Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

A Nice Cuppa Cha

This week, I received a parcel from Japan. It had been sent by someone at whose house I was frequently a guest when I lived in that country. There was a small slip of a note accompanying the gift inside. The note contained nothing of a personal nature, so I feel no qualms in translating it – into rather awkward English – here:

"I have long neglected to write; does your life continue as normal? The leaves of the trees are turning yellow and crimson, and Japan’s autumn is deepening.

"The other day, in Tokyo, I came upon this 'karigane' tea from Uji – please try it. If it is good, I shall send some more."

What I liked about Japan seems distilled into small things, and these small things are also my continuing link with that place.

In my room, by the ornamental fireplace, is a 'chakoro' or tea-burner. Inserting a night-light (also, rather appropriately called 'tea-lights') into the tea-burner heats a little earthenware dish that rests on top. When you place tea leaves – green tea leaves – in this dish, they give off a very fresh, pleasant, somehow resinous aroma. When the tea leaves thus roasted are used to brew with, the tea produced has a different, more delicate flavour (it also has less caffeine).



This aroma is one of my links with Japan, and for me contains a whole world of meaning. I believe I first smelt this aroma in Uji, and that is certainly the place with which I associate it. I have lived in Japan twice. The second time, I spent some months in the town of Uji, which lies to the south west of the former capital Kyoto. Uji is famous for two things – it is the setting of many scenes on one of the worlds earliest novels, The Tale of Genji, and it is also the home of the finest Japanese tea. It is perhaps little wonder, then, that one of the main influences that Japan has had upon me is to instil in me the habit of drinking green tea.



When I say that I am interested in Japanese tea, people usually ask me if I mean the tea ceremony. The simple answer is 'no'. I have tried the tea ceremony, but I found it rather stiff and artificial. Perhaps this artificiality seems less oppressive if you keep practising it, but I never got that far. Most of what I know about Japanese tea drinking is what I learnt at a little shop called Akamonjaya, on a road filled with the scent of roasting tea, near the temple Byodoin, which appears on the back of the ten yen coin.



The proprietress of this establishment taught me the proper way to prepare green tea, which, apparently, is not the way most Japanese these days prepare it. From her I learnt that quality green tea – gyokuro – should be prepared in a very small pot, called a hohin (which translates as something like "pot of treasure"). The water should only just cover the leaves. That way the leaves can be used again and again. For genmaicha or low quality sencha, you can use a dobin (an ordinary Japanese tea-pot) and put in plenty of water.

Well, I’m hardly an expert, and my knowledge of green tea does not really extend much further than that. For instance, one of the areas in which I am struggling is that of hojicha, the roast tea mentioned above. You can buy it pre-roasted, but Akamonjaya sold special packets of tea for use with the chakoro (tea-burner). The proprietress told me that you can really use any tea in the chakoro, but so far, apart from the special packets I bought at her shop, I have not found any that produce the same aroma or flavour.

It has been over a year since I left Japan, and most of my best tea – the expensive and exquisitely packaged gyokuro and so on I brought back with me – has now gone. I only have half a packet left of the special tea for use with the chakoro. However, I do know that the special tea is a variety of karigane. "Karigane" might be translated literally as "the sound of geese"; a little less literally, I think, as, "the cry of geese". I think it actually refers to tea that is very fresh and has a mixture of leaves and stem, but this, too, is a point I am yet to verify.

Although I am not an expert, because I really got used to Japanese tea in Uji, the tea capital, I have become very fussy. I will try the karigane that has been sent to me in the chakoro. Perhaps it will work. I hope so.

These are the difficulties that face the tea drinker, but such difficulties make the tea so much more precious to me. It is almost Christmas, and lately I am inclined to find gifts that are permanent rather depressing. Gifts, such as tea, that are used up in the making of moments and which disappear – these are the most precious kind.



Such are the gifts that currently form my ties with Japan. Incidentally, the habit of drinking tea, and the very word 'cha' also form ties between England and Japan. Both nations are tea-drinkers, and the Japanese word for tea (cha), has entered into English slang. I rather think the word came to England from its original source, however, which is China. There’s a phrase in English, "I wouldn’t do that for all the tea in China." This rather implies that tea is a heavenly reward.

Downward Curve


I’d like to talk a little about one of my favourite writers, Thomas Ligotti. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but recently I noticed some similarities between my own conception of, or fascination with, Daoism, and the work of Ligotti. I don’t even know when I began to notice this, exactly, only that it’s been on my mind for some time.

Well, let me start with The Unholy City. The Unholy City is a CD that comes free with the filmscript Crampton, by Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz. It consists of six tracks, all of which are written and performed exclusively by Ligotti. I say ‘tracks’ because they are not exactly songs. They are soundscapes over which Ligotti recites six prose-poems that centre on the concept of a place, or state of existence, known as The Unholy City. The tracks are, in order, The Player Who Takes No Chances, You Do Not Own Your Head, No one Knows The Big News, The Unholy City, The Name is Nothing and Nobody is Anybody. The first track, describing the human race as pawns in a sinister game that it will never understand, returns frequently to the refrain, "There is a greater blackness", and perhaps it is really here where the similarity I have spoken of begins.

What is it that first makes Daoism seem attractive to me? What is it that makes it seem different to other religious or mystical systems? Let us look at the opening verse of the Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing):

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

(Above translation copyright to Stephen Mitchell)

"Darkness within darkness." Christianity speaks of the light of God, the light that blinded Paul on the road to Damascus. Buddhism, too, seems to lean towards the abstract, one might say, 'asexual', otherness of the 'light' within enlightenment. But in the first verse of the first Daoist text we are confronted immediately with darkness, which is "the gateway to all understanding". Immediately, instead of the ungraspable of light, I see the black mud that clings to roots of trees, and rivers flowing blindly underground. These things are earthy, they are watery – you might say that they are opposite to the air and fire that is inspiration and enlightenment. They also suggest movement and mutability. The light, on the other hand, stands for something that does not have shape or movement, but exists abstractly outside of time. "The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." It is mutable, changing, like clay under one’s fingers as one tries to grasp it. But there is also a suggestion here of the beyond, since the Tao is beyond the tao, the Name is beyond the name, and this tallies with Ligotti's 'greater blackness'. There is always one shade of blackness beyond, and beyond, and beyond.

I have mentioned the mutability of the Tao. Mutability, that is, the lack of any substantial and consistent reality, is another aspect of the nightmare atmosphere conjured up in Ligotti's work. For instance, the story 'The Cocoons' features one Dr. Dublanc and a patient of his, the latter obsessed with the notion that things are changing form around him. The story opens with the doctor waking the patient in the small hours to go on some therapeutic excursion:

Side by side, the doctor and I proceeded over uneven pavement and through blotched vapors emerging from the fumaroles of several sewer covers. But I could see the moon shining between the close rooftops, and I thought that it subtly shifted phases before my eyes, bloating a bit into fullness. The doctor caught me staring.

"It’s not going haywire up there, if that’s what is bothering you."

In another story, 'The Mystics of Muelenberg', he describes a town that undergoes nightmare transformations:

At last the faces of Muelenberg became subject to changing expressions which at first were quite subtle, though later these divergences were so exaggerated that it was no longer possible to recapture original forms. It follows that the townspeople could no more recognize themselves than they could one another. All were carried off in the great torrent of their dreams, all spinning in that grayish whirlpool of indefinite twilight, all churning and in the end merging into utter blackness.



In my mind, however, the work of Ligotti diverges from Daoism in that Daoism suggests a kind of cosmic cycle, and a cycle, in turn, suggests something like order. When I question myself as to why Daoism suggests a cycle, I am hard put to find a particular quote to back this up. I think the impression rests upon the pairing of opposites that one find in the Tao Te Ching, for instance, difficult and easy, long and short, high and low. These are given as examples of opposites supporting each other’s existence. One might easily add, for instance, night and day, summer and winter. And when one adds to these the famous symbol of Daoism, the Yin/Yang design, the cycle concept seems to become even more definite. After all, Yin/Yang is a circle.



Daoism has a lot to do with accepting things for what they are:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.

This is a philosophy that I find increasingly necessary, because, if the universe is indeed cyclical in nature, then the Yin/Yang wheel is now turning into shadow. We are on the downward curve. Do you doubt this? The tree of the world is facing autumn. Leaves are falling, and soon it shall be winter. The tree shall be utterly barren.

Watch the leaves fall. There they go:

A murderous beast man is elected to the White House.

And look, there’s another one:

Global frog crisis.

And another one:

Three million dead in Congo war.

One by one they fall. Thousands of them. Millions of them.



We are the unlucky ones. We have been born on the edge of cosmic winter. Perhaps there is nothing for us to do but, in the spirit of the Tao, find the beauty in barren plains of ice. The beauty in extinction and darkness. Anyway, it seems we must accept it. In this spirit I see myself as a dead leaf already detached from the tree, floating through the air to oblivion. I yield to this great extinction. The human parasite has been too successful and is killing its host. Now extinction is good – human extinction. So I will not strive, or, if I cannot help but to strive in some way, at least I shall not reproduce and add to this heartbreaking, barren struggle.

I think now of a scene from The Setting Sun by Dazai Osamu. The female narrator has an affair with a hard-drinking artist. They are walking at night and she points to a leafless tree. "It’s beautiful," she says. "The contrast between the buds and the branch, you mean?" But she doesn’t. She means the branches themselves. "Even like that, with no leaves, they are still alive."

And so, perhaps, if there is a cycle, the Earth will eventually recover, having rid itself of the human parasite, and a beautiful spring will come again, which, by definition we will not be able to see, since everywhere we go we destroy the spring.

But perhaps, after all, the universe is not cyclical. Maybe the Tao and the mutability of the Dao extends beyond even the order of cycles. After all, doesn’t global warming herald the end of the seasons? As Ligotti says in The Name is Nothing, when deconstructing the name he has constructed, 'The Unholy City':

As for the quality or characteristic of unholiness, this is also misleading, a nominal façade designed to make things interesting for a world born out of blackness where nothing holy or unholy has ever existed, where nothing exists at all, except dreams and fevers and names for nothing, the creation, so to speak, of that original blackness which pulls itself over every world like a hangman’s hood over a condemned man’s head.

Yes, the name that can be named is not the eternal Name. Perhaps everything, despite the dubious Dr. Dublanc’s diagnosis, has indeed gone haywire. Perhaps the moon has shifted its phase.

The Coming of the Purple Better One

Congratulations America! Once more you have voted to reverse human evolution! In celebration of this auspicious occasion, I offer the following words from one of your fellow citizens, who foresaw this glorious future:

*****


The scene is Grants Park Chicago 1968. A full scale model of the Mayflower with American flags for sails has been set up. AJ in his Uncle Sam suit steps to a mike on the deck.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is my coveted privilege and deep honour to introduce you the distinguished senator and former Justice of the Supreme Court Homer Mandrill, known to his friends as the Purple Better One. No doubt you are familiar with a book called The African Genesis, written by Robert Ardrey, a native son of Chicago, and I may add a true son of America. I quote to you from his penetrating work:

"'When I was a boy in Chicago I attended the Sunday School of our neighbouring church. I recall our Wednesday night meetings with the simplest nostalgia. We would meet in the basement. There would be a short prayer and a shorter benediction . . . And we would turn out the lights. . . and in total darkness. . . hit each other over the head with chairs.'

"Mr. Ardrey's early training tempered his character to face and make known the truth about the origins and nature of mankind.

"'Not in innocence and not in Asia was mankind born. The home of our fathers was the African Highland. The most significant of all our gifts was the legacy bequeathed us by our immediate forebears, a race of terrestrial flesh eating killer apes. Raymond A. Dart of the University of Johannesburg was the strident voice from South Africa that would prove the southern ape to be the human ancestor. Dart put forward the simple hypothesis that man emerged form the anthropoid background for one reason and one reason only – because he was a killer.



"'A rock, a stick, a heavy bone, was to our ancestral killer ape the margin of survival, and now we sit in his office at the wrong end of the world. . . Man's original nature imposes itself on any human solution.



"'The aggressive nature of the southern ape, sir, glowing with menace, fought your battles on the perilous veldts of Africa 500,000 years ago. Had he not done so you would not be living here in this great city in this great land of America raising your happy families in peace and prosperity. Who more fitted to represent our Simian heritage in all its glory than Homer Mandrill, himself a descendent of that illustrious line?'


"Who else can restore to this nation the spirit of true conservatism that imposes itself on any human solution? And at a time when this great republic is threatened by enemies foreign and domestic? Actually, there can be only one candidate: The Purple Better One. . .Your future President. . ."

To the battle Hymn of the Republic an American flag is drawn aside to reveal a purple assed mandrill (thunderous applause). Led to the mike by secret service men in dark suits that bulge suggestively here and there, the Purple Better One blinks in bewilderment.

*****
Well, God bless America, and God help the rest of us. And for those unfortunates who didn’t vote Bush but are stuck in America, my commiserations.