"The reader rightly demands of the poet, who, like the Roman's Horace, should be a dear companion through life, that he should be on a level with him intellectually and morally, because he does not want to sink below himself even in hours of pleasure," says Schiller. It is not enough to describe feeling with heightened colours; one must also feel heightened.

*

In the seventh century, the Eastern Roman Empire lost Syria, Mesopotamia, North Africa and much of Asia Minor to Islam. Constantinople had to withstand sieges. Slavic peoples migrated to the Peloponnese. Byzantium seemed to be neither able to live nor die (Jacob Burckhardt) - and yet the Roman residual ramp lasted a thousand years. A thousand years of futile instauratio imperii Romani. Byzantium considered its life worth the utmost defence. Indeed, it still dreamed of regaining the Occident when it had already fallen completely to the Orient.

*

"That, too, is a negative product of the Age of Enlightenment - that people constantly think they have to understand something  ... The head doesn't belong in the theatre ... Experience can only be gained blindly." Heiner Müller

*

Not a disorder, but a variation - A person's gender is much more in the 'brain than in the genitals'. Magnus Hirschfeld

Namba Station

We returned to the hotel. The fan blades cast their shadow play. I laid the cloth on a pillow—a gesture hovering between invitation and command. I no longer wanted to hold anything back from you. There was only this fierce desire. What you had unleashed in me could not be contained again. I was ready to cross the threshold. Had you foreseen this? Had you known this with another woman before?
I brushed the thought aside. I wanted more—not just touch, not just desire. I wanted everything outside this bed to disappear, for the world to become your breath. I let you taste me. My hands in your hair. I arched beneath you, pulled you closer. The eruptions of my hips told me—at least told me—this is forever. You are the man of my life. I pushed away the notion that you might simply be a good lover: sensitive, capable, seasoned, sure‑footed, superbly equipped with a cultivated hunter’s instinct.

Two days later we flowed together in a human current, up escalators and through glass corridors, past disorientingly flickering advertisements. We were in an underground labyrinth on our way to Platform 10.
Namba Station is a transport hub—branching below ground, an entire universe of its own. Businessmen in suits, schoolgirls with white collars, a woman in a kimono. Namba is the starting point of the Nankai Kōya Line. We followed the signs to Nankai Electric Railway and bought our tickets at the counter.

Nankai Kōya Line Limited Express bound for Gokurakubashi will depart from Platform 10.

Gold lettering revealed the destination—Kōyasan—Gokurakubashi.
Upholstered seats in warm red, curtains at the windows. The city slid past us. The urban pulse softened. The train was barely half full. Uniformed students dozed over open textbooks. A monk read intently. Country women shared rice balls with one another.

The mountains drew closer.

I looked at you. You looked out the window. Cypresses. Veils of mist. Shrines at deserted stations. I leaned against you. You placed your hand on my thigh.

*

Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty, closed Japan off from the world in 1633. The shogunate limited contact with Europeans to representatives of the Verenigden Oostindischen Compagnie, who from 1640 onwards were concentrated as expatriates on Dejima, a stinking artificial peninsula painstakingly reclaimed from the bay outside Nagasaki. As uncomfortable as the conditions were, they offered a monopoly position that would only be broken by American gunboat diplomacy in 1853. One reason the small Dutch outcompeted Portugal was that the Protestants did not engage in missionary work—unlike the Catholic imperialists who “discovered” Japan at the end of the Magellan Strait and systematically repeated their dual colonial strategy of saving souls and plundering resources. And yet, not entirely: Japan’s particular cultural formats were noted by all travelers, while in return, the Japanese studied European advances (after the period of seclusion, within the framework of Rangaku, or Dutch learning).

The Dutch East India Company had no sovereign status. Japan maintained diplomatic relations with a trading house. The Dutch government expected the annually rotating chief factors to pursue interests beyond mere operations and to extract the advantages of their exclusive representation.

Tokugawa Iemitsu conducted Christian persecution among his people in a Roman style. Much is known about the shogun, who had succeeded in unifying the realm, from François Caron. The son of Huguenot refugees arrived in Japan as a kitchen assistant on a Dutch ship. He trained as an interpreter and found employment in this role with the shogun. In 1639, Caron became head of the Dutch factory. Later, he oriented himself toward Batavia, fought the Portuguese in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and reached a career peak as governor of the island of Formosa. Eventually, he renounced his Dutch offices and entered French service. In France, he was accepted as French—and thus became the first Frenchman to become a writer in Japan.

Merchants fulfilled the functions of the crown. They determined colonial policy and blurred the lines between private trade and public administration. They reduced the East India service across the board to a matter of mercenary enterprise. In Caron’s time as CEO, a single shipment of the Dutch East India Company return fleet, worth six hundred thousand guilders, fetched two million on the Amsterdam market. Such spreads fueled speculative fever in Japanese copper and Javanese sulfur.