“It is simply an effort to use words in such a way that they will tell as much as I want to
and can make them tell of a thing which has happened and which, of course, you have no other way of knowing.
It is in some degree worth your knowing what you can, not because you have any interest in me
but simply as the small part it is of human experience in general. It is one way of telling the truth:
the only way possible of telling the kind of truth I am here most interested to tell.”
James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”
A Sumtyme Jurinal of Knowthing
Sha-do two-dimensional |
My Pottery |
Split‘n’Image Photographic images of |
Things Posters to go along with |
The Street Photographs of things I |
On February 12, Sora, our golden retriever, over 14 1/2 years old, passed away. Actually we put her to sleep. She was such an inspiration to me—she never gave up trying.
She never gave up.
(Click on the image to see the page of photographs of her life.)
We got her at eight weeks.When she was young she was attacked by a pitbull and needed over 20 stitches. She was operated twice for cancer, lost an eye to sickeness, and had other operations which were painful and often required wearing a cone on her head for weeks.
She regularly had allergy trouble and hot spots and for the last two years her nose got stuffed up with snot and everyday required special efforts to clean it.
But she did have sushi almost every Saturday and Sunday nights with us—my wife and I usually have sushi and watch Japanese tv on Saturday night and she was always there, ready and in her later years got quite demanding.
Sora and I walked everyday it was possible, generally two walks a day, morning and night—possible means if I was here and Sora was not recovering from an operation. No matter how bad the weather she was ready to go and I went with her. Even the past two years when it got harder and harder for her to walk, she never lost the desire.
When she was young we could do two miles in about 30 minutes. Saturdays and Sundays we would walk five miles in morning and two miles in the evening. For the past two years its been about a mile in an hour, but stilll about 40 minutes in am and an hour in the pm.
About two years ago I moved my office home. At 7:30 am and about 4:00 pm she would come in to remind me it was time to take her for a walk. Her gentle way of reminding me was to come in, lay down and begin farting,
She had the softest fur. Regularly people would pet here and comment on how soft her fur felt, especially little children. I know she had a good life. She did not have any problem with her teeth. She never went hungry, though she would eat almost anything anytime and one might get the impression that she had been starving.
When we put her to sleep she was still ready to live, still willing to try. She could not walk, she could not get up, she could not poop without falling in it, but she was still willing to try as hard as she could.
She died with Dignity and as a Champion and I feel good to know that we were friends.
This is the blog of personal and professional experiences and comments and whatever.
New Book: Splitti‘n’Image Monogatori; Wriding the Divided Celph. Its a largepdf file
B&W images from the past
Fun with posters
Daruma and Direct Pointing
Tokyo Streets
Direct Pointing to emptyness in the United States
Tokyo Shibuya Free Hugs. This is a link to one of a series on YouTube, its worth seeing all of the Free Hugs series. Besides Shibuya is a fun place and the department store has great takoyaki. I am looking forward to seeing Free Hugs videos from Teheran, Kabul, Palestine, Gaza, Damascus....
Japanese Noren
Images of the Street
The EmptyPage Store
Japanese Lantern
A New Life for EmptyPage
EmptyPage is entering a new life and is in the process of changing as you read. Right now most links are to old pages but there are being slowly updated both in design and content. Click on an image to see the link.
The character for empty is the kanji in Japanese “mu” and in Chinese “wu” refering to the first koan from the Mumonkan. The monk asks “Does a dog have Buddha-Nature?” and Joshu replies “Mu.” Mu used in everyday conversation or on signs or just reuglar usage refers to a negative. On the right is a Japanese calligraphy of Mu which was used in My sister’s film ‘Corporate Warrior’ tells a story of a Japanese man married to an modern American woman, they live in Tokyo and he dies from overwork. She works and is pregnant. Her mother-in-law comes io Tokyo to bring her back to the family country home to have the baby. She wants to continue working and living in Tokyo and this generates a disagreement. They become reconciled over drawing the kanji ‘Mu’. Ozu, the Japanese film maker, thought of the unexposed film as “mu”or an empty page and the kanji was written on his grave stone.
Mushin, the combination of the kanji mu and shin (heart) refers to the empty mind of Buddhism. On the left is caligraphy done by a Chinese caligrapher. Many times when I visited San Francisco Chinatown I had stopped in this little card shop on Grant Street. They had a fascinating inventory of cards for sale and they also sold brushes and writing paper. Once when my sister was visiting I took her there. It turned out that the store was closing down, going out of business and it was the last time I could ever go there. For the first time I realized that they did caligraphy there, charging by the character and an old man wrote this out for me for $15.00, $7.50 a character, What a bargain! its beautiful. His final comment, more like a mutter but still loud enough for us to hear, was that he could not really understand why someone wanted a calligraphy of “no heart.”
The second character is the Chinese character for a page in a book or a leaf. However my wife, who is Japanese, and says she is viewing it from a Japanese point of view, does not think its the correct meaning. She recommends katakana but I prefer the way the kanji looks as compared to the katakana.
I have been doing an EmptyPage of one sort or another since about 1986. The first ones were printed (pre computer), usually one page, front and back. My parents had lived in Japan for many years. When I first came here to begin business there were many people from Japan involved in start ups and engineering and they were interested in doing business with Americans and Americans were interested in doing business with them. I thought it would be fun to provide some educational materials on Japanese culture for Americans, or at least on subjects in which I was interested .
Whenever I would be doing a good size job I would ask the printer to give me a discount on it and of course I would give them credit for the printing and send them out, snail mail, to prospective clients as a promotional piece or hand them out in person.
I am going to link this site to a blog and see if there might be some interest in comments from people who see EmptyPage. I do some times get comments in the email but most of them are complimentary. I think if I had a way for people to post comments directly it would be more fun and include some more negative things.
Steve Naegele