2003–02–11 20:22:00; Doko-ni iru-to nanika-ni naru kana?
Ethnic Narcissism and Infertility in Japan - Tom Bradley
[Just prior to this quote, the author describes a colleague’s incredulity at the thoughtless consumerism of modern Japanese.]
“In amelioration of that perhaps borderline-racist statement, we must glance at our surroundings. The geography of this archipelago is so cozy, the mountains so tiny and green. Rivulets of sweet water trickle gently from feathery bamboo groves. Hornets are the most dangerous animals. Maybe we can excuse the natives for never developing a spirituality beyond the gutless Zen. The only reminders of Providence’s down-side are occasional typhoons, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, as impersonal as nature gets, and just random enough to encourage mindless totemism.”
Anymore, I just look out my window and wait to go to sleep or wait to get up. On days when I have my pillow on the side of the bed near the door, I spend the peripheries of sleep gazing out at the tree tops and sky. The moon nightly crosses its great ecliptic through the branches and finds its way back to Apollo’s realm. Orion’s jeweled belt sparkles and the Pleiades fight with the lights of the parking lot for visibility. I think about the way the mountains look in the distance on north bound 25, heading towards the Yellow Sign. The gummy muck along the sidewalks. About the ways that the world around you sneaks inside.
I was walking to the Japanese movie of the week, and thinking about how the advantage of being in love is that as one person you can’t be yourself. As one person, there’s no boundaries, no walls. Your whole being is without containment; like a gas trying to fill volume of its container, you become everything and nothing. What ever you do just by yourself, there’s no commitment, no responsibility. You don’t have to make yourself happy if you don’t want to. Being marches to time’s drum beat in any circumstance. Instead your thoughts can only feed on one another, try to produce a false conflict in order to gain synthesis. But, a second person acts as mirror or a wall. You can see yourself; you can lean on something and still stand. Another person is a horizon line for your painting; they give you an up and down, without which there is no difference between moving and not. Suddenly, you have a relationship, and it’s not just thoughts in your head that make sense to just you, but thoughts between you two that have an independent meaning. Two-ness is the protological basis for community. Being stripped to essentials: Self and Other. There are three people present, you and the other and the relationship between you.
But then I was thinking today, that maybe the physical world is an Other, too. The balding mountains of Greenville are there, telling us about their indomitability. About how they don’t care about Being and can’t be threatened by Death. ‘Of course, the Japanese made the mountains their gods,’ I thought. It’s location, space, place that must sustain our sense of distinction when all else is gone. But, the relationship is almost one sided. We can impact the mere make-up physical world, but we can’t impact its essence. Mountains will be mountains; trees will be trees. So, it was with this in mind that the Japanese came to believe or hope that in death, a human to can become a kami, a god or spirit. When we go, all that’s left of us is words, stories, ideas. Our essence goes to a realm beyond corruption. We slip to the other side of the relationship, losing our Self for an eternity as Other. So naturally, the Japanese felt it important to maintain their relationship to extra-human Other in this life, so that the next generation will maintain a relationship with them in ages to come.
All of this made sense to me, earlier today. Now, it’s back to staring out my window. Looking at stars, letting them into my eyes, sneaking through that door into my Self, to be cluttered up with the rest of me. They’ll catch in the cobweb’s of everything else’s that’s gone inside of me and lay wait for their chance to sneak back out, in some other form, and live in someone else’s head.
Maybe.
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