Using the Houjouki as a gateway into Japanese means using his sentences as set-pieces to demonstrate vocabulary and grammatical patterns. For example, the following sequence is a memorable example of the particle ばや (baya: “I wish” or “if only”) and the auxiliary verb む (mu: intention). Chomei is talking about the feeling of entrapment during and after an earthquake:

羽なければ、空をも飛ぶべからず。竜ならばや、雲に乗らん。

Without wings, one cannot hope to fly up to the heavens. Oh, to be a dragon–I would ride away on the clouds.

Of course, you read poems about cherry blossoms and moon-viewing and things, too; my point is that even the process of learning your inflections gives you a sense of life as struggle and resignation. The struggle can be expressed beautifully–all those sibilant t and s sounds in the phrase hisashiku todomaritaru tameshi nashi rush by like a brook–but it’s still struggle, experienced by people who lived with a lot less insulation from nature and instinct than we do now.

This is not going to turn into a diatribe about our greedy, empty, over-abstracted society, which would be more spiritual if we all learned a thing or two from Native American harvest ceremonies. It’s just that what gets lost when we stop exposing ourselves to old artifacts is more than merely a vague sense of continuity.

For one thing, while aspirin and supermarkets and microfibers make our physical frailty and impulses easier to deal with, they don’t erase them. I don’t know that the ancients were intrinsically nobler in mindset than we are; they dealt with reality more directly because they had to. At the same time, it can be easy to forget how much husbandry civilization needs in order to be preserved; old writings and other artifacts are a useful reminder.

Then there’s the fact that, if you’re not versed in what older artists did, you often have no idea what modern artists are doing. Sometimes this is just because certain motifs have a primal way of recurring; other times it’s that artists have inquisitive minds and draw inspiration from their predecessors without underscoring it. When Madonna’s Bedtime Stories came out ten years ago, much hay was made of the Walt Whitman quotation in “Sanctuary.” But the thing that threw me was that the song just before it contained these lines:

Love tried to welcome me
But my soul drew back
Guilty of lust and sin
Love tried to take me in

The only possible reaction to that is, “What?! Is that Madonna citing George Herbert ?” (I happened to be in England when the album came out; I will never forget those first few times listening to it.) The song is not one of Madonna’s famous taboo-tweakers; the allusion to Herbert is respectful and, to me, moving. (I personally could have done without the Carson McCullers bit, though.) Can you enjoy it without knowing where the chorus came from? Well, sure, but it counts for something that you don’t have the added weight of the poem whose ending Madonna is reversing to describe herself. There’s a dimension missing. Of course, no one catches every reference, but if you’re so unlearned in anything before 1960 that you have no choice but to take every artifact as a self-contained little package, you can’t understand the thinking that produced it. It’s no wonder a lot of people have the idea that you can improvise everything.

*******

What brought this post on, for the two of you still reading, was that I realized that I hadn’t posted any spring poems, and the cherry blossoms are about to bloom, and what kind of Japanophile does that make me?

忘るなよたのむの沢を立つ雁もいなばの風の秋の夕暮

摂政太政大臣

wasuru na yo/tanomu no sawa wo/tatsu kari mo/inaba no kaze no/aki no yuugure

Sesshou Daijou Daijin

O geese flying home
over fields turned to bare marsh
and not yet planted
forget not the wind that stirs
rice leaves at dusk in autumn

Kujou Yoshitsune (Regent and Chief Minister of State)

Today was a warm, clear, breezy spring day. Given my temperament, it immediately reminded me of the kiln that Tokyo is going to be in a few months and how we’re all going to be borderline-hysterical with eagerness for fall to arrive.

Yoshitsune is telling the geese not to forget the autumn wind so that its crisp beauty reminds them to come back from the north at the end of the summer. There are three or four characteristic plays on words here. tanomu means 田の面 (“the surface of the fields”) but sounds like 頼む (“I ask you”). inaba means 稲葉 (“leaves of rice plants”) but sounds like 往なば (“if you will not stay”). Yes, I need to use my annotated edition to get most of these, though even I understand the screamingly obvious ones. If you’re a student of Japanese who doesn’t remember, after being clobbered with it several hundred-thousand times, that まつ indicates both 松 (“pine tree”) and 待つ (“to pine for”), you need a new hobby. But that won’t be important again until autumn.

* That doesn’t refer to you, dearest.