\u201cWeeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city\u2019s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them.\u201d (John Hersey, \u201cHiroshima\u201d, 1946)<\/i><\/p>\n
Nothing is what it seems, even less the splendour of the grass in a radioactive land. The pioneer journalist and writer John Hersey travelled to Hiroshima right after the attack, when touching a flower in bloom could give you a deadly cancer. He didn\u2019t know that the shining was ravenously poisonous. He just embraced it as the only living thing his eyes could grasp on such a charred land.<\/p>\n
79 years have passed and nothing is what it seems, but the toxic nature of humankind.<\/p>\n
Upon arrival at Hiroshima\u2019s train station, Ralph Lauren, the unquiet American, seals his devices as I shut down mine, and asks me out for dinner. I get immediately dehydrated, buy a bottle of water in a vending machine, gulp it down, produce the necessary saliva, and claim that I was considering exploring okonomiyaki<\/i> on my own, even though considering food when landing in sacred A-land sounds as Holy Abhorrent as denying a date to Adonis in the first nuclear ring of hell.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fiestaybullshit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/000274880023-scaled.jpg\")
<\/b><\/h4>\nGOD WITHIN\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
There is a bouncer with an earpiece waiting for him outside the platform. I don\u2019t mention that I need to see a dentist, only that I\u2019m planning to join Sensei Murakami\u2019s training until 9pm. He says \u201cperhaps desert\u201d,<\/em> and asks for my details.<\/p>\n We exchange encrypted emails outside the bullet train, under the station glass roof, opening to a skyscraper that absorbs and bounces the sunbeams like a thousand Apple-wheels-of-death simultaneously spinning.<\/p>\n God\u2019s Within Aural Remix provides the soundtrack: \u201cInfinite Gentle Blows\u201d<\/em>. I can only wonder if I\u2019m infatuated or just poisoned by the stranger on a train.<\/p>\n The station isn\u2019t exactly what it seems either. The way out turns to be the foyer of a maddening shopping mall vaguely resembling La Fenice, although instead of neoclassical boxes it is filled with giant screens displaying baby-faced adults with terrifying eyelashes staring at you like Ralph Lauren\u2019s orphans. The J-Horror mall-show culminates with a bridge connecting a Starbucks to a McDonalds, the most invasive, poisonous flowers stimulated and superseded all over the post-bombed geography of Japan, the visiting flowers from the exterminators.<\/p>\n I ask Google for directions to the dojo and they say that I need to walk for five hours, almost the entire length of the river, and then turn left.<\/p>\n It is 2pm and class starts at 7, so it is mathematically perfect.<\/p>\n The river \u014cta is one of the fewest seemingly intact remains of the city where Murakami sensei was born on the same day that the sky was ripped off and 150 thousand persons were eviscerated.<\/p>\n If you\u2019d like to start a religion you could try to walk the city on a sunny day without a hat or an umbrella. Whatever is your faith, you\u2019d end up looking like a benedict monk from behind, although by then, it might be too late to start praying \u2014let alone getting a back-hair implant.<\/p>\n Half an hour into the walk, I make the distant shape of a half-formed building. It seems like a 3D projection of a faceless Godzilla. I consider dementia and magnifying lenses before the end of sense of humour.<\/p>\n In the blink of an eye, the ground opens and turns into an extension of glass splendour and flowers in bloom, perfectly trimmed trees, the whole Eden that John Hersey dreamt and barely grasped, encircled by imperial avenues and Bauhaus looking buildings where butterflies thrive and birds sing and smiling city workers brush off every single subatomic dirt particle.<\/p>\n This is unannounced ground zero. Your camera freezes, your fingers stiffen. And suddenly your steps are heavier, the amount of sun-stroked tourists an increasing nuisance, until you see one bench. It is quiet and wide, immaculate, and it is whispering your name. You crouch. Your joints feel like thin glass, your own shadow, obscene.<\/p>\n Your irrelevance is ominous; your privilege, an embarrassment.<\/p>\n And then you feel the inexorable needle of an explosive device ticking towards cremation. You can see the remote glistening, smell the stink and the smoke of all fallen empires; bite their dust.<\/p>\n Numbers are going backwards, time becomes a shapeless burden, until the unstoppable countdown takes hold of your breath and taste, and a deafening silence bursts inside you and shatters knowledge, perception, intelligence\u2026<\/p>\n I look up again and I see Godzilla closer, the harrowing building where the 20th<\/sup><\/span> century started going backwards again, the half destroyed fa\u00e7ade of the Atomic Dome looking like the titanic ghost of a past that should not come back.<\/p>\n And you also know that it will be forgotten.<\/p>\n The A-Dome structure was heroically saved from crumbling. The resilient effort to keep it standing was the measure of the country\u2019s humble union when under attack: they fought to keep the symbol of horror present, untouched, as they do with forests and rocks, with sacred things, spirits and animals: with any fundamental essence of your being that you must not forget about.<\/p>\n You must remember that you are no one.<\/p>\n Yoko Ogawa, author of the astonishing novel \u201cMemory Police\u201d<\/em> wrote a piece in the \u201cNew York Times Magazine\u201d<\/em> ten years ago. She claimed that only 69 per cent of the residents of Hiroshima remembered the day, the month or the year of the attack.<\/p>\n It is a number that you read around here.<\/p>\n They don\u2019t know the dates but they do have the buildings, they see the A-Bomb. It is a beautiful piece of architecture.<\/p>\n It also the building that was stricken first, annihilation falling from heaven, obliterating dreams and birds, plants and clocks, sidewalks and shores, pinnacles, memories, arms, legs, eyes, dust, ashes, silence\u2026<\/p>\n This is the end of reparation, hope, potential, virtue, empathy or solidarity, the burnt down landmarks forming a bubble of unspeakable despair, crying out very quietly and yet so loud, that the sky was once black and that now is blue \u2014and there is nothing you can do except remembering.<\/p>\n No matter how many vending machines you\u2019d find you know there is no liquid capable of satiating this evil thirst. You sit down and you breath, shut your eyes, cancel your voice, until you start quietly mumbling your condolences to something that will always be greater than you, a radiation still shining at inversely proportional speed to that of the Oppenheimer device: the non-written, the half-formed, the unsaid, the endless legacy of all the voiceless lives eradicated like dust in the brink of an eye.<\/p>\n You sit down and you are the old man splayed on a bench, defeated, humbled, insufficient, and yet unscathed. You know you are nothing, and somehow you also know that you belong, that you are one of them, the victim and the hammer, the flower and the axe, dignity falling at deafening speed upon consciousness: the shame of being human will never be greater.<\/p>\n Walking is grotesque, thinking a stressful privilege, and moving becomes awkward \u2014let alone taking photos or speaking.<\/p>\n You still have ten fingers and two eyes, so you learn how to make a crane origami at the Children Memorial. And then you walk down a spiral staircase into the victim\u2019s memorial. There are many digital pads listing all the names.<\/p>\n I press the face of a namesake. On August 6th 1945 she was 17 years old. She was late to pick up her only son, and she hurried downtown. It was the last time she ran; the last day she was MUM.<\/p>\n I read a few more biographies and I\u2019m clueless, numbed and emotional. I get out and walk the grounds, sitting by the flame of Peace, steadily and quietly burning since that day.<\/p>\n There is nothing more dangerous than a human being. History repeats itself because we are not brilliant enough to remember forever. Are we just tiny particles looking for belonging, perhaps a home, before disappearing in this fleshy shape?<\/p>\n I\u2019m late for Aikido and I have no appetite for dessert, starters or main courses, when I stumble upon a kiosk and see Ralph Lauren\u2019s face in the cover of a magazine. The headline reads:<\/p>\n \u201cThe absolved murderer is back for retrial.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n I stop by a bush.<\/p>\n The cute puke comes out like the slight unbalance of a dazed supermodel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A PAIN \u201cWeeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city\u2019s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them.\u201d (John Hersey, \u201cHiroshima\u201d, 1946) Nothing is what it seems, even less the splendour of the grass in a radioactive land. The pioneer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57850,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1059],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nFIRST WALK IS THE DEEPEST<\/b><\/h4>\n
BEFORE LOSING YOUR RELIGION<\/b><\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fiestaybullshit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/nowhere1.png\")
<\/b><\/h4>\nSILENCE<\/b><\/h4>\n
IRIDESCENT DIRT<\/b><\/h4>\n
BACKWARD COUNT<\/b><\/h4>\n
A HUMAN?<\/b><\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fiestaybullshit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/000274880024-scaled.jpg\")
<\/b><\/h4>\nYOKO YES\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
AUGUST 6<\/b>th<\/sup><\/b><\/span> 1945<\/b><\/h4>\n
WATER OR SHAME\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
AFTERLIFE<\/b><\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fiestaybullshit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/nowhere2.png\")
<\/p>\n