The North and Nostalgia; or, In Remembrance of Things Past

Nothing much has happened this week, but even so I thought I'd put down some thoughts. What? Bugger off, this is my blog, dammit.

We've been doing Basho's Oku no Hosomichi (奥 の細道, The Narrow Road to the North) in the Keene seminar for the last six weeks or so. Most of us who have spent any time in Tohoku will have come across one or two of the sites mentioned in it, even if we didn't actually know it at the time. So it brings about a little wave of nostalgia every so often to read of the places that Basho visited and which 300 years on, I would do too. I have many happy memories of Tohoku.

So it makes me smile when I read how the haiku poet Basho claims he got lost and wound up in Ishinomaki, because I've been drinking out there many times with many good friends (it's still just as much of a shit-hole as it was when he was there).

It makes me laugh when Basho says he saw Kinkazan from Ishinomaki - because it's about two hours away, and there's no way you could ever have seen it. He got it wrong. But I've been there (during the lifetime of this blog, in fact).

And when I read his haiku about the cool waters of the Mogamigawa in Yamagata, I recall the time I went there and stood on a bridge over the Mogamigawa with my friend Ando, talking about my plans for the future. It was the day after I'd taken the GRE, and I had a raging hangover. We'd gone there to make soba in a little mountain village, and it was a brilliantly sunny late autumn day. We stood there for a while looking at the mountains, talking about our lives and where we thought they'd lead us.

The Hojoki's opening line tells us that ゆく川の流れは絶えずして、しかももとの水にあらず - "The flow of the river is unceasing, and its waters are never the same." Eighteen months on, and the river has taken me to New York.

I didn't know at the time that that September afternoon would prove to be such a powerful memory. I guess you never do.