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MOVING WALL
She walks slowly pastthe three bronze menslumped wearily one against the others,and shuffled haltingly towardthe Wall where, at the sixth panel,she stooped and placed the small plastic poppyin the trough that cut along the base of the marble.Eyes squeezed closedshe reached up and tracedthe etched lettersseeking warmth from the cold stoneand felt its coarseness, likehis…
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PLEASE TO FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS
At least some Chinese manufacturershave seemingly grown tired of ourendless mockery of their instructions. No longer do they tell me “please to beinserting the extended aspectof part A into part B in the slotted area.” Now they give me wordless instructions,a series of pictures with lettered partswhich seems easier until, after unpacking the many pieces,…
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KENSHO
Tonight, if all goes well, I will bea monk in a good-sized Buddhist temple.I am hoping it will be in Nara,at Todai-ji perhaps, or Asakusaat Senso-ji, or better still somewherein Kyoto, although it might well bein the Myanmar jungle or somewheredeep within the Laotian highlands. One problem with that world isthat I have no control…
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LANGUAGE
The Hawaiian language has 12 letterswhich is important to understandparticularly if you consider writingan apostrophic poem, not to a personor thing, but to a letter of the alphabet. It might help to explain why Hawaiianpoets never write about zoology orthe role that zygotes play in life, andleave zymurgy to the haoles, fornative Hawaiians prefer a…
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LE CINÉMA
Watching French movies you know why Hollywood seems less real than the giant letters stuck like pushpins into a hillside. Even in translation laughter remains universal but you begin to think in word pictures that have utterly no meaning le neige gris la belle chat la lumiere fantastique and you imagine dreaming in a tongue…
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an old writer and his words 