Uncle of Cats

Read John Wilkinson's introduction to Uncle of Cats.

ISBN: 9780645761658

On 21 May, 2021, ‘locked down’ in our respective spheres of Takarazuka and Alexandria NSW, Pam Brown and I had a yarn. One thread involved ‘The Gavel Foundation’, which I wanted her to read because it made use of a quotation of her ‘Susceptibility song’ from click here for what we do. This poem concerns something Pam’s poetry taught me: a present-affirming, anti-nostalgic register achieved through a paratactic way of remembering (Erinnerung, 思い出) memories (Gedächtnis, 記憶), against the totality of time (Zeit, 時間). ‘Only a fool buys real estate’ is my translation of the terrific line from Basil Bunting’s ‘Chomei at Toyama’: ‘Men are fools to invest in real estate’. Bunting got it from the Hōjōki by late Heian, early Kamakura-era writer Kamo no Chōmei, but through an Italian translation. Chōmei’s poetic chronicle is a philosophical study of an isolated life outside the capital in a hōjō-sized hut following a fire disaster in Kyoto.

I brought Pam’s sensibility to absorbing Bunting’s parataxis and intertextuality when I first read him. Bunting’s loose poetic translation of Chōmei shaped how I approached him when literate enough to gloss his medieval Japanese: ‘人のいとなみみなおろかなる中に、さしも危き京中の家を作るとて寶をつひやし心をなやますことは、すぐれてあぢきなくぞ侍るべき’ (‘Among the foolishness of all human actions, this troubling of the soul over the squandering of treasure, building houses in danger-prone Kyoto in particular proves the most impressively senseless’). Since the poem appears after Pam’s ‘Only a fool buys real estate’, ‘The Gavel Foundation’ evolves to include me remembering (Erinnerung, 思い出) our locked-down exchange. What really matters is real estate’s fool, and 人のいとなみ.

–Corey Wakeling