readying to go
leaves fall like teardrops
another season beckoning

Once again, the Yokozuna Hakuho has won a tournament, this his 38th. A 15-0 score at the Tokyo Natsu Basho secured him the title and not a single wrestler came close to beating him over the course of the two weeks. Impressive is an understatement. He has been called the "quintessential all-round sumo wrestler" because of his strength in both grappling and pushing techniques, and his ability to read and respond to his opponent's intentions. (Wiki)

Also of note from the Tokyo tourney is the likely promotion of Takayasu to Ozeki rank after three excellent tournaments in a row. Together with Kisenosato, this may point to a revival in Japanese sumo at the top level, an area which has been dominated more recently by Mongolians.

On a completely different track, tomorrow I decamp to Sydney in preparation for our flight to Thailand on Thursday. I hope that I can give some reportage of the trip in situ, though I am not sure of when and where wireless might be available. But I remain hopeful of being your honest correspondent.

Hakuho and supporters:

I have suspected for a long time that the art of self-improvement (you might call it a cult or a fetish) has had a large BS component. I recall with amusement a housemate priming himself in front of a picture of a BMW, intoning something along the lines of "I'm a winner" over and over again. His long-suffering companions had also to put up with marketing sessions in the living room and motivation tapes played over and over. After six months or so of this conditioning, resistance was difficult. Truly, you can start to believe the cliches, generalisations and pat responses, all washed down with a beery mix of pseudo-Friedman/Rand neo-liberalism. Soon enough you are signing up to sell plastic containers (yes, I did) or attending Amway meetings(no, I didn't).

This was the extreme end of the self-improvement quest, the one tied in with making money. It is still with us and the players are unrepentant, even though many of them make their stash off the backs of ordinary people. My friend (of the previous paragraph) ripped off friends and family to achieve his so-called winning outcomes.

At a less mendacious level, most people seem to have bought into the notion that self-development is a key aspect of life. Looking within to find strength, joy, renewal, healing etc has been a leitmotif of the past 40 years. It has given rise to endless self-help books, flirtations with Eastern religions, programs, activities, fads and the like, most returning in another guise cyclically. The over-arching doctrine might best be summed up as the power of positive thinking, a power which has led, through its unrestrained application, to a kind of neurosis.

The Danish psychologist Svend Brinkman puts this much better than me.

"We are only allowed to be positive, we are only allowed to be happy and anything that threatens these states of mind is considered wrong."

and

"People's problems are explained with reference to the fact that they weren't positive enough"

It is not hard to see where this might lead - the constant seeking of our inner potential is likely to be exhausting and ultimately debilitating. Depression rates are soaring even as more and more people sign up to the doctrine. Brinkman argues for a healthy dose of negativity bolstered by some Stoic philosophy as a palliative.

For decades I have called myself an optimist, without really quite believing it to be so. Maybe it was all the nagging of those self-help tomes and the indoctrination of that living room in the share house. I am guessing that it might be better to call myself a realist, a position which calls out for a balance between unbridled positivity and gloomy pessimism. Or perhaps a cautious optimist? I don't know.

black sky crimson maple,
leaf-bed slippery underfoot
and a magpie calling

What are we to make of Trump? From a distance, it seems that we have a man who is not only uniquely unsuited to the office of the President, but also a deeply flawed individual. It is hard to know where to start. Trump appears to be inept at every turn. He is unable to shut his mouth when clearly he should, he is a braggart, he is uninformed and apparently uninterested in finding out. He is totally inconsistent and happy to hang his team out to dry.

I mean no ill-will to the fellow, but surely he is out of his depth. The scandals piling up like a freeway accident are not of anyone's making but his own. He can blame the media, Hillary Clinton, Republicans, Democrats, Mexicans, really, whoever he likes, but in truth, it is his own incompetence and lack of self-awareness (or depth at any level you choose to name) that is driving the shambles.

Can it get any better? Only if Trumps learns from mistakes and makes changes to himself. Can that happen? There is no evidence to suggest that it might or that Trump has any idea that he needs to change. We may look back, if we are lucky, and see this as a sui generis moment. But money and power have an unhappy knack of being found in the same place, so maybe this is a sign of things to come.

It's no secret that autumn is my favourite time of year. The days are still warm and the nights grow progressively cooler. Winter is forestalled but never halted; the heat of the sun in May is diminished and a palpable chill fills the air as the days shorten. Through all of this, leaves turn, sometimes to the deepest red, sometimes a shade of red that is impossible to describe, only to witness.

I have been reading again the work of Tang Dynasty poets and marvelling at their easy immersion in the natural world. Profoundly influenced by Taoism (and a love of wine!) poets like Du Fu, Wang Wei and Li Bai wrote about the relationship, profound as they saw it, between people and nature. They were also deeply sensitive to the vicissitudes of the human condition. Consider Li Bai's Crows Calling at Night:

Yellow clouds beside the walls; crows near the tower.
Flying back, they caw, caw; calling in the boughs.
In the loom she weaves brocade, the Qin river girl.
Made of emerald yarn like mist, the window hides her words.
She stops the shuttle, sorrowful, and thinks of the distant man.
She stays alone in the lonely room, her tears just like the rain.

As moderns, we often consider our ethics and understanding to be superior to people in the past, as if lost love or a broken heart were uniquely contemporary affairs. It is a foolish mistake. Li enters the world of the Qin river girl with conviction, the poem moving from the exterior world of the crows and their cawing, to the interior world of the girl, who, stopping her work, "thinks of the distant man."

Yesterday being Mother's Day, Ann and I made the long journey to Manly for a family lunch. The ferry to Manly from the Quay cut through fairly gloomy waters, though it is difficult to ever diminish the joy of being on Port Jackson. It may rain and it may blow but the harbour overwhelms the elements.

I had booked a large Italian restaurant, Criniti's, which seemed to have the capacity to seat a football crowd and then some. Buzzing with waiters and ancillary staff, and apparently fielding 15 chefs in the kitchen, Criniti's is the kind of place you don't go for a quiet date. It was booming and it was bustling. At every point in the vast space there appeared to be another food kiosk - here gelato, there coffee.

The pizza was great. The pasta - meh! Most importantly though, the day was marked with two lovely mums having a good time as guests of honour.

climbing a hill
the sun on still morning mist
and trees ablaze

the sling of my plum
has the shot of the moon
cold in its grasp

Thinking still about the closing of autumn, I came across this small piece by Tang dynasty poet, Meng Hao.

Autumn Begins

Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen,
and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder,

summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still.
At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.

The poem is a little masterpiece of absences, the poet only becoming aware, internally and externally, at the turning to autumn. Sounds and sensations bring him back to a still tenuous sense of self. The exterior world of autumn, the beginning of the dying, if you like, reflects the same sense of emptiness of the poet, the Taoist empty mind. It's a translation, of course, and we must necessarily accept it as such. But still, so quietly beautiful.

You know that autumn is fading and winter is coming when the mornings start to get very cold. Ann came in to say goodbye about 4.30am, telling me that it was only 2 degrees. I could see her outline in the semi-darkness, her hood in place and her gloves already on. Poor thing, these kinds of days must be hard on a person from the tropics.

It is only three weeks now until we leave for a short holiday in Thailand. I invariably feel a kind of trepidation before travelling, as I do believe and it has been confirmed many times that I am a home-body. I have said it before (and Mr Larkin has said it much better than me) that I would go anywhere in the world if I could return to my own bed that night. I might even go to Mars. But once I am there, wherever there is, things settle down and my metabolism grows accustomed to the uncertainties of a transient existence. Well, almost...

We have now had the first hundred days of Trump and, chaotic though they were, we are all still breathing. They say that a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, but what about a complete absence of knowledge? Is it better or worse than a little bit? Is total ignorance of how things work a blessing? There are many days of Trump still to run and we are bound to find out.

Silly photo time, do I hear you say? (No, ed.) Thinking of auditioning for a new Lawrence of Arabia movie, I was.

Every year when the cherry-blossom season comes to Japan, my thoughts fly back to the time when watching the blossoms was something I enjoyed too. The beauty, fragility and transience of the blooms are what most fascinate the Japanese. There is a neat metaphor in this, for the blossoms themselves can be seen as a representative of human life, of all life. The seeds of mortality are encased in the very act of watching, which is necessarily brief, for the blooms will fade, the petals fall.

Of course, you can just have a jolly old picnic with friends under the cherry trees and forget all the deeper musing. We used to cycle out along the Mukogawa River under trees that lined the bike paths. Other times we were invited to join friends or students for the o-hanami feasts.

What can I say? It was a special time in a special place.

oceans away now,
the thwack of my old bike saddle
under shimmering blossoms