Daidō Moriyama's 'Stray Dog' Looks At You

Stray Dog by Daidō Moriyama

As a dog you are dead

But as a look,

A spirit shine in the eye,

With what passes to humans 

As a wan smile

Cast back over a 

Trunk of uneven fur

You ask hard questions 

Of us for years to come.

Emperor's Last Wish

I wrote this piece while fresh out of university, seemingly unemployable, angry and sad. I was working at a venue cafe/bar and sometimes for a catering company, both zero hours. We'd just moved to Bristol. I had so little money, and way too much time on my hands. I have edited it here and there for readability, but have kept a lot of it as this is what I was feeling then, no matter how silly it is to read back all these years later. 

(April 2024)

Emperor’s Last Wish

 

Through the condensation,

I see him stood still, too still in that room.

Oh my boy, my son’s son,

What hath befallen the house.

 

I wander the palace

With my robe open and my crown gone

My mumblings echo around me.

2017: I’m earning less than minimum

to keep payments up

water                 TV

electric             rent

gas                      tax

to keep living in this mouldy flat,

the books mouldy, the woodwork, clothes,

shoes, plants. The corners green and puffy

The kitchen, an expanded cupboard.

the air ripe with moisture and spores.

Eyes are peeling from screens.

 

The palace is cold; outside it snows

But here no fires are lit. I know nothing of the Empire

(never had one)

my advisers and cohort are in flight

(23, masters degree, sit around all day)

don’t answer the phone,

barely wash. Can feel

my back curl over and in

on itself, a snails shell building

for me to hide my digestion in.

Mouth cannot fathom

Conversation.

Perhaps it is I who

Lurks in the freezing palace, listening

To the Emperors bare feet slap pathetically

On the marble and stone.

No jobs, barely a plight of career.

I look back on my diaries in youth

And to the unrealised dreams and futures around me.

Had such dreams, destined now to grow into

An old man heating a can of ravioli alone in a boarding house.*

Even that old man must have a blade for this emperor endling?

Mad with incestual nobility, his fingernails long and varnished

His body scarred with many idle and odd habits

Despite it all, despite everything,

Out there the farms grow

Small things find shelter in woods

And deep animals bray and buck

Strange, odd, despite it all.

 

2017: never been to America

can’t speak no languages.

Feel myself getting paler day-by-day

The Emperor hasn’t spoken in weeks.

Today I have seen the sun rise and set

From the pearl light of the main room window.

Car horns, reversing tones, seagulls, bicycle brakes, sirens.

The Emperor can’t find the exit

And even if he could he’d be lost

In his rotten, unattended gardens. He never sleeps, merely fumbles in fugue and delirium.

23… People my age have sailed the world

and invented life saving devices.

5 years ago 18. Big dreams burst hard, slow.

Since August I’ve killed time wishing I were dead.

The Emperor’s best knights have smithed their swords into plows

Their armour to spades, their shields to barrows,

Their warcries to coos and trills over their children

And calls to the sheep dog, the hunts dog,

And the calming ‘woah’ to horse and cattle.

Court jesters and servants have become tyrannical barons

Swollen on the wealth made from stolen palace jewellery.

I cannot make next months rent; I sell all but a pair

Of my shoes, all my books.

I somehow know, despite his incoherence,

That the Emperor has a final wish.

Strange to think this is the same Emperor

Whose mother stood like iron and traded

With all the Empire’s strange and alien neighbours,

making sense with councils and senates

while she harboured cannon and spears in the borderlands.

Strange to think I haven’t left the house all day

I know what I need. My hands need to meet soil. Take root.

Or give myself to ophiocordycepts unilateralis

Or lencochloridium, to be proved finally useful, nutritious,

Sustainable. The Emperor’s old knights step out their homes in

The first frosts of autumn, see their breaths, and feel good.

Good harvests are soon to come. Great migrations have occurred,

Across mountains, across seas. They are looking for peace.

I moved from the coast back West. I need the sea, to give

My world a full stop; the tide line an assuring stitch.

Woods retake old fields of wheat, consuming the hedgerows.

The Emperor has not made it outside;

Hear him gasp and struggle,

Slips on the hem of his robe, wriggles on the floor,

Long talon nails bend, splintering yellow and brittle as they are.

I sleep and wake with no difference;

Like a damp candle I treasure little energy.

The Emperor, his fluttering mouth blinking,

His raving eyes screaming,

Finds me in the throne room (he has made a full circle)

Where I await him with his mother’s sword.

I know his final wish as I know my own, and

Here I am, in impossibility,

Eager to meet it.

 

 Cotham, Bristol 2017

*Line taken from a Noah Van Sciver diary comic.

Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing

The UK editions of Cormac McCarthy's work
are unfortunately very ugly

 I've been quite a McCarthy fan for a while now- I'd put my top three as The Road, Blood Meridian and Outer Dark. I found it rare so far (though I haven't read everything the late author wrote) to dislike one of his novels (though I didn't feel much of a spark with The Orchard Keeper.) This text, The Crossing, took me a long time to finish. I personally kept becoming detached from certain threads of the story and then at another attempt became swept up again.

    Despite being the second in the Border Trilogy it's stylistically and thematically very different from All the Pretty Horses, and felt like, despite great moments of violence and evil among the beatific wild countryside and romance in ATPH, a trek towards a lonesome mountain populated only with hidden darknesses and the philosophical grit of those who have had to bear witness.

    In these short reviews I attempt to give my honest take without spoiling much in the hopes you will be enticed to read- but at the same time, if you have read the text, that you will find something written here to compliment your own readings. 

   The first main section concerns Billy Parham taking a wolf he has trapped back into Mexico. I found this section really rubbed me the wrong way; the whole ordeal comes across as immensely uncomfortable, painful and maddening for the poor wolf, and we are never given much of a solid reason as to why Billy feels such a need to disappear for so long without telling anyone to take the wolf back to where it had just come from. America, the land across the border, then is the place where wolves can't be, where they cannot belong even though this wolf has made it, has naturally ranged into the territory. National borders mean nothing to such an animal. The permeability and nonsense of the border becomes more and more apparent as the text continues. Reading the story of the wolf, I thought many times of Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac, especially the essay 'Thinking Like a Mountain' in which Leopold comes to recognise the importance and wonder in every animal and how they fit into the natural world. 

    After the wolf's story, Billy wanders deep into Mexico, meeting proper wildernesses, human evils, and hearing of a nation racked by war and revolution. Everytime he re-emerges in the States, he finds that the border does not necessarily define a land where these things happen from one where they don't; on one of his later re-entries of the US, he learns after a time that America has joined WWII. I don't know how to explain it but in this book and also All the Pretty Horses I feel as though Mexico is portrayed as this older country, and the USA as younger, a whippersnapper. Perhaps in The Crossing it is in part because Billy meeting veterans of a previous war, only to emerge stateside and meet the young men newly enlisted; he has met their destinies in reverse.

    A random note, but, despite having grand moments of pain, anguish, hunger, and strife, generally when people meet Billy he is given extraordinary hospitality, often even from some of the most poverty-stricken people he meets, and in some cases even though he may not behave honestly back. Perhaps he appears as angelic, a very young white boy in rags on horseback- or, like the wolf met unto him through but a look in the eye, when they meet his own they can see the eye of the storm that sits within him. 

    

Don DeLillo- White Noise

Library copy from the university I work at now. I'd read DeLillo's Point Omega and The Body Artist for my Literature degree years ago, and liked them both, but especially The Body Artist. Both of these books are novellas really, and it took me a long time to finally break in to any of DeLillo's chunkier texts, even when the premises really caught me. 

I fell into a reading rhythm with White Noise as a text of episodes; of anecdote's and events that begin and end in chapters and that shuffle a main story along. These 'episodes' each feel like they're wrapping up an exaggerated occurrence or description of, for want of a better word, postmodern America. Ridiculous but believable events over and over. Straight from the off, with the convoy of gleaming station wagons of parents dropping their children off to university, like a herd or natural events not to be missed, described with hilarity and aptness; a favourite description is of the fathers as having "something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage."

The core of the book is a search for an avoidance or meaning in the fear of death, that I felt was such a burden for Jack Gladney and his partner Babette because in this era of American suburbiana, so much else has been taken care of or rendered obsolete that there are not other things to worry about. There is no feeling of impoverishment in their lives, despite their positions as multi-divorcees. The big catastrophic event in the second section is mostly void of worry about impending death, even though it could potentially be a cause; it almost happily fills the void Jack & Babette usually have empty for fear of death.

Despite this morbid preoccupation of the main characters, it's hard to mirror their philosophical dread as the world of the book is sodden, overloaded, infested, with stimuli. Radios and televisions are always on, overheard. Adverts and packaging instructions bleed into the text. Artificial habitats and occasions spawned from a docile consumer culture manifest into hypnotising tableaus, fit for a cosmic bird watcher distracted by human life for a moment.

Streams of information and data gathering stitch the book together; products promise more, Jack and Murray as academics endlessly look for meaning out in it; in Jack's case in Hitler studies, a field he discovered, and Murray in cultural niches, such as a seminar he runs on car crashes. The safe zones of the 'Airborne Toxic Event' are run by SIMUVAC, Simulated Evacuation, seeking more data rather than looking at the event head on. 

The world of White Noise, like our own, is a pastiche of headache-inducing stimuli, of searches for meaning and attempts at making it solid, of fear and confusion in a Western-bloc microcosm. I don't want to spoil anything, but readers of The Body Artist might enjoy one of DeLillo's spectres, the not-suggested supernatural presence, the figure who is the malady of the text in spirit, like a postmodern Dickensian ghost.