A Manual of Letting Go “Memory is repetition with a difference… a wheel that turns, returns, and turns again.” — Simon Critchley, Memory Theatre 🤜Prologue: A Chosen Unravelling I knew this would be my final excursion in Japan. That knowledge pressed gently on the edges of everything: the packing, the planning,
“Exile is not a matter of choice; it is an enforced state of being.” — Edward Said 🌊 Not Quite, Never Fully There are places on maps that refuse to be located. Places that do not belong to the nations that name them. Okinawa is one of them. Or more precisely: Uchinaa.
“A walk is always in the form of a question.” — Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection “A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images… In the end, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I believe there is a silence that predates speech, and a knowing that precedes thought. In Aokigahara, I came close to both: not as metaphors, but as difficulties. They call it the Sea of Trees. I
“Every fulfilled wish is the beginning of a new disillusionment.” — Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf 🥾 The Ascent of Desire I climbed Fuji to conquer it. Not to reflect. Not to find myself. Not to breathe the sacred air of Japan’s highest peak. I climbed it because I wanted it done: another
“It is not enough to think the divine. One must also summon it.” — Proclus, Theologia Platonica 🪆 A Stillness That Is Not Empty I have stood before countless images. The plaster saints of childhood, radiant and idealised. The Wounded Virgin of Valladolid, the Vulnerata, cradled in the scarred arms of Spanish
“We are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” — Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae There are seasons in life, unmarked on any calendar, when one begins to feel the deep fatigue of incessant usefulness. For some, this arrives
A meditation on Namahage, Greek tragedy, and the philosophy of the face “Give me a mask and I will tell you the truth.” — Oscar Wilde 🌍 The Oldest Invention Before we built cities or wrote down laws, we made masks. Across cultures and centuries, they appear in ritual, theatre, mourning, celebration.
“He fell in love with an image, but it was his own.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III Lake Tazawa is the deepest lake in Japan. It is also, perhaps, the most unsettling. The colour of the water is impossible, cobalt , ultramarine, sometimes a disquieting black depending on the light, and yet
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead Abashiri is a beautiful place. Cold, vast, impossibly quiet. The sea is never far from view, but it seems frozen in thought. In winter, the drift ice arrives like
「自分というものを他人の眼から見ようとする努力は、学問に通ずる道である。」 “The effort to see oneself through the eyes of others is the path to understanding.” — Natsume Sōseki When I first came to Japan, I believed ramen was the most Japanese thing imaginable. A steaming bowl of noodles, miso or shoyu broth curling with umami, thinly sliced chāshū resting
“Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.”Language is the house of Being. — Martin Heidegger I once lived in that house: all clarity and order, its ceilings held aloft by clauses, its beams shaped in syntax. In my years of priesthood, I moved comfortably within the architecture of Western language.