#jisei

散るをいとふ 世にも人にも さきがけて 散るこそ花と 吹く小夜嵐

A small night storm blows Saying 'falling is the essence of a flower' Preceding those who hesitate

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三島 由紀夫 Mishima Yukio 1925–1970

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You can find the full set on my KoFi

After I finished making a midterm exam, Molly and I went to a secret Japanese tea house. It appears on no map, has no hours, no sign. It is as though it exists, somehow, outside this world. When you enter, you give your phone to the owner to lock in a box for the duration of your visit.

We stayed for nearly 6 hours—sat reading poems, chatting with the eccentric owner about Sufism and the ocean and his peculiar flower arrangements consisting of a mix of living and dead plant matter.

How can I describe it, the strange sensation of being alive, late at night in those dim lights, surrounded by beauty. I got up to look at the wares, inhaled the hinoki essential oil—Max Richter was playing as I stared at blank notecards and imagined writing someone a heartfelt note, writing bravely, from that bewitched and emotionally authentic space I was in. I felt a sudden pang. It was the moment opening, with all its counterfactuals, what could have been, what will never be—how deeply I could feel, in that instant, the texture of my grief.

When I’m in the hustle and bustle of my busy and now quite ordinary life, I think, if only I could really hear the voice that says,

“Jackie, it was not for this that you were created.”

Then I would give away all my things and spend my days in prayer.

Susan Howe writes that for Sarah Edwards, “all works of God are a kind of language or voice to instruct us in things pertaining to calling and confusion.”

“...each soul comes upon the call of God in his word. I read words but don’t hear God in them.”

Did I pray, how long in supplication, with my inner eye fixed on that phantom, the phantom with her eyes stitched shut, limbs covered in oak moss. A dream of the opening of the eyes, the inert limbs now lithe and moving toward you. Ordinary objects and sounds are suddenly strange. That’s when the phantom slips through, when I hear the birds singing in a tree...

The blooming moment. Retrospectively, I am convinced that its condition of possibility was the confiscation of my phone, that it is only when we are unplugged that we can sense these holy emanations.

How calm we were, leafing through the book of Japanese death poems (jisei) in the tea house. What will be the last words I write before dying? For all I know, it could be this, or this. I remembered the dying words of George Mackay Brown: “I see hundreds and hundreds of ships sailing out of the harbour.” I remember the fragments Kafka wrote while dying, “lemonade everything was infinite,” his concern for the peony, the improvised performance—the incantation—I did at the Zinc Bar in 2015 using Kafka’s dying words, how J wept in the audience, then wrote me about the snow:

I am the guy, by the way, who said hi on the street, in the snow, after your reading. … I did indeed cry after your Kafka-Cixous incantation, partly because that phrase has been magic to me my whole life. I read Cixous' novel by that name when I studied with her and Derrida in my twenties... Her seminars were amazing. One day, funnily enough, she gave a seminar on snow in Proust, simply because snow was on the ground in Paris. For all sorts of reasons your whole reading shook and tenderised me deeply. I suppose, with the snow through the tinted glass outside, it will forever be, my imagination of what you read will forever be blanche niege texte.

Recently, I read an exquisitely curated collection of jisei—Japanese death poetry. It was a thoroughly engrossing volume, offering unique insight into man’s relationship with his own mortality. This illuminating glimpse into a cultural practice with which I was only vaguely familiar (I was aware of the verses composed by samurai before committing seppuku, but not much else) in turn contextualized the central themes of one of my favorite movies: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life.

Like Professor Yoel Hoffman’s book, the film explores core tenets of Buddhist philosophy: transience, impermanence, and the rejection of self. The plot revolves around the premise that the souls of the newly deceased are permitted to choose just a single memory to carry with them into the hereafter. Rather than selecting concrete moments in time, however, most of the characters prefer to retain emotionally evocative sensory images: the fragrant petals of cherry blossoms dancing in the breeze, the cottony texture of clouds drifting past the window of an airplane, the scent of laundry detergent on a childhood blanket.

The jisei poet’s final impression of this fleeting, illusory world is likewise deeply personal; after all, the details that he commits to paper immediately prior to his departure cannot help but be significant. When he gazes out the window, what does he notice? Are the flowers in the field wilted and withered, mimicking his aged flesh? Or are they freshly bloomed—a symbol of renewal, rejuvenation, rebirth? Does morning dew glisten on the grass, or has it already evaporated in the midday heat? Are the cicadas singing amongst the treetops, or have they long since fled, their discarded husks clinging to the bark?

Such observations are not recorded for the benefit of the living; they belong to the authors alone—keepsakes, talismans, mementos intended to ease their passage to the shore beyond this material plane of existence. And despite my skepticism regarding matters of faith, I must admit that I find Kore-eda’s elaboration on this notion to be quite compelling.

I was curious if there was any chance that there’d be a fourth game for the Jisei series?