Monthly Archives: May 2023

The Sound of Distant Thunder

by in Dad, Death, Existentialism, Fear, Luminous Aether, Philosophy | 33 Comments

“…what people fear in death is the loneliness of having to leave this world forever. Though people may not be consciously aware of all the phenomena around them under normal circumstances, the thought that that which makes them themselves will be lost forever is a terribly lonely thing.”
–Kaneko Fumiko (金子文子), 1903-1926, “The prison memoirs of a Japanese woman”; translator Jean Inglis. A translation of: “Nani ga watakushi o kō saseta ka,” (1991).

–

Over the last few weeks, I’ve come across a number of articles that were essentially about the topic of, “Be Here Now”. Short attention-spans and inefficient multi-tasking were cited, at least three articles mentioned putting down your phone, and “meditation” was brought up in several of them. In one case, however, it was suggested in a comment that Eastern meditation had been “corrupted”. And then I heard a radio article about how online media has been connected with higher rates of teen depression and suicide.


When I was much younger, my father said many times that when a person no longer fears death, the world will reveal itself. I was in my thirties before I really understood what he was talking about.

We usually equate “death” with the consequences of a physical conclusion to the biological processes that keep us “alive”.  But it’s not really our bodies that describe the experience of life. That’s something less corporeal, whether the sum of patterns in firing neurons, or an immortal “soul” existing on some higher plane.

Death consequently, is really about the loss of “ego”, or the internal narrative that makes us unique as human beings. Carl Jung called it “psychic death”, or the “…loss of subjective self-identity“. Consequently, what we actually fear is the loss of that uniqueness in our personal experiences. We fear the loss of “self”.

One of the articles I read asserted that all fear is really a fear of death. I’m inclined to agree.

Staying alive is rather essential to the perpetuation of the species. So it shouldn’t be surprising that fear of that which might cause one’s demise is the prime-mover behind most human action…
or inaction.

However, humans, as thinking beings with personal identities based in the interpretations of our own memories, apply it to all sorts of aspects of self-identity… from loss of personal power or usefulness in society, to social identity, and even to our presumed metaphysical selves. And this creates a constant background narrative of fearful noise.

We become accustomed to all this noise, like the din of a city or voices in a crowded restaurant… or the latest “news” on a screen that plays continuously in the background. The sounds become a part of our own identity, keeping us company while creating a familiar space.  And it can be surprising to find one’s self in the clarity of its sudden absence.

Sitting in the living room quietly with the back door open to the darkness.  No sound of laundry or dishes.  The heat is off.  The refrigerator unexpectedly stops running to the unwinding rhythm of a rapidly dying beat.  I can hear refrigerant boiling off for a few seconds, and then…

Unexpectedly, everything changes.

A breeze is blowing in the treetops, and the smell of humid air.  Aspens rustle closer to the ground.  Something chirps rhythmically in the distance, and then stops.  A faraway pine cone tumbles down through a tree.  The air slows for moment, becomes still.  The very distant sound of thunder.
My own breathing.

Photo: View from the top of the Sierra Buttes.

Ashes

by in Culture, Death, Family, Japan, Loneliness | 13 Comments

Hand in Hand
–Boris (Translated from Japanese)

Together we travel, walking at a pace.
I hear the whistle blowing in the distance,
You say there’s an elm tree.

Good night…
We see the birds fly away, to their nest in the forest.
Together we go home. You’ll never be alone.

To home, to home… We hurry our way home.
Your shadow hurries me on, as if it were the only hope.
[To return home.]

–

Traditional Japanese funeral customs might appear somewhat strange to Westerners.  But they combine native Shinto and adopted Buddhist traditions in a manner that has deep cultural meaning. 

Shinto is an ancient, native Japanese religion based in practices intended to find harmony with the natural forces of the world around us.  Buddhism, which first entered the Japanese archipelago from China around the 6th-century AD, adds an aspect of transition between lives.  And in Japanese culture, the two traditions have become intertwined in ways that include funeral practices.

Bodies are customarily cremated in Japanese culture, and the recently deceased aren’t traditionally preserved or embalmed.  They are also treated as though the spirit remains close for some period of time.

After being bathed and clothed, ice is packed around a body, which will spend one final night at or near the person’s home. If dressed traditionally, kimono are wrapped in reverse, or right-over-left.  A white cloth may also cover the face; however, my family’s traditions leave one’s face visible.

Family members including children, as well as friends and neighbors will visit to offer condolences.  Envelopes containing money and tied with black and white string called “busyugibukuro” (不祝儀袋, “non-celebratory ceremony bag”) may be offered to help with funeral expenses.  Usual amounts range from ¥3,000 to ¥30,000 (about US $30 to $300) depending upon the relationship with the deceased, and avoiding Yen amounts with the number “4” (pronounced “shi”, it sounds like the word for “death”). 

During this time, visitors may sit with and speak to the deceased as though they were still alive, and a wake, or “otsuya” (お通夜, “through the night”), takes place. Wake practices may be more or less formalized, might include formal offerings of incense and individual recitations of sutras (Buddhist prayers), and a priest may be present for varying amounts of time.

In my family, wakes include a lively dinner gathering in the nearby company of the person who has died. These include a great deal of food, and much drinking and good spirits.  Attendees will periodically leave small offerings of food or drinks adjacent to the body.  These go late into the night, with people gradually departing to get some sleep before the next day’s ceremonies.  However, at least one close family member will stay with the body overnight, making certain that incense remain lit.

Occasionally, people may stop in during the night to speak privately with the deceased. These are often moments of closure, apologies, peace-making, or expressions of respect or appreciation that may have been overlooked in life.  Traditionally, such visitors may conclude by whispering the name of the Buddha into an ear so that it’s the last thing that is heard.

The next morning, the body is moved to a location where a more solemn service is held. This could be at a Buddhist temple or other location of convenience, and some regional crematorium facilities may also have a space for ceremonies. The body is placed in a coffin which is packed with dry ice, and a portrait is placed within a flower arrangement behind the coffin.

Men wear black. Women may wear a proper formal kimono or a dress in a dark or subdued color.  A priest will conduct funeral rites, which can vary by tradition.  But in general, they are intended to release the person’s spirit to its next life.  Buddhist sutras will be recited, and the deceased may be given a “kaimyō “, a Buddhist name that will not call them back to this realm.

In my family, the coffin is open as there is a tradition of each person who offers a prayer placing flowers or another soft item with the body. This results in a final view of the person entirely surrounded by a sea of flowers, symbolizing a Buddhist imagery of paradise.

After the service, the priest and mourners will accompany the coffin to the crematorium, where the furnace may be operated by a close family member.  This is more often the case with a husband who has lost a wife, or with the adult son of a parent. While waiting for the cremation, attendees may gather with the priest and share food. This tends to be a less formal time in which to have conversations with the priest.

Americans don’t usually see the actual result of a cremation. What’s left after the process are very brittle, bleached skeletal remains.  In Japan, attendees will gather around them.  A crematory staff will briefly explain about the various bones and observe how they indicate a person’s life, signs of work and labors, injuries, disease or health issues.

Each attendee then receives a special pair of large chopstick, one of bamboo and one of willow, which symbolize the passage between life and death. Bones from the feet are first placed into a small container.  Then, pairs of attendees will choose a single bone to move into the container together.

Traditionally, each person in a pair lifts a different part of the same bone without their chopsticks touching one another. (This is why Japanese will never pass food between chopsticks since it replicates a funeral action.) This is done by everyone in attendance, including children who may need some assistance. A bone may be chosen for a blessing according to its meaning – wisdom, intelligence, strength, health, peace…

The second neck vertebra is considered the most significant bone, as it is seen to hold an image of a seated Buddha.  Remaining small bones and fragments are carefully swept up and placed into the container, with the skull placed on top.

The process of transferring bones to the container completes a ceremonial cycle of life to death. Where the body was treated as an attendee during the previous day’s gathering, each participant now experiences that it is physically gone.  And in the process of moving the bones, the various blessings of that person’s life are passed on as spiritual gifts to the living.

The container is returned to the person’s home if possible, or to the home of a close family member, and placed in a special location with a photo and various traditional Buddhist items that can be used in a series of later ceremonies or for prayers.  Usually, it is interred at a family monument or other permanent location after some prescribed period of time, often 49 days.

This really only touches on the traditions and formalities of Japanese funeral rites, which may continue on long after a person’s death, and which can vary greatly.  While most Japanese aren’t “religious” in the Western sense, Shinto traditions acknowledge the influences of our connections to the world around us, including those who are committed to our memories.  And Buddhism acknowledges that life is transitory.  Regardless, the spiritual closure of traditional funerals is becoming increasingly less common in Japan.

About the Japanese references in the song lyrics, which allude to the death of a partner:
-The elm is a symbol of a connection to the spirit world, and of the goddess of the hearth.
-One life moves on, and a relationship passes into another world.  Ashes are what returns home.
–The warmth of the hearth calls to the one left behind. There is a final word spoken (not in the lyrics) after the abrupt end to the song, “kaeru,” meaning, “to return home.”

Mount Whitney via the Mountaineers Route

by in Altitude, Environment, Snow | 25 Comments

Last week ended with a trip up Mount Whitney via the “Mountaineers Route” (red line).  The road up to the portal was closed by several large rock-slides during the winter. Consequently, we had to park lower down and walk an extra couple of miles up to the “Whitney Portal”.

The usual trail-hiking route up from the Whitney Portal to the summit of Mount Whitney is 11-miles each way for a 22-mile round-trip. This is the route most hikers take, and the route I used the last time I went up the mountain in the summer of 2015. This time around, the mountaineers route seemed like a good alternative due to the heavy snows covering the trail… and it cuts 12-miles off a round-trip. I also thought I might be able to ski down a large part of the route back.

From the portal at about 8,000′ (2,500 m) elevation, it’s just a few miles, though 2,500 vertical feet up to Lower Boy Scout Lake, where we set up camp for the night. There were a surprising number of people, some quite “interesting”, camped in the area. I was also feeling the altitude rather more than I had expected, which I attributed to the ludicrous load I’d hauled up. But after ditching my haul-pack and pitching the nine-pound tent stuffed inside, we collected water, set up for the next day’s summit run, cooked dinner, and watched the light fade as the sun set behind the mountains before crawling into our sleeping bags.

Up at 4:30AM, we were on our way well before sunrise at 5:45. The steepness of the terrain and the frozen snow conditions, including some debris-strewn avalanche run-outs, precluded much skinning up on skis. And this had left me with a decision regarding boots… putting crampons on my super-light and super-comfortable spring mountaineering boots, or hiking up in ski boots. In the end, the skis were A-framed onto my summit pack, and my ski boots strapped onto the bottom.

At that point, I should have taken a cue from my condition after the previous day’s hike in, and maybe just left the skis at the camp-site. From the camp to the point where I stowed the ski gear above Iceberg Lake at about 13,000′ took somewhat over four-hours, or about a half-mile per hour. Dropping the weight off my pack helped a great deal, though not as much as I’d hoped.  Many people will take their skis up another 1000-feet to “The Notch”, just below the summit.

My heart-rate had been higher than I would have liked, frequently breaking 140 (about 85% Max HR for me). I’d attributed this to the altitude; although, I suspect it’s something else.   Despite a rest and some food at Iceberg Lake before the last big push to the summit, I still couldn’t get to below 100.

Counter to my usually cautious approach, we decided not to rope up for the last chute run to the top. It’s not a good area to take a fall. But the snow had become fairly soft in the late morning sun, and we had climbers ahead of us, making the bigger risk rockfall. Taking the easier (if somewhat exposed) “traverse” near the top, we came onto the summit plateau right around noon.

It was a beautiful day, and actually just about perfect timing.  But I really didn’t feel all that great, and didn’t much want to sit around in the thin air.  So walking up to the summit marker, we took the requisite photos and chatted briefly with a couple of the about a dozen people gathered around summit shelter before starting back down. 

Roping-up, we bypassed the traverse by dropping directly into “The Notch” at the top of the gully above Iceberg Lake.   And after having a bit of a religious experience while staring at the pinnacles on the other side of Iceberg Lake, we started down the gully.  I was surprised to see probably twenty people picking their way up.

At Iceberg Lake, we shifted into ski-gear for the trip down.  The upper part of the first ridge off the lake basin amounted to “survival skiing”.  Much of the descent involved a rather unflattering side-sitting technique while using the axe head on a “whippet” pole as an alternative to mimicking a rag-doll.   The ridge definitely tested my limits, but the skis made for quick descent.

As it turned out, our timing for the trip was pretty good.  Thunderstorms came through the following afternoon, and chased us north as we were heading home.  But the trip left me with a couple of observations about Mount Whitney.

Entry into the Mount Whitney Wilderness Area requires a permit, year-round.  Permits for the trail are by lottery, and only about 1-in-4 who try for one will receive an application.  However, permits for the mountaineers route (and associated routes), require applying for a “North Fork Lone Pine Creek” permit.  All of these permits are issued in low numbers… less than 100-people per day.  But I think there were rather more than 100 people on the route while we were there.

I suspect that many who managed early May permits for the trail had decided to shift over to the mountaineers route, since the trail looked impassible where it reaches toward the “99-switchbacks” up to the summit ridge.  And since it didn’t seem like there were any rangers working the Portal area, nobody was checking anything.  Indeed, nobody checked our permits.  And somehow, I don’t think anyone had looked into the naked guy picking his way up through the snow from Lower Boy Scout Lake.

 

The Princess and the Bureaucrat

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Family, History, Humanity, Identity, Japan | 4 Comments

Princess Takiyasha conjures a giant skeleton to attack the samurai, Mitsukuni.
A woodblock by the Japanese artist, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861).

“Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism…”
-Bertrand Russell, “Sceptical Essays“

–
My birthday is separated by just a few days from that of my grand-niece, who just turned twelve last month. When she was little, I once gave her a pair of shoes with flashing lights for her birthday. Remember those? They plied the bounds of socially appropriate clothing for Japanese kids at the time. But much to the chagrin of her mother, as well as a couple of airport security officers, I can still see her flashing feet happily chasing me into the Haneda Airport passenger screening area as I prepared to head back home.

A couple of years later, I sponsored her “randoseru”, one of those large, boxy school-bags carried by sometimes only slighter larger Japanese elementary school children. Hand-made and extraordinarily durable, they’re also extraordinarily expensive. Picking an inner lining and which of two approved colors for one that would be custom made for her represented a sort of right-of-passage into elementary school.

This year, I left the start-of-middle-school fashion choices entirely to her, and simply sent some money. Those flashing lights of childhood were long ago extinguished by the institutional social responsibility instilled by six years in a school uniform. She’s become a top student with good grades, strong in mathematics, serious, quiet. So I don’t want to interfere in whatever self-expression might seep between the black shoes and tied-back hair, whether from Ginza or Harajuku.

In response, I received a package from Japan for my own birthday last month. Inside was a stylishly black card, and a black shirt screen-printed with a large artwork depicting the Princess Takiyasha. It’s was a curious, if somewhat revealing choice. But I understood.

During a stopover in Japan last December, I managed to catch a performance by a group of Japanese musicians that I like. They were playing at a compact venue in Koenji, a part of Tokyo known for its underground arts. The music was incredibly dark and astoundingly loud, with the band shrouded in a dense stage fog for most of the performance. I managed a few photos on my phone that I shared with my grand-niece the next day, and she ended up finding a YouTube clip from the performance.

Her comment to me afterward was, “Do you really listen to that?”
“Wata”, guitarist for
the band, “Boris”.

–
Taira no Masakado was the samurai leader of a powerful provincial family in eastern Japan during the Heian period (794 to 1185). He’s best known for having led a rebellion in the year 939 against Japan’s central government, then in Kyōto. After capturing several provinces in a brief series of bloody battles, he declared himself the “New Emperor” of Japan.

The Kyōto government bureaucracy, however, responded by putting a bounty on Masakado’s head… literally. And two months later, his cousin, Taira no Sadamori, showed up to collect the reward. Some time after, the head somehow ended up in the little fishing village of Shibasaki, where it was buried on a small hill rising out of the adjacent bay.

Shibasaki would eventually become the site of the great city of “Edo”, now known as Tokyo. And Masakado’s severed head still resides in today’s Ōtemachi area on some of the most expensive land in the world (presently about three kilometers from the shoreline due to land reclamation).

It seemed that Masakado’s “onryō”, or vengeful spirit, cursed the city with the likes of earthquakes, fires and drunken brawls whenever attempts were made to relocate his head. So to appease his spirit, government officials decided that it would be easier to simply enshrine it where it was buried. You can find the shrine to Taira no Masakado’s head near exit C5 of the Ōtemachi subway station, facing the Imperial Palace grounds from Tokyo’s financial district.

But legend has it that Masakado‘s vengeful spirit didn’t hold a candle to that of his daughter, Satsuki. After the death of her father, she was said to have traveled to the Kifune shrine in Kyōto where she climbed its long, stone stairway and collapsed in its inner sanctum. Awakening in the dead of night, she called upon the shrine’s powerful water-spirit to give her the power of sorcery to avenge her father’s death.

Impressed by her fury, the spirit granted Satsuki’s wish, and directed her to take the name Takiyasha-hime, from “taki” (滝) for waterfall, “yasha” (夜叉) for demon-warrior, and “hime” (姫) meaning princess.  Now a powerful sorceress, Princess Takiyasha then returned to the ruins of the castle of the Sōma clan, where her father had lived. And from there, she prepared her revenge.

When the Kyōto Imperial bureaucracy heard of Princess Takiyasha’s plan, it dispatched the warrior, Ōya no Tarō Mitsukuni to the castle. But the princess sent an army of minions and “yōkai”, or spirits to attack Mitsukuni.  Finally, the princess summoned a “gashadokuro”, a tremendous “hungry-ghost” in the form of a monstrous skeleton formed from the unclaimed skulls of those who had died in battle.

This epic encounter is depicted in a well-known “ukiyo-e”, or woodblock print. And that’s what’s on the shirt that my grand-niece sent to me. A heroic and all-powerful Princess Takiyasha is about to defeat the overwhelmed bureaucrat samurai, Mitsukuni.

I like it!
–

I understand what my grand-niece was thinking when she chose it for me. It was a recognition of her mysterious, eccentric auntie from a faraway land… the one who listens to stoner-doom music, and who once gave her magic shoes. It’s a connection to something not tied down by the everyday, strict social limits of Japanese society. But there’s a sad irony.

Mitsukuni, as it turned out, had some powers of his own; and the rest of Princess Takiyasha’s story didn’t go so well. Mitsukuni overcame the princess’s magic, and a final battle ensued during which Takiyasha-hime shape-shifted back-and-forth between her human form and those of a series of increasingly terrifying demons. But finally recognizing an inevitable defeat, she returned to her human form to make one last defiant rebuke to her enemies, and met her end by Mitsukuni’s sword.

Even the 19th-century woodblock print artist who created the piece, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, found himself on the losing end of a battle with bureaucracy. He was known as a great master and creative spirit, as well as an optimist with a sense of humor. Still, after coming under investigation by the magistrate’s office, his works were eventually restricted by the Tokugawa shogunate.

Looking at a picture of my grand-niece included with her card, she’s become a tall and beautiful young woman, proudly framed in her new, middle-school uniform. I admire and respect her more than she could possibly imagine. But I also know the rest of the story, the part that isn’t so unencumbered or heroic, the part where even the power of magic can be struck down by expectation and the demands of social order.