I write this seated on a Shinkansen as I head back to Kyoto for New Year’s, the laptop screen framed against a window oscillating between views of green hills and blue waters. To begin this month the way I did, and to end it back in the arms of that city I utterly love, it feels cyclical. It is a city that lets me write only in poems and click only in monochrome, and I look forward to willingly submitting to that.
That artistic asceticism would mean that by the time I leave Kyoto, I would have left December as well. There have been a few poems written already for this month, and I’m sure there will be more to come, but I was hoping to look back on it in plain terms, or at least as plain as my writing lets me. So I decided I’ll do that in the form of a letter, a letter I will write entirely on the 2 hour 36 minutes this bullet train takes to cover the 600 odd kms between Hakata and Osaka. It feels frighteningly short but it might be a good enough constraint to actually work, else I’ll never get around to it. Because this December has been an inchoate mass of time, gloriously wayward and endlessly deep, trying to make sense of it in any way would kill me multiple times over. I’m still picking up the pieces of what it’s been, scooping up memories in tiny handfuls and preserving them in poetry, discovering new depths every time I wade back in. So, no, I can’t look back on it all in one leisurely go, it would be like staring directly at the sun. Instead I’ll seek refuge in the medium of letter-writing, where words move faster than thought and there’s no scope or space for reflection. Apologies in advance if this doesn’t make for smooth reading, this is the best I can do to translate the immensity that this month has been.
***
December is my favourite month of the year. Nothing else comes close. There’s something about it, maybe the equanimity with which it carries all that has gone before while simultaneously evoking the promise of what is to come. (The Romans thought January epitomised that, hence naming it after Janus, but I disagree. January just coasts on the promise of what might come, it doesn’t acknowledge the past enough, at least for me. And without the past, where’s the promise?) December is impeccably graceful, and its patience has always epitomised what I believe in - endings are just as important as beginnings, sometimes even more so.
***
And this December, this gorgeous chunk of time, has taken me closer to eternity than anything else ever has.
Between Nara, Kyoto and the islands of the Seto inland sea, I dug my way so deep into antiquity and then ferried myself so far ahead into the future that I ended up seeing how they are both the one and the same.
Time is a circle, and this December I dragged myself through its entirety, face-first.
Ryoan-ji. Tadao Ando. Oka-dera. Ryue Nishizawa. Daitoku-ji. Horyu-ji. James Turrell. Kodai-ji. Shugaku-in. Rei Naito. Fushimi Inari Taisha. Lee Ufan. Todai-ji. Gerhard Richter. Sanjusangendo. Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Architecture as sculpture. Solidified light. Abstraction in gravel and rock. Conversations with raindrops. Mythology in wood. Curated landscapes. Time corridors.
I am ravaged, utterly, irreparably.
To experience beauty is to be vulnerable, to be open, like a raw wound. I don’t know of any other way to do it and it wrecks me every single time. The overwhelming ecstasy of it all, where you don’t know where the tears keep coming from, or where they’re going.
It drains you, pure beauty, and I don’t trust anything that doesn’t.
***
This December has gifted me so much of it. The first half of the month was spent spellbound in some of the most intense spaces I’ve ever experienced, both architectural and natural, both ancient and modern, containing some of the greatest art I’ve laid eyes on. To put it mildly, it was bloodcurdlingly intense. Sleep became a distant friend because my mind wouldn’t let me, and my feet had a perpetual need to be on the move, almost with an existential urgency. To acknowledge, to process, to preserve, even though it was like trying to hold fog in a fist.
Eventually, I had to balance that with the calming presence of nature, so in the second half of the month I started making my way down along the coast in slow, contemplative journeys in local trains. I people-watched high schoolers with their eclectic backpacks on staid blazers and befriended benches in desolate stations with only vending machines for company. I gave myself up to tiny coastal towns, gazing into mountains and waves, spilling myself into words. I first travelled down the eastern coast, and then along the western coast before I went all the way south to Kyushu. Then I looped all the way around the big island, ferrying myself to tiny island shrines and volcanoes, punctuated with conversations and letters.
I wrote more poetry in one month than I’ve written in the last few years combined. I walked over 500 kilometers in 30 days, in towns, cities, and sometimes between towns. I climbed forested hills on islands, with only the moonlight for company. I’ve walked through castles I’ve only previously traversed as a video game character. I’ve eaten sea food I didn’t know existed, and not thrown up. I’ve fallen asleep on empty beaches, my camera bag for a pillow. At times, I’ve gazed into wood grain longer than the duration of most movies. I’ve befriended people using literary conversations on google translate, and shared meals with them. I’ve been on more ferries than I can count, always mesmerised by the shapes and colours of the wake. I re-watched Ozu in Kyoto. I spent a day trapped between snow and sea, subsumed in a snow storm. I laid the foundations for the company I’m building next. I sat on piers, singing old Telugu songs out loud. I met some beautiful people.
Not that any of those moments signify anything in themselves, but the fact that this month had so many of them in such close succession and intensity, that was something. I felt free, unbearably free, not knowing where I would be next, or how I would get there. I am aware life never works that way, at least not the modern version we are forced to live, but even glimmers of that are good enough. The year hasn’t really been a great one for me, and I had hoped a Japanese winter would help the way a European summer did earlier. And how this December has.
To walk through the halls of Sanjusangendo alone at the break of day, or to see a sliver of light trace itself across any of Ando’s grey corridors, or to gaze into one of Sugimoto’s seascapes on a clifftop framed against the sea itself, there is no way of coming back from that unchanged.
There is no way back.
So, thank you, my December. You have been calming beyond measure, thrilling beyond containment, a shimmering light all through.
You have been a long, uninterrupted dream.
Love,
Dheeraj.
