cages

In 1980 John Cage wrote:
 

"I don't understand any of it. Nor do I understand the night sky with the stars and moon in it. The fact we travel to the moon has given me no explanation of it. I would be delighted to retrace Basho's steps in Japan where as an old man he made a special tour on foot to enjoy particular views of the moon."

Some twenty years later, I did exactly that. Already older than Basho when he died, I set out to walk in Japan, visiting Basho's stopping points, moon-viewing all the way.

Of course, in the intervening years - since Basho, I mean, not since Cage's words - the world had moved on. We've covered the hills & valleys with railtracks, with motorways and with cities. These cannot be crossed nor gone through on foot.
Instead, I watched the moon & walked those parts of Basho's journey that I could; spending time instead sitting at huts that he had lived in - basho huts - named (him and huts) after the Japanese bananas (Musa Basjoo).

One of my favourites is the Hut of the Fallen Persimmons. This hut got somehow tangled up into my walks, which became in turn nuclear walks - walks in places affected by nuclear bombs - in desert USA where they were tested and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Nagasaki, I met the farmer and tree-surgeon Mr Ebinuma, who had grown from seed some persimmon trees which had survived the atomic bomb blast in 1945. One of these trees I planted in Glasgow Botanic Gardens: the picture of a walking/modernity/landscape destruction becomes complicated at that point of my basho-hut visits.

Many things become simpler in huts.At the garden of the unfinished hut - Larach Beag to give it the official name - at Carbeth, is a yet-unfinished star viewing seat. Inscribed in a never-ending circle round the outside edge of this circular seat will be the words seeing stars seeing ourselves. There are more urgent priorities than finishing that seat, especially when, with no effort at all, I can walk through the hut door, crane my neck and see Orion. And Ursus. And the milliard stars that light the sky there. When the moon's out, then I gaze at that. I have no more purpose in mind than Basho had. Lightness, like him, maybe.

The nuclear walks are the reason for my last book, that person himself - and for the forthcoming book fault line which is in, on or about the premises of Faslane, our own sets of bunkers and submarines for nuclear missiles. But the moon viewing journeys are awaiting the pen, mostly.

One of the simplifications that hut life brings is the joy of not travelling. Of being in place. Being in place means that I'm free to travel inward. The moon comes to me, wherever I am, but at the hut it not only visits, but belongs; hangs in the sky until I next sight it and my own stillness.

This year, I'll be at the hut each full moon, to honour Basho's moon viewing by not travelling but still watching the moon. He knew it's the same moon wherever, then as now. I'll start with April's Waking Moon on the 18th  and go outside each month until October's Harvest Moon which this year will be seen at the hut on the 12th: the day Basho died in Osaka in 1694.

There is no cage for the moon.