(With apologies to Bashô.)

My high school chemistry teacher was an intriguing man. He struck me as some vision of my father in a parallel universe. The details of his life story are fuzzy, but a few facts became known to me. He says, he lived alone in the woods of Iowa for years, longer, he boasts, than Thoreau lived in Walden. He worked occasional construction jobs to earn money for books and propane then went back to out wait the end of the world. At this point, the story becomes more speculative, based more on rumor, and inference. Precisely how it came about is unknown, but somehow, he ended up leaving his solitude forever one day, and it was for the sake of a woman. He rejoined the human race, married, and had a son. Then somehow, it turned sour. There was a divorce, and his son, given a choice, chose to live with his mother. Now, he lives by himself again but is connected to society through his job at the school and the volunteer fire department. He earns extra money from the government by letting his farmland grow over with kudzu. He earned his doctorate recently. Still, I can’t help but wonder if he thinks it was really worth it. He rejoined the world, only to be burnt by a woman whose love made the world worth joining. It is an intriguing story, but I’ll probably never know the whole truth of it.

(:title (With apologies to Bashô.):)

(With apologies to Bashô.)

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and five senses, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind.

This something in me took to philosophy years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to consider philosophy, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of pure reason, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be an existentialist, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of philosophy. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of philosophizing, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.

In examining the Waffle House in Akron, Ohio, one finds it is both like and unlike the Waffle Houses of Columbia, South Carolina. Interstate 77 runs a length of more than six hundred miles, beginning in Columbia and ending in Cleveland, some forty miles north of Akron. To my knowledge, there are no Waffle Houses along I-77 in either Virginia or West Virginia. There are several in North Carolina. The coffee in Akron is tainted by their use of Ohio water, with its muddy taste. Further, the waitress ask patrons to confirm the inclusion of grits with their All-Star Special, and the jukebox has suspiciously few country songs. All taken though, its similarity to other Waffle House is unmistakably clear.

How many bridges
were crossed traveling along it?
Seventy-seven.

Bashô travelled thousands of miles in his lifetime, wandering from place to place, pushed forward only by his love of haiku and the determination to seek the experiences that inspire them. His greatest work is known as, “The Narrow Road to the Deep Interior,” and the title can be taken to mean both the literal far flung interior of Japan and metaphorically the further flung interior of the heart. Though travel, Bashô hoped to come to an understanding not only of himself, but of poetry and its full potential.

I departed for Ohio with less ambitious goals but perhaps a similar dream. At the time, I was reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a novel in which the protagonist sketches his philosophy as he and his son travel out West. Motion is an important part of many American novels. Somehow in America, it’s expected that half or more of the children in a family will leave the city of their birth when they come of age. Striking out on one’s own is an important American tradition. In order to make a name for oneself as an American, one must do so alone, without recourse to one’s parents or ancestors. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

I went to Ohio with my friend Shige, but I came back alone. It was a long drive to make by myself, and yet it wasn’t so lonely. Bashô lived alone on and off through out his life. He quotes Saigyo approvingly, “I shall be unhappy without loneliness,” adding, “There’s nothing so intriguing as living alone.” There is something powerful about the idea of being alone. I have a memory from my childhood of children’s TV show. It was a program hosted by some kindly bearded man with a guitar who would sing songs about this-and-that. The part of the show that I remember is the episode in which he described New York City. He said, it is a city of eight million people, yet it is still possible to feel alone there. Somehow, that stuck with me.

Sabi is the root of the Japanese word for being lonely. It occupies an important place in the values of Japanese literature. As Bashô said, it is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that.

Bashô once wrote, “Octopus traps: fleeting dreams— the summer moon.” The poem is very short, but the image is clear. The summer moon reflects on the waves as they roll along the shore. The tentacle of an octopus in its pot reaches out, as if to grab the distorted moon in the sky. Another wave washes over the octopus and it relaxes its pose. The next day, the octopus will be taken away from the ocean forever. Likewise mankind reaches out his hand for the fleeting image of the moon, but come the morning everything grasped for will be swept away.

We are born alone and die alone. Whether we are alone in between or hereafter seems, to me, a question of great philosophical importance. Every relationship is the interaction between at least six participants. There is how one perceives oneself and how one perceives the other. There is how the other perceives herself and the one. Finally, there are the actual selves of the one and the other, though the roles of the actual selves in the relationship is in all likelihood imperceptible. How can we every stop being alone if we can’t reach out and touch the other self as it touches our own?

In Ohio, I had Shige introduce me to his friend as famous. The Japanese for famous is literally “existing-name.” Homer Simpson describes the experience of fame as being one in which people know your name, but you don’t know theirs. He adds enthusiastically that it is great.

In Japan, I felt like being foreign had given me a small taste of fame, which only left me hungry for more. Everyone knew that I was some portentous symbol of the West, walking in their midst. All the school children cried out, “Harro!” Somehow, that felt right.

The wind-swept spirit that is inside me is a rather thin and threadbare cloth. The consciousness is like the crossing grounds for sensations moving in opposite directions. Perceptions move in from the world to the self, and thoughts move out from the self to the world. Threads of control and causality are woven back and forth through the fabric of the wind-swept spirit. A thought bubbles up from the self to the world and tells the eye to open. New perceptions stream in from the eye and move from world to self. Having moved inside, these perceptions become thoughts that then bubble back out again. However, all the consciousness feels is the crossing of sensations from one realm to other, leaving the wind-swept spirit doubly blind. The consciousness knows neither the inner nature of the self nor the outer nature of the world. Over time, one’s sense of the mineness of the self seeps out onto the world, creating projects and desires and relationships. The self is tangled up in the world and the once windswept spirit is trapped in between.

We are born alone, and yet loneliness is itself a deprived state of being. To be a member of mankind is to be a member of a kind. It is through others that the difference between self and world can become clear. If we did not recognize our own spark in the eyes of others, we would never see the difference between inside and outside the self. Loneliness is just a means of exploring the space that others have made. An identity is made of actions observed by other selves. At birth, the world and self are one, and it is only other people and our clear distinctness from them that rips the world away from the self.

I think the hope that propels my desire for fame is a hope that others will take notice and through their attentions bring me into complete being. Fame is an existing name, and existence is an extension of being observed. Heisenberg’s dictum applies to life as well. The act of observing changes a system imperceptibly but undeniably.

Considering the physical space of America, it is mind boggling to think that one can travel from one coast to the other on a seamless flow of concrete and asphalt. Interstate 77 is just one of the many names for paths along this flow but its length is startling enough for a single pair of drivers. When all the roads interlocked together are looked at as a unit, the result in inconceivable. This web of roadwork has nailed down the dirt of our country, affixing it as under a vast net. There is now no part of Interstate 77 that I haven’t experienced as driver or passenger, and yet I feel I am almost no closer to understanding the road as a whole.

My high school chemistry teacher was an intriguing man. He struck me as some vision of my father in a parallel universe. The details of his life story are fuzzy, but a few facts became known to me. He says, he lived alone in the woods of Iowa for years, longer, he boasts, than Thoreau lived in Walden. He worked occasional construction jobs to earn money for books and propane then went back to out wait the end of the world. At this point, the story becomes more speculative, based more on rumor, and inference. Precisely how it came about is unknown, but somehow, he ended up leaving his solitude forever one day, and it was for the sake of a woman. He rejoined the human race, married, and had a son. Then somehow, it turned sour. There was a divorce, and his son, given a choice, chose to live with his mother. Now, he lives by himself again but is connected to society through his job at the school and the volunteer fire department. He earns extra money from the government by letting his farmland grow over with kudzu. He earned his doctorate recently. Still, I can’t help but wonder if he think it was really worth it. He rejoined the world, only to be burnt by a woman whose love made the world worth joining. It is an intriguing story, but I’ll probably never know the whole truth of it.

“Just by yourself today, eh?” asks the woman at the Pizza House. “Where are your friends?” asks the woman at the Wok Inn. How is it that we can feel alone in a crowd but feel fine by ourselves? A well lived life should balance being with and being without fellow human beings.

Bashô wrote, “The road! Without a traveller, this autumn eve.”

Of Waffle House and loneliness, there is an almost unbounded amount which can be written. And with the summer’s closing, I find myself living alone in this 15th year of Akihito’s reign in the ninth month. The days are still pleasingly warm, but the nights have grown too cool to leave open the window and listen to the crickets as one fades into sleep. I find myself going to Waffle House on days when loneliness has grown too much for me. The sensory experience of Waffle House is, of course, especially rich for one as starved for the connection with mankind as I have allowed myself to become. The dishes clatter noisomely in the sink, and the odor of coffee and cigarettes fills one’s nose like fresh cut fruit or well ground sumi ink. I have thought before that Bashô could, if properly initiated, come to appreciate much of the deep sabi that pervades the Waffle House. Its rhythms and routines are not so drawn out as the seasons but real nevertheless. The changing of the staff and the confluence of regulars seems as fixed as the song of the hototogisu. The woman I love is in Tibet, and the girls are love are even further removed still—in my dreams and on the moonbeams. Nothing real is so fine as the idea of it, and burnt hashbrowns too are served. Someday my world may cease its mad gyrations, but for now Waffle House the ideal and material can remain as the axis for its motion.

I journeyed thirteen hundred miles going to Ohio, and in doing so mapped a new space for myself in the world. I never felt alone on the ride back. I had my stack of CD’s, one after another. I had America, rolling on and on for hundreds of miles. I had my thoughts and thus the identity others have helped me create.

For all his wandering, I wonder if Bashô ever found what it is he sought. His life’s final poem suggests a tireless striving, “Sick on a journey— my dreams wander, withered fields.” In his pursuit of the truth of haiku, Bashô ruined his health and died on a final meandering journey. My own dreams vacillate between total fame and complete anomie. As far as intelligence or the quality of our writings go, I can never compare to such a man. And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling? But enough of that—I’m off to bed.