Sunday 22 June 2014

SIXTH SENSE

The important thing is to be able to live in a place or situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.
- Michael Ondaatje

On the path of language there are wild flowers: consonants and vowels.
 - Ian Hamilton Finlay

I’m in my friend’s studio - the one whose paintings combine kimono cutting-patterns with paramathematics and language collapse.  She’s painting right now, and I’m walking up and down this cluttered yet open space in more or less straight lines, like a forest monk gone AWOL, a forest monk a long way from the forest, just digesting the world - which is of course the ultimate forest - just walking up and down in silence, at peace.  We’re both here: an artist, trying to contain traces of love’s future language within the gentle lines of a kimono design, and a monk, for whom all language is increasingly a UFO language hovering in a midnight sky blessed by Jane Austen and Wily Coyote and the infrarealismos.

Most nights are like this: we don’t talk much, we just share the spaciousness of her studio while listening to internet ambient music sites.  Between us: ten metres or so of space, world culture, and silence.  Between us: pratimoksa vows, bodhisattva vows, and teddy bear vows.  Each of us alone with the other, just working or being, inside this kindness.

But sometimes a story bubbles up inside me and tonight is one of those nights.  All day I’ve been thinking of a Japanese boy I met two years ago on my last pilgrimage out there.  Or rather, not so much about the boy himself but his hat.  He got on the same train as me - a two hour journey from Okayama to Osaka - and sat down opposite.  He was about 20 years old and dressed in normal-looking clothes (though slightly raggedy by Japanese standards), but on his head was a woollen hat that was obviously a child’s hat - it was a ‘bear hat’, golden coloured, with two sewn-on plastic eyes and a pair of ears on top.  And he wore it totally naturally, like it was the latest fashion (which it might have been if he was 4 years old) or like it was something totally ordinary.


After a few minutes he came over to talk with me.  He told me he was wandering around Japan living homeless, usually living in temporary structures in forests, living off handouts from his parents.  He showed me his notebook, which contained carefully copied out charts of annual weather patterns throughout Japan, simple drawings of manga characters, and oddities such as drawings of the ten most dangerous animals in Japan (the Japanese police were number 8 with something like half a dozen deaths in custody a year!).  He gave me his email address (which I lost) and which was something like ‘koalakoala’ - the name of an animal repeated twice.

He was a nice kid but kind of lost - he was interesting (lost people are always interesting) but I forgot all about him soon afterwards.  In fact I don’t think I gave him another thought in the two years since… until yesterday when he suddenly popped up in a conversation with some friends.

“And now” - I’m telling her about it - “in the back of my mind, all I can see is that bear hat - no longer attached to the Japanese boy’s head but floating free, like a UFO, like the biography of a nice person in a world without paper or even language …  Actually, I cant begin to tell you what I think that hat might be saying to me…”  (I must have said this bit really dramatically because at this point she started to laugh.)  And then I tell her something an Indian guru once said that I’ve often thought about.  He said: don’t trust altars that look diminished by the presence of a cuddly toy.

And then - the story over - I let us both settle back into the silence again.  I play a song on her laptop -  http://www.xlr8r.com/news/2010/05/watch-toro-y-moi-recreate-you-hi - and as I wander about I read the scraps of paper that are everywhere attached to the walls of her studio: names of songs or paintings, complete and incomplete quotations, little lists of things whose connecting logic is beyond me but which, paradoxically, speak of simplicity and candidness:
 
— Euphoria Of Disobedience
— Lights Of Little Towns
— El Cloud
— A Minute, A Day, No More
— Old Punch Card

"It’s a park; it’s a plan for escape; it’s an extra-large piece of lava rock that’s come from Mexico and landed on the green grass; it’s a blue phone booth from Rio de Janeiro; it’s a butterfly pavilion screening a film inspired by The Invention of Morel, the fantastic novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares; it’s a rose tree from Chandigarh; it is outside, coming from all over the world…"

— ascetic
— criminals
— earphones
— wells
— stories, landscapes
— sentences
— the closing-up of stores
— hard work, hallucinations
— sixth sense
— the art of packing

, or contemporary proj         , here w
address them in a more pure and fundamenta
undesigned way.  So in this way, I think therapeuti
ight be the right word in that its been a discovery
at the end or whatever you want to call this point -
the culmination of a career or the end of a career, or
let’s say late in a career - of the luxury of nondesign
    a method for dealing with issues rather than the
lways serious effort of intelligent invention or
     ion. It’s            amazingly malleable; you c
                                    directions, muc

— Songs Without Words, Words Without Songs
— The Addressability Of Dumb Things
— Ambient Gospel
— Mathematics And The End Of Certainty
— More Money Than God
— Operation Wandering Soul
— The Savage Detectives

  As I’m leaving she asks if I’ve bought my ticket to Sri Lanka yet.  I say no, but its almost done, its kind of decided, more or less.  She asks if I will go and say goodbye to my mum.  I say I don’t know, maybe, yes.  She asks if there are bears in Sri Lanka and we both start laughing.  No, I don’t think so, I say.  No, she says, but there are planes.  More laughter.  There are planes, she says, that swoop down beside mountain caves and whisk monks away to cities of 15 million people.  They drop them at midnight in the car-parks of convenience stores where you can buy microwave meals and milk tea in cans and chocolate bars and ampan.  Bear food! she whispers dramatically.  We cant stop laughing.

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