WEBVTT

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Tonight I'd like to read
mostly a sequence of poems

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written for my wife.

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They all have a particular
feeling in relation

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to Japan, where I've lived
for the last 10 years,

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off and on, making a few
trips to America now and then.

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The land and the gods of
the land are very important.

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And to give these
poems a place, I'd

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like to say a little
bit about what Japan is.

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Japan is a string of volcanic
islands off the coast of Asia

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which is very unstable.

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And it's geologically
relatively recent,

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which gives it a
particular feeling.

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Those things are very
necessary to feel, I think.

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Like one time, I was driving
across Texas with Keith Wilson,

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from Houston to El Paso.

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And finally it occurred to
me what was wrong with Texas.

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I said, this land is unstable.

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It's been in and out of the
water for the last million

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years--

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or the last billion
years, actually.

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And Texas is a genuinely
unstable part of the continent.

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It's been underwater and
out of water and underwater

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and out of water, which gives it
a peculiarly unstable feeling,

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I think.

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Japan is also unstable, but
not in an unpleasant way,

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in a fiery kind of way.

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The Japanese islands are
a continual battleground

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between the air masses
of the continent

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and the air masses
of the Pacific.

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And you can actually feel,
within a space of 12 hours

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sometimes, one mass or the other
mass winning, cool, dry air

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coming over from Siberia, and
dropping the temperature 30

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degrees, and drying
everything out,

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and then a warm, moist,
almost subtropical air mass

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from the Pacific sweeping in and
bringing rains and changing it

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again completely.

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So the elements
that make Japan are

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volcanism and moving air and
clouds, shifts of rain and dry.

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The winter is essentially
a victory for Siberia

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and its dry continental air.

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The winter is essentially
a Pacific victory.

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And it has the tail
ends of the monsoons,

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and has a summer monsoon
climate, which makes

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it possible to grow wet rice.

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You can only grow
wet rice where you

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have a monsoon climate,
the heavy rains all coming

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during the hot season.

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And Japan is much farther
off the coast of Asia

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than England is, say,
off the coast of Europe.

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The two countries have
sometimes been compared.

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And in some ways the
comparisons are interesting.

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But it's a much more difficult
journey by sea to Japan.

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And the early voyagers
that went there

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must have had considerable
nerve to go that far.

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One more point about
Japan, speaking of voyages,

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the very first
level of population

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didn't go there on a ship.

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They probably walked there.

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At the same time that the
Bering was open and dry,

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Japan was connected to
the Chinese mainland

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at about where Shandong is.

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And the Okinawan
Islands and Taiwan

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all made, apparently,
a kind of a chain,

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so that at the same time
that the peoples who

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became the American
Indians, or at least one

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of the early waves of
the American Indians,

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were traveling up north
and across the Bering,

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a band of their brothers
took a more southerly route

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and went out into the Japanese
islands, very possibly

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the same period of migrations
of the early Mongoloid peoples.

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This sequence is
called Regarding Wave.

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It will be published as a
book, maybe this spring,

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by the Wendover Press at
the University of Iowa.

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I think it will just
be in a small edition.

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Regarding wave is a kind of
pun on the name of the Buddhist

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Bodhisattva, goddess
of compassion, Guanyin.

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Or in Japanese, Kan-on.

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In Sanskrit, Avalokitesvara.

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The name means, literally,
"regard the sound."

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And sound is waves,
so regarding wave.

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The reason sound is important
is because, in this world

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epic, this present kalpa, they
say that the sense of sound

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is, of all the senses,
the sense by which it

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is most possible to
achieve enlightenment.

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Wave.

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Grooving clamshell,
streaked-through marble,

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sweeping down Ponderosa
pine bark scale,

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ripcut tree grain, sand dunes,
lava, flow, wave, wife, woman,

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wifman, veiled,
vibrating, vague.

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Sawtooth ranges pulsing.

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Veins on the back of the hand.

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Forked-out bird's
foot alluvium wash.

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Great dunes rolling, each inch
rippled, every grain a wave.

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Leaning against sand
cornices till they blow away.

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Wind, shake, stiff thorns
of cholla, ocotillo.

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Sometimes I get
stuck in thickets.

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Ah, trembling spreading
radiating wife, racing zebra,

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catch me and fling me wide to
the dancing grain of things,

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of my mind

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One gloss on that--

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the word, "woman," old
English wifman, wave man.

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The word, wife, also
wif, wife is wave.

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Woman is wave man.

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Cognates are veiled and vague.

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The proto Indo-European
root is v,

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which apparently means, as
they can figure, vibration,

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vibrating.

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So woman is the vibrator.

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