Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) by Matsuo Bashō
This is a map of the route taken by Matsuo Bashō and his traveling companion Sora in 1689. They covered most of the route on foot and the book combines both prose and verse. Here is an excerpt from the prologue, translated into English.
"It was only toward the end of last autumn that I returned from rambling along the coast. I barely had time to sweep the cobwebs from my broken house on the River Sumida before the New Year, but no sooner had the spring mist begun to rise over the field than I wanted to be on the road again to cross the barrier-gate of Shirakawa in due time. The gods seem to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and the roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner, so that it was impossible for me to stay idle at home."
I learned about this bit of travel writing this morning from a blog post about the fact that a recently published edition of this book has caused pencil sales to jump in Japan. The book comes with tracing paper for copying the calligraphy as a sort of meditation.
I like pretty much everything about this story. I'm envious of anyone who can read and write Japanese. I love the image of commuters hunched over their tracing paper. Copying text is a much underrated task. In some ways rewriting a text by hand is the lazy cousin of memorization, but it also has its own particular advantages. It's more exercise. When you copy a text you learn a lot about the work from the errors you make--the places where your inattention drops a preposition or alters some punctuation.
I also love the connection of tracing a route with your feet, with words, with calligraphy. There is something about motion and thought that mingle so nicely. And lastly, I like the way this fits into thinking about neogeography. Personal geography is as old as humanity. It's only the tools and the new possibilites of form that they open up that are new.
Recent Comments