In 2022, during the Yume.Digital Dreams project, my collaborative partner Jon Sasaki sent me a photograph that he took in a hotel in Wakayama, Japan. “The room only had one little window and it opened to a 1 foot gap between my hotel and the adjacent building,” he said, “so the decorator installed a lightbox with a beautiful beach and mountain scene … it felt like a cheesy but effective workaround.” Then he asked, “if you had to spend 2 weeks in a room with no windows, what would your lightbox scene be?” [I wrote about this earlier, on the page YUME arrivals & responses.]
The first image that came to mind was a photograph of Takakkaw Falls — which has always felt like a powerful, spiritual place to me. But it was the second image that I knew was the one I’d want to have in a room with me. What I imagined was actually a composite of two images that I’ve worked with separately in the past — a photograph of melting glacial ice that I took at Athabasca Glacier, when I was there to work on my project a frail history: thirteen poems disguised as a passage, and an old photograph from the Meiji Era of a young woman riding a stuffed crane, which I worked with initially in my project until my body says sleep (Kokyo). In response to Jon’s question, I saw these two images in my mind as one . . . as a lingering . . . as something still in me, unfinished.
Many years ago, in Montréal, I woke from a dream of kanji characters inked down the side of my left hand. Since I couldn’t read kanji, I wasn’t able to truly understand what was written. And in getting out of bed, searching for a pencil to jot down their shapes, some of what I saw was lost. The sense I got from those kanji characters however and the feelings that surfaced, seemed to say something about the act of writing. There is something about this dream that continues to haunt me. ‘Haunt’ doesn’t quite describe the feeling, but I can’t seem to find a more accurate word. There is something about this dream that has been nagging at my mind for decades.
Now, in my seventies, I feel I need to give myself space and time to really be with the things that continue to linger in me, and that I sense are unfinished. And so, I am steeping myself into this still, not still project.
As I continue to work on this project, I’ll periodically post pieces or bits of my process here on this page and on this website.
(Thursday, November 16th, 2023)
* * *
(beyond reading)
more than an apparition
she is, part of my landscape
reminding me of
the interconnectedness
of the visible and the invisible
of the sensed and the tangible
of what can be articulated
even shaped into poems, sometimes
and that which evades the verbal, heard
language of words
(November & December 2024)
* * *
(it’s in my blood)
reading from within
in this place of flesh and roots
rotting leaves and blood lines
composting an untold story . . .
(December 2023)
* * *
(we are)
(what was)
(Two of the postcards from February 2024.)
* * *
(Text walking on February 1, 2024
from 748 Granville to 52 W Cordova, and back again,
led to this poem & folded broadsheet piece, not the end.)
* * *
(what was is a text walking poem
written in February 2024.)
(The photograph for this piece
was taken by J. D. Brown.)
* * *
(so many questions I never asked, back then)
She returns to the story, to the place, the gesture, the memory.
(April 9, 2024)
* * *
(untitled)
From across the street, looking towards what once was a rooming house. Pecking at crumbs.
There’s some leakage — like a topographical map, offering a watershed of so many unknown seasons.
a texture of time
peonies on Granville Street
demarcating a spatial ache —
and returning a memory.
her hands, carefully shaping
crêpe paper
peonies
that my young hands would later carry
in the procession, at the start
of Hana Matsuri.
(Some initial Polaroid experiments
from June 4, 2024.)
* * *
(Text walking on March 7, 2024
along Broadway Street in Vancouver,
almost ten years after my initial text walk,
eventually led to this poem.)
I want to acknowledge and thank the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society for their support of my still, not still project and for their dedication and efforts to offer support across the community.