Iheon Kim

Preface from “Spring and Ashura”, Kenji Miyazawa
English translation by Moss Quanci

the phenomenon called I
is a single blue illumination of
a hypothesized alternating current lamp
（a composite body of every transparent ghost）
is a single blue illumination of
a karmic alternating current lamp
that will surely stay lit
while busily busily flickering
together with landscapes and everyone
（the light endures　its electric lamp is lost）

from the twenty-two months
that are in the direction I feel is the past, these words
I join with paper and mineral ink
（all flickering with me
　things that everyone feels at the same time）
scene after scene of shadow and light
that have endured until this point
they are mental sketches just as they are

concerning them, people or galaxies or asuras or sea urchins
as they eat cosmic dust　or breath air and saltwater
may each come up with fresh ontologies
but in the end those will be but single scenes in their minds
yet surely these recorded landscapes
are recorded landscapes just as they are
and if they are nothing then that is just as nothing is
and to a certain degree they are shared by all
（because just as everything is everyone within me
　I am everything within everyone）

however, these words, supposed to have been correctly copied
in the accumulation of hugely bright time
of the Cenozoic era and Holocene epoch
in the light and dark that is equal to a meager point
　　（or an asura’s billion years）
already change their structure and character
moreover there may be a tendency
for I and the printer
to feel that they are unchanging
perhaps just as we all feel our sense organs
and landscapes and personages
just as we merely feel them in common
the things called records and history　or geological history
together with their various data
（under the spatio-temporal restrictions of karma）
are nothing more than what we are feeling
perhaps when two thousand years have passed
an appropriately changed geology will be diverted towards
appropriate evidences appearing from the past one after another
so all will think that two thousand years before
there lived colorless peacocks that filled the clear sky
and promising new scholars will excavate fantastic fossils
from the dazzling frozen nitrogen
of the upper stratum of the atmosphere
or maybe will discover
in a plane of Cretaceous sandstone
the giant footprints of a transparent humankind

all of these propositions are asserted
as the nature of mental image and time itself
within the four-dimensional extension