Kansai for home and didn't care one bit to settle anywhere else, even if it was only for a short time.

I don't really care about Tokyo. I went to Akita, and it was nice, but not for me. Okinawa sounds pretty, but, meh. Hiroshima is cool. To visit. Yokohama's got a sweet Chinatown. I hear Hokkaido is famous for its summer wildflowers. Hm. Now that I think about it, I actually want to go to Hokkaido, and summer wildflowers sound heavenly, but fuck Hokkaido, and fuck summer wildflowers. As far as I'm concerned Japan is (one end to the other) about two hours on trains, and has only two cities (and their surrounding areas) that matter: Osaka and Kyoto. I've been fighting it, trying really hard to give Hamamatsu and Kanto a chance, but fuck 'em all, when you're from Kansai like I seem to have become nowhere else matters.

This is going to get out of hand if I keep going at this pace, so let me cease blasting 95% of the Japanese landmass and get down to business. I went to Osaka and Kyoto this weekend! It was great. It felt like Japan for the first time. I like soccer. I don't like natto. I am fine, thanks, how are you? Whoops, sorry, slipped back into my English teacher role, there, but for the moment we're discussing nothing that has to do with my life as an educator and everything to do with my life as a student of Japanese. I first came to Kyoto when I was 16, and, in the middle of a long day touring various Japanese cultural landmarks, we stopped in at a place called "Heian Jingu," a large shrine famour for it's largness, orangeness, oldness, and four lovely gardens you can walk through. One of those gardens has a large Koi pond in it, and running along the edge of the koi pond are a group of stepping stones you can use to cross like a bridge. Of course, to a still culturally nubile 16 year-old mind, these stones were perfect for pictures posed in the kung-fu and zen style. Somewhat amazingly, I found a couple of those pictures deep in the memory banks of my computer, so I'll dust 'em off and here they are:








Oh what the fuck? This isn't right? John English turned into a little Japanese girl? And what, I didn't have a beard... Or a pony-tail for that matter. What the hell. Oh, that's right, these photos were taken yesterday. Not 6 years ago. But other than that they are the exact same. It's unreal. I don't know exactly what it means that my life continues to meander through the same points on the map of a distant land, but maybe it's just that I like those places. After we took those pictures, I went and made myself a little medallion to replace the one I'd lost 5 years ago (thankfully the imprinting machine was there), and to bring the deja vu a couple years into the future, we walked around Sanjo, a pretty, but mostly exorbitantly overpriced shopping district that we came to from time to time two years ago. Time goes on in a straight line, but I'll be fucked if life doesn't go around in slowly expanding circles, each of us sucking new people into the vortexes that are our lives even as we are sucked in by others until the ripples all overlap and you can't tell which one is yours and which one your neighbors anymore, but it's all good because the point is that we can all be connected if we spend a little bit of time in the same pond. Though I could say a lot more about this, and will later, perhaps tomorrow, I think I'm going to end the transmission here. I really really can't wait to pull a few of my friends from back home into this crazy pit of light and sound and agelessness that has one index of my life for the past god knows how long. Throw 'em into the pond and watch the ripples spread.