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An Opening to Basho’s Road

A hundred generations are made of months and days passing by, as each passing year is a traveller too. By boat to living’s limits or leading a horse by its mouth towards old age is taking each day as journey, dwelling in journey. Many ancients have perished in journey. I too–from which year was it?–guided by winds from distant clouds, cannot keep from thinking to drift, roaming the strand, from autumn of last year ridding this ramshackle hut of cobwebs, year’s end soon, hazy sky raising spring, would sooner be passing through the Shirakawa Barrier and in spite of myself feel totally involved with things of god, feel summoned by the god of travel and cannot take up what’s at hand. [So] mend my breeches, fasten a new cord to my “kasa”–no sooner treating my shins with moxa than Matsushima’s moon burns in my heart–turn tenancy over to another and move to Sampu’s country house.

– Basho

Scott Watson’s version
Sendai, Japan

The following is a translation of a text by Beatriz Preciado that originally appeared in the french newspaper Libération (21/11/2014) and was written on the occasion of a debate on courage organise…

Source: The courage of being one’s self: Beatriz Preciado | Autonomies

Because we abhor the utilitarian, we have condemned ourselves to a life-long immersion in arbitrariness… The average contemporary lunch box is a microcosm of junkspace: a fervent semantics of health – slabs of eggplant, topped by thick layers of goat cheese – cancelled by a colossal cookie at the bottom… Polarities have become equatorial, nothing left in between. There is nothing between desolation and turmoil, between beauty and crassness. LAX: welcoming – possibly flesh-eating – orchids at the check-in counter…

‘Identity’ is the new junkfood for the disposessed, globalization’s fodder for the disenfranchized.

If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but junkspace. Junkspace is . . . .

An augmented HTML 5 version of Rem Koolhaas’ Junkspace essay from 2002

Source: Rem Koolhaas | Junkspace (2001)

Rem Koolhaas | Smithsonian magazine