Food Is Life Food is People _ a poem by Yuri Kageyama

Food is Life Food is People _ a poem by Yuri Kageyama

ガリガリに痩せた子供の写真みたり
お腹からチューブで栄養を与えられてる病院の父をみたくなかったり
毎日普通にたべ
時々楽しく外食
いきている
SNSで
ひとのランチなんてくだらなくてみてられないなんて言うヤツは
記者の資格
無い
ちゃんとみて社会をかんじろ
色鮮やかなサラダだろうがゆげまで写ってるラーメンだろうがコンビニだろうが海辺のカクテルだろうが
世界中のお父さんや子供達の
それぞれのイキザマが今日
ナウ
確実に
ある

Denouement _ a poem by Yuri Kageyama

Denouement
a Poem by Yuri Kageyama

You are curled up, tight, still, in fetal position, eyes closed but seeing red blindness, throbbing flesh, deep inside our stomachs, so entrenched within, but disjointed, expanding _ like our pain, infinite like solar systems in the universe.
I was already there in that moment.
We shared in that secret of knowing, knowing you will be born, someday, before anyone else knew, and then grow up and become man _ or woman _ with a yelping gasping flash-of-light wail, the newborn’s cry in that first breath, and recognizing from the very start that you will, someday, have this same joy and same pain, growing inside you and being born.
It doesn’t matter you will make towers. You will make music. You will make computer programs. You will make money. You will make babies.
It doesn’t matter you will be a pillar of society. You will be an outcast. You will win rewards. You will be abused as a stranger.
It doesn’t matter you will witness a great northern earthquake, although it is a once-in-a-century disaster setting off a torrent of outraged water that turns farmland into mud, buildings and homes into rubble, and quiet untouched happy towns into ghost towns, untouched but covered with radiation.
I was there, with you, before it all _ in that redness and blackness and all seeing blindness, that was here and everywhere, bleeding and beating and breathing and being, inside my uterus, that spot near my navel that connects with your navel, before and even after your terrified newborn cry.
This is the same cosmos inside the bodies of all mothers, where we fall in our slumber, snuggling against our blankets, the safe and eternal place we visit that are called dreams after we awaken.
This is the same cosmos gyrating in the resonance of the giant taiko drum, shaking and deafening that we hear and understand every note like our mother’s heartbeat.
The otherworldly world that awaits behind the mirror in a Tadanori Yokoo painting, the crooked road not taken behind that church in a Vincent Van Gogh painting _ a world from this end we fear might be the Michelangelo hell of a nuclear meltdown with faces and arms peeled, stunted and contaminated by an erring god scientists will never admit was provoked by anything other than a mother’s mistake, or else it could smell like lotuses and incense and honeyed candles, sinking into a Claude Monet lake of sheer light and blindness that is canvas and museum walls no more but total artist’s vision.
This is the same cosmos where ghosts with long black hair reside, sometimes standing besides riverside willow trees weeping about betrayal, while at other times mysteriously saving children from car crashes as benevolent all-knowing ancestors.
After all these years, I finally know this is where I return when I die.
To be with you again, all the time, in that moment of eternity that is before birth, so perfectly connected we don’t need to speak or breathe or remember.

Goals to go for

What I found and was happy to find from taiko drummer Isaku Kageyama and what is the dream of all arists:

I wanted to play at the highest possible level that was humanly imaginable.
I wanted a feeling that somehow the music I was playing was “my own.”

who is the poet? a poem by Yuri Kageyama

who is the poet?
a poem by Yuri Kageyama

poets who pause to pontificate
poets who write for grants
poets who count syllables
poets who admire texture of words
i work and have no time
and i have no time for
poets who have all the time
poets who find poetic moments
poets who teach laureate poetry
poets who chatter on Facebook
it is blood in the veins
to kill and give birth and die
i am the true poet, not you
i am the true poet, not you
poets of the revolution
poets weeping tears at bars
poets who don’t write lyrics
poets of pure soundless music
angels of suicide
bridge of neon, cliff of ice
we are the true poets, not you
we are the true poets, not you

winning and losing

In sports, career, dating and other games people play in life, there is always a winner and there is always a loser. Most people spend their time and energy trying to win because winning is crucial to basic needs like survival. The fight of life is about reducing abuse and getting ahead. But how deceiving life can be. It is not really about this kind of winning vs. losing at all. Each and every life holds potential for being a different kind of win that produces no losers at all. Think about the certainty of death and think about what you value the most _ what gives you truest and purest fulfillment. Life is about yourself _ and only yourself. This kind of winning is about winning for yourself. It is a win that cannot be handed to you. It is not being defined outside of yourself. People can win the game of life, hoarding riches and status and empty feel-goodness and turn out a total loser in finding the meaning of life. When you create that music, that poem, that story that feels just right, and when you feel so very close to the meaning of life in that moment, that is a win. When you find that love with no reason except that you love, whether it’s for your lover, your child, your protege, your art, the people of the world, or all the generations of humankind that come after you, that is a win.

Life is good

LIFE IS GOOD.

Fear of death

If you ever panic about the impermanence of life, if you ever get worried about your job, your relationships, your future, if you fear death, the best way to put all that turmoil to rest is to reassure yourself that death will come _ surely, whether you worry or not, whether you try to stop it or not.
All of it will end _ surely.
Since you know this, you could conceivably go berserk and kill everyone you ever hated before you kill yourself.
This is one obvious scenario. And daily headlines tell us some people really do this, thinking they are justified.
OK and so why doesn’t everybody go out and do this, since death comes oh so surely.
We want to leave this world a better place for those who are still alive, and this means that we don’t really deep inside believe that death ends everything, though it comes, surely, as we know it.
There is something else that goes on forever.
Like our love for our children, including other people’s children.
Simple things like the light of the stars, the taste of food in our mouths, a blade of grass, the scentless smell of the wind.
Simple things that are so forever complex.

money for art

This is what I heard from a dancer.
But the biggest stars of Tokyo Butoh troupe Dairakudakan, not just the student dancers, don’t ever get paid to perform.
Instead, they must bring in money from outside jobs to a pool of funds that has been set up to support the group’s performances and other artistic activities.
So they are paying to dance _ never mind worrying about getting paid to perform.
The question has already been answered.
You dance to dance. That’s it.
The dance is separate from livelihood _ which must be dealt with outside of dance.
That’s why I think Dairakudan performers exude that absolute confidence.
They look at us with disdain because they know they are pure and we are not.

Toshinori Kondo

“Oh, my Buddha!” was what Toshinori Kondo kept saying.
That was back in the 1980s, when he was in his IMA band stage, fresh from his return from New York, where he had built his fame, and now out to forge his own Japanese jazz sound.
Instead of looking to the West (as in “Oh, my God!”), a musician must look to his/her Asian roots (and start saying, “Oh, my Buddha!” instead).
He was one of the most fascinating people I have ever interviewed.
Maybe he felt sorry for me that our interview was about to end, and I could have been in his presence forever.
He began to clown around and disappeared into the narrow crevice between the wall and a soda vending machine.
“Oh, my Buddha!”
I don’t know why, but this was terribly and perfectly charming.
In his recent book “Inochi wa Sokkyo da (Life Is Improvisation),” Kondo says he studied the lives of Buddhist monks and spiritual leaders when he was younger to find out for himself what made Japanese and Japanese thinking great.
Otherwise, he couldn’t feel confident that, as a Japanese artist, he would have something unique or competitive to say in the world of jazz, dominated by Americans.
The Buddhists all led pretty wild and crazy lives, it turns out, fasting, becoming hermits, wandering penniless, chanting in a frenzy.
Best of all, they had a unique view on the meaning of life and spirituality, which remains key to Kondo’s approach to music today.
Kondo wasn’t satisfied with the Japanese music scene, despite his great success, because it was so insular and it wasn’t trying to say anything universal.
He was hectically busy.
But artistically, he felt he was going nowhere fast.
This is when he started living in Amsterdam, partly to get away and collect his thoughts.
In recent years, he began his “Blow the Earth” project, in which he goes to forsaken but gorgeous places like Machu Picchu and Bali and basically plays his heart out.
No one is there to listen.
He feels at one with the Nature around him as though the pulse in the mountain air is beating in time with his blowing, down to the tiniest pulses in every cell of his body.
It is a true high.
This is about getting to the music that is the origin of life.
It is totally divorced from the usual assumptions about music _ how its success is calculated by how many CDs you sell _ about trying to commercially reach hordes.
One time, Kondo travels to Kenya with a Japanese camera crew and wades into a lake filled with flamingos and pelicans.
Be sure to roll the cameras when I start playing, he says. Thousands of birds are going to take flight. And it will be beautiful.
He starts to blow.
But the birds don’t take off.
They just start to dance.
Why are young Japanese so worried? Kondo wonders in his book.
And they aren’t even worried about what might happen decades from now.
They worry about what might happen next year, tomorrow.
They are so privileged yet they are so afraid.
He was never so afraid.
He kept going for half a century and has never turned back and is still going.
My son plays with this very important Japanese musician WED May 13 at a temple near Mount Fuji.

Revising haiku

I’ve decided to change the haiku from before to this:

八重桜
ここにいます!と
どぶに散る

Yaezakura
I am here! Scattering
petals in the ditch

The way I had it before with 影のなか (In the shadows) was too regular/predictable haiku-like.
Today, on my way to work, I saw cherry trees bending over a muddy ditch.
I realized that image sent a stronger message about what I was feeling _ that the flowers bloom wherever they are, even if no one is watching or aware of its existence.
That to me is utter beauty and presence and life.
And a ditch still can be a good dark backdrop for cascading pink petals.