During the summer of 2023, I had the privilege and joy of spending six weeks in Japan, based in Niigata, with short trips to Tokyo, Kyoto and Sado Island. I enjoyed the flaneur’s giddy and childlike luxury of wandering streets and alleys, day and night, on foot and on bicycle, absorbing a poetic treasure trove of impressions which stimulated me to no end. As a longtime lover of Japanese literature, film and culture, it was one of those rare experiences where a place, its psychic complexion and the unflagged intangibles of its essence, not only matched but exceeded my precursory vision. It was akin to slipping into a dream-state that felt at once strangely unreal and intimately homelike. Deeply felt resonances and tender soulful stirrings echoed throughout, as my internal worldscape forged a harmonious and reciprocal arrangement with the external worldscape. It was a marriage of functional poetry and unchecked romance. We each curate reality through our own perceptual slants and nodes, our own protean slideshow of consciousness and indie cinema-of-self. That being said, I decided to compile a photo-poetic odyssey of Japan, with digital asisstance from my daughter, curated valentine slices of spoken word and image broken into four volumes (each with its own character and flavors), titled: In the Company of Solitude.

To get lost, to lose myself in, and undertake the role of phantom witness, is one of my favored positions in this life, one of my grace-places. To be there and not be there simultaneously. I imagine that’s why writing is not just something I do, but a ceaseless mode of being.