Pic 35: 新宿 - Shinjuku, Tokyo

Unadventure Holiday

Everything will be arranged beforehand

bleep messages, triply repeated,

reminding to take passport, tickets,

suntan lotion, hat, stomach-through-flow pills,

for both stopping and making you go,

sunglasses, health and accident insurance,

a change of underwear made of the right material

for both tropical and temperate climates.

There will be help with luggage,

massage to and from the airports;

a satellite navigation system will ensure that

you do not stray into territory inhabited by locals;

the restaurants and food will be similar to what

you are used to at home,

but tweaked to seem authentic and exotic,

but never too singular.

Protection from natural sounds and smells

will be provided via devices conveying signals

to olfactory and auditory receptors,

so there will be no feelings of strangeness

in unfamiliar lands;

masks for the whole face will be distributed

to alleviate fear of catching diseases

that might affect you for as long as two days.

Pic 34: 新宿 - Shinjuku, Tokyo

Pic 33: 新宿 - Shinjuku, Tokyo

Pic 32: 神宮前 - Jingu-mae, Tokyo

Pic 31: 新宿 - Shinjuku, Tokyo

Straight Curve

The straight line sneered at the curve. Look at me. Straight as a die, not a deviation to be seen, no bends, no ungainly twists. The curve replied: you are looking at me only from your biased point of view. You see me from one side represented on a flat surface. Your impression of me is from only one visual plane. You are limited. Try to accept that appearances can deceive. For example, think about where you are standing. And don’t say you know where I am coming from. You don’t know where I am coming from, because you don’t know where I’ve been, where I am, and where I will be. Be the mouse in the field looking up at the sky. Be the bird looking down at the scene below. Be the god that tries to see all.

Look at me in three-dimensional space. Let’s imagine we are both a thin wire. I look just as straight as you from a certain perspective. Yes, some see me like that. And what about you? You are exactly the same from all angles. Not very interesting, one could say. And looking at you directly from your tip, you are nothing more than a dot, a speck, a full stop. And anyway, if you tried to extend yourself until you stop, you would come back to where you started from. In other words, you would discover that you are also a curve.

Don’t worry. I know your contributions, your usefulness, and your potential. You are rightly proud of your heritage. You joined with your kind to create the right-angled trinity. You gave us shapes and forms that have defined our evolution throughout history. Your geometry gave us the wonders of architecture that exist even today, after thousands of years. But we’ve also lent our support, often literally: the sensuous columns, arches; the rib and the dome. The violin is a thing of beauty largely because of us, and we even enhance its acoustic properties. We can make people smile, cry, indulge in ecstatic reverie; we are often cited in descriptions of the beauty of the human body; and we are abundant in the primordial shapes of the egg and the embryo. I could go on and on, but if this isn’t enough for you, go and have a word with the parabola, the circle, and the sphere.

Pic 30: 有楽町 - Yurakucho, Tokyo

Pic 29: 五反田 - Gotanda, Tokyo