Saturday, June 10, 2006

On Beyond Zebra

It has been one month since our last post. Ideally, we should get into the habit of more frequently updating this website; truth be told, however, it is sometimes a month before we have had any report worthy experiences.

Recently, we visited a 615 year-old Zen temple in a nearby town. Zen-Shoji is a sprawling complex of sprawling complex of tiny wooden corridors and beautfully crippled trees. It has an ancient rock garden, with moss and pond plants cascading down from the foot of a cedar forest, as well as a weathered ink brush portrait that is a National Treasure. Perhaps because we were the only visitors, perhaps because he sensed something about us, the resident monk/priest of Zen-Shoji approached us and invited us to have tea with him. It was a very odd, though pleasant experience. We felt very accutely observed, though in no way threatened. With his big glasses and frequent laughter, the monk remined us of the Dalai Lama (I mean, what other Buddhist monks do I know ...) He spoke much better English than he let on to, and afterwards, gave a book on Zen buddhism and Japanese culture and invited us back. Of course, we both Natasha and I harboured Kill Bill fantasies about his training us as samurai or ninja ...



When I was a child, I had a Dr. Seuss book entitled On Beyond Zebra. In it, a young boy who is learning the alphabet is interrupted by a friend or elder brother that informs him that there are more letters in existence than the rudimentary 26 one learns at school. "Most people stop at the Z," says the adventuring older boy, "but not me!" The younger is then taken on a tour of the "other" letters of the alphabet and of the worlds they are used to describe. Kind of a simple conceit, really. But I was always intrigued by the shapes of the letters -- a blend of familiarity and grotesque. I have been thinking about this book, because we have begun studying Japanese. Not as interesting or practical as German, Latin, or Sanskrit, I would venture, but it is always good to dabble, multilinguistically. Goethe observed, "The man who knows only one language knows none." Anyway, we are still at the exciting stage, when the Japanese alphabetic characters still have an image quality to them: I can admire them as new and exotic designs--interesting compositions of vertical and horizontal lines, curves, rhythms. They have not yet become purely symbolic of sounds, words, ideas, communication ... They still have a presence of their own. They move. I try to look newly at the Roman alphabet, for traces of strangeness. I try to imagine what a first encounter with the shape of an "h" is like. Or a "Q". It must have happened sometime when we were children ... how did we let our letters become so prosaic? How can letters, words even, be both image and communicative currency? I guess this is the stuff and power of typographic Design. Of calligraphy.

Speaking of "beyond zebras", I recently stumbled upon a Japanese kamoshika. I decided, one day, to escape the mulling city and climb up one of the surrounding mountains. I spent several hours picking my way up a mountain river (bouldering? is that what it is called?). It wasn't light work: the slopes of the Japanese are pretty darn steep. Anyway, far above me, up the high slope of the river bank, I noticed something moving. I supposed, excitedly, that it was a monkey; but when I moved in closer to try and take a picture, I realised that it both walked on all fours and had a bearded, eerily human-like face. It was pretty terrifying. Anyone who has ever seen "the forest spirit" in the film Princess Monoke will have a pretty good sense of what this thing looked like. Other than that, the most exciting news is the discovery of a tiny town that has a cheese bar ... a cafe that imports European cheese on a seasonal, monthly basis. And there was much rejoicing.

2 Comments:

Blogger Walter said...

Oh Yeah,

A cheeze bar sounds like my kind of place. I am very jealous that you saw the forest spirit. (I believe I watched that movie with you.) Good to see you're posting again. I have to work on my blog again soon

6:59 PM  
Blogger e.go said...

and now it's been two months since your last post! got your thank you card from the wedding, and it was lovely. i hope to read more about what you're up to on this blog soon! :)
erin

9:31 AM  

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