The Pine Islands

by Marion Poschmann

  He had sat beneath stone pines with Mathilda in Rome. Pines, whose shade they sought out time and time again, pines, whose resinous scent they inhaled, pines, tall with a cloudlike black corona. He hadn’t known they were pines, they were nothing more than handy parasols to him at that point, he made use of their relative coolness, but neither he nor Mathilda were interested in conifers. Now he remembered the Jesuit-blue, the baroque-blue, the pale-blue Roman sky covered with deep black cumulus clouds. Rome, with its white towers of cloud glistening golden in its painted domes, the dark, swaying coronas of pine trees like clouds in the heavens.

  The white-bearded God the Father was enthroned on the cumulus clouds, and Gilbert wandered from one church to the next with Mathilda in order to compare the depictions of God’s beard. As a general rule the hair of the godly beard was wavy, it flowed down from the chin like curls of smoked eel, individual strands squirming dynamically. On the other hand, it mustn’t be too fuzzy, how it flowed was imperative, the beard was white and undulating in the cloud swells of the cupolas, and this alluded to the weather god, to the weather-making power of God, but also the unseen God, who drapes himself with clouds, the unportrayable God whose counten-ance, even when a bold attempt is made to paint it, remains partially obscured by a flowing cloud of white. There were no alternative styles for the godly beard. The Christ figure might appear as the clean-shaven Good Shepherd as per the Roman fashion of the period; Christ Pantocrator wore a short, trimmed monarchic beard; the ailing Christ seen in gloomy baroque churches, among grinning marble skeletons and golden ossuaries and mummified popes wrapped in red velvet, shows the traditional burgeoning three-day beard, as he understandably hasn’t found time in his role of the sacrificial lamb for worldly affairs such as having a morning shave. Some artists had conversely forgone tousled, unkempt hair and furnished the afflicted Christ with the so-called strategist’s beard, as befitting one ready for battle. It was ultimately a conflict between heaven and hell, life and death, and it wouldn’t do for the star player to be impeded by wildly flowing locks. Christ was, however, only a secondary aspect in his study. Gilbert preferred to concentrate on God the Father, whose beard wasn’t, according to centuries of Christian tradition proscribing the depiction of the face of God, actually even supposed to exist.

  Mathilda had been put out by this display of virility. God’s beard, she had snorted, it’s all about the expression and preservation of patriarchal structures, and that’s all there is to it. Of course the film industry had a vested interest in it.

  Mathilda gave him the feeling that the object of his study was behind the times. What about the deconstruction of traditional gender roles? What about the problematics of representation in the postmodern age? Wasn’t it true that the Christian iconography of God the Father was based on Zeus and that this image persists to the present day?

  After a few days Mathilda stopped accompanying him to the museums and churches, she found the glum oil paintings, the pale frescoes, the ostentatious statues all unbearable, and she was happiest when, decked out in sunglasses, summer dress, sandals, she was sitting in a piazza with a drink in front of her. For her, the Rome trip culminated in this moment, when the Roman baths, the excavated ruins, the endless ancient walls had been sightseen, when she was able to reflect upon the catacombs, the chapels and the palazzi. Mathilda: a clearly defined body presenting herself to the sun in the Eternal City.

  Gilbert often cursed himself for taking her with him. She had slowed him down, held him back in his research, deterred him from his work with her lethargy, her cultural disinterest, her disdain. She demotivated him, she made him just sit around for the second half of their trip, drinking grappa, eating ice cream, pasta and pizza, meandering from one café to the next and yet behaving as if they were on an important mission.

  Perhaps, he now thought, they should have spent more time under the pines, camped out there, looking at the horizon from the top of a hill, over the roofs and domes of the city.

  And then Yosa, falling from a cliff, over and over again – he couldn’t get the image out of his head, it remained unrelentingly before his eyes, imprinted over the landscape as the train chugged through it at a strangely leisurely pace, as if showing him everything one more time. Port facilities, steep coastline, the bay. They had found the optimum place, a cliff, falling majestically away, the sea very far below. Ancient pines tilting out towards the rock face, bent by storms, obstinately clinging to the hard ground, swaying in the wind. They threw a shadow which stirred and swept over the dried needles on the ground, and through this shadow slid Yosa’s silhouette. He walked close to the edge, took off his shoes, fussily placed them next to his gym bag. Then he stood for a moment on the rock in thin white socks, his toes apishly curling against the rock’s surface. Gilbert wanted to call something out to him, wanted to rush over to him, grab his arm and pull him back, but his voice failed him, and for unfathomable reasons he suddenly didn’t seem capable of rapid movements. He was able to inch forwards millimetre by millimetre, as if floating, he glided out of the distance towards Yosa, he moved forwards very slickly, travelling without effort, a magical wish, unfulfillable, because if he put even a minimal amount of will into his movements, if he wanted to accelerate even a tiny amount with almost imperceptible propulsion, he faltered and could go no further. He watched from a distance as Yosa jumped from the cliff. Gilbert could suddenly run again, he sprinted, looked into the abyss, but only saw the waves far below, white, and steadily beating against the rocks. Anything that had fallen from the cliff would have hit the rocks below, but Yosa’s body was already gone.

  Gilbert took a step back and sat down helplessly beneath one of the gnarled trees. The cliff continued to be its windswept self, the laces of Yosa’s trainers fluttered, the gym bag buckled inwards with a sucking, plasticky sound.

  松島

  Matsushima

  Dear Mathilda!

  The pine islands of Matsushima are one of the three most beautiful landscapes in Japan. The view of them is deemed classic, inspiring, poetic. This is what makes them predestined for poetry, for utamakura, a so-called poem pillow. For centuries Japanese poets have taken pilgrimages to places of scenic allure, sought out wondrous places that are so inviting, so lovely, poems wish to settle in them. I too desired to seek out a place that so many others had visited on their travels. Matsushima, they say, is a particularly plump pillow.

  There are countless islands – including tiny ones – where knobbly black pines grow. The majestic pines in the Imperial Palace Gardens were pruned after their example: wind-beaten, they should look wild, as if formed by the weather and not by human hand, old pines, a symbol of endurance, solemnity and astringency, which the wise man may be granted at the end of his life.

  Japanese black pines thrive exclusively in the Japanese island kingdom and in parts of Korea. Attempts to plant them on the east coast of North America have failed, the trees were immediately infested by disease and pests and died. This is a coastal tree, they tolerate saltwater and can withstand salty winds without any problem. Their wood is the material of choice for the construction of stages for Noh theatres because it doesn’t creak.

  Stages in Noh theatres are generally adorned with pines and painted with pines. This is because the pine tree functions as a site of godly manifestation. It is the earthly site where the gods descend, which is, they say, like a lightning bolt coursing through a rod.

  The Scots pine shares many qualities with the Japanese black pine. It is the habitat of the Pine Beauty, the Monk, Nun and Pine Processionary moths, spiritual-sounding moths, and is also a place of the eerie grandparental silence common to pines the world over.

  Matsushima-Kaigan. Overcast sky, silky grey and cloud-skimmed, slim, flat clouds like the ones on Japanese folding screens, clouds not depicted but implied by the scalloped edges of twinkling gold leaf, highly stylised clouds, clouds whose function amounted to making part of a landscape vanish. The long-lost sky of a musty old postcard, the back
of it marked with greetings in old-fashioned script long since faded into illegibility. A feeling of yellowedness hung over Matsushima, something implaus-ible, as if all the wanderlust had accumulated here and could no longer find a new route out. He had arrived at his destination. Could it be true? The clouds which in that first moment had seemed petrified drifted on at a brisk tempo, the wind blew cool and salty, he could see the sea from the station.

  The other passengers left the train with the bustle of locals, they didn’t trouble themselves with the view. No one apart from him had come for the pine islands.

  The previous night he had lain awake for a long while and looked at the dark, restless sky. He sensed clouds swelling inside himself, they accumulated, grew to gigantic dimensions and were set in motion by an overbearing wind. They lost their form, were torn to shreds, reconfigured themselves, changed from triumphant black to faded grey and then became an endless grey surface, an oppressive carpet of stratus cloud from which he wanted desperately to flee, to effect an escape to that place where the clouds had their rightful place beyond his imagin-ation: the sea.

  He walked through the barrier and showed an inspector his train ticket. Then he stooped and stroked the station forecourt. He had arrived.

  His journey to Matsushima had been less a matter of travelling and more a gliding or slinking, a snail-paced groping, a cloudily sedate approaching, he had travelled, it seemed to him, like a pudding, just turned out of its mould and slowly cooling, still wobbling a little, sliding helplessly down a sloping surface and losing more of its form with every amoeba-like step forwards.

  He stood on the windy station forecourt at Matsushima and felt a strange compulsion to his actions. A grey cumulus cloud slid over the parking bays, the dusty bushes and the gloomy railway underpass, balling itself up over the small shops like an enormous brain – his brain.

  He didn’t want to submit to this impulse, and yet he did, it blew him onwards like the wind did the clouds. Outwardly he seemed purposeful and ambitious, motivated if not industrious, in exactly the same way the clouds overhead seemed to strive eagerly in a particular direction, as if they had a destination in mind and had propelled themselves in its direction. For some time, however, there had been growing inside him a mistrust of this force masquerading as a motor, this impulse which he increasingly experienced as a kind of compulsion. And he sometimes wondered whether, without this compulsion, wouldn’t we instead move in the same motionless way the moon moves as it rises, seemingly immutable in its tranquillity, gathering all nightly things around itself?

  Saigyō’s journey had been guided by moonlight. It had led him through magical landscapes to solitary places, he had followed its enchantment and its beauty as he had progressed further and further north.

  Gilbert knew precisely where he wanted to go. It was a bright day, he unfolded the map showing where his reserved lodgings were, he walked through the station underpass and followed the street as it climbed more and more steeply up to his hotel.

  Behind a crash barrier was a car park which, given the modest size of the town, Gilbert found to be astonishingly extensive. The car park was empty. There was a sign at its entrance: Catastrophe Assembly Point. In the event of a tsunami one should – as Gilbert had just done – rush up the mountain, drive your car to the high-lying districts and seek refuge from the waves in the car park. According to all human calculations, a tsunami couldn’t get you here. His hotel was above the car park. As far as this matter was concerned, he would be able to sleep peacefully.

  He saw himself making his way up the slope like the tiny figures following the mountain paths in the old scroll paintings, barely discernible against the stony hulks of the mountains that fill and dominate the space in these compositions, the slender figure scarcely noticeable amid the heavy brushstrokes, one misplaced stroke enough to cover this delicate single line intended to represent an entire human being.

  The receptionist bowed to him many times, had him sign a stack of forms, all the while conducting telephone calls in multiple languages.

  No, no new guests have arrived this afternoon. No young Japanese man, no one by the name of Yosa Tamagotchi, no one under any other name, no woman, no child, no one.

  The receptionist conjured up a folder of postcards, Gilbert could choose one. This game seemed rather condescending to him, but he didn’t dare refuse the card. Various views of various small islands. He chose one of an island protruding starkly out of the water in the shape of a sail. This one, the receptionist noted, this one doesn’t exist anymore, it was lost in the tsunami. Gilbert politely accepted the image of the dead island with both hands.

  Matsushima was beautiful, it had been for centuries, all through the centuries Matsushima had possessed the kind of beauty that even a tsunami could not harm, perhaps even the kind of beauty that could hold a tsunami at bay. The bay’s countless pine-clad islands, so it was said, had mitigated the impact of the wave, had prevented something worse from happening to the surrounding area.

  The receptionist led him to his room. A hotel in the Western style, no cedar-wood walls, no tatami mats or paper windows, in their place the hum of air conditioning, a reading corner, skylights that gave the sober concrete a cosy appearance, as if the sun was constantly shining into the room.

  Dear Mathilda!

  In his essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’, the writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki celebrates the Japanese inclination towards darkness. Recent technological advances had convinced him that his country was set on a path towards westernisation, and in the essay he expresses regret that particular aspects of traditional Japanese culture were falling to the wayside, if not completely into obscurity. For him this idea of ‘Japanese’ culture included a sensibility for subtle intimations, for the things that remain concealed in shadow. The West, one could pithily summarise, is bright; it not only brings with it the illumination of the Enlightenment, but also lights up every street, every town, every room with dazzling lamps, so that every single object will for evermore be sharp and delineated. The East, conversely, prefers to allow things to emerge only vaguely from the background, to hold their mutability and fragmentariness as their defining qualities, so that it would be considered the peak of aesthetic experience to catch only a glimmer of an object. How vulgar the clearly visible object that pretends it could exist independently of its context; how glorious the twilight that strips away the substance of things, their unanswerable persuasive power, their obvious worldliness.

  As a point of departure for his argument Tanizaki took the different skin colours that prevail in the respective cultures and derived different conceptions of beauty from them. The rosy white of people in the West is of a completely different quality to the dusky pallor of those in the East: besides his general inclination towards keeping things veiled, he sought to justify with this sleight of hand the idea that the ashen skin tone of Japanese women would really come into its own if they spent years in poorly lit homes, far from society, and then like a ghost, with a wan face and blackened teeth, stepped out of the darkness. His conclusions are so backward, chauvinistic and nationalistic that they gave his ideas an extremely unpleasant aftertaste. Nevertheless, the images he uses to advocate for a reduced concept of the image have a strongly sensual persuasiveness. When furnishing his new house he wanted a bathroom in the Japanese style. He had it done out in dark wood but couldn’t find an alternative for the glistening fixtures. The shining white porcelain toilet seat was particularly central in his stylistic critique. The most elegant solution in his eyes would be a model not available on the market: made entirely from wood and coated with black Japanese lacquer.

  The receptionist informed Gilbert as he walked up the stairs in front of him that only breakfast was served at the hotel. Should he still wish to eat, he ought to be aware that all eateries down in the town would close at 6 p.m. The legs of the receptionist’s trousers fell cleanly in a strange kind of slow motion right in front of Gilbert’s face. The soles of the receptionist’s shoes se
emed to rise off the step only with some effort. Gilbert walked slowly behind him, he hadn’t let his small bag be taken off him, but it seemed all the more to him that they needed a disproportionate length of time to climb the stairs. Gilbert leant a little too far forwards to speed up their ascent, just as he had exercised subtle pressure on the train platform, but the receptionist remained unaffected, raised his foot step by step off the floor as if it were sticking to the carpet, as if it were pulling up a little piece of the carpet and the stairs and thus the entire house with it, while the other foot exerted a counter-pressure and brought everything back into balance.

  He had been born in Matsushima, the receptionist explained as he opened the door for Gilbert, he had spent his entire life here, apart from when he was studying, and never wanted to leave again.

  Shadows poured from the receptionist’s sleeves, spilled from out under the bed and the desk and submerged the lower half of the room in a sombre vagueness, while every object on the glossy desk provocatively took up precisely the space allocated to it, the kettle with the two upturned cups, the paper packets of sugar and teabags, the monstrously large desk lamp with the metal shade and its movable Z-shaped arm. Only the old television seemed to hail from the same kingdom of shadows as the room itself, hulking blackly on the table, projecting into the room and trailing a long wake of darkness behind it.

  The receptionist was up to his knees in this nebulousness, Gilbert couldn’t see clearly into it, the room seemed rather dusty and the carpeted floor simply filthy, and he realised this lower part of the room was absolutely off limits and that it would be best to simply ignore it, as well as any vermin it might contain, right from the off.