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lawbox.com myna.social paulinekerschen.com = 2023.06.16 February 15, 2024 Hokkaido, Reiwa 6 It was Valentine’s Day for me but not for J., and she sent a wish across the date line that I could think some quiet thoughts. Short on sleep, a bright day in the forties after a week below freezing, our little group walked the sunlit slush in front of the tourist shops along Lake Akan. So far from anything. Bokke,” an Ainu loanword, picks out a boiling pit of sulfuric mud along the lakeshore. It steams, it glops. Proceeding to the right, one finds a half-snowed path stamped with dirty bootsoles leading around an advisory sign (warning on encounters with bears”), an older couple eating lunch out of plastic containers (konichiwa”), to a little prominence where the path swerves and the hillside cover of bare branches draws back to admit the mass of Mount Oakan, enormous across the flat of frozen lake. I tried to take a picture but it was stupid, it just looked like it was illustrating a Wikipedia article about the mountain. Your gaze brings nothing to a volcano, it’s already itself. I stood maybe ten minutes with its weight in my eyes. The trees up slope were Cézanne brushstrokes but monochrome; I’d never seen a brush-and-ink painting like that in the created world. A faint cry, maybe a hawk, otherwise hushed snow. Zero point. Find your balance. I’m here, I’m you. In the summer the lake ripples, and you’ve been living in that surface motion; but winter stills it. The deep freeze is where writing comes from, or used to come from. Not death but solitude. Black water, white snow, tree and stone, that gets you started. Any more and you’ll lose your way. Girl, you haven’t left any space empty. My friends didn’t know where I was and I had to turn back. Sea of Okhotsk tomorrow. Close to forty years since I saw the name on a map and it might as well have been in Middle-Earth. December 10, 2023 Fuba Jien Considers the Passions, Again I’m grateful to the friend who let me know that Muqi’s Persimmons and Chestnuts had been agriculturally imported to San Francisco; they stay in Kyoto otherwise, and are hardly ever on view, and I’d figured we would never cross paths. You know the large panel screens and hanging scrolls will never show up right in reproduction; I didn’t expect it from these two. Something about how the silk takes the ink, and gives it back, still. The different shades of black wash look colored. They emerge from the void and leave you in doubt about the completeness of that emergence. Rāgarāja in the permanent collection is a tantric figure who got to Japan via Shingon. The museum lets us know he embodies the concept that earthly desires, including carnal passion, can be a pathway to spiritual awakening,” and Wikipedia chimes in, while it is ahistorical to ascribe a ‘gay’ self-identification to historical figures, clear examples of Rāgarāja’s patronage of men having intimate sexual relations with other men appear in the historical record. Male kabuki actors placed love letters to the men they desired on the wall of Rāgarāja’s temple at Naniwa.” Thanks, Wikipedia, what other kind of kabuki actor was there going to be? In onnagata or otherwise. I remember the first time I saw footage from a Heron Maiden dance and fell in love, before reading the fine print and realizing I wasn’t supposed to... but there’s nothing appealing about Rāgarāja, he scares the shit out of me, terrifying to think of inviting all those arms and eyes into my mind. The life-size Kamakura bodhisattva across the room, on the other hand, has been a friend for a while. They used to think it was Avalokiteshvara; now they’re not sure, but it’s still androgynous as you please, slim-chested in a draped robe, and couldn’t have been carved by someone who did not find the human form beautiful. One imagines embracing it. To embrace the bodhisattva without turning into Rāgarāja. I don’t know. The seasonal screens one room over are always fairly well crowded with motifs, but across the way was one of those temple scenes that depict mist simply by ceasing to paint the temple... one whole panel with nothing on it but a floating line that might have been a roof, a bridge. Form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. We literally chant that all the time . I don’t not believe it. Why, then, this need to fill everything up? Why not let the emptiness be? Our monk at the panel screen, she could have wept for it. December 8, 2023 τίς σ’, ὦ Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει; Venus in Scorpio will task me till I’m dead, I’m sure of it, but I never seem to sting anyone other than myself. My therapist recommended an older book on trauma, embodiment and so on. I know it’s well regarded and everything, but I haven’t caved on picking up a copy because, tragically, it’s called Waking the Tiger , has tigers on the cover, makes me feel like I’m being sold supplements by a website…. Poor awful hungry Polyphemus stumbles out of the cave clutching his ruined eye. What’s the trouble, Polly? Cue the disco beat as he starts to bellow, Nooobody, nooobody, nooobody, nobodyyyy….” I guess take it off, and put it back on again?” November 25, 2023 A Filiation This past weekend, I and four others were ordained at my Zen temple and received among other things a new name and lineage. The names come in pairs; by convention the first part is meant to reflect some aspect of one’s present self, and the second a future aspiration. Fuba 風馬 reads wind-horse”; I’d never thought of myself as all that equine, but I guess I did turn into a leggy girl with a mane. I have hope it’s going to sit better than whatever nervous small animal I used to evoke. Jien 自圓 in English would be self-circle”; the en is the same as in ensō . I haven’t yet talked it over with the teacher who gave it to me, but I fancy it points toward integration and wholeness, a highly incomplete project from this current vista point. Falling rocks next n miles. Along with the name I received lineage papers tracing a line of dharma transmission from the historical Buddha down a historical chain with plenty of fiction in it (Nagarjuna, Bodhidharma, Huineng, Dōgen, onward), to Shunryu Suzuki and Sojun , who passed away a few days after the depth of my gender quandary finally became visible to me, and so to my present teacher and so to me. Since the document is a wholly patriarchal affair (as far as anyone knows, with the possible exception of Prajnatara ) until we ladies get involved at bottom, a second paper was given with a compilation of women ancestors from history and myth arranged not in a line but in a circle, since whatever notion of ancestorship is in play, it’s not like the one by which titles and property are passed from father to son. More contemporaneous that way, it feels like. Playing catch-up as I have with the recent crop of trans novels, I’m struck by how many of them are also concerned with ancestry, and the need to posit or rewrite a lineage. Casey Plett’s Little Fish does this in the most literal way, by having the trans protagonist discover that her grandfather may have been trans as well, and while the knowledge doesn’t inspire or comfort in any way—so scant and equivocal, it barely counts as knowledge—it does provide a lightweight supporting structure for what is otherwise a catalog of present-day hardship. Jeanne Thornton’s Summer Fun makes ancestry out of fandom, orienting the present-day narrator back toward a Brian Wilson-like figure whose life, at least in fabulation, is given a trans arc. It’s this notion of ancestry I’m drawn to; the books I keep on my shelves and the records I held onto after streaming ate the world are, more or less, the forebears I most recognize, and naturally I have my own way of reading them. My trans friends who have read The Warm South think of it as a novel about Keats as a trans woman. (They also say, how could you have written that book and not known ?) Obviously knowledge in general has a funny status here, but...