Lice-ridden, I stand
before class. The teacher says:
You will play with him.
***
Hungover, I stand
before class. I say:
You’re lousy students.
New Paths & Old
In June, I married Tara Horner. A white wedding sounded as appealing as shock therapy, so instead we opted for exchanging rings in a quiet civil ceremony with a grand total of two guests. Life is good. We designed the wooden rings ourselves, and cannot speak highly enough of the craft and service of Touch Wood Rings, who produced them.
Since then, we’ve both been reading the large pile of submissions for The Tangled Bank anthology, the first release for Tangled Bank Press. I was initially concerned I wouldn’t get enough submissions, but we’re closing in on 250 submissions, and there’s still another few weeks left before submissions close. If you write fiction or poetry, or create visual art, and are interested in evolution, then I’d love to see a submission from you. The number of submissions has meant I’ve already had to make a few tough decisions about stories and poetry that I liked but for whatever reason felt weren’t suitable for the anthology, and I’ve got plenty more ahead of me. I’m looking forward to sharing my discoveries at the end of the year.
With all the reading and editing, my writing has been on the backburner the last couple of months, but I’ve mapped out my Japan book and have made a solid start on several chapters. (Thanks to the dogged persistence of a friend keen to see them, I’ve also finally got round to uploading my photos from Japan to the computer and begun the daunting task of sorting through them.) I’m also studying poetry at the moment, and coincidentally have just had my first poem published, in a rather curious place: the world’s first anthology of zombie poems. The anthology is Vicious Rhymes and Reanimated Verses and the poem is ‘Natural Succession’, an ecological take on the ever-popular undead. I’ve never really thought of myself as a zombie connoisseur, but I’m looking forward to seeing what the other 90-odd poets have done. Should get my copy in the mail soon.
I’ll post more photos on the walk site soon, but in the meantime here’s one of my favourite spots on the entire walk, on a country road in northern Honshu at the foot of Gas-san.
Wet fern forest and a gravel road
plunging on.
The Road
Sorting through my haiku from the walk, I’m reminded of the strange, whimsical moods I was in as I wandered alone across Japan. Some days — usually when the featureless road stretched out before me for hours on end — my idle brain would compose dozens of haiku in a single day. They sometimes shared a theme, and were often rather silly.
I discarded most of them, but occasionally I wrote them down, like the sequence below, an imaginary attack on the road by the forest. A more mundane version was a fairly common sight on my walk, thanks to the Japanese habit of building new highways and abandoning old ones.
I vividly remember crossing one bridge, deep in mossy forest, that was covered in thick soil and young trees. I was glad it hadn’t yet collapsed, as the mountain was steeply sloped, and the creek was quite a drop. I stood on the bridge among the trees, looking down at the creek, for a long time.
THE ROAD
(cue Imperial March)
Mushroom lifts the leaves
peers across the bitumen
forest’s forward scout
moss on black desert
water cached in its bosom
for frontier soldiers
grass seeds lob and land
in volcanic cracks, explode
in green profusion
black feathered squadrons
dump their fruity load of shit
on solo traveller
“Saplings, forward march:
Root beneath the road, find drains,
start water torture!”
a dead squirrel lies
bloody on white centre line
next to her revenge
grappling tendrils
cross the pitch-black Rubicon
growing thick and taut
acorn cries freedom
punching through rotting highway
and spreading her legs
forest floor fungus
surveys silent battleground
and puffs a victory.
A home for a hiker
joyboards of Tokyo
all the beautiful faces
where am I, really?
***
sunlit banksia
black cockatoo and rainbow
I’m in Australia
And — like that! — I find myself home, with a massive debt, no job, and a sackful of memories. I’ve only written the two haiku above since I finished walking six weeks ago, which, after a month of meditation and two weeks of unpacking and socialising, seems like an age ago. Thanks to everyone who followed along and commented on the haiku during the walk.
Not many of them are keepers — most are journeyman poems, some mere prose. But hopefully they imparted a flavour of what it was like to walk the length of Japan. And I think I largely achieved the goals I set for myself: to sharpen my skills of observation, establish a writing routine, and build poems from plain words rather than baroque ones. Many of them serve as little time capsules, preserving moments I would have otherwise forgotten; in many cases I can vividly remember where I was and what I was doing when I composed them. Another unexpected bonus is that I’m finding it easier and more enjoyable to read poetry in general; I’m better equipped to understand the choices other poets make. If you enjoyed reading the haiku, you might consider a donation to the charity I was raising money for, The Fred Hollows Foundation.
I’m planning to write a book about my journey across Japan next year, and after a bit of redrafting will be incorporating the best of the haiku into the narrative. I hope the book will be out sometime in 2010. Stay tuned. I have written a lot on the Four Corners of Japan site about what I learnt from the walk. I was going to edit, rearrange, and post them here, as it’s the kind of thing I like to post to hydrolith, but rather than inflict them on subscribers, many of whom have already read them on the other site, you can find them here.
Other than a book about walking Japan, I’m focusing on short fiction. I completed a couple of stories during my walk, and have notes for half a dozen more. During my self-imposed exile from the everyday, the anthology Dreaming Again: Thirty-five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction was released. It contains my sci-fi short story This is My Blood, which I co-wrote with my friend Ben Francisco.
The anthology has been getting great reviews, and I’ve been a bit shocked by how many have singled out our story for praise. George Williams, in the national broadsheet The Australian, said that “Dreaming Again is chock-full of entertaining and thought-provoking short fiction. My favourite story is by new authors Ben Francisco and Chris Lynch: This is My Blood mixes a powerful combination of human religion, alien culture and first contact on an unknown planet in the distant future.” The Australian Financial Review wrote that the anthology was a “deep treasure chest” and praised “the vision and potency of story” of This is My Blood, in which “many complex themes are explored in a short space”.
Well, that’s it from me for a while. I’ll be posting more about my walk on Four Corners in the next few weeks, but for now hydrolith is returning to its regularly scheduled silence, punctuated by the occasional thought bubble. It’s evolving toward a platform for my published writing, but I’m loathe to turn it into the daily navel-gaze or bristling link-fest of many blogs. One of the things I learnt from my walk is that I’m not really a blogger, so hydrolith will continue to be not-really-a-blog.
Walking Japan: Haiku #202
with all of my strength
I hurl that black rock, and now
the endless north sea
