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| Early Friday morning (4:50 am): View down through the clouds to Kobe |
Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air
and feather canyons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way.
But now they only block the sun, they rain and they snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way.
It's been, as they say, a funny old day. Extremely quiet, as Sean is away on a five-day field trip with his elementary school to explore the delights of a typhoon-swept island just to the Southwest of Awaji-shima (which you would just be able to see if this picture was the type that allowed you to squint around to the right). Also, extremely wet, yet again, even in town (and almost certainly for Seán): after the last five weeks, if any Japanese person criticizes British weather in my presence, they can expect less than no sympathy at all, possibly a sharp kick—and it isn't even the so-called 'rainy season' yet. It is hard to imagine that it can really get more damp and grisly than it is already; the only consolation being that sometimes—as yesterday morning and again this evening, we're high enough up the mountain to avoid the worst of it ('That is why we have come up on this mountain, to be safe...') I am reminded of a ski-trip to Whistler Mountain near Vancouver a few years' ago now, when, instead of skiing down out of the clouds, it was blind skiing through drenching fog for the last 100 metres down to the lift. Have I mentioned that I'm sick of this weather?!
Most of the day passed in the way of damp Saturdays in the city, unseized and unseasoned—though we had a good lunch in a pasta restaurant at Hankyu Rokko station called Ryu-Ryu, whose toothpick wrappers boast of 'serving pasta and happiness in Kobe since 1970', which by coincidence is the year of the first Joni Mitchell video recording you might be listening to, if you had clicked the link above. (It's worth noting that the reason we ended up there was that we were turned away from a much more up-market Italian bistro in Nishinomiya for being 'unsuitably accompanied', by Julian: they refused to admit children under 6, even at lunchtime on Saturday, with us standing pathetically in the rain.)
The day ended oddly too with me responding to the comments of a 'friend' of a Facebook 'friend', who—in a less than reasoned comparison (of his view of) European reactions to Israeli and Syrian aggression—accuses Europeans (en bloc and en masse) of widespread anti-Semitism and "depravity":
Really, at my age, I should know better than to even engage in conversation with someone who fails to see the irony of accusing hundreds of millions of people of xenophobia and race hatred, while using expressions such as "X is in their blood and their bones". What hope for peace when prejudice is so powerfully expressed? Still, I didn't know better, and did protest the point, as pointless as this gesture was. For my pains, I was sent a series of articles, which indeed suggest that the problem of anti-Semitism in Europe is much greater—and more dangerous—than I suspected. But that does not excuse or lend any significant support to the blanket charge of depravity. Yes, in my life I have met many people who are critical of the government of Israel (including not a few Israelis.) I am critical of Israel, but then like most citizens of the world who are not blinded by chauvinism, there is not a country I am uncritical of. Not that it makes a blind bit of difference. I have also met many people who are critical, and fearful, of what they understand of Zionism (granted their—and my—understanding may be deeply flawed). But I can honestly say that in all my life, over many thousands of encounters, and hundreds of thousands of conversations, I have only directly met two instances of anti-Semitism. Two may be two too many, but it is hardly a majority view.
As I've noted before, life is too short and love too precious to engage in political shouting-matches: I just don't have the energy any more. What I do have time for is music, and I'll end this piece with one final quote from a previous post, and a second link to this most wonderful song by Joni Mitchell, thirty years on. If only we all matured so beautifully:
And he took up his 'cello, and he began to play. And someone from the press ran out and said: "Sir, why are you out here playing your 'cello while they're dropping bombs?" And he said: "Why are they dropping bombs, while I am playing my cello?"
Tears and fears and feeling proud to say 'I love you' right out loud,
dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I've looked at life that way.
But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads and they tell me that
I've changed.
Something's lost but something's gained in living every day.
I've looked at life from both sides now,
from win and lose, and still somehow
it's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all.
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