Exiting the Impasse

It is exactly three years since the referendum. Three years since the slim 52/48 margin decided the vote for the UK in favour of leaving the EU …

It really feels as though the world is rapidly redefining itself at the moment. And it’s changing in a way which my younger self is finding hard to comprehend. I say ‘younger self’ because I’m increasingly realising how ossified my sense of optimism has been throughout the course of the last two and a half decades, I feel like Rumpelstiltskin waking up – or is it simply that this extreme pendulum swing since 23 June 2016 has happened far faster than anyone would have thought reasonably possible only a short time ago?

What has happened to that sense of hope and optimism which seemed so ripe with potential at the close of the twentieth century? Where are our present day Nelson Mandelas (truth and reconciliation), our Václav Havels (living in truth), our Aung San Suu Kyis (freedom from fear)? – Now we have Putin, Trump, Xi, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orban. And, even more unfathomably, Aung San Suu Kyi has of her own accord now joined their ranks! … It’s the new norm. Politics by personality cult. Populism providing sustenance for a rising sense of blinkered nationalism. Globalisation on the brink of imploding, and globalism about to atomise itself.

For a long time a lot of people I know here in the UK bemoaned our identikit plastic politicians, groaning at the lack of choice and the apparent inevitability of the outcomes of our elections. Our major political parties all seemed intent on occupying a safe middle ground, seemingly for the sake of their own careers first and foremost, massively fiddling their expense claims as a requisite perk of the job. But, bizarrely, that galling status quo now seems like some strange lost halcyon era.

A friend and I were discussing the current deepening division which is developing in the UK. Thinking about the gap that’s only widening and getting wider whilst the uncertainties of our nation’s situation remain unresolved, wondering how this crisis has ostensibly manifested itself out of nowhere. I’m sure the reason it all seems so obscure is because it’s not such a simple thing in and of itself. It’s more complex and probably runs far deeper than we can readily perceive on the day-to-day surface of things. I’m sure it’s due to a combination of factors.

The economic disparities within society at large sit at the root of all of this in the shape of the growing distance between those who have and those who have not. The divide between the wealthy and the poor is deepening perhaps because the system itself is not self-sustaining. Continual growth is probably an unrealistic and impossible aim, but rather than believing boom and bust is a natural, self-regenerating cycle, can we not seek to realign our society to different aims? – New Zealand is trying to do just that – This though is perhaps an eternally difficult circle to square. It seems as though human nature will always part between two extremes, and there will be those who will always want and seek to steer things off a middle way. How to improve upon this self-confounding conundrum? – I’ve no idea what to suggest.

The political ideologies which overlie our economic and social systems are a significant factor, simultaneously driving and hindering these changes. A quaquaversal conundrum at the core. The fact that so much is now in direct contention with itself within our Government, within Parliament, and even within the main political parties themselves, suggests that we are perhaps at a point of genuine transformation – surely whatever comes of this, no matter how bad or divisive it might get – change is now genuinely possible. But how are we to gauge the magnitude of what could as opposed to what should, or more importantly, what will happen?

I can’t help feeling that our collective discontent and antagonism is only going to grow over the next few months (or even years), fuelled by the deracinated ‘democracy’ of social media, egged on by the echo chambers of the mainstream-media-manipulated bubbles in which we are all cocooned – but how will this rising discontent eventually manifest itself? – Are we headed for discontent on a par with the Poll Tax riots, the Miners’ Strike, the anarchy of August 2011? – Or are we headed for a General Strike, an economy in free fall or meltdown? – The break-up of the United Kingdom? – Or will we see a slow emergence of a ‘Brexit Spring’ whereby some sort of social rising occurs which galvanises us all and demands a revolution in our political system, throwing out the two party, ‘first-past-the-post’ system which has hitherto prevailed for so long?

Whatever happens I think one thing is for sure – it won’t be quite what any of us want. More likely than not, we are all destined to have our expectations disappointed. Whatever compromise is arrived at – it won’t be a consensus. It’ll be a fudge made to seem like a consensus. But as ever, some of us will win (probably a few), some of us will lose (probably quite a few) – and in the long term it will only serve to be a massive missed opportunity.

If the systemic trend of rising nationalism is a response to the increasing imbalances of capitalist globalisation over recent decades, what will be the eventual outcome? – If nationalism means this world system is no longer sustainable and it really does begin to breakdown, what do we think might reasonably replace it? – Or is it too big to fail?

I have no idea. I can’t even begin to fathom it. But neither can I foresee it playing out without some recourse to violence somewhere along the way – small scale and/or potentially large scale. From civil disobedience and rioting within our own borders (stemming from social and economic discontent), to full scale military conflicts between nations (from the tensions of rising nationalism, punitive tariffs and petty trade wars). I hope I am proved wrong, but it all seems possible, and most scarily of all it maybe even seems to be becoming increasingly inevitable as each day passes with all of these uncertainties perpetually hanging over us, unresolved.

What I deplore and despair of the most is the absolute mindless stupidity of it all. Particularly in the UK the rising xenophobia and increasingly overt racism, made all the more shocking for its official endorsement in the form of the Government’s repugnant and bluntly implemented “hostile environment” policy, which is demonstrably aimed far wider than simply targeting illegal immigrants. None of this needs to happen. If only we could dispense with our partisan self-interest (for we are all, wittingly and unwittingly, complicit) and focus ourselves instead on the greater whole and the greater good. We’re painting ourselves into an ever diminishing corner. But sadly I suspect no one who has any kind of clout in these machinations is truly interested in finding an equilibrium which is the most optimum for all of us; there are too many petty agendas constantly in play. Too many pockets to line, too many nests to feather. Too many people to keep down and keep in their place. And too many of us all too willing to play along, willingly hoodwinking ourselves, swallowing the panacea, or alternatively raging against the machine in a way which is simply self-detrimental or playing straight into the hands of those manipulating the odds. United we are corralled, but divided we stand. Milksops or Militants. Milkshakes or Molotov cocktails. It’s all an almighty mess.

No matter how much I think about it, no matter how much I talk about it with family and friends, people on both sides of the present divide – I can’t see an exit. We seem to be oscillating unendingly between tragedy and farce. If ‘all the world is a stage’, then clearly we are stuck firmly in the theatre of the absurd. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (the more it changes, the more it's the same thing) – the dissident-playwright-turned-politician, Václav Havel’s alter ego, Ferdinand Vaněk, was right, “It’s all fucked up.”

A Poetic Pilgrimage to Matsushima

Matsuo Bashō, 1644-1694

I first read about the beauty of Matsushima in the pages of Matsuo Bashō’s travel journal, Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North), written in 1689-1691. But it was only on my second trip to Japan over the Christmas and New Year period of 2003-2004 that I first came across a photograph of the place in a newspaper, and what I saw bowled me over. It looked stunning. I immediately reached for my guidebook, wondering how far away I was from the place, and whether or not I’d be able to add it to the itinerary of places I was hoping to visit during my trip – but, alas, on that occasion it was simply too far away. However, I finally got the chance to visit Matsushima three years later, oddly enough whilst I was working in Hong Kong, by making an unusual detour onwards to Japan, before heading back to the UK.

'Matsushima left poet Basho at a loss for words' - The Asahi Shimbun, 6th January 2004

Matsuo Bashō, Japan’s foremost poet and undisputed master of haiku (or hokku, as he would have called it), writes that: “Much praise had already been lavished upon the wonders of the islands of Matsushima. Yet if further praise is possible, I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan ...” – It is a regular conceit of newspapers and guidebooks alike to claim that Bashō was so stunned by the beauty of the place that “it rendered him speechless.” Usually what is meant by this is that, unusually for Bashō, he wrote no poems about the place (at least no poems that we currently know about). It is unusual because during his life Bashō travelled widely throughout Japan, and frequently wrote poems about the many places he visited, hence there are many towns which can find a connection to the nation’s foremost bard – some more famously than others. His travelling companion, Sora, on the other hand did write a poem while they were staying in Matsushima; which Bashō includes in his travel journal:

Matsushima ya

Tsuru ni mi wo kare

Hototogisu

      -    Sora

Clear voiced cuckoo,

Even you will need

The silver wings of a crane

To span the islands of Matsushima.

(translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, 1966)

Bashō gives an evocative description of Matsushima in his journal, but confesses he’s at a loss to distil his feelings about the place into verse: “The islands are situated in a bay about three miles wide in every direction and open to the sea through a narrow mouth on the south-east side. Just as the River Sekkō in China is made full at each swell of the tide, so is this bay filled with the brimming water of the ocean, and innumerable islands are scattered over it from one end to the other. Tall islands point to the sky and level ones prostrate themselves before the surges of water. Islands are piled above islands, and islands are joined to islands, so that they look exactly like parents caressing their children or walking with them arm in arm. The pines are of the freshest green, and their branches are curved in exquisite lines, bent by the wind constantly blowing through them. Indeed, the beauty of the entire scene can only be compared to the most divinely endowed of feminine countenances, for who else could have created such beauty but the great god of nature herself? My pen strove in vain to equal this superb creation of divine artifice.”

The Boat from Shiogama

Like Bashō before me, I arrived by boat from nearby Shiogama. And the marvellously picturesque effect isn’t much diminished today either. Shiogama is fairly heavily industrialised with a hulking great power station overlooking the bay, but rounding the headland the boat enters a small enclave of rocky islets – each sculpted by the wind and the waves into remarkable shapes, and each is capped by a scrub of artfully ragged pines, reminiscent of the best bonsai displays. Fast fishing boats raced past us, heading back into land, whilst yachts and dinghies with elegant white sails glided silently past in the opposite direction. Hugging close to some of the islands and visible just above the waves there are great long rows of wooden stilts on which oysters and seaweed are traditionally farmed in these clean waters.

The dramatic process of geological formation of this stretch of the coast is quite interesting in itself. The bay is underlain by a seabed laid down during the Holocene era, made of sedimentary clays which sit over a Miocene era bedrock of limestone. It’s thought that the bay itself and the islands along with it were formed as the result of a massive landslide which sent a huge portion of this part of the coastline into the sea. Hence the age of the marine clay strata suggests the landslide occurred as far back as the early to middle Holocene, roughly some 6000 years ago (read more here). It’s also thanks to this topographical configuration that Matsushima was largely spared from the full devastation of a more recent massive natural disaster – the awful tsunami which struck in March 2011 following on from the Tohoku Earthquake, which also damaged the nuclear power station a little further south along the coast at Fukushima.

Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa (British Museum)

As the boat from Shiogama motored through the span of some 200 or so islands everyone on-board seemed transfixed, pointing out the natural oddities of shape and size. One island very comically looked like the head of Donald Duck staring out to sea. Another had been sculpted by the elements into a shape which seemed to echo Hokusai’s famous print, The Great Wave at Kanagawa. Yet Bashō was just as moved by the charm of the town of Matsushima as he was by the bay and its islands: “I noticed a number of tiny cottages scattered among pine trees and pale blue threads of smoke rising from them. I wondered what kind of people were living in those isolated houses, and was approaching one of them with a strange sense of yearning, when, as if to interrupt me, the moon rose glittering over the darkened sea, completing the full transformation to a night-time scene. I lodged in an inn overlooking the bay, and went to bed in my upstairs room with all the windows open. As I lay there in the midst of the breeze and the drifting clouds, I felt myself to be in a world totally different to the one I was accustomed to.” – When I was there I too stayed in a ryokan hotel overlooking the bay. The ryokan had a large onsen, or hot spring bath. And, as so often when I stay at onsen in Japan, I found I was the only foreigner staying there; which feels both odd and a novelty all in one – invoking in me a rather detached sense of removal from the norm, much like Bashō perhaps felt.

Statue of Masamune Date at nearby Sendai

Exploring the old town and a few of the islands which can easily be reached by footbridges is a lovely way to spend a day or two, returning to the ryokan for a relaxing soak in the hot tub and a delicious evening meal before a sound night’s sleep is the perfect way to unwind Japanese-style. In the centre of town is the Zuiganji Temple, originally founded in 828 by Jikaku Daishi the current building was built in 1609 under the direction of the local Daimio, or feudal lord, Date Masamune. It is a Zen Buddhist temple with links to Engakuji in Kamakura. The three main islands to visit are Godaidojima, Fukuurajima, and Oshima.

Zuiganji

Godaidojima is a small island, named after a sacred hall built there again by Date Masamune in 1609, which houses five statues of the Mikkyo, Buddhist deities. These statues are only unveiled once every 33 years – the next occasion will be in 2039. The footbridge which connects this island to the mainland is curiously constructed like an arched ladder with large gaps between the beams underfoot. It’s thought that this was deliberately done because the island was meant to be off-limits to women (happily, not so today), and so this design would have made it more difficult for them to cross in their geta – which are a kind of wooden sandal set upon raised stilts, nowadays mainly worn by geisha as part of their traditional costume in Kyoto. That’s not to say geta weren’t worn by men sometimes too – in fact I was once given a pair to wear when staying at a traditional ryokan in Izu. They take a bit of getting used to, as they are quite disconcerting at first, but once you get the hang of them you can clack along on them at a fair old pace!

Godaidojima

Fukuurajima is a much larger island, reached by crossing a much longer bridge (252 metres long) which is one of the most picturesque aspects of Matsushima – often featured on picture postcards of the place. The island also has a couple of shrine buildings, one of which is dedicated to the goddess Benten, but it is mainly known as a kind of natural botanical garden, as it is home to some 250 species of plants.

Benten-do

Fukuurajima

Oshima is much more secluded and has a more mysterious air to it. It was once a place of retreat for Buddhist priests and monks. There are many time-worn Buddhist carvings in the rock-faces across the island, some are thought to be memorial stones. But there are also a couple of stelae dedicated to our old friends, Bashō and Sora, inscribed with their poems. There’s also a longish foot tunnel which is also said to have been carved by hand too. On the morning I visited the island was suitably deserted, hence it seemed a very peaceful and meditative place removed from the bustle of the town. Just the quiet sounds of the water all around and the fresh scent of pine trees filling the air.

Monuments to Matsuo Bashō and Sora

Oshima

There is a story relating to another of Japan’s most famous poets, named Saigyō, who also liked to roam the length and breadth of the country some 500 years before Matsuo Bashō. It is said that whilst Saigyō was en route to Matsushima he chanced to meet a young Zen monk meditating under a pine tree not far from the town. Their conversation evolved into an elaborate debate regarding the tenets of Zen Buddhism which ended with Saigyō eventually conceding defeat. And so, immediately thereafter, feeling rather, disconsolate Saigyō gave up on his plan to visit Matsushima and passed on by. – Personally I’d say it’s better to avoid disappointment and borrow a blank leaf from Matsuo Bashō’s notebook and be sure to see the town and its bay of many islands for yourself. It’s a place where literature, history, and nature all combine in the subtle poetry of the place itself.

Also on 'Waymarks'

Walking the Tokaido

The Dancing Girl of Izu