Notebook Entry: 2009 Japan

I loved my daily early morning walks past rice fields, streams, altars and temples. One day I found myself in a new and unknown area and came across an unassuming temple standing on a hill, the path leading to it a series of ascending steep steps lined with multiple red Torii gates.This small temple–whose name was written in Kanji, which meant I could not point it out again–was more unkempt than some of the other majestic temples that were laced through the streets and culture of Japan. The coins at the altar were the only evidence of its local worshipers. The small building was encircled by old trees, a precipice of an ancient forest. The birds were singing, yet all was silent.

As I walked amongst the trees time felt suspended. Colossal and august, these trees had been dictaphones of time. They had a palpable internal rhythm that reached out through their branches and leaves. The fragrant of earth and bark was overwhelming. Within this eternal pause I disappeared. I could simultaneously sense and feel each star and planet, each plant root system burrowing into the crust of the earth, each heartbeat, and the spin of each cell in my body. All boundaries disappeared, an ocean of everything and nothing. Life and death merged into an omnipresent fragrance. I will never know how long I was caught in the splice of time, I only knew that I did not want to leave or exit this moment.

For the first time in my life I considered death, not because I wanted to give up life but because I wanted to give into it. Her beauty was so overwhelming and exquisite that I never wanted to be parted from her again. I wanted to join her. Partially my sense of place returned and I feverishly started to seek anything I could tie around my neck–a rope, a vine, a piece of fabric. I needed to hang from these majestic branches. In my death these trees would become my infinite friends. I scratched like a squirrel between the leaves and seed pods. I knew I could find a way, I just kept rummaging through soil and roots, but she was already pulling away; the ocean slowly froze over.

The last of the fragrance dissipated with the bark of a dog. In front of me a long lost friend emerged from the understory. His eyes a deep amber, his fur caked with dirt. When his dog nose touched my face I could smell his breath. Hints of fresh cut grass and rotten leaves. He whispered something in my ear in such a deep low pitch that only my spirit could pick it up. He disappeared just as fast as he came into being. Abrupt faraway barking slowly brought me back to where I was. Now just an ordinary forest on an ordinary hill but I left this place not in an ordinary state. In me was a mixture of the sweetness of life and the translucent words of my childhood guardian.

By Anja Marais

He is me, but he is also you and her. He wandered the carved-out path of faded memories in a daze. The fog lay thick in the dewy hills, and he kept walking through the curtain of dusk into the cobalt-dark night. When luck was on his side a star would unassumingly make its presence known. A frivolous guide with ambiguous directions. There was plenty of food for him alongside the road dripping from foliage and branches. The rotten, fallen fruit would squeeze between his toes as he walked on. He never stopped to eat; his stomach wasn’t nearly as barren as his sense of recognition. He was seeking “it”. He once, long ago possessed “it,” but it slipped away, unnoticed and unattended.

His only companion beside the occasional star was the hoarse wind. Softly, like a shawl, it would embrace his tired shoulders and lift the dust majestically around his legs. During the night shadows would visit him in unidentifiable shapes, moving in and out of the fringes of his mind. They were hardly memories but more like ripples in a bowl of water. A scrying tool of past possibilities. In his ambulatory quest he thought he saw another traveler on the road ahead of him. He hastened his steps trying to catch up. The distance between him and the co-traveler would stay the same no matter how he adjusted his speed. With adamant concentration he would not take his eyes off the stranger’s back, even when the fog coagulated the space between them. At times he would have an uneasy feeling that he was being watched but as he turned around the figure behind him had already disappeared.

The fruit was getting heavier and the branches moaned under their weight. They fell and burst like fleshy bombs over the road up against his legs. He noticed the fruit splatters on the traveller’s legs ahead of him as well. He marched on. The road would occasionally split. He knew that it did not matter which side of the fork he chose, it would always unfold as an intricate fractal of itself. He used to take the road that tugged the hardest, but now he blindly followed the familiar traveler instead.

He hardly rested, for the weight of incompleteness fed his restlessness. He decided once and for all to get hold of the strange man ahead of him. He picked up the pace and started running, an awkward shuffle, trying to avoid the slippery stains in the road of skin and pits. Behind him footsteps became imminent and louder but the fog never revealed to him the occupant it sheltered.

And then he finally stopped. Tired. Hungry. For once he allowed the aroma of tree and fruit to enter him. He reached for a full, quivering, soft peach. As his teeth sank into her body the hoarse wind momentarily lifted the fog like a flimsy lace slip and he saw the road stretched ahead of him, open and unoccupied.