These photographs were taken between 1991 and 1994 in Japan's southern island of Kyushu.  They present many of the cultural artifacts found in this island's rural seaside communities and, in part, examine some of the rich traditions of form and ritual found in quotidian places.  The following was written during this time in Kyushu.

A one-car diesel switches off the main yard, and after three bridges clicks through thickly greened chines of curves into tunnels and stops at country stations.  A shallow grade climbs to a summit bringing into view from great heights the rapt river, the distance to the sea and the tops of trees.  Between the broken endings of tall thickets and the fork of the river lies the perdition of cloud on water, as shadow and revolving brilliance against the curve of rails.

Living within a perimeter of blue.  People taking things from the sea, building houses with them, putting them in bathwater, sprinkling them over funerary pyres.  People diving into the ocean.  How living on a small island of mountainous terrain tends to push everyone's house into the sea, especially frequently from earthquakes, tidal waves and landslides.  A ready acknowledgment of seismic phenomena is the laying of foundations into a million years of accrued ash on Shikoku.  And residence here admits the geological history, is taken up into a religious frame, into the will by people's living on.  This is the kind of thinking of peoples of islands, when the landings of swarthy crews, oars chocking in their locks, break upon their beaches.

The ocean, if known from shrine circumnambulatories (those weather-lumbered decks which circle tiny miracles in gold and gold enameling) affording majestic views, is cause for puzzling.  From such belvederes above a vast blueness, so many abstractions have come into the thinking of a long history of circumnambulators, cross-armed and brooding.  The ocean and the pressing to realizations of new applications for its contents.  Frequent results are sociomorphisms.  The grinding together of snail meats that better flavour be smoothed into a pickling, or that a delicate lace of sea moss comes to signify some auspicious and usually seasonally related event.  Most often, however, of the things that are taken from the ocean, the people of this island, they hold them between fine slivers of a tropical giant grass, they take them into their mouths and they eat them.

Some few, instead, being well fed when snorkeling in the eighth century (when it seems so many especially metamorphosing cultural happenings knew a clever renaissance), bring home coral, carve it up and make small ornaments in coraline colours.  Perhaps no transgression of seaside logic after having eaten your fill of everything else.  Brought back from this smallish island, an object from twelfth century shores.  Such clear notes from this flute of nacre.

An island at the edge of the Pacific is caught out of sleep.  The moon is here at the beginning of sky.  I confirm its shape held above the pagoda, against indigo from China.  Along the slope of breaking concrete, cornering against the close fitting stones in the redan, it carries me in its light.  There is special mention in its tide and in the treasure tops of the trees: pasania, paulownia, cypress and the willows.  They have coloured and hold themselves bright against the open reaches, and tell me of distances from these narrow steps of revetments and tumbledown garden wisdom.  The openings to long views show patterns in the atmosphere. 

I must speak on the slow swelling of a hibernal cold which hesitantly collects this place, for the winter here comes unsure of itself.  It retreats to bring autumn air, and green which breaks out in new florescence.  It returns again in strides rushing the land and confusing the thinking of plants.  You must know of the fires which ride in the evening airs, and of the still waters which do not torrent but move darkly in their snake selves.  There come, too, in the fabric of such skies much indecision and argument.  With the auspice of winter, and seas beaching in the wakes of storms, the churning of all the oceans ends here in a nacreous cloud of sand.  Smoothed shells giving up the mensing of the moon.  True furies begin this season.  Wind will arrive with the longest distances lost, all of the moving air sure in its sliding over stinging north waves.  Then, the earth in its chilling dip away from the sun invites the poles to swing, and I will walk under the aurora and know its brave carillon. 

In these friezes of mixing weathers, when the sky is around the island and around me are the whipping limbs of the strongest trees, the aurora will descend, and its light will be merciful.  I hold visions caught in these weathers,  made measurable in the magnetism of these earthbound heights. 

The temple in Ozai, and a derelict weight of beams, once rotating on a spindle of air.  Two hundred and sixteen drawers, each knowing elements or emanations of divinities in rolled writings.  Centuries of papers still spinning, escaping on winds of a pantheon.  Beside a foundered kago, a palanquin, to offer spring virgins to cloisters.  Tall oke staves and withes, and coiled hemp heavy in corners.  Dim columns of cypress, revolving the magics and the rites of ceremonial prayings and circadian attentions to the hallowed, empty: the mystery of this whirling catafalque, now fractured, unable in its course.  A great octagon, sided in special-nine tiers of three, for parchments; made more in their loss of contents for the hidden impress of their power.  But all of it is darkness, and I can't really see.  The building which contains this history is like a shrine; the entrance is by the front only, and there is one small pendant window.  Light penetrates diffusely through a kind of mashrabiya, a large section on the upper half of the sliding doors, horizontal and vertical crossings of splined cedar.  So the objects, too, which gather around this whorl of wood fall into its uncertainty, take upon a little of that same light, marginally divest in the dim tones of its passing.  Here they preserve their last acts in a resting place. 

I am seeing rare birds on frozen limbs.  A sky that threatens made the colour of an autumn crocus (it is bright at the edge of the lens).  A saffron stamen caught in the heights of trees, that I know this a hemisphere toward winter, that the sun quickens its course, and I am in the land of the Brahmin's children.  Azaleas of izayoi, their anthers glowing, gather the close intensities of retinal thresholds, extend further, out of their fluorescences into the air.  Twilight passing into the sixteenth night of the moon: loss of light to the atavism of night vision, the competition thus visual flutter of this transformation.  Vision in shifting hues of non-vision, the not-colour in meshing colour with night.  Coleridge's not-flower of the Passage Though Paradise.  Tasogaré and the rushing wind-of-change, when light is lost to give shade.  The block of azaleas in an expanse of iridescence are their ephemeral quintessence, their transitory evanescent most. 

The moon's sixteenth night of its folding.  Indigo-in-the-eyes.  Meshing retina colour with cat-night eyes.  Primary green leaves against primary flower petals produce a distinct uncertainty, a vibratory field when the eye cannot image at once the very colours it wishes to see, "being so caught up."  Then flooded with a moon's continuance of this contrariness that elongates the phenomenon at the oncoming crash into blackness.  The black and the white.  The absence of colour, a loss of hues into mere dimension, into an evening of notes on wings.  Here is the not-flower, existing once a year, as a tantamount phase of the moon and a petal's exchange in air when the eye must deny it, both in its colour and in the quavering breath of its fading.  Rising in its scent, its sighs and suspirations, while tenuously night is and eyes are.  I remove this depth and focus, and fathom the calls in the darkness over the crowns of the trees, all rounded in this almost moon.

Nexus and salutatory.  At the temple gate fall the chinking drones of the bhosan's hand of bells.  At the stones of ancient boundary run the priest's polemic and chant together in its meter and strength.  In their claiming rusting, the rubor rods of iron know this man tasked in his motions, graced in his focus, made more than himself for this sudden rite.  His three layered robes shut out a January cloud of sky and cold.  Wind quiets to hold his continue of blessing, and he is alone. 

A dark string under his chin, an empowered voice its resilience of concentration, a hat of straw shadows his quick motions of ritual, hands rhyming these bells of tones.  At the temple gate, instead, a man stands; his hands are so heavy with the history of their shaking, hands incorruptibly present in the tiny tintinnabulation, gather deities to ensure their little sounds when his hands move in other histories. 

The invocation disperses and purifies.  He recognizes the four corners in windless station, and the air curls in its cold.  Enters through arches sliding screens, sets the low fires, seats himself by the mokugyo and begins with his mallet.  Flames consume the names he has prepared, now sanctified, now exchanging the four elements mixing with the fifth, the soul, capstans of the prayer he beats.  The rush of kindling sounds take up the spirits, mix the transcending bodies, strike together the heat colour, the essences of those returning, in the tips of the flames, in smoke.  Here, the intercedent shares the heats, fast-rising, invites, gongs a long decaying pitch of ringings, weighs the hundreds of folding pages, adjusts the chant, exalts that sublime thing of manifest certainty.

His hands are so heavy with their resonating faith, his power so imbued, his seeing raised in the sting of horizons.  Up with the heat, ringing spirits, his hands let fall the beads of prayer, he stills the dissipating gong.

Into the centuries of Siva's legacy, his entire frame of emanations written in the sand at Mohenjodaro and Varanasi.  Stratified.  Bearing ages of castes and dynasties and powers of religion.  All the detritus of ages, the fallow of thinkings made alive again in new frames.  All the quiet majesty gained over time, occurring in the new.  Given up from those sands, ripened, the essence of India's stone crypts.  Seed in the jewels of the Japan Islands.  Moving in its own rhythm and silence, an importation of the spirit.

The Ashurazo of six arms and peripheral views, god-devil of extreme protection; she owns her wealth carefully, carries her tithes, enters the guns-of-life, mothers a cunning, curls the little ends of time in the unrapidness of a fascination-implosion, is tied to long lights of shining metals layered in the cowls of sentience given to those who may share it, holds the marks in sheaths of gold, wears tacit empowerings that measure rites in smoke, sees farther than her own visions, may be wrapped in the silks of night yet still emit so many pearls.