INTRODUCTION TO "SPRING AND ASHURA"

The phenomenon called I

Is a single green illumination

Of a presupposed organic alternating current lamp

(a composite body of each and every transparent spectre)

The single illumination

Of karma's alternating current lamp

Remains alight without fail

Flickering unceasingly, restlessly

Together with the sights of the land and all else

(the light is preserved...the lamp itself is lost)<P>

These poems are a mental sketch as formed

Passage by passage of light and shade

Maintained and preserved to this point

Brought together in paper and mineral ink

From the directions sensed as past

For these twenty-two months

(the totality flickers in time with me

all sensing all that I sense coincidentally)

As a result people and galaxies and Ashura and sea urchins

Will think up new ontological proofs as they see them

Consuming their cosmic dust...and breathing in salt water and air

In the end all of these make up a landscape of the heart

I assure you, however, that the scenes recorded here

Are scenes recorded solely in their natural state

And if it is nihil then it is nothing but nihil

And that the totality is common in degree to all of us

(just as everything forms what is the sum in me

so do all parts become the sum of everything)<P>

These words were meant to be transcribed faithfully

Within a monstrous accumulation in the brightness of time

In the confines of the present geological era

Yet they have gone ahead and altered their construct and quality

In what amounts to a spark of sharply contrasted light

(or alternatively a billion years of Ashura)

Now it is possible that both the printer and I

Have been sharing a certain turn of mind

Causing us to sense these as unaltered

In all probability just as we are aware of our own sense organs

And of scenery and of people's individuality through feeling

And just as what is is but what we sense in common

So it is that documents and history...or the earth's past

As well as these various data

Are nothing but what we have become conscious of

(at the root of the karmic covenant of space-time)

For all I know in two thousand years from now

A much different geology will be diverted

With fitting proofs revealed one after another from the past

And everyone will surmise that some two thousand years before

The blue sky was awash with colourless peacocks

And rising scholars will excavate superb fossils

From regions glittering of iced nitrogen

In the very upper reaches of the atmosphere

Or they might just stumble

Upon the giant footsteps of translucent man

In a stratification plane of Cretaceous sandstone

The propositions that you have before you are without exception

Asserted within the confines of a four dimension continuum

As the nature of the mental state and time in themselves

Kenji Miyazawa, 20 January 1924