The Way of Providence is a Little Rude

We stumbled up and down Mount Ogura in May, talking of nematodes, Japanese beetles, nonsense lyrics, and British Beatles. Vitality, and the nothing that lies behind it, will see to its nematodes, and they to their sawyer beetles, ten thousand to the belly, until even the pines go red in the face, and perish. Emerson is cold comfort here. “The way of Providence is a little rude,” he says. “The snap of the tiger and other bloody leapers and jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda;––these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.” “Expensive races,” he concludes, meaning “species”: “race living at the expense of race.”

One among our congress spoke very well for the pines of Ogura. And we all spoke up for the mountain proper. The general consensus? Let the nematodes speak for themselves. It is easy enough to dislike their way of making a living, easy enough to discount their point of view.

The pines run a fever,
Bearing the unasked-for burden
Of being alive on Mount Ogura.
That is, until they bear
The unasked-for burden
Of being dead on Mount Ogura.

We kept our eyes to the ground, for the most part: cigarette butts, shards of bottles put to bad use. But we reached the height of our reclamation in two motor-bikes, one refrigerator, a burnt-out stove, a Mahjong set, and all manner of small tatters. (We left one bicycle behind, for footing.) Then someone said aloud what everyone was thinking: How could a city ignore a thing so big as a mountain? Well, how could it not, given what cities harbor? “Expensive races”: the root of the matter.

Grubbing my way up the slope of Ogura
(Every grubbing man of us leaves his stain),
I heard a festival down the gorge below.
But for what occasion? Spring, was it?

Anyway, having met an old stone conduit to gods long dead, and having knelt with a sleeping tiger, we hauled up the rubbish of another year’s making, layer upon layer: a papier mache mockery of a mountainside. We shot up the scene with our cameras and left the wake of it for the city to cart away in a two-ton truck. Then, having had our fill of the land, we took the low road home. “Kampai,” fellow travelers. “Here's to the nothing that is everything.”

Next May,
When you lope down Ogura
To see that sleeping tiger of a stone,
Don’t fall for him any harder than you must.



From Ogura, toward the gorge.
Click on the photo for a larger image.
N.B. My apologies for liberties
herein taken as to verse.