Shield for Your Eyes, A Beast in the Well on Your Hand

heyeyeyeyeyey. hey. i'll post about the tazawako trip when i'm on my own computer in m'room and i'm able to add pictures. right now i'm in the computer lab. i just woke up at one pm, dunno why. it's another holiday here, health and wellness day, i think. i've got my journal here, so i thought i'd transcribe a little hastily scratched idear about japan wherein i sound like i'm able to explain things to myself a little better than i can usually muster. was that a grammatically correct sentence? yeh. anyway, this things a little embarrassing, mainly, i think, because i use the term "life force" or something like that, and also because this idea might already be blatantly obvious to a lot of people, and i'm just starting to define it for myself. whatever, here it is, and maybe tonight some tazawako pictures and a rundown of that day.

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i think i might have some kind of stronger idea about why i feel connected to japan, japanese art and japanese people, and i want to try to explain it before the understanding fades. i think all the japanese art i've seen, and all the japanese people i've met, even if they seem more "western" or atypical, have a deep, strong understanding or connection to the life power behing every growing thing, (even non-growing things, i guess, like the wedded rocks) and an instinctual sense of our individual and group place in the movements of the universe. just some picture or idea or understanding carried with them ofhow life flows and where to fit into that flow, from tiny to massive. i think that might be why suicide rates are so high here, (with akita prefecture being the suicide capital of japan) because of that extremely high sensitivity to life flow, and a sense of being outside of it is so much stronger with a person like that. no art from anywhere else in the world, except tribal cultures, which have almost been fucked into nonexistence by westerners, has that fundamental connection to the energy that everything has inside it. i think that's part of why i feel such a strong connection to and gratitude toward this culture, even with all the evidence, socially, economically, and in the physical environment of its stepping out of that flow. maybe. hope i've been able to document or explain the feeling a little. maybe it's bullshit, but it feels real to me.

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the one example i keep thinking of is a time when kinumo was talking about her astronomy teacher, and she described him as "a man who's head is a bowl filled with stars", and i just wanted to be surrounded by a culture that could see people that way. i know there are massive problems here, too, and that it's not the sole source on the planet of some sort of connection to the universe, and that there's been western art that makes that connection, too. just something i feel very strongly here that i don't feel quite as strongly from other places. they've also got melt banana, sushi, and haruki murakami, so yeah, that's part of it, too.