ABSTRACT
Kogo tokitsukusazare As people say here, “in a good talk, don’t explain everything”
GISHIKI Rituals
and the formation of identity the skill of behavior, the craft of framing time, the art of paths
why travel, I would say, if not to be in touch with the ordinary in nonordinary ways; to feel and think ordinarily while experiencing what can later become the extraordinary in an ordinary frame
SHINKANSEN
the bullet train part of a new class structure the luxury of going faster while sitting in one place
start in a room sealed with darkness and a door or a window immediately etches itself onto the viewer’s mind
again, it’s that unbearable fellow traveler who won’t stay behind, whom one cannot get rid of
opening at dawn, closing at dusk
sorrows forming and falling away heavy like drops of water from a lotus leaf
every day from a blossoming lotus something’s emerging every day from deep in the mud someone’s being reborn
SUKURIN RIZUMU — (on screen) SCREEN RHYTHM
painting, photography and cinema used to offer different realms of images today the gap becomes the bridge, what tends to separate film from video can offer a passage a world, not of motion pictures, but of images on the move
pushing, no piercing the match lasts the times it takes for horns to unlock no crisis, no bloodshed when “gravity is the root of lightness” (Tao teching)
the seated interface carries with it a danger both geophysical and spiritual:
that of body losing touch with body
everyday, controlled by a computer brain in Tokyo over 150 bullet trains crisscross Japan
their whereabouts neatly mapped in tiny lights on wall panels
the truly real world is there where you see trains. For Soseki Natsume, nothing represents better the civilization of the 20th century than the train. Hundreds of people crammed in a box that rumbles along heartlessly. All taken at uniform speed to the same station. . . . He wrote: “Modern civilization uses every possible means to develop individuality, and having done so, tries everything in its power to stamp it out. It allots a few square yards to each person, and tells him that he is free to lead his life as he pleases within that area. At the same time it erects railings around him, and threatens him with all sorts of dire consequences if he should dare to take but one step beyond their compass. . . . The railway train which blunders ahead blindly into the pitch of darkness is one example of the very obvious dangers which abound in modern civilization.”
