Diary

14 April 2013

Tokyo soon, a 10-day visit - my first in six years. "The lovechild of LA and Paris," I thought, when I first visited it 24 years ago. The last time, I went to the Meiji Shrine in Yoyogi Park. It was in the summer, so very warm. The shrine is isolated from the metropolis. Several years before, I went out to Miyazaki's Ghibli Museum, which involves taking the subway and then a "cat bus" that drives along an ancient street with a tree-lined canal and detached, older houses. I'd never seen anything like it in Tokyo. In the early 1990s, staying at Ark Hills, I remember seeing an old-style house in semi-ruin, walking around the neighborhood uphill from the development. Minoru Mori for some reason often set his properties up against Buddhist temples, shifting their graveyards. Atago Hills, for example, looks down on one. I think it's good that the dead are present in a community, part of its fabric. We live in time, and the dead are part of it.

Last weekend, I threw the hexagram "Receptivity," number two, with no moving lines. This is my particular hexagram, I believe - my ability is to bring things into existence, drawing on myriad stimuli. My openness to experience is accompanied by a chronic resistance to it, I notice. This is accentuated if I arranged the thing beforehand - signed up for a concert, lecture, or panel. This reflects a nature that is drained by experience, even as I look for it. Something, too, about autonomy - a resistance to falling in with other people's agendas. Work in the formal sense demands this, but we're paid to do it. Family, too, creates comparable obligations. So there's a certain perverse luxury to ignoring obligations to self - treating them as optional. My resistance may have a slightly hedonistic root. I speculate on it because of course I'd like to feel it less.

Comments

  1. I enjoyed reading your thoughts. I feel I have learned more about you in this one blog post than in 30 years living near by.

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