the threshold between earthly longing and celestial remove
There is a story — very old, older than most grief — about a princess found inside a luminous bamboo stalk, raised by earthly parents who loved her beyond reason, sought by emperors who could not possess her. She was always already leaving. The longing she inspired was not the ordinary kind: it was the longing for something that was never fully present, something radiant and polite and eternally just beyond the reaching hand.
This is a site about that distance. Not as tragedy — Kaguya's ascent was not a tragedy, though the people she left behind experienced it as one — but as the particular clarity that comes from having always known you were going to leave, and choosing to be present anyway, with open eyes, through the amber autumn afternoons and the cooling tea and the careful sentences.
The moon's distance from us is not a wound. It is a fact, like the fact of tides. And the tides, for their part, remain faithful — they arrive on time, always, without being asked.
What follows here is written from that disposition: present to what is present, without grasping. Letters to the distance. Notes from the threshold.
These are dispatches from the threshold — essays and observations written at the borderline between the ordinary and the luminous, between what can be held and what will not be caught.
An account of the particular silence that falls when two people who have read the same poem arrive at the same thought from different directions and decide, without discussion, to let it rest there between them.
On the way certain grasses seem to hold light after the sun has technically left — the last illuminated thing, bending slightly, neither asking nor offering anything. Just there, in the ongoing fact of being there.
A close reading of two English translations of the same poem from the Hyakunin Isshu, attending to what each translator chose to preserve and what they chose to let go — and what those choices reveal about the distance between one grief and its rendering in another century's tongue.
The old correspondences between moon phase and human mood were not superstition — they were attention. Someone looked up every night for long enough to see the pattern, and then thought carefully about what the pattern meant for the interior life. This is a form of scholarship: sustained observation, careful notation, patient return.
We correspond by this calendar. Letters are written in the waxing week — language is reaching then, feeling its way toward fullness. In the waning half, we read what was written. The new moon is silence. The full moon is the rereading.
If you want to correspond: the address is below. Send letters in any phase. I'll read them in their proper time.
Letters are welcome. I read them carefully and respond slowly — in the waning fortnight, typically, when words settle into their true weight. If you have read something here that moved you, or that you disagree with on grounds you find worth articulating, or that reminded you of something you thought you'd forgotten — write.
There is no newsletter, no subscription, no notification system. Things are written when they are ready, posted when the moon suggests it. If you want to know when something new appears, check back. That act of checking — arriving here, finding something or finding nothing — is itself part of the correspondence.