Korridorium

♫ Rent-a-Monk ♫

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I enter the cor­ri­dor. Sand—white sand has been blown in. Through it lead strange geo­met­ric tracks marked by imprints of rec­tan­gu­lar cross­bars: a line of prim­i­tive Braille con­sist­ing of the same repeated let­ter, etched evanes­cently into the sand.

The cor­ri­dor opens onto a beach—the roar of the sea had already sig­naled this. I fol­low the tracks east­ward, my gaze fixed on the grooved sand and the low-hang­ing sun.

Now, faint, mourn­ful sounds pierce through the roar of the ocean like the tips of knives through a bil­low­ing cur­tain. A fig­ure is perched by the water, play­ing a stringed instru­ment, his face turned toward the hori­zon-wide ocean.

He is Asian. His head is shaved bald, though the regrowth is already dark­en­ing his scalp. The monk wears a blue silk robe and white trousers. Beside him sit his sandals—simple wooden blocks with a loop on top and two wooden slats beneath—the source of the tracks that led me here.

The monk sings, strik­ing the four strings of his lute with a tapered piece of wood.

“It is a biwa,” a voice in my head explains—but it is not a voice. It is more of a déjà vu, a frag­ment of long-for­got­ten knowl­edge.

The monk ceases his play­ing, as if a noise had pierced his con­cen­tra­tion, and turns his head in my direc­tion. He mut­ters some­thing in Japan­ese, nod­ding as if to con­firm his own words to him­self; then he stands, sets the biwa aside, and bows deeply to me. As he raises his head, I see now that he is blind: his eyes are mute, bro­ken long ago.

Nev­er­the­less, I bow as well and sit down to his left after he begins to tell me a story.

I can­not explain how I am able to under­stand the moso’s story, as he is speak­ing Japan­ese. But some­how the old man’s dry voice touches my heart and paints ink draw­ings in my mind, so that I grasp every­thing he tells me.

And so I lis­ten, moved, to the moso’s tale of water, fire, wood, earth, and metal—of a land where peo­ple live in har­mony with nature and know how to appease the demons—and I am sad­dened that I can take so lit­tle of it back with me into the nar­row cor­ri­dor of my alien­ated and super­fi­cial life.

The sun has long since set by the time the monk resumes his biwa play­ing and I begin my walk back. Regret­tably, the magic of his words and images quickly evap­o­rates; they melt like snowflakes in my open palm the moment the clamor of the city rolls over me again.

Biwa: