The second piece I'm going to read
is called "The Road North."
It's a word map of Scotland guided
by Basho's "Oku-no-hosomichi," the road to the--
I'm sorry, "the Narrow Road to the Deep North."
Some of you may also know it as "Back Roads to Far Towns,"
which is Cid Corman's translation.
And I'm going to read just a few sections, concentrating
on the Shirakawa section.
And Shirakawa comes about one third in to the Basho journey.
And this is Scotland.
And this is Scotland as Japan.
[LAUGHTER]
And for the Basho project, he has
52 different, he calls them stations, short chapters.
And for every one of them we paired it with somewhere
in Scotland.
And essentially, Basho's journey is from Edo, Tokyo,
through the mountains to the West Coast.
And you can do exactly the same thing in Scotland.
You go from Edinburgh, which I now
call Edo, or Edina, as it's known, through the mountains
to the West Coast.
And Shirakawa is where you make the transition.
It's where you leave behind the atmosphere of the city
and its city ways, its luxuries, its smart city poets.
And it's where Basho hears the songs of the women planting
rice.
And it's a very important moment in his journey.
And at that moment he's crossing over into the wilderness,
into the otherness.
And those songs struck me as being very like Gaelic song.
And there's a part of Scotland around Perthshire where
you make the same transition.
You begin to go into the hills, and you
notice that the streams are no longer called burns,
they're called "alts."
Alt is Gaelic for a mountain burn.
So you know although there's no Gaelic spoken in that area,
you've crossed over into a different ecology, bio-region,
mindset.
I can't reach up, but it's where there's
a bunch of names right in the middle.
That's Perthshire.
And that's Shirakawa.
So I give you some of the beginning,
but mainly I focus on that.
And then I'm going to take you from Shirakawa to Argyll, north
to Arisaig, North Uist, and then we'll
end in a wilderness glen above Applecross in Inverianvie.
I share those names because I enjoy your names so much.
And I just want you to feel the time of my names.
You don't have to know what they mean,
you just have to enjoy that sense of-- the names
are very important in this piece.
It's about the same length so don't worry.
I'm not going to keep you too long.
So we begin with the prologue.
"So when was it I first had that dream of roving the glens up
and down, guided by Basho?
Some morning, awake on pillow hill with a matinal willow
warbling at the window, books on the bed, my heart in a fankle
to see clouds and mountains in the faraway,
to be on the road, north, where paths of moss and crottle
follow peaty waters.
Some morning I will cross over to the kingdom
shrouded in mist, tracking back to the origin of things.
Sipping tea from a shell, I will learn
to tell burns that run lochan to lochan from the wide river that
flows free to the sea, to turn down some other glen east west
into low sun.
Swap one view for another, familiar streets Pilrig,
Rosslyn, Bonnington, exchanged for hills, Lomond,
the Buachaille, Roshvan.
Come summer we'll name our band 'Shafts of Sun.'
(ASIDE) Thanks, Becca.
"Come fall, we'll name our album 'Bands of Rain.'
Now we're leaving behind lanes of gean
blossoming in the meadows, heading off on the Hosomichi
to look for Shirakawa.
Now we'll let our looking survey Scotland from Monreith
to Poolewe, setting out to see the best view of all,
where the land meets the sky.