by Allen S. Weiss
My desire to return to Kyoto has been frustrated for over two years due to the covid epidemic, just as work on my most recent book project, Illusory Dwellings: A Kyoto Travelogue, has been stalled for the same reason. But there are many ways to travel. A voyage has neither beginning nor end. A true voyage begins well before departure and does not end with homecoming, for a trip is both long anticipated and perpetually renewed in literature and myth, cuisine and art, reveries and dreams. This minuscule contribution to Writers in Kyoto is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s desire to write a book composed solely of citations, which is in fact the form of his Arcades Project, the incomplete yet voluminous notes to what would have become his magnum opus. In this spirit, I offer the epigraphs to the chapters of my book, awaiting the moment when I can return to Kyoto and its illusions.
“But is there anybody who does not live in an illusory dwelling?”
– Matsuo Bashō, Record of an Unreal Dwelling
“To discover a land is first of all to assemble all the memories that announced it.”
– René de Ceccatty, “Lettres de Tokyo”
“…if it is not true as fact it will be so as symbol.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Story of the Warrior and the Captive”
“…find the substance in the emblem…”
– Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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Allen S Weiss is an academic and aesthete who spends his time between New York and Paris, though Kyoto occupies a special place is his lifework. He teaches at New York University, and has authored or edited over forty books in the fields of performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art and experimental theatre. For the preface of his book on ceramics and collecting, click here. For his versions of Ryoan-ji, see here. For his Manifesto for the Future of Landscape, see here. For the autobiographical piece on ‘Teddy and Daruma’, see here. And for an account of Allen’s talk in Robert Yellin’s ceramic gallery, see here.
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