2003–04–29 21:33:00; Yo no naka wa… (Sore ka ‘ukiyo’)
An astronaut dangling from a tether, hundreds of miles over the surface of the earth.
Floating in space, the earth’s distant image glowing below, the sun’s blinding light above.
Held in place by a single line, a single chord powering his vital systems, connecting him to life and warmth.
Connecting him to the promise of return, safe passage, security.
A diver gasping at the bottom of the ocean with a bulky pressurized helmet, air pumping through the long tubing.
An unborn child floating in the womb, umbilical chord connecting him to life and warmth.
The ancient Greeks, for a while, they had a lot of different ideas about the world. They thought maybe you couldn’t step in the same river twice; maybe the world is just constant change and any attempt to nail it down or define it is wrong. Then they thought, maybe change was illusion; there is no motion; everything just is, and that’s all there is. You’re always stepping in that river, all the time. Zeno denied that moving even made sense. How silly. Socrates finally got a handle on the problem and decided to split the difference. Yes, the river is changing, but it’s still the same thing. You see, the river is just the changing representation of the form of the river. So, the form is the same, and the river just mirrors it with varying degrees of success. The definition of Being is the relationship objects have to their idealization.
The Buddha lived about the same time and was more of the ‘you-can’t-step-into-the-same-river-twice’ school. He said everything was changing all the time. It never stopped. Nothing held still for even a second. ‘You’ as yourself are an illusion, an artifact of the desire to have a stable identity, a permanent Being. He found the world to be eminently real, but our place in it is like the wave on the shore, building up and then breaking. Later, Japanese Buddhists decided there might could be some permanent things. Thus the universe was divided into the diamond world of essence and the womb world of existence. The Buddhas and gods of the diamond world, changeless as they are, are matched by the demi-gods of the womb world, who exist in a state of change with us. When the Great Sun, Dainichi Nyori, clasped his hands together, change and no-change came together and our world was born. And thus, Platonism arrived in Japan, just a couple hundred years later. There was just one shift. The diamond world is subjective, and the womb world is objective. Flying in the face of Platonism as it does, this seem crazy on the surface. How can the changeless be subjective? What is objective about the petals in the stream that make up the world of change? Yet, on closer examination, it’s the most natural explanation you can think of. The womb world, the world we live in, is real; as undeniably, objectively real as anything you can imagine. It doesn’t get anymore objective than the five sets of data streaming into you 24-hours at a time. The diamond world is the one that depends on how you look at it. Changelessness is a matter of perspective, a way of interpreting the world. You look out your window at the flickering light and tell yourself, this is Waffle House; this is the meaning of life in this world. The permanence of meaning emerges from subjective experience in the world.
Do you think the moon looks hot or cold?
Human actions form the basis of process of relational-identification. Having an identity as an individual is a dialectic act. Identity is a resolution of being a solitary object, a discrete creature, while concurrently a member of a class with mutually interacting members. That is, I cannot be myself without others with whom to contrast my identity, even as they give or withhold validation of my self-conception. To be a rebel, you need something to rebel against. To be a square, you need something to be square to. To be a son, you need a father. To be a teacher, you need a student. To be a hero, you need mere mortals.
An umbilical cord to earth. That last thread of humanity that links you to the world below. That’s what makes it all count. When you live on the moon, you aren’t human anymore. You’re beyond that. As far beyond as the earth below. People can’t understand that. They could never understand. It’s cutting the chord, coming out of the womb. No one on earth could ever imagine doing that.
The key to Confucian thought is the independence of relationships from the participants in it. When two human beings have a relationship, what their doing is trying to approximate the proper forms of such things. Fathers and Sons are real. You and your dad, well that’s a matter of opinion.
To be a man alone, to be that person at the bottom of the sea is near impossible. You’d become the river that no one steps into twice. You’d lose yourself from moment to moment. You’d dissolve upon the water, just float away. You need people to hold you in, to weigh you down. “Anchoring.”
Everything we say, is objective words that become subjective life. Our actions are at once completely derivative and original. We act in preformed niches by redefining our roles. At least, that’s how they say it was until the 21st century came and swept us all out to sea.
Sometimes, I’m just afraid that there’s nothing real out there. Or worse, everything is. The difference between the actual and the theoretical is, of necessity, inscrutable to theoretical examination, since if it could be understood theoretically, any theory could be changed to additionally posses the quality of existence. That being the case, everything possible and impossible would be equally real, which is to say, nothing would be real. The consequence of the inscrutable nature of reality is thorough doubtfulness. The quality of reality must be philosophically proceeded by a proto-ontological nothingness, the qualities of which are necessarily ineffable, lest it be tainted with the reality that we posses. It is this dark, clouded nothingness that haunts the edges of the psyche. We see it in the shadows and in death, never daring to say its name.
Against this world-consuming doubt, I have only my experiences, which have always confirmed the scientific view of the earth. The Eiffel Tower exists, if my memory is to be trusted. So too, Big Ben and the Empire State Building. Mount Fuji is every bit as spectacular and common sensical worldview affirming as a mountain goddess could be. The nation of Japan is or, at least was, observably real and filled with people who seemed to speak Japanese, eat mostly Japanese food, and even think exclusively in that tongue so impenetrable to my own self. These perceptions could be written off as inconsequential if it wasn’t for their undeniable mineness. The perceptions I have of the world are what the Japanese might call mai wârudo, a world of connected things that all have the condition ownedness. The Japanese words mai and wârudo takes their source from the English “my” and “world,” but their nuisance is quite distinct. In Japanese, “my car” is a personal car, a car with the condition of ownedness. Similarly, “Doremi World” is not a planet of Doremi, it is a world limited by interest and concern, in this case in the cartoon Doremi. The Japanese did not steal those English terms because no such terms existed in Japanese, they did and do exist and are highly elementary vocabulary. The words have been adopted in order to add a new sense to the existing terms. Together, mai wârudo signifies a world that we each bring to our own interests and experiences. Our perceptions have undeniable mai wârudo-sa, which is why one cannot entirely give into doubt without risking the discontinuation of meaningful life itself. Nihongo de gambara nakutewa dame datte, ne?
Relationships are the cables that tether us to the world, hold us to its surface, giving us the web from which identity is hung. Watsuji Tetsuro explains that Descartes in his Mediations started off on the wrong foot entirely. From the act of authorship, it is clear that Descartes was not just the I-who-thinks-and-is, but also the author who writes for readers. That he and his audience have existence should have been clear to him, if he had just taken note of those relationships that were tethering his actions.
The promise that Japanese held for me, may have been the ideal of having a proper response to every situation. That is, the Japanese have so codified etiquette that relationship maintaining action is always apparent. One’s relationship to the world could be kept right with minimum effort, that was the promise. Sadly, modern Japan mixes -masu verbs with casual ones quite freely. The promise still sways me, however. I still want a world of nailed down possibilities. A world in which nothingness cannot trump one’s concrete perceptions and relationships and nothing dissolves in the touch. Eternal in the sense not of indefinitely extending time, but time that holds still. A river that does not flow.
These worlds are not however known to be accessible through the application of science or the ordinary. It is this disconnect that makes the world so intriguing. The relationships of one’s life are knotted and blurred, the cable twisting and melting in the cold, blinding sun. Definitions are impossible. Language is fraught with contradiction. Clarity is only a wish. Perhaps, it is in acknowledgment of this unsatisfactoriness (the Buddha’s tanha), that God offered to destroy Himself for the sake of the world. Though God could never acknowledge imperfection without contradicting Himself, He did so. Hell is the negation of God. God in Hell is the absolute contradiction of the universe. It is only though this mystic contradiction that the viability of world we know has resulted. God could never acknowledge His own culpability in the sins, the imperfections, the flawed relations, the doubtful knowledge, the wrong action, the suffering tanha of His creation. To do so would be to cause the world to cease to exist, for why would mystic God impart reality to something counter to the goodness of His Being? Ultimate culpability must belong to individual members of humanity in the world, if God is to have created a world with fallible contents. So, God in turn denied and affirmed His culpability at once. In accepting the sins of the world, God performs an act so astoundingly moral that it at once removes from Him the penalty of the sins He voluntarily accepted. Thus our world is ours to pursue in our finite, fallible way, now with the knowledge that the Universe (for identity is relationship and action, and God’s relations and actions are the Universe) itself has accepted our failure of relationships and definitions and forgiven us by bearing the pain in itself, purifying everything. That is the good news. Things are and will be OK, not on this perceptual level of reality, but in the mystic transcendence thereof.
An astronaut, floating in space, tied by a single line to life and air and living. The world, my world, connected by relationships, freed by a mystic transcendence of its own fractured state. An unborn child in the womb, nurtured by the umbilical chord, connected to its mother. The womb world is the world that is, the world coming into being, the world that’s real. Relationships are the subjective experience that self brings to world, creating meaning, a diamond imposed from without. Both worlds are mai wârudo, the stream of being in which the self must make its home. Though we are plagued by doubt, the world of sense has not yet failed us, so Fuji and Eiffel stand. Our relationship with God is that of the Universe’s creative principle destroying itself for our benefit and the mutually beneficial resolution of the unsatisfactory nature of reality. It’s what’s outside the womb providing for the unformed life within.
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