everything except himself

I forget why I was thinking about it, but for some reason I had found myself in the middle of looking for a poem from a show called “Blue Sub No. 6″. The poem, as presented in the English version, goes this way:

“Today, today,”
Each day I have waited for you.
And now, do they not say you are strewn
        with the shells of Ishi River?

The show makes an allusion to it being from the Manyoushuu, which is, wait for it, volumes and volumes of Japanese poetry, including thousands of poems. And, to top that off, they’re not written in modern Japanese, since they were written in the 7th-8th century.

So, I looked online and no one had even so much as ganked a transcription of the Blue Sub No. 6 version. Then, I gave up because no one had done the work for me, but, being who I am, I tried looking it up again to no avail. So, I had stumbled across the untranslated version of the Manyoshu at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center website (here). And so, in a stroke of what I can only call brilliance, I searched for a double-occurrence of the word (in Japanese) for “today” (今日). I found a poem that had it, and began trying to pick out words to translate to see what it was about. It turns out that it was the wrong poem. So, long, boring, frustrating story short, I searched for not only a double-occurrence of “today” but for a second phrase (thank you Virginia) of “Ishi River” (石川). And then I ended up at the right poem, Manyoushuu #224: here (look for the red text of 224).

I made a weak attempt (because Japanese is hard for me, apparently) at the translation of the end note (that’s the part marked by “[ＫＷ]” on the original) and of the poem itself:

I wait for you, saying,
“Today! Today! He will come today!”
Even though they all say
You have become mixed
With the things of the Ishi River gorge.

Type: An Elegy
Author: Yosami no Otome (妻依羅娘子) (a woman)
Description: A song for Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本人麻呂),
her husband, when he was near death at Shimane (島根).

In so doing, I learned more than I wanted to know about “Early Old Japanese”. For instance, how the transcription of the poem into modern Japanese doesn’t do it justice because it uses a completely different set of sounds (i.e. it’s in a markedly different dialect of the language). Or, you know, how the sentence particles are used completely differently. Also of note, the poem is setup having syllables occurring in 5-7-5-7-7. But wait! The modern Japanese looks like:

けふけふと,	kyou kyou to, [sic]
わがまつきみは,	wagamatsukimiwa,
いしかはの,	ishikawano,
かひに, まじりて,	kahini, majirite,
ありといはずやも	arito iwazu yamo

The last line has 8! And, lo and behold, in this dialect, when two vowels occur side by side, one of them gets dropped. Go figure. So, 7 syllables it is. Also, the first line is literally romanized as “kefukefuto”, but I don’t know how you go from “today, today” (今日今日), which I would think turns into “kyou, kyou,” to “kefu, kefu.” Maybe someone can explain it.

At any rate, curiosity thoroughly exhausted.

Samsara

Human eyes,
Fickle and callous and full of surprise
At the sight of you –

My heart longs to tell you
That you are the very model of perfection to me
And that my eyes cannot properly see
All of the things you could mean to me.

But you have walked out of my life,
Trouncing upon that inspiration,
Leaving it in a pile of broken words,
Lined with your corrections,
And my mind cannot fathom how you would want to be
Anything but perfect to me!
And, so, that part of me chokes and dies on its words,
That you would not want to be beautiful, lovely, and distinct
But want to be planned and copied and cold.

The part of me that loved you will yet revive
And find another
And another
And another
Until either love has bloomed or hope has died
And continue still
That perfection was seen in you!

The whole city knew when the boy had hit the tower: everything stopped. Except those people who were standing, starring, video-taping the carnage, everyone was panicked. There’s some ethereal calming feeling, inherent only to humans, to watching a disaster, like how people slow down in cars to look. Only willing to watch, people stand apart from the mess. They take it in as a sort of chance entertainment, not as they would a book or something of importance but as a terrible sort of sideshow to their daily lives.

That’s when it happened. The maintenance man came running out of the pizza shop in a rush, followed with no real sense of the situation by pop.

“Drive my truck over to where the accident is. I’m going to go do what I can!” The maintenance man tossed pop the keys to the ‘truck’ — really, it’s a white service van with the tower company’s logo on the side. On account of the maintenance man being the only real adult in this city full of children, the maintenance man is hereafter referred to plainly as “man”. Not “super”, not “special” — just “man”.

Pop looked at the keys and then over to the burning wreckage at the tower. He looked back down at the keys, but his attention was on the tower.

By this time, the man was close enough to the wreck to see that nothing had been done at all to help the situation by the onlookers. He saw only one car, and so he headed over to it. The car looked like it was laying peacefully next to the tower, catecorner, taking a nap on its side. In the driver’s side seat was a boy of about seventeen years in appearance, also napping — unconscious — between his driver-side window and an airbag.

As big as the tower was, the SUV, motionlessly laying to one side of the tower, looked like it was trying to hug a tree. What occurred was that the SUV, in a last ditch attempt to stop, had flipped with such force that the SUV had furiously slammed into the tower with it’s bottom side and bounced off from the force. In a more violent world, you might say that the tower had sucker-punched the SUV.

For all that, the fire that had started at the base of the tower was still in need of an explanation. The man was looking around for the cause, and then, being close enough now, he saw that the control box for the tower’s all-important electric power transformer, which the SUV was using as a sort of pillow at the moment, was crushed flat, stomped like a soda can. To the man, it looked like the destroyed control box was the source of the fire, which screamed of danger on its own and practically yelled itself hoarse to the man that it was only a few feet from the power transformer.

Fearing the worst for the situation, the man looked behind him to find that pop had brought the truck around as close as it could get for all the traffic. Running over to the back of the truck, the man threw open the doors, grabbed his tool belt, and ran over to the SUV. Climbing up the side of the overturned SUV, the man proceeded to open the driver’s side door with his back to the flames. The airbag had failed to disengage. Taking the X-Acto knife from his belt, the man released the blade, covered his face, and slashed the airbag like a tire. In the following moment, accentuated by the “POP!” of the airbag, the man had reached in like the jaws of life and grabbed the boy up out of the SUV.

With a sudden “BOOM!” and shockwave from the transformer, the man knew the fire had spread and the worst-case scenario was in tow. Jumping down off the SUV, the boy held length-wise across his arms, the man landed with a “THUD!” From there it was a short dash to the safety of the backside of his truck. Pop was there, cellphone in hand.

“I keep trying to call 9-1-1, but I can’t get through,” pop told the man.

“Tower’s down.” The man said between breaths as he laid the boy down on the ground. “Not gonna do you any good. Besides, look at the traffic.”

Pop turned around to see cars in every direction — vultures, waiting to eat up the scene.

Standing up, the man drew out a dolly from the back of his truck. Laying the jacket he was wearing on top of it, the man commanded pop, “Help me get him on there.” Pop, while he meant no ill-will towards the boy, just stood there. “He has to get to the hospital. Come on!”

It was at this point that the man realized he was on his own in the endeavor to save the boy’s life. Managing to get the boy onto the dolly with difficulty, the man pushed pop aside to get to a length of rope located inside the truck. Tying both ends of the rope to the dolly, the man got behind the rope and began pulling the dolly like a sled dog in a race for the boy’s life.

Leaving the horrible accident scene behind, the man mushed across the street to the sidewalk, crowded with just as many onlookers as the street, but the sidewalk’s obstacles could be moved. Yelling like an ambulance siren, the man pushed through the sidewalk up the emergency care entrance, which had street access to the main road in the city.

Getting the boy through the double-doors on his own, the man called out with all he had left to the attendant who was supposed to be attending the door.

So, it’s been a while since I’ve written here. That doesn’t mean it’s been a while since I’ve been writing, though. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that prose puts me to sleep (yes, literally and on more than one occasion). So I’ve got a bunch of pages kind of laying around half-finished, and, without further ado, here you go:

The boy had been at sea for over a month now. Today, he was a passenger on a military cruiser. A month ago, he was leading a peaceful life on a small island located in-between two very developed embankments. The east bank marked the westernmost boundary of the kingdom of Aretolla, a land made fertile under the long rule of the Aretolla family. The west bank, on the other hand, marked the easternmost boundary of the land of the Ottoruk people. The two embankments provide a common ground between the two entities though, allowing for trade and information to flow across the channel.

Today, trade flourishes in this region; however, this has not always been the case. In fact, before the channel was used for trade, it provided a road for raiders to pillage the settlements along the channel. At that time, the nation of the Ottoruk had not spread to the channel, and even the people living on the west embankment were mostly from Aretolla. But, even if they were constantly being raided, the people could rebuild and move on with their lives — this was the stance taken by the Aretolla family. Because of this callous disregard, the raiders took up permanent residence on an island located within the channel, which allowed them to begin making raids farther and farther into Aretolla’s territory. Ten years of raiding found the raiders at the doorsteps of the royal Aretolla family residency, prompting the family’s immediate withdrawal to a safer place. It was out of this circumstance that a new leader rose to power: Merrian Winchester.

It was Merrian Winchester, a man of the working class of the kingdom of Aretolla, who organized the remaining people of Aretolla, specifically those living on the embankments, to fight against the raiders. It was, however, very much a failed resistance at first. For one, the working class of Aretolla were only a step above slavery and basically farmed to live, paying tribute to the royal Aretolla family for use of the land, so the average man could not afford to equip himself or his family to participate in a war against the raiders. It was because of this that Merrian Winchester sent himself as an envoy to the leader of the nation of the Ottoruk.

In short, the leader of the Ottoruk accepted Merrian Winchester as the acting leader of the kingdom of Aretolla, since the nobility had forsaken its people. In return for control of the west bank and exclusive rights to trade over the channel, the leader of the Ottoruk entered into an alliance with the people of Aretolla. He sent weapons and commissioned the craftsmen of his country to design and construct a war-ship to combat the raiders at sea. However, the design could not be brought to fruition within the land of the Ottoruk and was instead constructed from the materials and by the labor of the Aretolla people, all of which had a significant burden removed from them with the indefinite absence of the Aretolla family. So, after many months, the first war-ship, a joint-effort by the Ottoruk craftsmen and Aretolla labor, sailed down the channel.

It was a great day for the Aretolla people when news spread that the war-ship they had built had successfully sunk 3 of the raiders’ ships. It is important to note that the raiders had only been using the large ships at their disposal as storehouses for their loot, so the war-ship, specifically designed for combat with large ships, had the absolute upper-hand against the raiders’ ships. In the wake of this great news, the Aretolla people were also becoming increasingly successful at defending their homesteads, forcing the raiders to regroup what little they had left at their island headquarters. It was because of this that, in order to seal victory and expel the threat of the raiders, the leader of the Ottoruk advanced a set of mercenaries to the island in the middle of the channel, permanently burying the threat with the raiders’ bodies. As was his custom, the leader of the Ottoruk built a shrine to the god of his ancestors, leaving the spoils the raiders had left behind as an offering.

It was after the storming of the raider’s island that the Aretolla family returned, only to be turned away in a most violent fashion by all of those who had remained on Aretolla soil. For his leadership during those ten long years of hardship and for his key role in ending it, Merrian Winchester was recognized by the Aretolla people as their leader. The tribute system was removed by Merrian Winchester in favor of imposing a small transaction fee on trade to the citizens of Aretolla. The fee supplemented the rather large sum of valuables left behind by the royal family’s caravan, which, as was mentioned, did not quite serve the purpose the Aretolla family had intended in that their possessions had returned to the land but they had only barely escaped with their lives.

Thickly spread across the sky,
Mounted up so high,
How quickly they go by!

Up there my feelings lie,
Yet down here am I,
And I cannot get away.

Would that I were borne on the current of the wind,
This stationary life I would transcend
In the sky-river’s bend.

Up there to my feelings tend
But lose myself to the corner’s trend,
And I cannot get away.

How low I would swoop
Only to feel my heart droop
That we are stuck in this forever-loop.

Up there where my feelings coup,
We all march on like a troop,
And I cannot get away.

Standing still is our foe,
Defeated effortlessly by the air’s unending flow
So much so that I long for the ground below!

Down there my feelings go
In tears or snow,
And I cannot get away.

Something I rewrote in an attempt to get noticed by other users on Deviant Art. At least when people randomly fave my stuff, it’ll be relatively high quality.

11×14 I referenced in previous post can be checked out here: link. Total time was about 4 hours, because I had to clean it up something fierce.

So that chirping noise (the tech corrected me from “clicking”) was a combination of my belt, the belt idler, and the belt tensioner. Car runs silent now, though, which is exciting. Of course on the ironic flipside, this could just be one step away from, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” At any rate, the Saturn in Lithia Springs closed down, so I had to go to the one in Marietta. It is conveniently right up the road from school, though. However, the reading material was not as good and I didn’t get my fill of sleezy daytime television. The sleek flat-screen TV mounted on the wall was tuned to Sportscenter. Among finding out that some football coach is retiring (Dungy) and that people don’t get voted into the baseball hall of fame because they’ve used performance enhancing drugs, I also learned a ton of useless information from the January issue of “Atlanta Life Magazine”.

In other news, the day started out with drawing. I forgot how fast I draw since I did it all the time standing post at Regal. I almost knocked out an 11×14 shot in under 2 hours. I had to leave for school, though, and my car was still icy, so there really wasn’t any flex time. Then, after feeling moderately accomplished, I had to pass through Marietta’s premiere construction site (a.k.a. “Southern Polytechnic State University”). As if acknowledging my arrival, 2 trucks carrying dirt and rocks and stuff pass me as I enter. And, further down the road, holes have decided to take up residence in the road. They’ve got a veritable breeding ground there now. Finally passing them, I end up at the parking area: full. So, I go further down the road to park. There were actually a lot of spots open, and I didn’t feel like I needed to be there early on Wednesday. I got back from Discrete Math to find cars on the lawn. I think getting there early is necessary. And now, I am off to a SWE class with a teacher who shouldn’t be a teacher.

939 (no amp)

Rainy day + staying up all night + playing the guitar while lying down.

Dear one for whom my heart does long,
Soft night rays play in light of your being:
Your beauty shines transformed to song,
And your voice descends serene.

Laughter trails your form like wind
As your carefree intent is shown.
As the contours of your body bend,
Sweeter melodies may never again be known.

Your voice and grace are all in place –
Inspiration gently brought
By moves of greatest form and chase –
And you are desirably sought.

What life you bring to this lonesome face,
Dancing through my apt mind you race.

I haven’t talked to or seen the girl that poem’s about in 6 years. But, we’re in the process of moving, and so I found the poem in a large notebook under my bed. It’s hard to believe it’s been six years, at that. I found myself crying, remembering her. If ever there were a mistake, it was not telling her how I felt, but I was so young then. And now, with that horribly fiendish thing called the “Internet” (namely “facebook.com”) I’ve got the chance to again, but I don’t think I can work up the nerve to do it.

Now, if anyone were to ask me how to handle the situation, I’d tell them to go for it! Specifically, I’d tell the person not to let the mistake continue. You know, tell this girl how much she meant to you and how much you’ve thought about her since. Tell her how much you’ve missed her and how you just wanted to say “Hi!” after all these years. You know, tell her that, for what it’s worth, she’s always had a place in your heart, and, you know, it’s unconditional. I mean, no matter what’s happened, you still care about this person and nothing — not time, not hurt feelings, not anything — can change that.

I’m afraid that she’ll just write me off, though. But, I think I’m going to try anyway.

Poor Prometheus!
I, if no one else, know that
The true fire is not a flame but a fountain!

In contrast, our daily lives
Are a sinking boat
On which our fair futures float.
Though, we don’t get very far –
Life is a pond
Where we and the algae dumbly abscond.

Lying on our stomach with the water’s floor,
We claim to see the whole world and more.
To us, it is all darkness at best,
But, Darkness, confess!
Worlds within worlds from you can be wrest!

So I light my torch with that knowledge –
For in dreams and lighter things
We are not to rules bound
But in that free space found
To break or hold laws
For our own unwieldly cause.

See past what is in front of you –
Look into the depths!
Cast out your soul like a bucket,
And draw in what you can.
Drink deeply like the sponge you are!
And maybe you will go so far
As to tell the algae what it is
And tell your surroundings what they are not:
That they are not the whole, but just a part.