Matsunoo-taisha

Tags

Kinpaku, Matsunoo-taisha, miso, sake

(Wikimedia C Commons; photo by

KENPEI, Aug, 2010)

 

Where the turtle bathed

beneath the waterfall shrine,

makers of miso,

sake, pray for a blessing:

Kinpaku’s gold* gives them hope.

 

• a drink with gold flakes in it.

Japan’s Twenty Two Shrines

Tags

Amaterasu, boussokusekika, Ise Jingu, Japan, Sacred Mirror, shrine

I understand that there are three levels of shrines:

Upper/ First Rank : 7 examples

Middle : 7

Lower : 7 (plus 1)

 

I am going to go through each shrine and try to write a boussokusekika

for each.  5,7,5,7,7,7 syllable pattern.

Here goes:

 

Ise Jingu

(Photo by N yotarou, 2008)

 

Amaterasu,

here is your Sacred Mirror;

it reflects the truth:

though damaged by fire, its ash

was used to make it anew.

 

The goddess Amaterasu emerging from a cave.

 

 

100 Poems Explained by a Wet Nurse 2

Tags

abalone, Hokusai, Maple, Naniwa Bay, Poems Expained by a Wet Nurse, Sumi Bay, Tatta

(All images are from Hokusai’s series of ‘Poems Explained by a Wet Nurse.’

The woodcuts were taken from Visipix.com’s site.  The poems are my own.

The series was incomplete, so there are not quite 100.  I shall post on ten

sites, to break them up.)

 

 

(Visipix.com)

 

I’ll leave the island.

Abalone girls may dive,

but I’m going home.

 

(Visipix.com)

 

 

Virgin daughters dance.

I wish we could trap angels

and de-flower them.

 

 

(Visipix.com)

 

First love was a spring:

then a waterfall; torrent…

now a deep rock pool.

 

(Visipix.com)

 

Sometimes love is like

the complicated pattern

on kimono cloth.

 

No 15 or 16

 

(Visipix.com)

 

In Tatta’s blue stream,

red Maple leaves look just like

roosters’ talon prints.

 

(Visipix.com)

 

Together, aboard,

we sail through Sumi Bay.  Waves

rock us on the deck.

 

(Visipix.com)

 

Such a tiny thing!

How could this reed build a house?

What can our love do?

 

 

(Visipix.com)

 

In Naniwa Bay,

I hope that you will meet me,

though I risk my life.

The Equivocation of the Fiend

Tags

Act of Attainder, Assizes, Cain, Chief justice, Colchester oysters, Dame Alice Lisle, Ellingham, equivocation, Great Hall Winchester, John Hickes, Judas, Judge Jeffreys, Kings Bench, Machiavelli, Milk human kindness, Monmouth Rebellion, Moyles Court, Nelthorpe, Nero, Presbyterian, Satan, The Eclipse, The Rising Sunne, The Tower, treason, Wapping, Whigs, Winchester

A re-blog from August, 2013

 

 

THE EQUIVOCATION OF THE FIEND

Maybe a writ of Habeas Corpus will liberate me from my confinement

and then I can steal away from this loathsome Tower and gain passage

abroad, but there is no Court competent to assist me in this wise and now

I am fast losing strength.  I am supposed to be thankful for the protection

I have, while the country demands that a retrospective Act of Attainder

should result in my condemnation for multitudinous murders.

The wheel has come full circle.  A mob had congregated outside my

house in Duke Street and mocked the bills which announced the sale of

my property.  Women screamed, offering me their garters that I should

hang myself thereby and men raged, advising me to cut my own throat.

I downed another bottle of brandy and shut out their clamour.

However, I seemed to have one remaining friend – someone who knew of

my predilection for Colchester oysters.  A barrel had been left for me at

the Tower and I burst its bands eagerly.  Inside there was naught but

shells and a halter.  I apprehended its hint. The delivery youth jeered:

“Canst tell how an oyster makes its shell?”

He is not so dim as he looks.

Imagine: Chief Justice of the King’s Bench at thirty five and Lord

Chancellor before my fortieth birthday. I followed orders and to this

attribute my rapid promotion and even more sudden declension.I had

another birthday recently and there was none to exercise common

charity towards me, or to share a celebration. I stand accused of a

lack of the milk of human kindness.

I will never be permitted to forget the trial of Dame Alice Lisle. In

contrast, she was deemed to have shown exemplary, even saintly,

compassion and hospitality towards distressed fugitives, but there was

considerably more to the case than was imputed.

I was compared unfavourably to Nero, Satan, Cain and Judas, but I only

sent Whigs to Heaven. It was common practice to lash rogues with the

tongue and, after all, I cross-examined some of the deepest-dyed

criminals in the land. Their weeping and cries for mercy only served as

an irritant. How difficult it was to extract the truth from Presbyterian

liars and I grew adept at smelling one out at forty miles, hence the posy of

herbs that I was wont to hold to my nostrils. Severities may be properly

used, I believe, in common with Machiavelli, if they are appropriate with

national security.

Yes, Dame Alice, I turned a deaf ear to your plea and you could not hear

the foreman’s delivery of the verdict, by virtue of your three score years

and ten’s infirmity.

A witch, I thought, whose husband had been a regicide and now the old

crone was denying knowledge of the nature of the indictments against

John Hickes and Nelthorpe, initially denying their presence in her house,

Moyles Court. Subsequently she pleaded that she had understood Hickes’

offence to be merely illegal preaching.  She stressed that she had no

sympathy with the Monmouth rebellion, but I persuaded the jury to re-

consider their verdict and, on the third occasion, she was pronounced

guilty, and rightly so, for the Law recognised no distinction between

principals and accessories to treason.  “Let the old witch burn,” I ranted,

“and let it be this very afternoon!”

 

The interfering Winchester clergy appealed to me on account of her age

and sex and they gained a respite.  Our Sovereign commuted the sentence

to beheading, out of his merciful bounteousness.

Now the populace desire that I should shere her fate.  I am eclipsed- ha!-

a play on the title of the marketplace inn where she spent her final night,

before walking out of the first storey window, onto the scaffold.  They

said it was ever after “The Eclipse” as it drew all attention from its

neighbouring public house: “The Rising Sunne.”

Barter gave us the information.  She had entertained, concealed,

comforted and maintained the fugitive rebels.  The Devil had inspired her

to quibble, as do all witches.  Equivocation is the nature of the Fiend and

all his subjects.  I have oft-times heard his whine in the courtrooms

and the serpent-tongued dame tried to move me by a reminder that she had

bred a brat to fight for James, but, if she had been my own mother, I should

have found her guilty, notwithstanding her prevarication that she was being

charged with sheltering Hickes before he was convicted of treason  She stated

that subsequent evidence should not be admitted, since it had not been

available.

Very clever:  but anyone who harbours a traitor is as guilty as any who

bears arms, I believed, and I hold fast to the same conviction to this day.

“Nay, peace thou monster, shame unto thy sex,

Thou fiend in likeness of a human creature.

SEe thyself, devil!

Proper deformity shows not in the fiend

So horrid as in woman.

Shut your mouth, dame,

Or with this paper shall I stople it.”

The reference was lost on most in court.  Fools do those villains pity who

are punished.  Know this: that men are as the time is; to be tender-

minded does not become a sword.

It is more than three years since that fateful day in August in The Great

Hall of Winchester Castle.  Some say that a lady in grey haunts the inn

and that a driver-less coach has been seen in the grounds of her Ringwood

estate, drawn by headless horses and containing her phantom.

What is that nonsense to me?  Her head and body were given up to her

family, for burial at Ellingham and now the Whigs have all but canonised

her, raving about judicial murder.

Yet, when I attempted to escape from this hell-hle, no one would shelter

me in a cupboard, nor a malthouse and I was discovered at Wapping and

my disguise removed.  No port is free to me; no place that unusual

vigilance will not attend my taking.  So, here I lie, and suffer the

agony of passing these stones: a pain as sharp as the gravel of her drive,

but still I resort to my brandy.  I am bound upon my own wheel of fire.

My reins are rubbed with sulphurous flames.  The gods are just and of

our pleasant vices…  I waken to hear myself cry in the night and then a

distant rumble of carriage wheels approaches, or is it a more horrific

apocalyptic explosion?  Who is it that dare tell me who I am?

“What is that wailing?”  I shout to my guard.

“It is the cry of women, my good lord,” he replies through the grille, most

caustically.  “Come here most learned justicer.”  And then he laughs,

showing black tombstones in place of teeth.

“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.  I have supp’d full of horrors,”

I  answer, before I recall the context.  How malicious is my fortune that

I must repent to be just.

Equivocation – the only means of survival.  She was more skilled in its employ

than I.

 

 

(The grave of Judge Jeffreys was bombed by German aircraft during the war

and his remains scattered.  The grave of Alice Lisle can still be visited in

Ellingham churchyard.)

.

Six Poetic Immortals

Tags

Buddhist monk, Bunya no Asayasu, Henjo, Kisen, Komachi, Kuronushi, Lord of Dewa, Music, Narihira, Shiga, Tales of Ise, Ujiyama

 

O, Kuronushi,

you achieved divine status,

enshrined in Shiga.

 

 

Kisen – Buddhist monk

in Ujiyama Province-

your poems were sublime.

 

 

Lovely Komachi,

The Lord of Dewa’s daughter,

wrote delicately.

 

 

Bright dewdrops flash as

Bunya no Asayasu

breasts the Autumn breeze.

 

Henjo, an eighth son,

mourned his emperor father,

managing temples.

 

In The Tales of Ise,

Narihira, heroic,

immortalised Love.

 

A Sestina on The Fall

Tags

Adam and Eve, Cranach the Elder, forbidden knowledge, Free Will, hortus clausus, Paradise, sestina, temptation, The Fall, Uffizi

(Cranach the Elder: Uffizi- Adam and Eve)

 

In the hortus clausus of Paradise,

Adam and Eve were naked, without shame;

partook of luscious fruits’ delectation

and yet, both were subject to temptation

and yielded. God then issued His calm denunciation:

expelled, they entered a marred Creation.

 

They wanted to be lords of Creation;

were not content to live in Paradise.

Adam, quick in his denunciation

of his wife and, both wearing leaves of shame,

blamed the wily serpent for temptation.

Forbidden knowledge was delectation.

 

And, oh the price of that delectation:

to have usurped the Lord of Creation!

Over-weening hearts, prey to temptation,

caused them to exchange Earthly Paradise

for lives of labour, childbirth pain and shame

and inter-gender denunciation.

 

Lest we jump to denunciation

of the Almighty, His delectation

in His creatures was His aim.  Death and shame

were never endgames in His Creation.

But how could there be sin in Paradise?

Free will left them open to temptation.

 

Yes, automata feel no temptation:

adoration, or denunciation

of God both possible in Paradise.

Disobedience was their delectation;

they wanted to be Lords of Creation,

yet, till their eyes were opened, felt no shame.

 

Do we repeat the arrogance and shame

in excusing ourselves our temptation?

Have we now lost Free Will?  Does Creation

struggle under God’s denunciation?

There was One, Who said His delectation

was to obey and He left Paradise.

 

We, His new creation; delectation!

Conquering shame, temptation, He opened,

Paradise; cancelled denunciation.                                                                                

Visio Monachi de Eynsham c 1196 CE (revised) or The Vision of Edmund, the monk of Eynsham.

Tags

Abbot, Adam of Eynsham, Archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin, Benedictine Rule, Bishop of Salisbury, Blessed Souls, chain of being, Charismatic Renewal, Compline, corporal punishment, Easter, Edmund of Eynsham, election, Geoffrey of Eynsham, Good Friday, hallucinatory drug, Holy week, Joscelin, Lent, Matins, nepotism, Osney, Oxfordshire, Paradise, Purgatory, quinsy, Rapture, Saladin, sanctification, Sanctus, St Lawrence, St Nicholas, Sub-Abbot, vanitas

Vision of Edmund of Eynsham

 

 

 

Adam – now there’s a fine symbolic name

for a Sub-Abbot, but it is not he

of whom we wish to write.  No, the fame

belongs entirely to his brother: Edmund.  He

is the one whose ‘deathbed’ revelation

showed him Paradise and Purgatory.

Taken by the hand of St Nicholas,

he saw the penalties of Vanitas.

 

 

We are in twelfth century Oxfordshire,

but the application is for us too,

though believers in Rapture are fewer.

Nowadays it would be put down to ‘flu,

a fever, or hallucinatory drug.

Out-of-body experiences – who

would credit them with the spiritual?

Movements like Charismatic Renewal?

 

 

Imbibing only some tepid water,

for fifteen months, Edmund lay, very weak;

his quinsy made him hotter and hotter.

As Easter approached, he commenced to speak

and, with the help of a supporting stick,

he wanted to celebrate Holy Week

in the monastery chapel.  Brothers

claimed he remained longer than the others.

 

 

From midnight until noon on the next day,

he confessed all his sins and lamented.

The following night, he began to pray

and lay on the ground, as if demented.

Adam had cold water splashed over him.

He thought Edmund had simply invented

this behaviour to gain some attention –

thus he wanted to defuse the tension.

 

 

How Edmund arrived there, without some aid,

was a point to be considered (but post-

Good Friday.)  Yes, though fresh blood was displayed

on the cross, the monks felt the Holy Ghost

was not behind Edmund’s troubling conduct.

Maybe he wanted discipline, to boast,

boost spiritual pride.  He’d asked for penance,

but was too weak for simple observance.

 

 

Through Good Friday evening, the next day,

water dribbled from his lips, till sunset.

They thought he was returning to the clay,

for he made no response and didn’t fret

when pricked.  They blew a horn in his ear,

but he did not stir – at least, not yet –

till Compline, when his eyes opened.  He sighed

and ‘Sancta Maria‘ many times cried.

 

 

He had begged for corporal punishment

and he kept on sobbing into his hands,

while compelling everyone to repent.

One of his more unusual demands

was to have a silver cross brought to him.

No one to this day really understands

why he was agitated; in this state:

raving like some kind of inebriate.

 

 

On Saturday evening, he ate some bread.

Miraculously, he went, unaided,

to Matins, where he bowed his tonsured head

and the cross and relics venerated.

The Prior and Sub-Prior heard him confess,

till no omission had been evaded

and he received the Sacrament as well,

to the ring of the credence Sanctus bell.

 

 

He then shared his dream, which began in Lent:

how a man had stood beside him, who said

that the prayers of a Godstow postulant

should join with his and be intermingled.

Then, roused to consciousness, he kissed the cross,

penitent for time he had spent in bed.

Entering the chapel of St Lawrence

and All Martyrs, he bowed in obesiance.

 

 

He begged Adam for further punishment

and bathed his eyes in blood and swallowed it.

He was birched further and did not give vent

to spleen; nor did he ask for a remit.

Adam denied the Benedictine Rule

condoned this practice.  He felt its ambit

was for daylight hours, but, apparently,

St Nicholas had amended the decree.

 

 

Edmund saw souls flogged and bound together,

but they still had a hope of salvation.

You could have knocked him down with a feather

when he saw, in the throes of purgation,

(previous Abbot) Geoffrey of Eynsham,

negligent in his organisation,

though he’d been in charge for forty four years,

now past nepotism induced his tears.

 

 

The Bishop of Salisbury – Joscelin –

committed sexual immorality

and, as for the dire dealings of Baldwin,

he had tinkered with criminality:

unwise Archbishop of Canterbury.

(Most preferred Saladin’s mentality.)

Much given to Chapter disputation,

Baldwin funded Crusades through taxation.

 

 

In the next place to which Edmund was led,

he smelled a vile pond and climbed a steep hill:

souls were burned on one side and they perished

with cold conversely.  A rotating grill

principle moved them from one location

to the other, like ants from an anthill.

To see a goldsmith from Osney- a drunk-

being purged here did not surprise the monk.

 

 

The third realm was a place of snakes, devils –

reserved for the homosexual.

A lawyer was suffering for evils

and monks too were punished by gradual

degrees.  Unchaste churchmen who had blasphemed

(so nothing much there far from the usual)

by dispensing holy things with foul hand,

epitomising the wrongs in England.

 

Those who had been successful in the world

endured more than those of a low degree.

Regions of Paradise were then unfurled

to Nicholas, Edmund: a panoply

of Blessed Souls, who approached a huge gate

set in a wall of crystal – so shiny

that, blinded, he scarcely saw the entrance

of those receiving their inheritance.

 

Edmund then saw Jesus Christ on a throne,

but, at this point, his guide made him return

and yet he sensed that there were those who’d flown

to higher realms and who with joy would burn.

They exuded Light Inaccessible,

but he was not yet ready to discern

the joys of one who finished his course –

his sanctification was yet perforce.

 

This vision showed him a chain of being,

linking angels and the perfected souls,

descending from God, who is all-seeing,

to those who’ve just embraced heavenly goals.

Necessary purging of perception

allots individuals specific roles.

Adam wrote this down for our perfection:

Verify your calling and election.

 

No Such Thing….

Tags

David Cameron, Decameron, Juncker, Theresa May

(Image from Decameron- no, not David Cameron, though he got us into this farce.)

Juncker:   No such thing

as a free lunch, chere

Therese.

En Suite

Tags

en-suite, Nat Library of Poland, Roman de la Rose

(Roman de la Rose: Master of the Policratique,

Nat Library, Poland)

 

This en suite

turned out a god send,

adding value!

A Head Start

Tags

British Library, Harley MS, La Carolle in the Garden, Roman de la Rose

(3L Harley MS 4425, British Library.  Wikimedia Commons.

The Carolle in the Garden: Roman de la Rose; Master of the

Prayerbooks)

 

Yes, if you

want to get ahead,

wear a hat.