Aphids and Cowboys

Dear John,

Today I’m a fucking cowboy, rolling into the big city on my high horse. Plains heat, a cool breeze. Not a real summer but some kind of fake burnt offering to the ancestors that sucks the warm air between its teeth into the concrete instead.

I had some meetings lined up in Tokyo which was my excuse for coming in. I really didn’t want to do it, but I have found over all these years that I need to force myself to engage with the world sometimes. I have to create situations or obligations to get out there into the awful mess lest I stay in my cabin forever.

I know you’ve read Walden. You were the one who told me that people think Henry David Thoreau was some kind of wild bush man, but he only lived a fucking country mile out of Concord.

I’m not much different – an hour on the Yokosuka line rapid. It’s not Walden Lake, but I go from water and ancient hills to Babylon and blindness just the same.

Why do I do this to myself John? Tumbling into Tokyo with the emotional equivalent of jet lag. I come seeking something, ready to extract the juice from that city. But I find nothing but an open-air hospice with bodies young and old, mummified and wrapped in gray and black burial clothes.

You know back in New Zealand there is a species of parasitic wasp, aphidius, only a couple of millimetres long. It is a natural enemy of aphids (those tiny green bugs that cause damage to commercial crops). Someone had the smart idea to breed aphidius en masse and release them onto farms instead of using insecticides. The wasps voraciously penetrate the aphids with their stingers and lay eggs inside their abdomen. The aphids stay alive and keep crawling around for a while but soon enough the eggs hatch and the new pupating wasps chew their way out to leave an empty mummified husk.

I guess some days we are the aphid, swarming on the underside of the giant concrete leaves or escaping through the cool underground tubers of the city – a place you and I know all too well. The wasps are invisible here, but I hear them hovering in the air waiting to lay their eggs inside me. You never know if they have got you or not until the pale-faced creature burst out of your chest to leave behind the shell of a man.

***

My last meeting for the day rescheduled and so I left the Mitsubishi building where I was working and went outside just on twilight. Down Marunouchi Street, in the heart of Tokyo Central, they had rolled out the green astro turf under the ginkgo trees to make a little “playful chill space” to try and bring a bit of nature to the city, I guess.

There were mist machines to cool it down and bean bags and bird sounds emanating from some fake-ass wooden pagoda. The whole thing had a brand identity and a look-and-feel designed by some award-winning studio and some neurotic agency art director. It sounds like a neat idea and I bet they were real proud of themselves.

There was even a small raised box of actual real grass - I promise you it was real - with a sign encouraging passersby to take their shoes off and walk with nature for a minute.

But what have they done? Nature? This is not nature. This is the damn City. The City was always where prophets go to die, to be stoned by their own people. The city must always banish its poets to the dark forest, manuscript in hand.

Nothing about any of this is natural or humane. Who are the swarms of people on the plains of these wild lands, among the canyons of glass and steel and the ginkgo trees? The ginkgo is a living fossil, you know – unchanged for millions of years. In the age to come the cities of man will fall and burn and be turned to dust, but I guess the ginkgo will remain just the same.

I only visit the city every once-in-a-while these days. I’m not that far away you know, an hour on the train, but it feels much further.

I don’t understand this place John. Even from on my high horse I can’t see what they see. I know how to navigate its canyons and its natural redoubts, but I truly cannot fathom this land.

– CE