January 14, 2021

 

January 14, 2021

I'm always in my writing studio at midnight, and I don't finish until the sun rises. Once inside, I don't have a clock, nor do I look at the time, because the sun coming up tells me what the time is. As I approach the studio, I, at times, don't have a thought in my head. I'm surrounded by my books, and often what triggers my desire is an old travel guide to New York, which reminds me of specific physical, and therefore spiritual pleasures. By nature, I'm a performer.  I feel writing is a performance in itself. Although great moments are spent between me addressing words on a page yet, I have to act for me to get to this point. "My' act' has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act."

"I'm becoming the sort of person who can't believe in anything except the counterfeit." As I sit here smoking and viewing my cat sleeping by my side, I realize "the most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult state to live in." It's a strange irony that the tobacco I'm smoking is named "Peace." One can only buy this brand in Japan, and, ironically, the company started in 1946, at the height of the post-war years of Japan. Raymond Lowey designed Peace's logo and then eventually created the Lucky Strike package in 1952.

I slowly smoke as to extend the thoughts in my head. I only drink green tea at this time of the night, and I hardly drink alcohol. It's only when I see the boys that I may have either a beer more likely or, if in the mood, whiskey on ice. When I see a fellow, I think, "perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood." Before leaving the bar to go to my studio, I pay attention to these young men's attendance chatting among themselves. "Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everyone else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done."

 I sometimes take the public bus back to the studio or arrange for a car to pick me up. I feel empty. This is not a bad state to be in, but more of realizing the existence that we or I should say, I, live in. "We live in an age in which there is no heroic death." I put the pen on paper and write, "possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth." Writing is clarity in a zen-zone landscape. I just hear the pen scratching the Japanese paper, and "when silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning."

I get up to stretch my legs and torso for being in a position for so long. In the back of my head, an angel (or Satan) tells me to move around the studio. I have a pattern, and "I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line…"

-Tosh Berman (after Yukio Mishima on his birthday).