Yukiguni

the enigma of arrival

2011-09-24T23:42:00.007+09:00

Still far from finding my feet in this new unaccommodating world, I'm on the verge of inarticulacy in face of the enigma.

Thus this new writing space - and, as promised, gentle readers, the key to it:

http://enigmaofarrival.wordpress.com/

closing the parenthesis

2011-08-20T14:39:00.013+09:00

What is another language? Not just words
and rules you don't know, but concepts too
for feelings and ideas you never knew,
or thought, to name; like a poem that floods
its lines with light, as in the fabled
origin of life, escaping paraphrase.
So living in that country always was
mysterious and never to be equalled.

--Andrew McNeillie, from 'Cynefin Glossed'.

It has been with me for four years and I made it into the main vehicle for tackling the perplexities of living in this country. I have tried, not always successfully of course, to strike a balance between my own limited perception and a desire to generalise and understand the larger patterns of life here so as to stay afloat and not be hopelessly engulfed by them.

I wrote the truth as I saw it, to paraphrase an intrepid predecessor who travelled in Japan at the end of the 19th century and soon found the country 'a study rather than a rapture'. More than a century later, so did I.

The time has come to bring this space to a closure, as I will now be moving elsewhere and opening a new chapter in life. I will no longer be in Japan, but Japan will always remain in me and be joined by other equally baffling places and experiences. The writing is thus bound to continue somewhere (I'm already marinating some ideas), and, to those who might eventually be interested in following it, I will leave a note here at some point. It might still take me a while to find my feet though, so please bear with me.

Apart from a few friends who give me feedback every now and then, I don't really know the identities nor the motivations of the readers who have followed this blog regularly or occasionally, but I'm grateful for their time and interest.

And I couldn't possibly leave without also expressing my appreciation and thanks to the dear enemies, those who through their example have shown me the kind of person I most definitely do not want to become. Amazing indeed how a couple of years in this society can make empty shells of so many -- way too many -- people. That's why I'm out of here, while there is still some humanity left in me.

The journey continues -- and with it the bewilderment, the curiosity, the discovery, the desire for the new and the unexpected.

Até sempre!

departures (11)

2011-08-20T00:05:00.007+09:00

Even the weather seems to have gently yielded to the melancholic mood -- and I would be filled with gratitude if it just snowed tomorrow.

For there is no better way to say goodbye than to evanesce in the blizzard, together with the memory of happier times.

* * *

My friend who loves owls
Has been with me all day
Walking at my ear
And speaking of old summers
When to speak was easy.
His eyes are almost gone
Which made him hear well.
Under our feet the great
Glacier drove its keel.
What is to read there
Scored out in the dark?
Later the north-west distance
Thickened towards us.
The blizzard grew and proved
Too filled with other voices
High and desperate
For me to hear him more.
I turned to see him go
Becoming shapeless into
The shrill swerving snow.

--W.S. Graham, from 'Malcom Mooney's Land.'

last things

2011-08-17T14:21:00.009+09:00

It is strange indeed how seemingly trivial everyday activities -- having a bath, making a cup of tea, listening to the sounds outside before falling asleep in the small hours, catching a glimpse of the fist morning light through the half-opened curtain -- acquire an almost ritualistic, dreamlike quality when you know you are performing them for the last time in a particular place.

As though you were walking barefoot down a cliff path and feeling every stone beneath your feet.

As though you could taste the tears a friend struggles to hold back when waving you goodbye at the station.

As though you were sleeping one final night in your small prison cell before being set free.

The bittersweet flavour of last things.

it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (3)

2011-08-16T13:25:00.002+09:00

What a fine little poem to bump into in an (almost) empty house amid the rubble and the remains of an abandoned life.

Another serendipity, of course -- and it might well be the last.

Because I sail, I sail.

* * *

Look !

I am becalmed in a deep sea
And give signals, but they are not answered.
And yet I see ships in the distance
And give signals, but they do not answer.

Am I a pariah ship, or a leper
To be shunned reasonably?
Or did I commit a crime long ago
And have forgotten, but they remember?

Into the dark night into darker I move
And the lights of the ships are not seen now
But instead there is a phosphorescence from the water
That light shines, and now I see

Low down, as I bend my hand into the water
A fish so transparent in his inner organs
That I know he comes from the earthquake bed
Five miles below where I sail, I sail.

All his viscera are transparent, his eyes globule on stalks
Is he dead? Or alive and only languid? Now
Into my hand he comes, the travelling creature,
Not from the sea-bed only but from generations,
Faint because of the lighter pressure,
Fainting, a long fish, stretched out.

So we meet, and for a moment
I forget my solitariness.
But then I should like to show him,
And who shall I show him to?

--Stevie Smith, from Not Waving but Drowning in Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 369.

Fuses, again

2011-08-16T02:12:00.003+09:00

Donald Richie's comment on the denigration of women in pornography has reminded me of a text I posted here almost two years ago, and which I cannot resist linking once again.

And can any human being in her/his right mind wish for anything else than to inhabit a relationship in this way -- no hierarchies, no denigration or objectification of anyone? Just the sheer joy of intimacy and trust.

Fuses, or: inhabited bodies.

the future

2011-08-15T12:33:00.004+09:00

The Western world and many of its time-honoured values, beliefs and social systems -- human rights, multiculturalism, the welfare state, democracy itself -- seem to be on the verge of collapse, and there are very few grounds for optimism about what will take their place.

And when one looks at the societies and political systems that are now emerging and rising to power in the world scene despite their total disrespect for the individual and her/his dignity, for the environment, for pluralism, for freedom of thought and speech, for history and memory, then one cannot but remember Orwell's ominous words from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

Yet the urge to be there and witness history unfolding is irrepressible, as well the desire to mitigate it somehow, however modestly, however discreetly, by leaving a mark on those who will at once suffer and be held responsible for its consequences in the future.

departures (10)

2011-08-15T01:34:00.002+09:00

Not that it brings any reassurance or comfort.

Compiling all these thoughts, musings, ruminations, is not so much to pave the way for the journey ahead as a way of suspending the physical departure by painstakingly enlarging, stone by stone, the narrow passage that leads to a door which opens to yet another passage that leads to yet another door, and so on and so on.

The thoughts are the stones on the way; the destination does not matter.

An admixture of fatigue and pleasure.

Ideally, no one should even notice the moment of departure, because there is no such thing, really. You always leave earlier or later than they realise.

No parting gifts needed. No goodbyes.

Travel at once sculpts and erodes your sense of belonging by creating passages that are nothing but permeable membranes between worlds, categories, dichotomies.

I am here and not here.

I am still here and I have already left.

I shall never return but I will arrive again.

through queer eyes

2011-08-14T12:36:00.017+09:00

A fine review of Donald Richie's latest book of essays in today's edition of The Japan Times, a review which does justice to his unique insights as a long-residing, non-assimilated foreigner in Japan.

The article doesn't directly refer to this, but it is widely known that Richie's has always been the perspective of a gay man. Hence perhaps his comfort in "the distance of being a foreigner in Japan. . . . This I regard as the best seat in the house. Because from here I can compare, and comparison is the first step toward understanding. I have learned to regard freedom as more important than belonging."

Interesting, no doubt, how Japan has been such a paradise of emotional detachment for so many western... gay men, precisely. Richie's comments on the seedy but also infantilized world of Japanese sex clubs where "anything goes" may provide some suggestive clues about why this has been (and will continue to be) so.

Yet to a straight western woman who has reached her wits' end in Japan, the following remarks are much more significant -- and depressing. They certainly provide valuable clues about why stuffy old Japan is (and will continue to be) such an inhospitable place for independent, liberated women:

Richie is a sympathetic witness to the plight of women in Japan, deploring that they are "frankly regarded as chattel. The double standard is so ingrained that it is taken for granted. The manipulation of women for economic, social, and sexual purposes is openly displayed and its rightness is seldom officially questioned."

Lamentably, "women seem also to subscribe to the rightness of their own oppression. They submit and endure."

[my comment: Chizuko Ueno, one of Japan's most outspoken feminist scholars, once remarked that these Japanese women suffer from a serious form of 'moral masochism'.]

It is precisely the systematic discrimination women suffer, he argues, that makes them consummate actresses. Role-playing is second nature, a coping mechanism as, "From the earliest age she learns to mask her true feelings and to counterfeit those she does not feel."

This comes in handy in pornography where the formula insists that "women must be denigrated and she must deserve to be." He adds that in this realm women are portrayed as hysterical animals: "While she screams, kicks, and in general abandons herself, he remains thoughtful, calm, a dedicated craftsman." Curiously, the genre is "puritanical about the virgin state," while insisting that "women are evil, that sex is their instrument and that men are their prey."

Indeed. I have written on nothing else of late (here, here, here and here e.g.) -- and only wish that the self-imposed geographical distance I will be very soon acquiring will one day allow me to simply laugh at the sheer ludicrousness, backwardness and absurdity of it all.

first intimation

2011-08-14T00:15:00.003+09:00

Manuscript upon manuscript, day upon day, consecutive separations from what we love,

winter is approaching . . . .

--Maria Gabriela Llansol, Na Casa de Julho e Agosto / In the House of July and August.

It is, it is, even at the height of summer. The dead cicada in the sun brings its first intimation -- and I already feel its icy paradise in the bones.

The lurking nostalgia awaiting me.

If only it would stay away a little longer. If only...

departures (9)

2011-08-12T20:24:00.004+09:00

What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country . . . we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. . . . This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travel, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. . . . Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way that distraction, as in Pascal's use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

—Albert Camus, from Notebooks 1935-1942.

* * *

But in the broadest sense, as a passage across significant borders -- a transformation, a transition -- travel is also a way of restoring the fabric of existence that has been torn by intrigue, heartlessness, contempt.

A way of recovering trust and kindness, because when alone among strangers you have no alternative but to be trustful and kind; you put yourself in their hands to feel less alone.

And once the torn fabric is quietly and slowly restored, the beauty arising therein becomes all the more precious.

You are back to yourself.

it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (2)

2011-08-11T16:39:00.008+09:00

And yet another small serendipity that mitigates the exhaustion and discomfort of departure. How strangely comforting indeed to find this long-forgotten book in a corner of my messy, in-transit library and to retrieve a passage that pretty much sums up my current frame of mind.

A salutary reminder -- and a celebration -- of the absolute necessity of breaking out from the traps in which we often find ourselves caught and which can shield us from truth and emotion, from life itself: the trap of false comfort and safety, the trap of spurious alibis and reassurances, the trap of numbing habits and routines, the trap of fear.

Despite and beyond all the uncertainties, the hesitations, the despairs.

* * *

They walked into what you call traps because they find a lot more shelter and a bit more food in the trap than elsewhere, even though they might finish up in the trap with no room or chance to do anything but wait patiently to be pecked to hell.

--Gwyn Thomas, All Things Betray Thee (1949; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986).

I want, if older, still to know

2011-08-10T02:12:00.004+09:00

Despite all the frenzied days of packing and preparations, the stocktaking is inevitable and the thought visits you ever so often.

How, in defiance of life's endless disasters and disappointments, one goes on, even when nothing new is promised or seems possible.

The love of truth sounds way too lofty to describe this urge, because it is more simply a desire for self-knowledge, for self-respect, for the respect of others.

Most of all, it is a refusal to let anyone, under whatever circumstances, trample on your inalienable imperative of existing, of standing upright in your own shape, of growing and expressing yourself according to your own autonomy.

Thus I shall hold it close forever keenly, repeating it like a mantra, wherever I am.

Because they shall have no dominion.

* * *

Myself (click to listen to Creeley's reading)

What, younger, felt
was possible, now knows
is not—but still
not changed enough—

Walked by the sea,
unchanged in memory—
evening, as clouds
on the far-off rim

of water float,
pictures of time,
smoke, faintness—
still the dream.

I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women are

so torn, so lost,
why hopes cannot
find better world
than this.

Shelley is dead and gone,
who said,
"Taught them not this—
to know themselves;

their might could not repress
the mutiny within,
And for the morn
of truth they feigned,

deep night
Caught them ere evening . . ."

it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (1)

2011-08-09T00:10:00.008+09:00

... when it arrives, the moment to pack these most precious of belongings into cardboard boxes and send them to a faraway place -- and I'm forced to sort through them and make some stark choices. Which ones to take with you, which ones to leave behind? And how can you possibly create such a hierarchy among your closest friends? And how can you know beforehand which ones you're not going to miss at some point later?

Some of their landscapes, memories, scents are so full of life that all too often I cannot but yield to the irresistible urge to open a parenthesis and be led on countless, unexpected journeys, oblivious to the passing of time and the surrounding chaos.

At other times I just enjoy opening one of them at random and marvelling at the significance of these chance encounters, other countless journeys -- like the following, still sitting warmly on my lap:

With lips I have prevailed
and a brain of fire
now there are ashes in my head.
I haven't heard from you in months
because I am afraid of that black sea,
not needing the bathers in its foam.
More than a tincture of infidelity
more than a tight cock gathered in salt-sweat.
Standing in the rain is like reading
an inaccurate biography of you.
An echo of a sea, raging.

--Barry MacSweeney, from 'Brother Wolf' in Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe), pp. 30-31.

The task never ends, suspending the closure a little longer.

a principle of kindness

2011-08-07T21:12:00.012+09:00

Davood Emdadian

The deep desire for beauty, which is also a desire for the new, the unexpected.

That which is most repressed because it hates the monotonous, the fixed for fixedness's sake, the safety based on fear, the imposture of language -- the hallucinated misery in which so many seem to live.

A desire for beauty that impels movement and inscribes on the living a principle of kindness, as Llansol calls it.

And there is something eroticising in this kindness, such as the kindness we stake when we love. The kindness that flows and lingers between lovers, and which they, once satiated, run the risk of never finding again.

It alone makes the splendour of bodies, inscribing their intense and attractive forms on significant and surprising relationships from which affection emerges.

And the greatest, deepest grief of every being, that which can make her/him irreversibly bitter, ugly, sick, opaque, is to have risked that kindness and lost it, as though one loses a game.

Because to be abandoned, to have the kindness one has extended to an other treated with contempt is to be buried alive under a devastation of ashes.

Yet how can one possibly resign oneself to lose it?

Better die howling in pain than shield oneself from the risk of growing -- and, above all, from the light one so sorely misses.

lest we forget

2011-08-06T22:11:00.000+09:00

From this the poem springs; that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

--Wallace Stevens, 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.'

the house

2011-08-05T11:03:00.001+09:00

in that house from afar where she was habitually happy and well imagined, vague hours of a great sadness were formed; the days piled up in a great hierarchy to overcome. . . .

--Maria Gabriela Llansol, Na Casa de Julho e Agosto / In the House of July and August (Lisbon: Relogio D'Agua, 2003), p. 20. Translated from the Portuguese by DK.

It alone counteracted my wanderlust for two years -- its faded beauty, our complicity, the almost mediterranean light in the late afternoon.

The homespun, tucked away Tokyo.

The greatest heartbreak to leave it to such an uncertain fate, bereft of memories, the things once held dear.

However illusory it might all have been.

'the loneliness of the long-distance foreigner'...

2011-08-03T10:24:00.017+09:00

I have written ad nauseam on this depressing topic (here, here, here, here, here and here e.g.), but if doubts still remain about how generally unwelcoming and mistrustful of foreigners - of others, tout court - the Japanese are and how difficult (or virtually impossible) it is for westerners to establish long-lasting, reliable friendships with most of these insufferable bores, I cannot but recommend the article reproduced below.

Such things should no longer surprise me after so many years in Japan, and yet I don't cease to be appalled by the emotional atrophy, iciness, rudeness, self-absorption and utter disrespect for basic human feelings - namely trust - that most Japanese (esp. the males) display in their interactions with others. How much lower can these chaps sink?

* * *

The loneliness of the long-distance foreigner
By DEBITO ARUDOU
The Japan Times, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011

A few months ago I had beers with several old Japan-hand guys (combined we have more than a century of Japan experiences), and one of them asked an interesting question:

"After all our years here, how many close Japanese male friends do you have?" (Excluding Debito, of course.)

We glanced amongst ourselves and realized that none of us had any. Not one we would count on as a "friend." Nobody to whom we could talk openly, unreservedly, and in depth with, about what's on our minds. Or contact for a place to stay because our spouse was on the warpath. Or call at 3 a.m. to announce the birth of our latest baby. Or ring up on the spur of the moment because we didn't want to drink alone that evening. Or who would care enough to check on us in the event of a natural disaster. Not one.

This occasioned much discussion and theorizing, both at the table and on my blog later (see www.debito.org/?p=8933)

(A quick note to readers already poised to strike with poison pens: None of the following theories are necessarily mine, nor do I necessarily agree with them. They are just to stimulate further discussion.)

One theory was that Japanese salarymen of our age group are generally boring people. Too busy or work-oriented to cultivate outside interests or hobbies, these one-note-Taros generally "talk shop" or resort to shaggy-dog stories about food. We contrasted them with Japanese women, who, thanks to more varied lifestyles and interests (including travel, language and culture), are more engaging and make better conversation partners (even if, my friends hastily added, the relationship had not become physical).

Another idea was that for many Japanese men, their hobby was you. By this, the speaker meant the culture vultures craving the "gaijin shiriaiexperience" or honing their language skills. This was OK in the beginning (especially when we first got here) but it got old quickly, as they realized we wanted to learn Japanese too, and when they weren't willing to reciprocate. Not to mention that we eventually got tired of hearing blanket cultural explanations for individual issues (which is how culture vultures are hard-wired to see the world, anyway).

Another theory was that after a certain age, Japanese men don't make "friends" with anyone. The few lifelong friends they would ever make were in school; once they entered the job market, all other males were treated as rivals or steps to promotion — meaning you put up a mask and didn't reveal potentially compromising personal information. Thus if Japanese men were going to make friends at all, they were going to make them permanently, spending enormous time and energy imprinting themselves on precious few people. This meant they had to choose wisely, and non-Japanese — generally seen as in Japan only temporarily and with unclear loyalties — weren't worth the emotional investment.

Related to this were issues of Japan's hierarchical society. Everyone was either subordinate or superior — kōhai or senpai — which interfered with friendships as the years marched on: Few non-Japanese (NJ) wanted to languish as kōhai, and few Japanese wanted to deal with a foreign senpai. Besides, went the theory, this relationship wasn't something we'd classify as a "friendship" anyway. Conclusion: Japanese men, as opposed to Japanese women with their lifetime coffee klatches, were some of the most lonely people on the planet.

Another suggestion was that this was just part of how life shakes down. Sure, when you're young and carefree you can hang out willy-nilly, spend money with abandon and enjoy the beer-induced bonhomie (which Japan's watering holes are very good at creating) with everyone all night. But as time goes on and people get married, have kids, take on a mortgage and a nagging spouse (who doesn't necessarily want you spending their money on your own personal fun, especially if it involves friends of the opposite sex), you prioritize, regardless of nationality.

Fine, our group countered, but we've all been married and had kids, and yet we're still meeting regularly — because NJ priorities include beers with friends from time to time. In fact, for us the older the relationship gets, the more we want to maintain it — especially given all we've been through together. "New friends are silver, but old friends are gold."

Still another, intriguing theory was the utilitarian nature of Japanese relationships, i.e. Japanese make friends not as a matter of course but with a specific purpose in mind: shared lifestyles, interests, sports-team fandom, what have you. But once that purpose had run its course — because you've exhausted all conversation or lost the commonality — you should expect to lose contact. The logic runs that in Japan it is awkward, untoward, even rude to extend a relationship beyond its "natural shelf life." This goes even just for moving to another city in Japan: Consider it normal to lose touch with everyone you leave behind. The thread of camaraderie is that thin in Japan.

However, one naturalized Japanese friend of mine (who just turned 70) pooh-poohed all these theories and took me out to meet his drinking buddies (of both genders, mostly in their 60s and 70s themselves). At this stage in their lives things were less complicated. There were no love triangles, no senpai-kōhai conceits, no "shop talk," because they were all retired. Moreover they were more outgoing and interesting, not only because they were cultivating pastimes to keep from going senile, but also because the almighty social lubricant of alcohol was omnipresent (they drank like there was no tomorrow; for some of them, after all, there might not be!). For my friend, getting Japanese to lower their masks was pretty easy.

Fine, but I asked if it weren't a bit unreasonable for us middle-aged blokes to wait for this life stage just to make some Japanese friends. These things may take time, and we may indeed have to spend years collecting shards of short interactions from the local greengrocer before we put together a more revealing relationship. But in the meantime, human interaction with at least one person of the same gender that goes beyond platitudes, and hopefully does not require libation and liver damage, is necessary now for sanity's sake, no?

There were other, less-developed theories, but the general conclusion was: Whatever expectation one had of "friends" — either between Japanese and NJ, or between Japanese themselves — there was little room over time for overlap. Ultimately NJ-NJ relationships wound up being more friendly, supportive and long-lasting.

Now it's time for disclaimers: No doubt the regular suspects will vent their spleen to our Have Your Say section and decry this essay as overgeneralizing, bashing, even discriminating against Japanese men.

Fire away, but you'd be missing the point of this column. When you have a good number of NJ long-termers saying they have few to no long-term Japanese friends, this is a very serious issue — with a direct connection to issues of immigration and assimilation of outsiders. It may be a crude barometer regarding life in Japan, but let's carry on the discussion anyway and see how sophisticated we can make it.

So let's narrow this debate down to one simple question: As a long-term NJ resident in Japan, how many Japanese friends do you have, as defined in the introduction above? (You might say that you have no relationship with anyone of any nationality with that much depth, but that's awfully lonely — I dare say even unhealthy — and I hope you can remedy that.) Respondents who can address the other sides of the question (i.e. NJ women befriending Japanese women/men, and same-sex relationships) are especially welcome, as this essay has a shortage of insight on those angles.

Be honest. And by "honest", I mean giving this question due consideration and experience: People who haven't been living in Japan for, say, about 10 years, seeing how things shake down over a significant portion of a lifetime's arc, should refrain from commentary and let their senpai speak. "I've been here one year and have oodles of Japanese friends, you twerpski!" just isn't a valid sample yet. And please come clean about your backgrounds when you write in, since age, gender, occupation, etc. all have as much bearing on the discussion as your duration of time in Japan.

Above all, remember what my job as a columnist is: to stimulate public discussion. Respondents are welcome to disagree (I actually consider agreement from readers to be an unexpected luxury), but if this column can at least get you to think, even start clacking keyboards to The Japan Times, I've done my job. Go to it. Consider yourself duly stimulated, and please offer us some friendly advice.

The Japan Times: Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011
(C) All rights reserved

writing matters (4)

2011-08-01T15:19:00.022+09:00

The invading letter I could have written, I should have written, no matter what.

But will never write.

You are not a memory, you are a landscape; at a certain moment of your suffering, you sent me a landscape that is a dune in front of the sea; a landscape with the scent of the sea breeeze in which I lay my spirit to behold time; no being of a companion dwells therein, but I see him, and it seems to me that the dune should not always be deserted; we are sitting on the sand, marvelling at the beauty coming out of our emptiness; and I cannot efface the pain, but on the sand of the dune, amidst some trees, there is the joy we recognised as fragile and precious.

--Maria Gabriela Llansol, Na Casa de Julho e Agosto / In the House of July and August (Lisbon: Relogio D'Agua, 2003), p. 29. Translated from the Portuguese by DK.

no fixed address (2)

2011-07-30T22:04:00.007+09:00

It takes half a lifetime to learn them, those much discredited qualities – the disregard for borders and hierarchies, the lack of deference, the independence of spirit – and another half to un-learn the little comforts, the numbing routines, the dross.

Yet nothing is more urgent, especially after such a lengthy stay among the most insular, inflexible, unadventurous, heartless of people.

To become enmeshed in the world again, responsive to and responsible for an other, whatever may come.

I wish for nothing else.

* * *

One of the questions we need to ask, if we’re to have a future, is “Where, when, in what situations, did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?” One answer is: when we were nomadic. It was when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment. . . .

There can be no return to previous modes of living, no retreat to the traditional as a way of shoring up identity, or denying rationality and the benefits of science. Such retrogression only lands us in kitsch. But there might be ways into previous kinds of thinking. . . .

When Adam Smith talked about the “wealth of nations”, he wasn’t referring simply to money, but to a whole ensemble of requirements to wellbeing. Perhaps, who knows, the materialist progress we have made since urbanisation, and the values existing before it, could meld into some marvellous, unprecedented syncretism. But if that is too much to expect, at least attention to nomadic modes of thinking might get us close to finding whatever solutions to the disintegrations of modern life.

So what are the qualities that nomadic cultures tend to encourage? It seems to me that they are humanistic virtues. The world is approached as a series of complex interactions, rather than simple oppositions, connecting pathways rather than obstructive walls. Nomads are comfortable with uncertainty and contradiction. They are cosmopolitan in outlook, because they have to deal with difference, negotiate difference. They do not focus on long-term goals so much as continually accommodate themselves to change. They are less concerned with the accumulation of wealth and more concerned with the accumulation of knowledge. The territorial personality – opinionated and hard-edged – is not revered. Tolerance, which accommodates itself to things human and changeable, is. Theirs are Aristotelian values of “practical wisdom” and balance. Adaptability, flexibility, mental agility, the ability to cope with flux. These traits shy away from absolutes, and strive for an equilibrium that blurs rigid boundaries.

--Robyn Davidson, ‘No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet,’ in Quarterly Essay, 24 (2006), pp. 48-49.

no fixed address (1)

2011-07-28T13:12:00.007+09:00

[O]ne wrong turning occurred when we gave up cultures of movement for cultures of accumulation. I do not mean to say that we should (or could) return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge, and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life, that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.

The French translation of "wandering" is l'errance, the Latin root of which means to make a mistake. By our errors we see deeper into life. We learn from them.

--Robyn Davidson, 'No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet,' in Quarterly Essay, 24 (2006), p. vi.

* * *

And how much we would gain in terms of tolerance towards difference, of adaptability, of respect for the environment, of human interconnectedness, if people yielded more often to the impulse to wander, to learn from their own mistakes and from others.

But wandering has nothing to do with this contemporary hypermobility stemming from acquisitiveness and a shallow sophistication. It goes hand in hand with the courage to trust and take risks, to reinvent oneself, to break the chains that constrict one's soul and one's movements-- to fail better.

between worlds, again

2011-07-28T00:09:00.004+09:00

How difficult it is to remain just one person. Our home is open, there are no keys in the doors, visible ghosts come in and out at will.

--Czeslaw Milosz

Therefore it is said: And the deeper secret within the secret: the land that is nowhere, that is the true home.

--The Secret of the Golden Flower

I may not always have looked at things in this way, but the more I travel from land to land, the more I get to know others and myself (and the others in me) -- the more I envisage it thus: no keys in the doors, fewer possessions, fewer certainties, fewer irreversibilities, but always moved by the undying, ever-growing desire to observe and understand, however intolerable, however impossible.

Never comfortable anywhere, but finally beginning to begin to understand in the flesh that home is indeed a profoundly uncomfortable place to be.

departures (8)

2011-07-18T21:34:00.006+09:00

And so it is.

Preparing to take chances again.

Plunging headlong into another culture so utterly different from my own, beyond the fear and the fatigue, beyond the heartbreak and the grief, I'm compelled by the thought that this is so because I haven't given in nor up--I have refused all alibis for immobility and cowardice, I haven't lost my sense of outrage (nor my sanity), I haven't sold out, I haven't taken anybody's shit.

And, knowing myself, I never will.

* * *

One sees them everywhere--ill-groomed, self-indulgent suburbanites seated before televised football games; on city sidewalks gray-skinned, gray-eyed men in business suits whose bodies one cannot imagine in another garb. By the age of forty they have given up; they still have half their lives to live but they will never be seductive to other humans.

Giving up begins by giving in; it begins in comfort. It begins each time comfort enters as a factor in any decision. It begins when one does not go down the Grand Canyon because the trail is hot and dusty and the mule the guide is offering you lurches, when one does not even go to Italy and France because of the hassles of not understanding the language and not digesting the food, when one did not set out to escape czarist Russia by hiding in a hay wagon by night.

For how many men the press of family and professional responsibilities, economic necessities, the importance of a long-term job function as alibis! Alibis for not being set on fire by chance nakedness, alibis for not ecstatically opening one's eyes to the fierce bird of hope and risk of soaring in the skies of chance. He took on this summer job in case a buddy would roar by on a wreck of a motorcycle and shout, "Let's travel the hemisphere!" He hastily married and sired a child in case his buddies would rush off to join the insurrection. How many family and professional responsibilities were first taken on in order to function one day as an alibi for not taking chances, not plunging into passion, not fighting for injustice!

One loses one's manhood [or womanhood] by selling out. One exchanges the hot passions of youth--passions for eroticism, ecstasy and justice--for the cold passions of age. . . . Indeed everything one despises in oneself turns out to be some cowardice.

-- Alphonso Lingis, Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 79-80.

Longing (2)

2011-07-17T16:37:00.003+09:00

There are intervals like this, when you go beyond your personal pain and reach some kind of grace, or something approaching peace with yourself.

Transforming affliction into affection, lingering on the irretrievable loss -- yet moving towards a future, recovering hope.

Knowing yourself in the late afternoon.

* * *

as longing stretches out

and begins to detach itself from

the initial object of longing

it becomes present everywhere

and can be found in everything

forming and informing everything

the weight of this stone is longing

the curve of that tree is longing

and longing makes the lightest breeze

sigh in the tall dead bracken

longing is not for this or that

but is longing for itself alone

to know itself in the late afternoon

longing is a kind of lingering.

--Thomas A. Clark, At dusk & at dawn (Nailsworth: Moscatel Press, 1988), n.p.

Longing (1)

2011-07-16T22:37:00.001+09:00

Tell me, men of learning, what is Longing made from? What cloth was put in it, that it does not wear out with use?

Gold wears out, silver wears out, velvet wears out, silk wears out, every ample garment wears out -- yet Longing does not wear out.

Great Longing, cruel Longing is breaking my heart every day; when I sleep most sound at night Longing comes and wakes me.

Longing, Longing, back, back! do not weigh on me so heavily; move over a little to the bedside and let me sleep a while.

On the sea-shore is a smooth rock, where I talked with my love; around it grows the lily and a few sprigs of rosemary.

May the mountain which covers Merioneth be under the sea! Would that I had never seen it before my gentle heart broke.

Longing has seized on me, between my two breasts and my two brows; it weighs on my breast as if I were its nurse.

--from the Welsh; traditional folk verse; seventeenth century?, in A Celtic Miscellany, Sel. and Trans. by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 261-62.

the murmur of the world (2)

2011-07-16T15:16:00.001+09:00

Computer technology, driven by the pilot-industries of the military-industrial complex, places top priority on transmitting the message as effectively, efficiently, and effortlessly as possible. It is computer technology that shaped and forms contemporary communication theory. But so little of what we say to one another makes any sense! So little of it makes any pretense to be taken seriously, so much of it simple malarkey, in which we indulge ourselves with the same warm visceral pleasure that we indulge in belching and passing air. It really is, Nietzsche long ago pointed out, bad taste to make serious pronouncements and work out syllogistically valid arguments in civilized company. So much language added to industry and enterprises that are programmed by the laws of nature or rational science and that operate all by themselves, so much of language added to fumblings and breakdowns and even disasters has no other function than to provoke laughter. Laughter mixing in moans, howls, screams into the racket of the world. As much of what we say when we embrace we say to release our sighs and our sobs into the rains and the seas.

All these stammerings, exclamations, slurrings, murmurs, rumblings, cooings, and laughter, all this noise we make when we are together makes it possible to view us as struggling, together, to jam the unequivocal voice of the outsider: the facilitator of communication, the prosopopeia of maximal elimination of noise, so as to hear the distant rumble of the world and its demons in the midst of the ideal city of human communication.

--Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 104-05.

the murmur of the world (1)

2011-07-16T10:42:00.008+09:00

How painfully meaningless, despite the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated means at our disposal, what passes for communication has become.

In our search for effectiveness and efficiency, how ruthlessly unforgiving, how intolerant to noise, blunders, hesitations, detours, breakdowns, stammerings, rumblings, creakings, murmurs we have become.

In our self-absorbed search for sameness, how insensitive to the otherness of the other -- his face, her voice, his body, her time and rhythm, his vulnerability, her struggles, his faults and demons, her loneliness, his difference, our irreducible uniqueness.

How deaf to the unruly, unpredictable murmur of the world.

How sadly in-humane it has all become.

* * *

To address someone is not simply to address a source of information; it is to address one who will answer and answer for his or her answer. The time delay, between statement and response, is the time in which the other, while fully present there before one, withdraws into the fourth dimension -- reaffirming his or her otherness, rising up behind whatever he presents of himself, and rising up ever beyond whatever I represent of her and present to her -- to contest it or to confirm it.

To enter into conversation with another is to lay down one's arms and one's defenses; to throw open the gates of one's own positions; to expose oneself to the other, the outsider; and to lay oneself open to surprises, contestation, and inculpation. It is to risk what one found or produced in common. To enter into conversation is to struggle against the noise, the indifference, and the vested interests, the big brother and little Hitlers always listening to -- in order to expose oneself to the alien, the Balinese and the Aztec, the victims and the excluded, the Palestinians and the Quechuas and the Crow Indians, the dreamers, the mystics, the mad, the tortured, and the birds and the frogs. One enters into conversation in order to become an other for the other.

--Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 87-88.

songs of exile (4)

2011-07-15T15:41:00.009+09:00

Heading seawards, I am called on by memories of my own forgotten tongue and its songs of exile.

And there I linger.

Madredeus
Ao longe o mar / The sea in the distance
lyrics & music: Pedro Ayres de Magalhaes

Porto calmo de abrigo

Quiet sheltering port

De um futuro maior

Of a greater future

Ainda nao esta perdido

Not as yet lost
No presente temor

In the present fear
Já não faz muito sentido

It no longer makes much sense
Não esperar o melhor

Not to expect the best
Vem da névoa saindo

It is coming out of the mist

A promessa anterior

The earlier promise
Quando avistei ao longe o mar

When I beheld the sea in the distance
Ali fiquei

There I lingered
Parado a olhar

Standing, looking
Sim, eu canto a vontade

Yes, I sing the willingness

Canto o teu despertar

I sing your awakening
E abraçando a saudade

And embracing the longing
Canto o tempo a passar

I sing time passing
Quando avistei ao longe o mar

When I beheld the sea in the distance
Ali fiquei

There I lingered
Parado a olhar

Standing, looking
Quando avistei ao longe o mar

When I beheld the sea in the distance
Sem querer deixei-me ali ficar

Oblivious, I just lingered there

(translated from the Portuguese by DK)

departures (7)

2011-07-14T19:53:00.009+09:00

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

--T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men.

I only wish departure did too: with a bang, with a clash, with a thud, whatever. With a clear beginning and a definite end.

It doesn't. It begins much earlier than you'd like to think and its pain never ends (even when you think it has).

Life seen from the perspective of death indeed; time put in parenthesis, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, disconnected from an-other's time.

So remote -- and yet you too enduring this never-ending, unbearable now.

* * *

Pain breaks down the path of time I am extending; I fall back from the future I was pursuing and the past whose resources I was drawing on, to sink into a time of enduring. In the pain I have a foreboding of the time of dying. The other suffers in another interval without equivalent and in a pain in which I can nowise displace him. Pain blisters in intervals of time coming from nowhere, going nowhere, disconnected from the past and future of life, of the transpersonal enterprises, of the evolution of the planet.

Yet it is out of that other time, the time of his or her dying, that the other addresses me.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 235.

on the wire

2011-07-14T00:14:00.001+09:00

A strange combination, but so ironically in tune with my current mood.

Los olvidados on the wire.

Leonard Cohen, Bird on the Wire

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

Like a worm on a hook
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee

If I, if I have been unkind
I hope that you can just let it go by
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you

Oh, like a baby, stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me

But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, "You must not ask for so much"
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"

Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

© LEONARD COHEN STRANGER MUSIC INC

torn between sea mists and solid land (2)

2011-07-13T08:34:00.003+09:00

One of my favourite selkie stories, a tale of love found -- and lost.

The Goodman o' Wastness

The Goodman o' Wastness was a handsome, well-to-do young fellow.

Strong, well-liked and with a profitable farm, it will come as no surprise to learn that many of the unmarried local girls had their sights on him.

However, despite their ample attentions the Goodman was a man who was simply not interested in marriage.

Their advances spurned, the local girls soon began to treat the Goodman with contempt.

Describing him as "an old, young man" and "old before his time" in their eyes he was committing the unpardonable sin of celibacy.

The Goodman, however, paid these malicious creatures little heed and as is more often the case, the gossips soon turned their attentions elsewhere. When questioned by his friends as to the reason he would not take himself a wife, the Goodman would smile and simply explain:

"Weemin ir lik minny ither tings in dis weary wurld, only sent fur a trial tae man an' I hae trials aplenty withoot bein' tried be a wife. If yin owld fool Adam hiddno been bewitched be his wife, he might still be in the Gerdeen o' Eden the day."

[Women are like many other things in this weary world, only sent as a trial to men and I have enough trials without being tried by a wife. If that old fool Adam had not been bewitched by his wife, he might still be in the Garden of Eden to this day.]

One old woman who heard this oft-repeated speech, remarked:

"Tak thoo heed theesel, fur thou'll mibbe be yursel' bewitched wan day."

[Heed well what you say, you will maybe be bewitched yourself one day.]

"Aye," replied the Goodman, laughing. "That'll be when thou waaks dry-shod fae the Alters o' Seenie tae da Boar o' Papey"

[That will be when you walk from the Alters o' Seenie to the Boar o' Papa (Orkney placenames) without wetting your feet.]

So it came to pass that one fine day the Goodman was down on the ebb when he saw, a short distance away, a number of selkie-folk lying out on a flat rock.

Some of these selkie-folk were sunning themselves in the afternoon warmth while others jumped and played in the clear water. All were naked with unblemished skins as white as snow. Their enchanted seal-skins lay strewn carelessly on the sand and rocks around them.

The Goodman crept closer to their basking rock.

As he neared the place the selkie-folk played, the Goodman leapt to his feet and ran towards them for all he was worth. With a shriek the selkie-folk snatched up their seal skins and quickly retreated to the safety of the sea. However, swift as they were, the Goodman was quicker and he managed to seize a skin belonging to one beautiful seal-maiden.

In the hasty rush to safety this poor creature had forgotten to retrieve her skin.

The selkie-folk swam out a little distance and turned to gaze mournfully at the Goodman. He stared back and realised that all, save one, had taken the shape of seals. Grinning, he put the captured seal-skin under his arm. Whistling a merry tune he set out for home.

No sooner had he left the ebb than he heard the most sorrowful wailing and weeping coming from behind him. Turning, he saw a fair woman following him. She was a most pitiful sight. Sobbing and howling in grief, she held her arms out and pled to have her skin returned. Huge tears ran from her large dark eyes and trickled down her ivory cheeks.

Falling to her knees, she cried:

"O bonnie man! If thur's inny mercy in thee human breest, gae me back me ain selkie skin! I cinno live in da sea withoot it. I cinno bide amung me ain folk waythoot me selkie-skin."

[Oh handsome man, if there is any mercy in your human breast give me back my seal-skin. I can not live in the sea without it. I cannot live among my own people without my seal-skin.]

The Goodman was not a soft-hearted man but he could not help but pity the poor creature. Pity, however, was not the only emotion he felt. With the pity came the softer and sweeter passion of love.

The icy heart that had yet to love a mortal woman was soon melted by this seal-maiden's beauty.

Eventually the Goodman managed to wring from the Selkie Wife a reluctant consent to remain with him as his wife. She had little choice in the matter for as you all Orcadian know, she could not return to her kin in the sea without her skin.

So the sea-maiden went with the Goodman and stayed with him for many a day. She turned out to be a thrifty, frugal and kindly wife and although she was a creature of the sea the Goodman had a happy life with her.

The Selkie Wife bore the Goodman seven children.

Four boys and three girls came from their union and it was said that there were no children as beautiful as them in all the isles. And all the while the sea-wife, and her human husband, seemed content and merry.

But all was not as it seemed - there was a weight in the Selkie Wife's heart. Many was the time that she was seen to gaze longingly out to the sea. The sea that was her true home.

So to all the islanders and to the Goodman himself all seemed well with his family. But as is always the case in these tales, the bliss was not to last.

One fine day, the Goodman and his four sons were out fishing in their boat. With the menfolk out of the house, the Selkie Wife sent three of the girls down to the ebb to gather limpets and whelks for their tea. The youngest girl had to remain at home because she had hurt her foot climbing on the sharp rocks by the shore. As usual, as soon as the house emptied, the selkie wife set to looking for her long-lost seal-skin.

She searched high and she searched low. She searched "but" and she searched "ben". She searched out and she searched in but to no avail.

She could not find the skin.

The time passed and the sun swung to the west, lengthening the shadows. The peedie lass, seated in a straw-backed chair with her sore feet on the creepie, watched her mother carry out the frantic hunt.

"Mam, whit ir thoo luckin' fur?" she asked.

[Mother, what are you looking for?]

"O' bairn, dinna tell, bit ah'm luckin' fur a bonnie skin tae mak a rivlin dat wid sort thee sore fit." replied the Selkie Wife.

[Oh child, don't tell but I'm looking for a pretty skin to make a shoe that would cure your sore feet.]

"Bit Mam, " said the bairn. "I ken fine whar hid is. Wan day when ye war oot and me Fither thowt I wis sleepin' i' the bed, he teen a bonnie skin doon, gloured at hid for cheust a peedie meenit, then foldit hid an' laid hid up under dae aisins abeun da bed."

[But Mother, I know where it is. One day when you were out and my Father thought I was asleep in bed, he took a pretty skin down, glowered at it for a short time, then folded it and put it away in the aisins over the bed.]

When the Selkie Wife heard this she clapped for joy and rushed to the place where her long-concealed skin lay.

"Fare thee weel, peedie buddo," she said to her child as she ran from the house.

Rushing to the shore she threw on her skin and with a wild cry of joy plunged into the sea. Shifting again into her selkie form she swam out through the waves where a selkie man was waiting for her and greeted her with delight.

All the while, the Goodman was rowing home and happened to see these two selkies from his little boat. His wife uncovered her beautiful face and cried out to him.

"Fare thee weel. Goodman o' Wastness. Farewell tae thee. I liked thee weel enough fur thoo war geud tae me bit I love better me man o' the sea."

[Farewell Goodman of Wastness. Farewell to you. I liked you because you were good to me but I love my husband from the sea more.]

That was the last the Goodman ever saw of his sea-wife.

Often though, in the twilight of his years, he could be seen wandering on the empty sea-shore, hoping once again to meet his lost love.

But never again did he look upon her fair face.

Source and images: Sigurd Towrie at http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/selkiefolk/wastness.htm

torn between sea mists and solid land (1)

2011-07-12T02:03:00.018+09:00

There have been sirens, mermaids, ondines, naiads, Loreleis -- all sorts of shape-shifting, feminine creatures of the water, whose manifold disguises and callous beauty ultimately betray their predatory and malign nature.

Driven by insatiable urges, at once aggressive and self-possessed, they pose voluptuously on rocks to lure men into their arms, or distract mariners with the haunting beauty of their songs, leading them to shipwreck on the rocky shores, or cunningly let themselves be caught in the nets of fishermen. Whatever the case, a materialistic hell awaits the man who, against what reason advises him, yields to the deceiving softness of their bodies. Nothing but stony agonies await him in the end.

These fantasies of feminine perversity never die. There is, however, one less obtrusive -- and more elusive -- watery creature who, despite her attraction for the land and its promises of sensual pleasure, remains a torn, divided being. Her name comes from the Orcadian dialect word for seal, Selkie, and, even though her origins seem to be Scandinavian (along with so many other things on the Orkneys), they later merged with existing elements of Celtic myth, making her inhabit the seas around the Orkney and Shetland Isles, as well as some parts of Ireland.

It might not always have been so, but the selkie came to be seen as a benign and kindly creature who, unlike the sly mermaid (with whom she is often wrongly conflated), does not lure men into some kind of trap. A shape-shifter, she is able to discard her seal skin and come ashore as a beautiful maiden. Yet only when a man, catching the selkie off her guard, captures her seal skin is she forced to become his wife and bear his children -- which she dutifully does, even though deep down she remains a wistful, melancholic woman longing for the sea. The yearning becomes so strong with the years that she eventually retrieves her skin, upon which she rushes to the shore and plunges into the sea again, without turning back, leaving her husband to pine on land. He will incessantly roam the sea-shore, but will never see her again.

There are myriad versions of the story, as well as songs. One theme in particular has stayed with me over the years, by the Irish singer Mary McLaughlin. Well worth listening to, despite the rather confusing homemade video that accompanies it on YouTube, criminally conflating all sorts of fishtailed creatures with the forlorn, unique selkie.

I'm all the way with her.

Sealwoman/Yundah

Words and music by Mary McLaughlin

Over the waves, you call to me
Shadow of dream, ancient mystery
Oh how I long for your sweet caress
Oh how I long for your gentleness

Torn between sea mists and solid land
Nights when I've ached for a human hand
I'll come to you while the moon shines bright
But I must go free with the first streak of light

Over the waves, you call to me
Shadow of dream, ancient mystery
Oh how I long for you sweet caress
Oh how I long for your gentleness

Lyrics source: http://www.greyglass.com/music/celticvoices.html
Image: http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/selkiefolk/origins/index.html

'the nymph with the broken back', or: enduring misogynistic clichés...

2011-07-10T22:23:00.011+09:00

Scene from Alban Berg's Lulu
Soloists, English National Opera, 2005
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2005/Jan-Jun05/lulu1804.htm

Enduring but most definitely not endearing clichés.

And wouldn't it be wonderful indeed—a sign of genuine, humane Progress—if men and women began to see, through the glossy veneer of aestheticised morbid violence, what these images really stand for and the profoundly sad truths they convey?

Again: sic transit gloria mundi...

* * *

The term masochism was invented by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who, in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), linked the phenomenon he defined as "the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force" (86) to the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a popular author of the period whose heroes usually spent their time in enthusiastic pursuit of maltreatment. But Kraft-Ebing saw the phenomenon of masochism as being a true "perversion" only in men. "In woman," he contended, "voluntary subjection to the opposite sex is a physiological phenomenon. Owing to her passive role in procreation and long-existent social conditions, ideas of subjection are, in woman, normally connected with the idea of sexual relations. They form, so to speak, the harmonics which determine the tone-quality of feminine feeling." Nature itself, Kraft-Ebing insisted, has given woman "an instinctive inclination to voluntary subordination to man; [who] will notice that exaggeration of customary gallantry is very distasteful to women, and that a deviation from it in the direction of masterful behavior, though loudly reprehended, is often accepted with secret satisfaction. Under the veneer of polite society the instinct of feminine servitude is everywhere discernible" (130).

The late-nineteenth-century male thus had it from the very highest, most advanced "scientific" authority that women, even if they might seem to indicate otherwise, wanted to be beaten and subjected to violence. In addition to being instructed by what Kraft-Ebing was saying, men were by 1893 being reassured by such other eminent--and widely read--authorities as Lombroso and Ferrero, that the "normal woman is naturally less sensitive to pain than a man" (The Female Offender, 150), so that there was clearly absolutely no reason to be squeamish about pushing women around a bit. On the basis of the "findings" of these and other "scientific" observers, the proponents of dualistic thought thus installed another durable antifeminine myth whose ramifications still echo daily through the popular arts of our time. In the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an author's adherence to the theory that women just naturally liked to be beaten was a sign of extreme intellectual sophistication. It was an indication that one was truly well informed about matters of scientific interest. . . .

In France, Pierre Louys, in Woman and Puppet (1898), had the perverse heroine of that novel, Concha, respond in spasms of yelping ardor to the narrator's violent attack upon her, during which "for perhaps a quarter of an hour" he "struck her with the regularity of a peasant pounding a flail . . . and always on the same spots, the top of the head and the left shoulder" (218). In a paroxysm of masochistic ecstasy she cries, "How well you have beaten me, my heart! How sweet it was! How good it felt--" Later Concha confesses to her attacker that if she told him lies, it was specifically "to have you beat me, Mateo. When I feel your strength, I love you, I love you so; you cannot imagine how happy it makes me weep because of you." And, beguilingly, she asks, "Mateo, will you beat me again? Promise me that you will beat me hard! You will kill me! Tell me that you will kill me!" (220)

Like Louys' heroine, Frank Wedekind's Lulu, the archetypal woman at the center of his play Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box (as well as Alban Berg's opera based on Wedekind's plays) does not really become interested in a man until he becomes violent toward her. To one of her early lovers she exults, "How proud I am that you will do anything to humiliate me! You degrade me as deep as a man can degrade a woman . . ." (77). For Lulu, as for Concha, the male's violence toward her is supposed to be proof of her power over her man, and this knowledge presumably makes that violence an erotic stimulus for her. The dictum pronounced by another of the men in Lulu's life, that "beating or love-making, it's all one to a woman" (122), had become one of the most common clichés among intellectuals at the turn of the century. . . .

It is clear that few of the anti-feminine clichés which had become institutionalized by the 1890s have had a more immediately destructive influence on the daily lives of women throughout the twentieth century than this particular pair of male wishfulfilling items of late-nineteenth century "scientific" knowledge. This is the period in which recourse to scientific truth rather than "faith" became the principal justification for the brutal and widespread oppression of human beings on the basis of race and sex, and for the institutionalization of concepts which ultimately led to the blanket justification of violence done to others because one group had decided that another "had asked for it." The women-want-to-be-raped theory is an integral part of the overall self-serving pattern of the rationalization of aggression which still dominates the world today, and which was crucial to the development of the imperialist mentality at the turn of the century.

It may seem a rather bathetic mismatch of causes to point to the supinely sprawling feminine nudes favored by painters of the Paris salons as a contributing factor to the spread of the aggressive mentality in the late nineteenth-century life. But inevitably the mentality of rape, whether it be personal and physical or cultural and intellectual, requires that guilt and temptation, and hence the justification for punishment, are to be seen in the other, in this case the woman. All too often the gestures and expressions of ecstatic transport accompanying the supine posture of these nudes suggest a perverse excess of erotic abandonment as the origin of the women's forced posture, as if somehow, in the midst of an intense spasm of uncontrollable desire, they had succeeded in breaking their own backs, thereby dooming themselves to stay forever paralyzed and helpless in the distorted position in which the artist chose to paint them. The sprawling nymphs' helpless postures, joined with their obvious ecstasy, thus suggested quite deliberately to the viewer that these women were, so to speak, "asking to be raped."

--Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (0xford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 101-05. [emphases added]

Arthur Hacker (1858-1919), "Leaf Drift" (1902)

the marvels and mysteries of Japanese 'soft' fascism

2011-07-10T14:00:00.011+09:00

A must-read on today's edition of The Japan Times:

With Japan at a crossroads, it's instructive to recall the Hidaka affair

By ROGER PULVERS
The Japan Times

July 10, 2011

Exactly 30 years ago this month, I had an encounter with a man who became innocently involved in an international incident. That incident may be all but forgotten now, but it's worth recalling here because it highlights the struggle of an individual of conscience to have the truth revealed.

Indeed, we in Japan are currently involved with the very same issues of personal responsibility and collective falsehood.

If we remain silent in the face of injustice or criminal negligence, if we allow unelected bureaucrats and business executives to ride roughshod over our personal welfare — as we are witnessing with regard to the ongoing nuclear disaster in Fukushima — the entire nation's future could be put at risk by recklessness and prevarication.

(full text here)

* * *

Pulvers reproduces a comment by Rokuro Hidaka—'The Japanese don't have much of a consciousness of human rights or the rights of the individual. Even the word kenri is not really the equivalent of 'rights.' The Japanese think that insisting on your kenri is an activity associated with egoism'—that is reminiscent of an earlier study by Masao Maruyama, published in the edited book Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London: Oxford UP, 1963). In it, Maruyama argues precisely that modern Japan, upon abandoning democratic institutions and disintegrating into an absolutist state, has never successfully established, as a nation, the primacy of individual rights or the subjectivity of a thinking and historically conscious people.

This, in turn, has reminded me of Etsuko Yamashita's argument in her book on Itsue Takamura (1988), in which she argues that mother dominance, the cornerstone of Japan's patriarchal society (a topic I have been exploring), is the symbol of a leaderless, diffuse 'soft' fascism: a ruling system of interdependence (amae) in which no one takes responsibility as an individual person. It is no wonder, in this context, that the Japanese Emperor system has so often been perceived throughout history as one of maternal dominance.

What is truly astonishing is not so much the cogency and perceptiveness of these views, but their rarity in a society that has reached such a high level of economic affluence and that claims to be a democracy. Maybe, as Hidaka himself has pointed out, economic affluence has never really managed to translate itself into social prosperity in modern Japan. It is nothing but a shallow, empty form of wealth.

And something must be terribly amiss indeed when the intelligentsia of a (supposedly) democratic country aloofly chooses to turn its back on reality and the world at large to pursue instead its own self-interest and vanity publishing.

strange portents

2011-07-09T22:41:00.000+09:00

Marx once noted it—that in periods of transition, between the end of one hegemony and the beginning of another, strange and yet unnamed phenomena stalk the land.

They are both harbingers of what might come and uncanny throwbacks to bygone events.

Unfathomable.

But there is something in the air outside, most definitely, making it unfit to breathe.

a season in purgatory (6)

2011-07-09T00:43:00.017+09:00

Sexual helplessness bears monsters of perversion. Symposia of Amazons, and other horrible themes. A threefold cycle: Carmen-Gretchen-Isolde. A Nana cycle, Théâtre des Femmes. Disgust: a lady, the upper part of her body lying on a table, spills a vessel filled with disgusting things.

--Paul Klee, Diaries.

Another perplexing contradiction in Kyoka's depictions of women (or of 'Woman', as he never really describes real women, but an archetypal, ghostly femininity): on the one hand, he has been regarded as a fierce critic of the then new ethics of Meiji society that pursued worldly success at all costs, to which he opposed, in the gothic tradition of Poe, love as a substitute for social and economic power. Yet, on the other hand, his fascination with women as the embodiment of evil was also unwittingly attuned to that very same emerging ethos within which the evolving male was expected to combine an attitude of socioeconomic belligerence and distrust of others with an ideal of personal sacrifice or abstinence in the service of worldly success.

Such dynamics was already at full throttle in the West, as Bram Dijkstra illustrates in his wonderfully provocative study Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture:

The symphonic incantations of ever newly curving female bodies were like the choral movements of a satanic invitation to worldly abandon. Women offered melodies of cradled melancholy to the laboring brain of sainted masculinity. Steely-browed and lean-loined Ulysses sailed past these aching calls, seeking financial self-sufficiency among the shoals of vice. The late nineteenth-century middle-class male already knew that Superman's ego was powered by gold. He feared that the Kryptonite of beauty could only weaken the essence of a transcendent power he knew to embed in his seed. Even the thought of a strong woman with a will, a mind, and wishes of her own was enough to weaken the musculature of a selfhood nourished by the bitter herb of monetary gain. The ardor of man's will to power seemed to shrivel into insignificance before the tumescent homage of his body to the wonder of a woman radiant with life and unmoved by the commands of cash. (p. 235)

Modern Japan, of course, had its own blend of native and imported traditions—Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism—which, combined with the newly imported Western logic of capitalism, did even more ruthlessly contribute to put women in their proper place. (And thus the 'natural order of things' has been, to this very day.)

Hence the wanderers and the 'holy men' who traverse the anxiety-ridden sexual territory of Kyoka's stories are not, ironically, that different from the men of the business world he so intensely despised for their lack of refinement and taste. What all these male 'ascetic' figures have in common is their search for some form of transcendence and their ultimate determination to keep Woman within her role as the soft, passive human clay that can be molded according to male fantasies and perceptions concerning the structures of ideal beauty and behaviour.

The idyll is shattered, lo and behold, when she slithers out of the frame of domestic bliss and motherly self-negation to reveal, in Dijkstra's words, 'the animal beneath the veneer of civilization with which the poetic spirit of man had covered her'—'a swamp, a palpitating expanse of instinctive physical greed whose primary natural function [is] to try to catch, engulf and, if possible, absorb the male and make him subservient to her simplistic physical needs' (p. 237).

And in Kyoka, as usual, the escape from such predicament is self-denial and/in death.

* * *

My base desires had brought me to this, to this point of indecision. As long as I could see her face and hear her voice, what did it matter if she and her idiot husband shared a bed? At least it would be better than enduring endless austerities and living out my days as a monk.

I made up my mind to go back to her, but just as I stepped back from the rock , someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, Monk."

I had been caught at my weakest moment. Feeling small and ashamed, I looked up, expecting to see a messenger from Hell. What I saw instead was the old man I had met at the woman's cottage. . . .

"What are you doing here?" he asked me. "You should be used to this kind of heat, or did you stop for something else? You're only twelve miles from where you were last night. If you'd been walking hard, you'd be in the village giving thanks to Jizo by now.

"Or maybe you've been thinking about that woman. Your earthly passions are stirred, aren't they? Don't try to hide it. I may be a bleary-eyed old man, but I can still tell black from white. Anyone normal wouldn't still be human after a bath with her. Take your pick. Cow? Horse? Monkey? Toad? Bat? You're lucky you're not going to be flying or hopping around for the rest of your life. When you came up from the river and hadn't been turned into some other animal, I couldn't believe my eyes. Lucky you! I guess your faith saved you. . . .

"So now that you know her story, you probably feel sorry for her. You want to gather firewood and haul water for the woman, don't you? I'm afraid your lustful nature has been awakened, Brother. Of course, you don't call it lust. You'd rather call it mercy or sympathy. I know you're thinking of hurrying back to the mountains. But you'd better think twice. Since becoming the idiot's wife, she's forgotten how the world behaves and does only as she pleases. She takes any man she wants. And when she tires of him, she turns him into an animal, just like that. No one escapes.

"And the river that carved out of these mountains? Since the flood, it's become a strange and mysterious stream that both seduces men and restores her beauty. Even a witch pays a price for casting spells. Her hair gets tangled. Her skin becomes pale. She turns haggard and thin. But then she bathes in the river and is restored to the way she was. That's how her youthful beauty gets replenished. She says 'Come,' and the fish swim to her. She looks at a tree, and its fruit falls into her palm. If she holds her sleeves up, it starts to rain. If she raises her eyebrows, the wind blows.

"She was born with a lustful nature, and she likes young men best of all. I wouldn't be surprised if she said something sweet to you. But even if her words were insincere, as soon as she gets tired of you, a tail will sprout, your ears will wiggle, your legs will grow longer, and suddenly you'll be changed into something else.

"I wish you could see what the witch is going to look like after she's had her fill of this fish—sitting there with her legs crossed, drinking wine.

"So curb your wayward thoughts, Good Monk, and get away as quickly as you can. You've been lucky enough as it is. She must have felt something special for you, otherwise you wouldn't be here. You've been through a miracle and you're still young, so get on with your duties like you really mean it." The old man slapped me on the back again. Dangling the carp from his hand, he started up the mountain road.

I watched him grow smaller in the distance until he disappeared behind the mass of a large mountain. From the top of that mountain, a cloud rapidly blossomed into the drought-cleared sky. Over the quiet rush of the waterfall, I could hear the rolling echoes of clapping thunder.

Standing there like a cast-off shell, I returned to my senses. Filled with gratitude for the old man, I took up my walking staff, adjusted my sedge hat, and ran down the trail. By the time I reached the village, it was already raining on the mountain. It was an impressive storm. Thanks to the rain, the carp the old man was carrying probably reached the woman's cottage alive.

This, then, was the monk's story. He didn't bother to add a moral to the tale. We went our separate ways the next morning, and I was filled with sadness as I watched him begin his ascent into the snow-covered mountains. The snow was falling lightly. As he gradually made his way up the mountain road, the holy man of Mount Koya seemed to be riding on the clouds.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya’ (1900), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 65-72.

a season in purgatory (5)

2011-07-08T00:20:00.012+09:00

I have been focusing on 'One Day in Spring', my favourite story by Kyoka, but it is in 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' that his recurrent themes, and, in particular, his morbid misogyny and truncated eroticism are more explicitly aestheticized. Images of a dangerous, violent, deadly nature recur and are inextricably associated with the woman who seduces and tempts the hero. She personifies throughout the regressive, atavistic, bestial element in woman's 'nature'—taking men, ensnaring them, and, once tired of them, turning the hopeless creatures into animals.

The ultimate symbol of the male's sense of fear and need for female nurturing, she is invariably encountered in the water, her privileged milieu. And it is here that the mendicant, on the verge of yielding to temptation and giving up his ascetic life, withdraws in hesitation and fear.

Once again, in the climactic scene of the tale, he does not take her into his arms but sees the woman being ravished by the dark, turbulent waters.

Once again, violence and death prevail—and, with them, the failure of love in passivity.

* * *

To tell the truth, ever since I had left her earlier that morning this single idea dominated my thoughts. No snakes spanned my path, and I encountered no leech-filled forest. Still, though the way might continue to be hard, bringing tribulation to my body and soul, I realized that my pilgrimage was senseless. My dreams of someday donning a purple surplice and living in a final monastery meant nothing to me. And to be called a living Buddha by others and to be thronged with crowds of worshippers could only turn my stomach with the stench of humanity. . . .

After the woman put the idiot [husband] to sleep, she came back out to my room. She told me that rather than going back to a life of self-denial, I ought to stay by her side in the cottage by the river, there where the summer is cool and the winter mild. Had I given in to her for that reason alone, you'd probably say that I had been bewitched by her beauty. But in my own defense let me say that I truly felt sorry for her. How would it be to live in that isolated mountain cottage as the idiot's bed partner, not able to communicate, feeling you were slowly forgetting how to talk?

That morning when she said goodbye in the dawning light, I was reluctant to leaver her. She regretted never being able to see me again, spending the rest of her life in such a place. She also said that should I ever see white peach petals flowing upon a stream, however small, I would know that she had thrown herself into a river and was being torn apart bit by bit. She was dejected, but her kindness never failed. She told me to follow the river, that it would lead me to the next village. The water dancing and tumbling over a waterfall would be my sign that houses were nearby. Pointing out the road, she saw me off, walking along with me until her cottage had disappeared behind us.

Though we would never walk hand in hand as man and wife, I kept thinking I could still be her companion, there to comfort her morning and night. I would prepare the firewood and she would do the cooking. I would gather nuts and she would shell them. We would work together, I on the veranda and she inside, talking to each other, laughing together. The two of us would go to the river. She would take off her clothes and stand beside me. Her breath upon my back, delicate fragrance of her petals. For that I would gladly lose my life!

Staring at the waterfall, I tortured myself with these thoughts. Even now when I think back on it, I break out in a cold sweat. I was totally exhausted, both physically and spiritually. I had set off at a fast pace and my legs had grown weary. Even if I was returning to the civilized world, I knew that the best I could expect was some old crone with bad breath offering me a cup of tea. I could care less about making it to the village, and so I sat down on a rock and looked over the edge at the waterfall. Afterward, I learned it was called the Husband and Wife Falls. . . .

The smaller stream was trying to leap over the rock and cling to the larger flow, but the jutting stone separated them cleanly, preventing even a single drop from making it to the other side. The waterfall, thrown about and tormented, was weary and gaunt, its sound like sobbing or someone's anguished cries. This was the sad yet gentle wife.

The husband, by contrast, fell powerfully, pulverizing the rocks below and penetrating the earth. It pained me to see the two fall separately, divided by that rock. The brokenhearted wife was like a beautiful woman clinging to someone, sobbing and trembling. As I watched from the safety of the bank, I started to shake and my flesh began to dance. When I remember how I had bathed with the woman in the headwaters of this stream, my imagination pictured her inside the falling water, now being swept under, now rising again, her skin disintegrating and scattering like flower petals amid a thousand unruly streams of water. I gasped at the sight, and immediately she was whole again—the same face, body, breasts, arms, and legs, rising and sinking, suddenly dismembered, them appearing again. Unable to bear the sight, I felt myself plunging headlong into the fall and taking the water into my embrace. Returning to my senses, I heard the earthshaking roar of the husband, calling to the mountain spirits and roaring on its way. With such strength, why wasn't he trying to rescue her? I would save her! No matter what the cost.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya’ (1900), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 62-65.

a season in purgatory (4)

2011-07-06T20:00:00.001+09:00

"In a nap at midday, I met my beloved." He returned to the poem. "Then did I begin to believe in the things called dreams." . . .

He had just seen a dream, but then—

What about dreams? he thought. He felt as though he were seeing one now. If you wake up and realize you were asleep, then you know you were dreaming. But if you never wake up, how could it be a dream? Didn't someone say that the only difference between the mad and the sane is the length of one's periods of insanity? Like waves that grow wild in a blowing wind, everyone has times of madness. But the wind soon calms, and the waves end in a soothing dance. If not, then we begin to lose our minds, we who ply the seas of this floating world. And on the day that we pray for repose yet find no reprieve from the winds, we become seasick. Becoming seasick, we quickly go mad.

How perilous!

We find ourselves in the same situation when our dreams don't stop. If we can wake up, it's a dream. If we can't, then it's our reality. And yet, if it is in our dreams that we meet the people we love, why wouldn't we dream as much as we could? If the world asks, 'What's gotten into him?' The dreamer answers, 'Here I am,' fluttering in tandem with another butterfly, enjoying his enlightenment.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 115-16.

a season in purgatory (3)

2011-07-05T22:17:00.000+09:00

"There you go again. If you doubt me that much, then I'll have to spell it out for you." [She said.] "See this glorious grass? These trees? They have blood and passion. They're hot beneath the sun's red light, and the earth is warm like skin. The light penetrates the bamboo grove, and the blossoms are without shadows. They bloom like fire, and when they flutter down unto the water, the stream becomes a red lacquered cup that slowly floats away. The ocean is blue wine, and the sky . . ."

She turned the white palm of her hand so it was facing upward.

"The sky is like a green oil. Viscous. No clouds, but still murky and full of dreams. The mountains are stuffed like velvet pillows. Here and there, the heat waves shimmer like thick coils of smoke rising fragrantly into the sleeves of a kimono. The larks are singing. In some faraway vale, the nightingale is calling, 'Isn't life a pleasure?' It has all its needs, and not a complaint to make. On a bright sunny afternoon like this, you close your eyes and right away you're drowsily dreaming. What do you think?"

"I don't know what I think." He looked away from the brightness of the spring day that her words had conjured. He focused on her.

"What are you feeling?"

He didn't answer.

"Are you having fun?"

"Fun?"

"Are you filled with joy?"

"Joy?"

"Do you feel alive?"

"Do you?" he countered.

"No, I feel sick, just the way I did when I saw you for the first time."

The wanderer sighed and took back his walking stick. Grabbing it with both hands, he held it near his knees, as if punting in the sea of love. Then he folded his arms and found himself staring at her.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 124-25.

a season in purgatory (2)

2011-07-04T21:44:00.000+09:00

Kannon, Goddess of Mercy! The wanderer silently prayed for help. His defenses had all come to naught.

"Your stockings are all covered with mud. Why don't you take them off and let me have them cleaned? I live right over there."

He hastily pulled back from her fingers as they reached for his leg. He collapsed onto the embankment, then sat up, the nape of his neck hot because of the warm grass. He was sweating. His face was flushed. His eyes were blinded by the intense spring light.

"Forget about my stupid stockings." His words sounded like something a second-rate storyteller would say. He shuddered. When his vision finally became clear, the woman was picking up his walking stick. She held it gracefully with both hands and stood before him in a relaxed fashion.

Her sash was tied with its end hanging freely. Her lined kimono fit loosely on her shoulders. With the slight movement of her body, the crimson silk slipped down slightly over the edge of her sky-blue sash. The style of her clothing hardly matched the walking stick. She looked pitiful, crushed by love's burden, as if she was being held captive in place of her husband.

"Thank you so much." Again, she took the initiative. "I'm not sure what I should do." Her eyes were half-closed in thought. She seemed worried and weighed down with sadness, like the blind when they sigh. "I shouldn't have said that. I really didn't mean it that way. I didn't want to say I began feeling ill because I saw you. Even if that were true, how could I say such a thing? I saw you. And then I started to feel ill. . . ."

She repeated what she had just said, whispering to herself. "Please. I know you understand what I'm trying to say." She came closer and sat down. Leaning back, she spread her sleeves out on the the embankment. She parted the green spring grass with her shoulder. Their skirts spread out toward the wheat field before them.

"I didn't mean to insult you. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You do?"

He nodded, but he still seemed to be bothered by something.

"You're mean for getting mad at someone because of the way they talk," she said.

What a disagreeable woman! He looked at her, feeling as if he had to defend himself. "You should talk. I didn't get mad at you for the way you said it. You're the one with a bad temper. All I was doing was repeating what you said to me."

"Yes, and you lost your temper."

"No, I didn't. I was going to apologize."

"But you should have known what I really meant. It's a matter of expression, you know. Like a morning-glory leaf. From the top it looks thin and flat, but underneath it's quite full. You should listen to the underside of language."

"The underside of language? Now just wait a minute." He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and took a breath. "You're trying to tell me you meant the opposite of getting your feelings hurt. Which is this: that after you saw me, you felt better right? So why don't you just leave me alone? It's perfectly clear that you're just playing around." He took her to task but laughed as he did.

She stared at him coolly. "You're such a complicated man. What did I say to make you talk that way to me? You shouldn't pick on people who are weaker than you. Can't you see I'm suffering?"

She put her hand on the grass and moved her knee. "Listen to what I have to say. All right?" She smiled as if enraptured. Her mouth was so seductive it seemed as though her teeth had been dyed black. "Let's suppose there's someone I dream about all the time, someone I long for. Can you imagine that?"

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 121-23.

a season in purgatory (1)

2011-07-03T23:46:00.031+09:00

“It’s almost impossible to tell you how this sunny spring makes me feel. It’s like talking about a dream. This quiet sadness. Can’t you feel it? It’s like seeing the most vivid part of a dream, don’t you think? . . .

“I feel more vulnerable in the spring than in the fall. That’s why I’m so damp. This isn’t sweat. It’s something the sun has wrung from my heart. Not pain, not distress. More like blood being squeezed from the tips of a tree’s tender leaves, as though my bones are being extracted and my skin is being melted. Yes, that’s the perfect expression for times like this. I feel like I’ve turned into water, as though what’s being melted of me will soon disappear, and that there will be tears—though neither of sadness nor of joy.

“Sometimes you cry when someone scolds you. Other times you cry when someone comforts you. But on a spring day like today, your tears are of this latter kind. I suppose they’re sad. Yet there are different types of sadness. If fall is the sorrow of nature, then spring is the anguish of human life. . . .

“Invited by a warm, gentle wind, the soul becomes a dandelion blossom that suddenly turns into cotton and blows away. It’s the feeling of fading into death after seeing paradise with your own eyes. Knowing its pleasure, you also understand that heaven is vulnerable, unreliable, sad.

--Izumi Kyoka, Tamawaki Mio in ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 125-26.

* * *

In time of departures, thinking of beginnings. Of what once brought me here, of what awoke the passion—and, later, the disappointment.

Of why the fascination never ends.

My view of Japan was always from the ground, between the country and the city, working, living among Japanese people. I was never one to seek company among groups of expats, be they struggling academic researchers or well-off Roppongi types.

Yet, at the same time, mine was always a Japan of the mind, because fundamentally mediated by literature. It was in certain Japanese writers, in their words and images, that I have found something that resonates deeply within me and with which I have played hide-and-seek ever since. Something I cannot fully explain but that is at once universal and unique, as is the hallmark of all great art.

While I did feel the initial attraction for the quaint and pretty vanishing Japan of the Western exotes—Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, Wenceslau de Moraes—it soon struck me as stereotypical, remote, outdated.

What I was looking for and have found, heartbreakingly, here is a dark and unsettling truth that, once one touches it, one cannot but recoil—in horror, in disgust, and, above all, in sadness. One cannot avoid seeing and thinking of it, though, at times judgmentally, at times sympathetically, but never with indifference.

Were I to name the writer who has struck the deepest chord with me in this respect, it would be Izumi Kyoka. His tales of madness and death sound so quintessentially Japanese, and yet so archetypal and thus universal in the human struggles, oppressions, inequities, and impossibilities they embody.

As a feminist—that is, as someone who is committed to social change in order to achieve more balanced, fairer and happier relationships between women and men—what puzzles me in Kyoka is, on the one hand, his sympathetic depictions of witty and lovely female heroines, who, precisely because of their wit and loveliness, are crushed by a brutal, insensitive patriarchal society that values them only for their outer beauty and fertility. They are never more than coadjuvants, helpers, or mere toys. Countess Kifune in ‘The Surgery Room’ (1895), Tamawaki Mio in 'One Day in Spring’ (1906), among others: their desire for love, their lives stifled and destroyed by a society that oppresses the true emotions of people. These women are invariably bright and beautiful, weak and strong, passionate and pure-hearted, but also mad and downtrodden.

And herein lies the 'on the other hand’, the all-pervasive double standard that has haunted the male images of femininity, time out of mind: Woman as dangerously alluring but also maternal, nurturing. Woman as the saviour of Man but as someone who must be subjected to unspeakable suffering and sacrifice to qualify for the honour of bringing the male his inner peace. There is no doubt as to who remains at the centre, shaken and embattled at times, but fundamentally immovable in the end. Woman is to be fought as a demon or altogether avoided; or, even worse: Woman is to be placed on a pedestal and lovingly revered as a being from a distant star, divinely powerful. She has no agency in this world though, no subjectivity, no reality. In a word, she is better dead—or asleep or subdued—than alive. (Some call this 'misogyny', but who am I to stick on labels?)

All these sexist stereotypes trammelling women have existed in the West, under different guises, since time immemorial, but in Japan they assume particularly disturbing sexual overtones, because Japanese masculinity is so grounded in the psychology of amae—mother-dependent sons who never really grow up—and Japanese femininity trapped in the interplay of female spoiling and male dependence. The dominance of the mother in this culture is what has, ironically, perpetuated what Chizuko Ueno coined the Japanese 'transvestite patriarchy': a patriarchy that cloaks itself in femininity, making thus women's situation more complicated and the struggle against male dominance more difficult.

Charles Shiro Inouye, in the magisterial Introduction to his selected translations, argues that Kyoka’s sexually hesitant heroes mark ‘the birth of the weak male’, the beginning of a process of male regression that is so blatantly obvious to anyone familiar with contemporary Japanese society. In Kyoka, the sexually immature, neurotic male is tempted and crazed by a desire which he rarely has the courage to test and which remains therefore unfulfilled, as in ‘The Holy Man of Mt. Koya’ (1900). To quote Inouye again: 'They make beauty, not love'… A truncated eroticism.

And this seems to happen not so much out of moral principles but because of the male’s impossible attempt to reconcile Woman as nurturer and Woman as lover. Maternal and erotic love can only meld in death, out of this world. Love’s fulfillment is thus always linked to death and lovers must die to be together, as Countess Kifune and Doctor Takamine do in 'The Surgery Room':

Although their graves are in different places—one in the hills of Aoyama, one downtown in Yanaka—the countess and Doctor Takamine died together, one after the other, on the same day.

Religious thinkers of the world, I pose this question to you. Should these two lovers be found guilty and denied entrance into heaven? (p. 20)

Or as in the drowned corpses at the end of ‘One Day in Spring’:

The boy’s head was like a jewel pressed against the woman’s breast, the red lion’s cape still wet and tangled around her white arm. Beautiful and alluring, Tamawaki Mio had finally discovered the destination of the dead.
The wanderer would never forget how they had parted at the embankment, how he had looked back and seen her, holding her purple parasol to the side, her black hair weighing down upon her as she watched him walk away. As the sand on the beach spread and drew back soundlessly, hollowing out and filling back in, he thought of how the waves must have ravished her. From the sand there appeared only beautiful bones and the color of shells—red of the sun, white of the beach, green of the waves. (pp. 139-40)

And it is here that Kyoka’s unsettling ambivalence lies, as well as my own ambivalence towards him and the world he stands for. A world where oppression and death are viewed as beautiful and virtuous, and which has bred both images of striking beauty and the most dangerous, wrongheaded delusions and mistakes.

Not a heaven, most definitely, but a purgatory of unfulfilled love and lost souls, epitomised in Kyoka’s strangely oppressing, dark Spring.

departures (6)

2011-07-02T17:01:00.001+09:00

We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind. . . . Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations.

--Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 92.

departures (5)

2011-07-02T00:52:00.007+09:00

Nothing saps my vital energy and drains my joie de vivre more than people's inability to break the chains that bind them, to take risks, to reinvent themselves.

Emotional paralysis, self-delusion.

Hence the question returns ever so often: how to avoid yielding to terminal disenchantment and anguish when the malaise seems so insidious and all-pervading?

Yet there are times when you cannot but yield to weariness and sorrow -- and retreat from the world.

Because you have been skinned alive, left in raw flesh.

A temporary retreat, though. As when you sit in the dark, listening, listening, and one day something out there calls for you. It is the faintest of sounds, but you can perceive it only because you have inhabited silence for so long, been to the other shore of language, of life.

Illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts your heart.

* * *

In fatigue one senses the fields of the world no longer supporting one's position, no longer sustaining one's movement and one's enterprises. In boredom the planes of the landscape lose their significance, the force of their presence; the paths become equivalent, lose their urgencies. One feels the emptiness that is in each thing, the abyss over which the paths scurry. Fatigue and boredom give way to apprehensiveness. In the emptiness of days, in insomniac nights, anxiety clenches the heart.

In this finding oneself adrift, supported by nothing, nothing to hold onto, one's life that still exists cleaves to itself. One comes to feel the heat and the pulse of one's potential for existence. One senses in oneself powers to feel things no one has yet felt, to perceive corners of the landscape hidden from others, to form thoughts no one has ever thought and fashion things no else can make, to pour one's kisses and caresses on minute and on grand things and on bodies no one has ever loved. The shadow of death that closes in illuminates these powers within oneself with its black light. One knows there are things out there that call for these powers.

Then, under the general and recurrent patterns of the common world, one catches sight of visions offered to one's own eyes alone, appeals made to one's own heart alone, tasks no one else sees, faces turned to one's caresses and surfaces turned to one's laughter and tears. They summon one, with an urgency that is illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts one's heart. One will advance unto them, releasing one's forces for them.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 232.

departures (4)

2011-07-01T17:27:00.002+09:00

Max Ernst, Cage, Forest and Black Sun

it may not always be so;and i say
that if your lips,which i have loved,should touch
another's,and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart,as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know,or such
great writhing words as,uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be,i say if this should be-
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him,and take his hands,
saying,Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

--e. e. cummings

departures (3)

2011-06-29T22:33:00.027+09:00

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort which I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me.

Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

But Jeanne, fear of madness, only the fear of madness will drive us out of the precincts of our solitude, out of the sacredness of our solitude. The fear of madness will burn down the walls of our secret house and send us out into the world seeking warm contact. Worlds self−made and self−nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters.

--Anais Nin, House of Incest.

* * *

Narcissism -- its seductions and pitfalls.

To be unable to love or take any genuine interest in anyone that is not a mirror image of oneself. The utter denial of otherness, difference, patience, tolerance, generosity, distance from oneself.

The first intimation of madness. The greatest tragedy.

And here too departure offers a forked path: whether you take yourself with you on the journey and remain the same, your self-hatred and self-destructive willfulness accompanying you like the shadow of death (a pointless journey nowhere); or you get rid of yourself... to find yourself.

Rimbaud: Car je est un autre...

This is to say that you give up finding 'home' to observe home -- from a distance. The difficult but necessary truth of the outsider.

No purge, no escapism. Just going away to think, to feel alive.

Shatter the mirror, break the rotten 和 (wa)!

And only then may something truly astonishing happen, at last.

Who knows.

departures (2)

2011-06-28T23:30:00.010+09:00

You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

--Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.

Yes, a departure can be a recapitulation of personal and cultural history, and dissipate disgust with the all-familiar, as Eric J. Leed puts it in his superb The Mind of the Traveler.

Yet each departure is also the eternal reenactment of a deep injury: the loss of home, an imaginary home, away from which no one knows you, no one recognises you, no one confirms your being in their gaze.

Because their gaze is always set beyond you.

You are invisible, banished from the others' gaze. The original meaning of 'exile', precisely: a banished person.

Thus an exile proceeds from invisibility to invisibility. Once an exile, always an exile.

Unrecognised, you are always no longer 'there' -- you belong only in the place you long for.

And where is that? Where is the land of those who have fallen from the time and the gaze of others?

Alphonso Lingis calls it 'the community of those who have nothing in common'. Nothing in common except their fallenness, their vulnerability, their mortality. The cracked people.

And it is the necessary alienation of departure that brings you to them, that compels you to communicate, to establish some form of communion, even if at the risk of causing misunderstanding, fear of disclosure.

Blunders happen.

Because they are in pain, we are in pain. And pain isolates, sets adrift.

But recognition can happen, when you see the abyss beneath the mask, the half-hidden wounds in the flesh.

The night of his eyes.

* * *

To see the sensibility, susceptibility, vulnerability of another is to see not the inner diagrams but the substance of the body. It is to see the opaque skin, lassitude and torpor, into which the expressions form and vanish. It is to see the night of eyes, on which the forms of the world leave no trace. It is to see the spasms of pain that agitate the substance of the flesh, the tremblings of pleasure that die away. It is to see wrinkles and wounds.
In pain the other sinks back into his or her body, into prostration that already delivers him or her to the death in the world. The flesh in pain is anything but an object; sensibility, subjectivity fill it, with a terrible evidence. This evidence is turned imperatively to me, more pressing than the evolution of the planet and the anonymous enterprises in the humanized map laid out on it, more urgent than the tasks my own death has addressed to me. It is not in elaborating a common language and reason, in collaborating in transpersonal enterprises, that the human community takes form. It is in going to rejoin those who, fallen from the time of personal and collective history, have to go on when nothing is possible or promised.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 235-36.

departures (1)

2011-06-27T22:35:00.007+09:00

Thus it is that every country to which you have grown accustomed holds a spell over you.

--Diodorus Siculus

In every parting there is a latent germ of madness.

--Goethe

And yet you cannot avoid the thought of departure, its implications, its divisions, its whirlwind of emotions.

Has it ever been otherwise?

An end and a beginning. A loss and a gain. What you leave behind, what you take with you.

What will be born.

Breaking with a past, projecting a future. Stripping off the accommodating self, redefining contours, recovering freedom, hope (even if only temporarily).

But this is only in hindsight. At the moment of departure, what weighs heavily is separation -- from once beloved others, from things that once defined you and forever changed you. Places, people.

Something breaks that will never again be joined.

A primal departure. One of those moments when you see life from the viewpoint of death, our mortality: the thought that I will never see that person again, that place again -- until I die, until you die.

That it will be too late, when you remember and regret.

No consolation for this, no hindsight.

the marvels and mysteries of Japanese 'kokusaika' (2)

2011-06-26T22:10:00.005+09:00

19th century, 20th century, 21st century -- and the very same attitudes persist.

As the song goes, 'after changes upon changes, [they] are more or less the same'...

* * *

The transformations which are being accomplished are under the direction of foreigners in Government service, and of Japanese selected for their capacities, who have studied for some years in Europe and America; and the Government has spared neither trouble nor expense in securing the most competent assistance in all departments, and it is only in comparatively few instances that it has been badly advised by interested by interested aliens for the furtherance of personal or other ends. About 500 foreigners have been at one time or other in its service, and though they have met with annoyances and exasperations, the terms of their contracts have been faithfully adhered to. Some of these gentlemen are decorated with high-sounding titles during their brief engagements; but it must be remembered that they are there as helpers only, without actual authority, as servants and not masters, and that, with a notable exception, the greater their energy, ability, and capacity for training, the sooner are their services dispensed with, and one department after another passes from foreign into native management. The retention of foreign employes forms no part of the programme of progress. "Japan for the Japanese" is the motto of Japanese patriotism; the "Barbarians" are to be used, and dispensed with as soon as possible.

--Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior, Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Ise, vol. I (1880; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 10. [emphasis mine]

How little Japanese attitudes toward foreign academics have changed over the past hundred years is suggested by the experience of one of the most illustrious of the early kyoshi, the Leipzig-trained physician Erwin Baelz, who served from 1876 to 1902 as chief adviser in developing the medical school and hospital at Tokyo University. Dr. Baelz's diary reveals a gradual devolution from his admiration in the 1870s for Japan's eagerness for Western knowledge, to his indignation in the 1880s as he watched growing numbers of foreign colleagues dismissed and repatriated without any thanks for their contributions, to his own frustration in the 1890s as he found himself bypassed in major faculty decisions and sought to leave but was repeatedly held back by unfulfilled promises to improve his situation.

At his own twenty-fifth anniversary festivities, Baelz touched on what he saw as the root of Japan's shabby treatment of foreign scholars. The Japanese, Baelz suggested, often seemed not to understand the true source and nature of Western science, mistaking it for a sort of machine that could be easily carted off to new places and made to perform the same work, rather than seeing it as an organism requiring a carefully nurturing atmosphere. Foreign scholars from many countries had worked hard to implant the spirit of modern science in Japan, but although they had come to nurture the tree itself, their mission had largely been misunderstood. The Japanese had treated them as no more than peddlers of the final fruits, and had been content to take the latest plums from them, without seeking to appropriate the spirit that had nourished the tree. Baelz concluded:

Soon there will be very few foreign teachers left in the country. Let me advise you to give those that still remain more freedom than you have done in the past, more opportunity for independent work; and let me urge you to keep in close touch with them in fields besides that of their strictly educational work . . . . In that way you will learn more of the spirit of science, the spirit with which you cannot become intimately acquainted in lecture theaters . . . but only in daily association with those engaged in research.

--Ivan P. Hall, Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 121-22. [emphases mine]

the desire to return to a warmer land

2011-06-25T21:11:00.003+09:00

In time of departures, thinking of returns.

Longing.

Though I know I shouldn't, I shouldn't -- but what the hell.

(It will pass, as all things pass.)

The separation

The time came when the desire to return
grew so strong that certain songs would automatically produce
the physical pain of real longing
just because they were markers of former street-days

the restraint was hard to bear
when the cold closed for the year

when the thaw might come was a speculation
too distant to have much reality

The orchestra would come and go
and there seemed no regulation by which
one could plot or know their movements
yet at each appearance they never failed to chill
me with their blank faces and uncompromising playing
It was as though "I" wasn't there,
as though it was all a self-supporting film
The leader of the orchestra would advance
towards me yet his eyes were set beyond me
It was so unbearable that I was forced to stay -
though the pleasure of mute acceptance was denied me
- their movements settled this
Many days were passed waiting in suspense for the next appearance

When the sun shone you could see the cliffs
and seashore across
The little boats bobbed in the harbour

That the pain was doubly hard to bear since
it involved such self-restraint as to
not gulp down the remedy which was
a bottle with "answer" crudely printed out on the label -
the symbolism of this went too far

If a ticket was bought it could only mean one thing
and there waiting on the other shore
was a table loaded down with childish treats
and lots of cuddly bears romped all round the table
I had almost packed my knapsack
before I realised the spell might break

I had tooted the car-horn for almost half an hour
outside their new house before I realised
they might not want to come out

The old photo had faded and was now very worn
It was more than a matter of recognition

Yet underneath the forest even when the glacier
threatened imminent extinction
the desire to return to a warmer land
was as fierce as ever and no dangers
even in the form of pawnshop windows that displayed
neat rows of pistols and automatics - each with its neat blue
price tag hanging down so prettily - could deter me

It was a necessity to be continually reckoned with
even at the height of ecstasies;
the ice-cold chewed deeper
It hurt when the "answer" was realised
and the whole camp stood silent for a minute

--Lee Harwood, from The White Room in Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2004), pp. 61-62.

the marvels and mysteries of Japanese 'kokusaika' (1)

2011-06-25T12:45:00.014+09:00

I have been re-reading a couple of books on Japan in the context of one of my current research projects – including Ivan P. Hall’s razor-sharp Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop.

While I generally agree, on the basis of my own experience in Japanese academia, with the line of his argument, there are certain passages which resonate more deeply with me, perhaps because I was raised in a Christian culture where a sense of humanist universalism and solidarity with the plight of others are (were?) still widely upheld moral values.

And perhaps that is why too the conspicuous absence of these values from Japanese society makes it so difficult, if not virtually impossible, for people with ‘our’ cultural roots to suppress a sense of outrage at the appalling discrepancies, aberrations, inequalities and injustices that such absence constantly breeds.

This also makes the Japanese shoddy attempts at 国際化 (internationalization) sound utterly ludicrous and insincere. Most of them seem absolutely incapable of understanding the reciprocity and openness to others that a genuine cosmopolitanism demands.

And how on earth can one take such people seriously and show any goodwill towards them?

Ivan P. Hall, spot on:

The truth of the matter is that the Japanese do not want non-Japanese physically present among them for any length of time, embedded as individuals in the working institutions of their society. As short-term feted guests or curiosities, yes; but not as fixed human furniture. Permanent intrusions are viewed by the Japanese as intolerable threats to their value system, their social relations, their way of life. . . .

What has been missing from Japan’s historical conceptualization of itself in respect to both the West and Asia is a capacity to think in terms of “horizontal” relationships among equals – a greater sensitivity to universal human traits and needs and interests, overriding the rigid verticalities of superior-inferior power relationships and the precipitous intercultural chasms that still dominate the Japanese view of the outside world. Having climbed to the top of the pile [my comment: it now seems to be slipping down towards the bottom, though!], Japan has difficulty deciding where to go next, since it cannot imagine simply going sideways – toward a relaxed collegiality.

In short, what prevents Japan’s assumption of an enlightened world leadership role is, more than anything else, its overblown particularism. Great powers in human history have all predicated their mandate (however presumptuous or self-serving) on some sort of universalism. That goes for the great imperial purveyors of political pax – be it America, Britain, ancient Rome, or even the perverted communist universalism of the old Soviet bloc – as well as for the major cultural players like France, with its self-appointed mission civilisatrice, and the Chinese with their superb self-confidence over the ages that the barbarians at the gates would eventually succumb to the overpowering charm of Chinese culture.

Indeed, one of the most striking features of contemporary, hitech Japan is the persistent Japanese fear of the adoption of their own culture by others, an attitude that contrasts most starkly with that of the French. A foreigner in France who does not know the language, or handles it poorly, has traditionally been persona non grata – precisely the reverse of Japan, where the fluent foreigner seems threatening and intrusive, and the complete linguistic and cultural ingénue is welcomed with open arms and sighs of relief. In France a reasonable mastery of the French language and culture by a resident foreign artist, scholar or journalist usually leads to professional and personal treatment no worse than that which Frenchmen accord one another. In Japan anxiety over the acculturation of others to their culture – together with the conviction that it cannot be done – leads most Japanese to view the effort less as a compliment or first step toward bonding than as an unwanted prying into their national psyche.

Unfortunately, the evidence to date suggests the difficulty of convincing the Japanese that their great influence in the world today makes reciprocal access to their society all but mandatory. Most, instead, when pressed, will elevate their exclusionism to a cultural principle requiring tolerance and acceptance by others on the basis of cultural relativism. True respect, in other words, means Japanese respect for American openness, and American respect for Japanese exclusivity. The demands for intellectual access represent Western absolutes, a new form of cultural imperialism. Heads I win, tails you lose. The economical and political implications of this insular rubric are mind-boggling, but that is the bottom line of Japan’s pledges of “internationalization.” (pp. 178-79; added emphases mine)

An intellectual -- and cultural -- closed shop, no doubt.

Bless 'em all

2011-06-24T19:40:00.004+09:00

My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter—with infinite subtlety—spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go,—and tell stories of me to people whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet; and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them. They help me to maintain the isolation indispensable to quiet regularity of work. . . . Blessed be my enemies, and forever honored all those that hate me !

--Lafcadio Hearn, Letter to Ernest Fenollosa, December 1898, cited in The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Elizabeth Bisland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), vol. 3, p. 147.

And how could I possibly disagree -- there's no more productive place on earth to make enemies indeed.

la donna è mobile...

2011-06-23T18:52:00.026+09:00

La donna è mobile
Qual piuma al vento,
Muta d'accento — e di pensiero.
Sempre un amabile,
Leggiadro viso,
In pianto o in riso, — è menzognero.

È sempre misero
Chi a lei s'affida,
Chi le confida — mal cauto il cuore!

--The Duke of Mantua in Verdi's Rigoletto.

(Woman is fickle
Like a feather in the wind,
She changes her voice — and her mind.
Always sweet,
Lovely face,
In tears or in laughter — a liar.
Always miserable
Is he who trusts her,
He who confides in her — his unwary heart!)

* * *

In time of departures, thinking of arrivals.

Anticipating, musing, imagining.

Because the moment of arrival -- home, or somewhere that creates ties between you and a place you may come to call 'home' -- is so much more heartening and full of promise, despite everything.

Yet all these comings and goings, as well as the comments from friends on my unabated willingness to keep in transit, return me to the thought ever so often. The archetypal image of Man's mobility and Woman's immobility, and how this crucially configures the sexual relations between them in departure and arrival.

Travel is eroticised through and through.

He travels far and wide -- and he arrives, conquers, penetrates a stable female ground: home, an island, a walled garden, an interior, bounded space.

Security.

He departs again -- or desires to, because she keeps him within, confines, devours him, Calypso-like, Circe-like.

Captivity, fear.

Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus und Kalypso, 1883.

"She wants you to be her prisoner,
She wishes to have your body
For herself, not even your heart
To be free."
"Surely," he answered,
I agree, I've no objections.
I want to be her prisoner."
"And so you'll be, by this hand
I lay on your shoulder"
......................
And so she led him off,
Worrying him a bit . . . and giving him hints
Of the prison he was going to.
What lover escapes his prison?
She was right, calling it a prison:
Whoever's in love is no longer free.

--Chretien de Troyes, Ywain: The Knight of the Lion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 59-60.

Double standards, the usual story. Bah.

But what if she is the one who travels unbounded? The established order is disrupted, reversed, moral suspicion arises -- hers is the nightflight of the witch, fantasy travel.

Danger, fear.

Wherever she arrives, she is not welcomed.

And thus the journey continues.

the rise of the academic bully

2011-06-22T15:59:00.016+09:00

Warfare is common and no less deadly because it is polite.

--J. Victor Baldrige (cited as epigraph to Faculty Incivility)

Dark times. I read the book a couple of years ago, shortly after it was published, in an attempt to make sense of certain behaviours whose increasing frequency seemed to me to suggest a disturbing pattern and a sea-change in human relations.

Little did I realise then that I would come full face with it as, having been forced to emigrate in search of an academic position (non-existent in my country), I struggled to survive in another culture that generally treats foreign scholars with the utmost contempt.

Again, it is not that Japanese universities are alone in this appalling rise of academic incivility and camouflaged aggression. However, certain cultural traits – namely the overvaluation of consensus (和) and the mechanisms of social control developed to suppress criticism and dissent as well as to manipulate or hide information – make it more covert, insidious, and yet no less deadly. As the authors of Faculty Incivility argue:

To keep cultural acts hidden is a subtle form of incivility; secrecy permits control, and control contributes to a culture of incivility. . . . A façade of social order and control often masks an underlying current of the general rudeness that prevails throughout society in general and the academy in particular. (p. 5)

It would take far too long to summarise the intricate argument developed by Twale and De Luca in the book, but since someone else has done it quite nicely in a review available on Amazon.com, I take the liberty of reproducing it here:

Some journalists . . . have ascertained that today . . . selfishness, disrespect, rudeness, and self-absorption are on the rise and incivility has become a serious societal problem. Since academy represents an image of society, the incivility amongst academics is dominantly visible. Generally, civility increases amongst individuals as they age but it rarely increases as a result of educational level. Uncivil acts occur among academics more often than one would like to admit. According to the authors, people bully and aggress others because of their personal insecurities, lack of self-confidence, envy, and inability to cope with the challenges of life. A hostile workplace often is the result of a power imbalance that leads to aggression, and workplace incivility. Further, when silent treatment, micromanagement, demotion, being given less responsibility , gossip, overloading with work, indulging in self-promotion, harboring rumors, breaking confidentiality, playing favorites, ignoring positive contributions, backstabbing, scapegoting, marginalizing, dismissing others' valid opinions and ideas, consistently interrupting, envy, and lies persist over a longtime, a bully or mob culture begins to develop and flourish in the academy. In some departments, bystanders are aware of what is going on but usually do nothing to support the target(s) for fear of retaliation. Through careful manipulation, bullies who are usually "charmers" and liars may acquire roles and responsibilities of a leader such as department chair or even dean. The way academy conducts its business, mobbing or group-bullying through committee decisions camouflages and insulates the real bully or singular instigator.

The authors point out that academic life can become competitive to the point of being dysfunctional. The individual faculty competes for space in top-tier journals, most publications per year, biggest offices with windows, grant money, and the most golden status in the administration's eyes. Further, in academy, at times, selected faculty members reach the status of urban legend. The value of their credentials is so inflated by themselves or administration that students and distant colleagues may believe that they walk on water and gain legendry reputation that is more pomposity and pretence than actual value and substance.

In sum, the book presents an insider's view of the sad tale of academy where individuals with doctorates [and sometimes even without them!] proclaim godlike status for themselves. They engage in underhanded acts of brutality towards one another usually unheard and unseen by the general public. Ironically, most outsiders to the academy think of it as a peaceful, nourishing haven where scholarly minds ardently pursue the quality life of the intellect. The authors conclude by emphasizing that incivilities and the bully culture of the academy are inconsistent with the normative expectations of civil society. They make suggestions on how the incivilities of the professorate and the bully culture of academy can be curtailed. This book is an eye opener.

In a dog-eat-dog world where self-absorption, unscrupulousness and philistinism have become the rule of the day and the privileged instruments of career advancement, there seems to be little protection or hope for those exiles who are in academia because they still believe it is a place where ideas may count and intellectual life flourish.

A belief that is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Some, witnessing the gradual devaluation of humane inquiry in an academia now entirely at the service of the status quo and a ruthless managerialism, have already proclaimed ‘the death of universities’. I tend to agree, more and more. Also, from what I have observed here over the past four years, I cannot but fully agree with the view that Japanese universities in particular are 'a huge tatemae erected against the very idea of education' (a quote from Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan, if I'm not mistaken) – and of scholarship, I should add.

Once again, Japan leads the way -- in the worst possible manner.

barbarism begins at home

2011-06-22T00:07:00.005+09:00

A recent chat with a friend on the extraordinary male chauvinism still prevalent in this society has brought back memories of an old song, I don't know why. Its original context -- corporal punishment, a recurrent theme in so many songs by The Smiths -- is wholly different, but it does make sense to me in other contemporary contexts as well.

There are indeed all sorts of ways, bodily or otherwise, to punish and put unruly girls in their proper place.

And, yes, here too barbarism begins at home...

Unruly girls

Who will not settle down

They must be taken in hand

A crack on the head
Is what you get for not asking
And a crack on the head
Is what you get for asking

...........................

A crack on the head

Is just what you get

Why? Because of who you are

And a crack on the head

Is just what you get

Why? Because of what you are

A crack on the head

Because of those things you said

Things you said

The things you did

--The Smiths, from 'Barbarism begins at home', Meat Is Murder (1985).

and the parting is sweet

2011-06-21T00:12:00.005+09:00

The day is fast approaching, at last, and you can turn back no longer indeed.

Such an immense relief, as though you have just been released from jail.

A life sentence.

Yet such an immense pain too, when the first goodbyes & farewell parties begin and you find no appropriate words to say to the few good people you have made friends with over the years.

Small islands of hope and affection in this most inhospitable, hopeless of places.

Whether our paths will ever cross again I do not know, but I will cherish forever those great moments we spent together.

They alone compensate for all the disappointments, betrayals, hardships endured here.

* * *

for my dear Shinobazu study group friends

In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,
Whither and why I know not nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air.

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye,
And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.

-- Stevie Smith, Tender Only to One in Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 129.

a sacred storied centuries-long procession

2011-06-19T01:27:00.007+09:00

The recent nuclear catastrophe has compelled me to revisit this little known epic which tells an archetypal story that has ever so often populated the primitivist modern imagination: a community struck by a man-made disaster survives only by shedding its hubris and returning to elemental life-patterns.

In a world that seems to have lost any sense of cosmic scale, reading a poem cycle that features such a great sweep of time, stretching back to ancient history and to the recesses of legend and myth, is an uncanny, unfamilarising experience. One gets the rare sense of a community whole, portrayed from its early beginnings, sailing west out of Norway in the ninth century, through Reformation and annexation to Scotland, and painfully struggling for material improvement over the centuries -- until the hubris of progress and materialism, after having drained the land of its people and left only ruins and the detritus of modern commodities in its wake, ultimately leads to nuclear holocaust. The few people who survive the disaster return, ‘unchanged yet terribly changed’, to their original settlement and occupation at the dawn of time:

‘The great song must begin all over again, very far back, beyond the oxen and millstones and bronze throats of agriculture’.

Not that I can fully endorse the view that only through ecological apocalypse and a return to some lost origin can the human race survive. Yet there are moments, like the present one, when I cannot but sympathise with this escapist metaphor that pervades Fishermen with Ploughs and all of George Mackay Brown’s work for that matter: the small island as that quintessential imaginary place one must get to in order to rebuild one’s life, to reinvent oneself -- and to forget all the sad, terrible things human beings can do to each other and to their communities.

Hoy, Orkney Islands, Scotland
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/314858

A ship called Dove sails west out of Norway in the ninth century carrying a tribe of fisher people. Their god, the beautiful Balder, is dead. They are in flight from starvation, pestilence, turbulent neighbours (what the poet calls, in the shorthand of myth, the Dragon). But also they are compelled west by the promise of a new way of life: agriculture. The cargo in their hold is a jar of seed corn. Fate, blind and all-wise, has woven their myth about them. Now the same Fate sits at the helm.

That is the theme of the opening section of the poem.

The people settle in a valley called Rackwick in the Orkney island of Hoy. Their slow evolution through the centuries occupies the next four sections; how the climate of their existence changed with such things as the Reformation, annexation to Scotland, foreign wars, compulsory education. But essentially their lives were unchanged; the same people appear and reappear through many generations - the laird, the crofter fisherman, the shepherd, the tinker, the beachcomber, and the women who watch the sea with stony patience; all are caught up in 'the wheel of bread' that is at once brutal and holy.

There is a slow sure improvement in the material conditions. Why does the wheel slow down and stop (Part V)? By the middle of this century the valley was almost completely depopulated. Perhaps (the poet argues) the quality of life grows poorer as Progress multiplies its gifts on a simple community. The dwellers in islands are drawn to the new altars. The valley is drained of its people. The Rackwick croft ruins are strewn with syrup tins, medicine bottles, bicycle frames, tattered novels, rubber boots, portraits of Queen Victoria.

In Part VI the Dragon, black pentecostal fire, falls on a great city. Once again a few people escape by boat. They return to the valley. Their most precious possession is the sacred corn sack. They make themselves farmers and fishermen. The women return, unchanged yet terribly changed. But the wheel has been wrenched from the axle-tree. The great song must begin all over again, very far back, beyond the oxen and millstones and bronze throats of agriculture.

--George Mackay Brown, Fishermen with Ploughs (1971) in The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, eds. Archie Bevan and Brian Murray (London: John Murray, 2005), pp. 89-90.

the erosion of character

2011-06-17T00:02:00.024+09:00

The important sense of character. Until recently people had character, and you felt that very strongly. . . . Their word is a commitment and a pledge, that you don't just drop when it becomes advantageous to yourself to do so. When they pledge their word they keep it. So I began to think that when people have nothing to identify themselves with they have character. This is a way poor people have a noble character. . . . A kind of inner strength, integrity. . . . There is a sense of character in people who have no other way in which to construct an identity. It seems to me now in our consumer culture we construct our identity with things. We construct our identity with collections, with garb, you know with little things we have in our home, our jazz collection or collection of cars or whatever.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'Foreign Bodies: Interview with Alphonso Lingis' (1996) in Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, eds. Alexander E. Hooke and Wolfgang W. Fuchs (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, 2003), pp. 94-95.

* * *

I have been thinking about this at length ever since I set my feet here, in the attempt to make sense of spineless, mindless behaviours whose recurrence and pervasiveness puzzle and, increasingly, depress me. And the more I get to know, in the skin and the bone, the workings of this society, the more I become convinced that there must be something in it that is set up to systematically nip in the bud any manifestation of character or integrity.

The education -- or perhaps I should say indoctrination -- system may partly account for the phenomenon, but it does not explain everything, since foreigners who have never been exposed to it all too often develop the very same two-facedness once they acquire a stake in Japan and become intent on surviving here, at whatever cost. A cynical adaptation strategy, no doubt.

A friend who was born here but spent many years abroad once told me that this insidious spiritlessness among so many younger generations (that is, those who did not experience the War and its hardships, having grown up in an affluent Japan) may be due to the fact that acquisitiveness and mass consumerism have taken the place of once time-honoured spiritual and personal values, leaving nothing but an appalling emptiness in their wake.

While I tend to be wary of over-simplifying and nostalgic explanations, there is indeed something -- a complex array of factors -- that is eroding this society at its very core and making any meaningful, trustworthy human relationships simply impossible here.

Unbreathable.

Japan is certainly not alone in this disturbing tendency, but is well ahead of most other societies in this respect. They will catch up, for sure, but where will Japan and the Japanese be then...?

NOTE (23:30): After reading the text above, a Japanese friend, one of those rare souls who has the capacity to look at his own culture with a critical eye and who doesn't take criticism personally, warns me that I need to be careful about my moral assumptions. That is to say, I cannot take for granted concepts such as character or integrity, because, he tells me, they simply do not exist, or at least have wholly distinct connotations, in a culture that does not value (and actually represses and frowns upon) 個性, individuality, the very core of Western moral philosophy (or, as Donald Richie once put it, 'Western man's pride and pain'). Even words such as 人格 (personality) and 尊厳 (dignity) are fairly recent in Japanese vocabulary, or so it seems.

And here we go again: how is it possible to find any common ground and establish long-lasting, satisfactory friendships here when what 'we', stuffy old Westerners, consider essential, integral (and therefore non-negotiable) parts of the concept of friendship -- character, trust, candour, constancy, generosity, loyalty e.g. -- just do not seem to exist in this culture?

O, the endless pain and fascination of incommensurability. All that is left at the end of the day, I guess.

the erotics of trust (4)

2011-06-15T17:46:00.001+09:00

To find beauty, love, joy, and reasons to care for and trust others in the most improbable places and times, in the most difficult circumstances, amidst the squalor, on the move, among people who have nothing in common -- is there a more meaningful, true-to-life basis on which to erect a whole philosophy?

And to be sensible enough not to take oneself too seriously, and to be able to laugh at life's endless absurdities, at the frailty of one's body and desires.

* * *

How foolish two people get when they become lovers -- how infantile their speech, how naive their sentiments, how frivolous their behavior! How awkward, how ridiculous are the gropings and thrashings of people copulating, how empty the aimless repetitions of caresses, how mindless the compulsive buildup toward orgasm! We lock the door, pull the drapes. In sex theaters, all the movements are coreographed to be graceful and synchronized; nothing is left to the directness of lustful urges. When in the force of momentary grabbings and repulsions they do show through, we are repelled and embarrassed: suddenly we see what we do in our lovemaking. We free ourselves from our embarrassment by giggling, and outside the theater guffawing over what we saw.

But when we spy on others and cannot help laughing, this laughter spreads through our body and reverberates in dissolute and wanton impulses. Telling and hearing dirty jokes do not make us superior and aloof from lustful urges; they make us sink into our sensual nature. In laughter we are transparent to one another, the peals of laughter not expressions of an I or of a you, spreading like waves about a pebble dropped into a lake, with no more individuality than waves.

The lust that disconnects the body from its tasks and its seriousness and releases it on the languorous and agitated body of another is nothing but the laughter of that body. The throbs, the convulsive repetitions, the upheaval, the absurd pleasure of the bodies in lascivious excitement are the laughter not apart from, but in those bodies. They have locked the door and pulled the drapes so that their laughter may be uninhibited, one and undivided. Orgasm is the vortex of the generalized laughter of the bodies.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'Love Junkies' in Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 119-20.

home and away

2011-06-13T22:27:00.004+09:00

Once you are compelled, for personal or professional reasons, to spend the rest of your life abroad, from place to place, land to land, you cannot help wondering. How many people are there who make you feel at home in the absence of any semblance of home?

So very few, especially here, especially now, when time-honoured forms of communicating with the other and creating community have been replaced by standardised, shallow forms of self-fashioning and ego gyms for narcissists.

Sic transit gloria mundi...

* * *

The home base is a pole of repose and departure. The zone of the intimate is a pole of warmth and tranquility that we keep sight of as we advance into the stretches of the alien and that our nomadic wanderings gravitate back to.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'The Intimate and the Alien' in The Imperative.

But in most cases, we have to appeal to others to make ourselves at home. We appeal to the others to help us be at home in the desert, in the rain forest, in the tropics, in the tundra, and in the ocean. And in childhood, and in the strange nocturnal regions of the erotic, and in the shadow of death that advances.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'The Elemental that Faces' in The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.

the erotics of trust (3)

2011-06-12T19:27:00.000+09:00

Hate can be cold, ingenious, devious. Love is lawless, volatile, and violent. The adoration that breaks out of us violates our integrity and breaks up our individuality. To be smitten by love is not to be simply wounded, but shattered.

In heading off to the back alleys and wastelands where our heads are exposed to the blows of chance we know in exhilaration what we have received by chance, what we are by chance. Love is abruptly ignited in impasses and traps; it is the combustion of interpenetrating dreams of bodies collapsed and dysfunctional. It is the incandescence of luck in the most squalid, the most sordid circumstances, the worst luck.

Shit happens.

Love attaches to the abyss. It is hate that circumscribes its own identity. Tell me whom you hate and I will tell you who you are. Tell me whom you love and I will know as little about you as before.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'Love Junkies' in Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 109-24.

a disease of the spirit

2011-06-11T12:23:00.013+09:00

And yet another eminent writer puts his finger on the chronic disorder affecting -- and gradually poisoning, destroying -- Japanese society from within, and which often seems to me, as an outsider, a sort of collective schizophrenia: a strangely generalised inability to link thought, emotion and behaviour, leading to withdrawal from reality and human relationships into fantasy and delusion.*

A disturbing inability, also, to learn from past mistakes and tragedies, as well as to really respect and feel solidarity with the suffering of others -- that is, those outside their closed little groups or tribes.

Heartbreaking, in a country that could have had it all.

* * *

Novelist Murakami slams nuclear policy
Kyodo

BARCELONA, Spain — Novelist Haruki Murakami criticized his country's pursuit of nuclear energy Thursday during his acceptance speech at the 2011 International Catalunya Prize ceremony in Barcelona, describing the ongoing crisis at the quake-crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant as "a mistake committed by our very own hands."

Murakami said Japan, as the only nation to have experienced the devastation and suffering from radiation through World War II atomic bombings, should have continued saying "no" to nuclear power.

Murakami, the first Japanese to receive the prize given annually by the autonomous Catalan government, said the €80,000 (approximately ¥9.3 million) prize money would be donated to the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami as well as those affected by the nuclear crisis.

"The accident at the Fukushima (No. 1) nuclear power plant is the second major nuclear detriment that the Japanese people have experienced," he said in Japanese. "However, this time it was not a bomb being dropped upon us, but a mistake committed by our very own hands."

The Japanese people, having "learned through the sacrifice of the hibakusha just how badly radiation leaves scars on the world and human wellbeing," should have continued to stand firm in rejecting nuclear power, the novelist, clad in a gray blazer, said.

"Yet those who questioned (the safety of) nuclear power were marginalized as being 'unrealistic dreamers,' " while the Japanese government and utility companies put priority on "efficiency" and "convenience" and turned the quake-prone nation into the world's third-largest nuclear-powered country, he added.

Japan should have pursued on a national level the development of effective energy sources to replace nuclear power. Doing so could have been a way of taking collective responsibility for the atomic bomb victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said.

On a more upbeat note, Murakami said he was confident Japan would rise again to rebuild after realigning its mind and spirit, just as it has survived on many occasions throughout its history.

==============================================

* I'm drawing on the OED comprehensive definition of schizophrenia: a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmention.

lament, by proxy

2011-06-11T01:11:00.003+09:00

. . . at one of those moments when the sheer banality and shallowness of people who put on airs just become too much to bear. Way too much.

* * *

O love, in a world of shuffled papers
and cheap haircuts, your honeysuckle-
scented locks, your locked and gripped
tongue will always be delight to me. In
an alien world of distant characters,
you'll always be inside the dangerous
part of my forever welling willing heart.

--Barry MacSweeney, from 'Pearl Against the Barbed Wire' in Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe), p. 250.

Japan admits it was unprepared for nuclear disaster

2011-06-08T11:03:00.009+09:00

Or: how the Japanese are always prepared -- painstakingly, obsessively -- for everything, except for what really matters.

It just can't be helped.

* * *

Japan Admits Unreadiness for Disaster
By AP / MARI YAMAGUCHI

TIME, Tuesday, Jun. 07, 2011

(TOKYO) — Japan admitted Tuesday it was unprepared for a severe nuclear accident like the tsunami-caused Fukushima disaster and said damage to the reactors and radiation leakage were worse than it previously thought.

In a report being submitted to the U.N. nuclear agency, the government also acknowledged reactor design flaws and a need for greater independence for the country's nuclear regulators. (Fukushima: Twice As Bad As Thought)

The report said the nuclear fuel in three reactors likely melted through the inner containment vessels, not just the core, after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant's power and cooling systems. Fuel in the Unit 1 reactor started melting hours earlier than previously estimated.

The 750-page report, compiled by Japan's nuclear emergency taskforce, factors in a preliminary evaluation by a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency and was to be submitted to the IAEA as requested. "In light of the lessons learned from the accident, Japan has recognized that a fundamental revision of its nuclear safety preparedness and response is inevitable," the report said. It also recommended a national debate on nuclear power.

The report said the flaws in basic reactor design included the venting system for the containment vessels and the location of spent fuel cooling pools high in the buildings, which resulted in leaks of radioactive water that hampered repair work. It also said the vents lacked filtering capability, causing contamination of the air, and the vent line interferred with connecting pipes.

Desperate attempts by plant workers to vent pressure to prevent the containment vessels from bursting repeatedly failed. Experts have said the delay in venting was a primary cause of explosions that further damaged the reactors and spewed huge amounts of radiation into the air.

The melted cores and radiation leaks have irradiated workers, including two control room operators whose exposures have exceeded the government limit. Lack of protection for plant workers early in the crisis and inadequate information about radiation leaks were also a problem, nuclear crisis taskforce director Goshi Hosono said. (Lessons from Fukushima)

The report acknowledged a lack of independence for Japan's nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, and pledged to improve safety oversight, as recommended in the IAEA report last week.

The report comes a day after NISA said twice as much radiation may have been released into the air as earlier estimated. That would be about one-sixth of the amount released at Chernobyl instead of the earlier estimate of one-tenth.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2076171,00.html

NOTE (6/19): Also worth reading 'Fukushima: It's much worse than you think'.

is the Earth trying to tell us something?

2011-06-06T23:25:00.005+09:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/05/puyehue-volcano-chile-erupts-evacuation

Another volcano eruption, this time around in Chile, prompts mass evacuation. After this series of deadly natural disasters and extreme weather -- earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes -- in recent years, I wonder if anyone in her/his right mind can still believe this is all a coincidence and that none of these events are closely related to the Earth's disrupted ecological balance.

While I certainly do not believe in apocalyptic prophecies for a second, I do give credit to those who have been thoroughly researching such phenomena for years and warning of what climate change might have in store for us -- and much sooner than we would like to think.

Here is one of those people worth listening to (in an article written in 2007).

I'm not so sure, however, as MacGuire seems to be, that there is really still enough time to listen to the Earth's wake-up call. What if things are already well beyond the tipping point, as some others seem to believe?

* * *

The Earth fights back

Never mind higher temperatures, climate change has a few nastier surprises in store. Bill McGuire says we can also expect more earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and tsunamis

Bill McGuire
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 August 2007

Unlike most apparently intractable problems, which have a tendency to go away when examined closely and analytically, the climate change predicament just seems to get bigger and scarier the more we learn about it.

Now we discover that not only are the oceans and the atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms, floods and ever-climbing sea levels, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too.

Looking back to other periods in our planet's history when the climate was swinging about wildly, most notably during the last ice age, it appears that far more than the weather was affected. The solid earth also became restless, with an increase in volcanic activity, earthquakes, giant submarine landslides and tsunamis. At the rate climate change is accelerating, there is every prospect that we will see a similar response from the planet, heralding not just a warmer future but also a fiery one.

Several times in the past couple of million years the ice left its polar fastnesses
and headed towards the equator, covering much of the world's continents in ice sheets over a kilometre thick, and sucking water from the oceans in order to do so. As a consequence, at times when the ice was most dominant, global sea levels were as much as 130m lower than they are today; sufficient to expose land bridges between the UK and the continent and Alaska and Russia.

Each time the ice retreated, sea levels shot up again, sometimes at rates as high as several metres a century. In the mid 1990s, as part of a study funded by the European Union, we discovered that in the Mediterranean region there was a close correlation between how quickly sea levels went up and down during the last ice age and the level of explosive activity at volcanoes in Italy and Greece.

The link was most obvious following the retreat of the glaciers around 18,000 years ago, after which sea levels jumped back up to where they are today, triggering a 300% increase in explosive volcanic activity in the Mediterranean in doing so. Further evidence for a flurry of volcanic action at this time comes from cores extracted from deep within the Greenland ice sheet, which yield increased numbers of volcanic dust and sulphate layers from eruptions across the northern hemisphere, if not the entire planet.

But how can rising sea levels cause volcanoes to erupt? The answer lies in the enormous mass of the water pouring into the ocean basins from the retreating ice sheets. The addition of over a hundred metres depth of water to the continental margins and marine island chains, where over 60% of the world's active volcanoes reside, seems to be sufficient to load and bend the underlying crust.

This in turn squeezes out any magma that happens to be hanging around waiting for an excuse to erupt. It may well be that a much smaller rise can trigger an eruption if a volcano is critically poised and ready to blow.

Eruptions of Pavlof volcano in Alaska, for example, tend to occur during the winter months when, for meteorological reasons, the regional sea level is barely 30cm (12in) higher than during the summer. If other volcanic systems are similarly sensitive then we could be faced with an escalating burst of volcanic activity as anthropogenic climate change drives sea levels ever upwards.

Notwithstanding the recent prediction by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that sea levels in 2100 will be a measly 18-59cm (7-23in) higher, Jim Hansen – eminent climate scientist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies – warns that we could see a one to two metre rise this century and several more in the next. Other climate scientists too, forecast substantially greater rises than the IPCC, whose prediction excludes any consideration of future changes in polar ice sheet behaviour. A worst-case scenario could see a return to conditions that prevailed around 14,000 years ago, when sea levels rose 13.5 metres (44ft) - the height of a three-storey house - in the space of about 300 years.

Such a dramatic rise in coming centuries would clearly spell catastrophe for our civilisation, with low-lying regions across the planet vanishing rapidly beneath the waves. Just a one metre (3.28ft) rise would threaten one third of the world's agricultural land, two metres (6.56ft) would make the Thames flood barrier redundant and four metres (13.12ft) would drown the city of Miami, leaving it 37 miles (60km) off the US coast.

As sea levels climb higher so a response from the world's volcanoes becomes ever more likely, and perhaps not just from volcanoes. Loading of the continental margins could activate faults, triggering increased numbers of earthquakes, which in turn could spawn giant submarine landslides. Such a scenario is believed to account for the gigantic Storegga Slide, which sloughed off the Norwegian coast around 8,000 years ago, sending a tsunami more than 20 metres (66ft) high in places across the Shetland Isles and onto the east coast of Scotland. Should Greenland be released from its icy carapace, the underlying crust will start to bob back up, causing earthquakes well capable of shaking off the huge piles of glacial sediment that have accumulated around its margins and sending tsunamis across the North Atlantic.

The Earth is responding as a single, integrated system to climate change driven by human activities. Global warming is not just a matter of warmer weather, more floods or stronger hurricanes, but is also a wake-up call to Terra Firma. It may be no coincidence that one outcome of increased volcanic activity is likely to be a period of falling temperatures, as a veil of volcanic dust and gas reduces the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface. Maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something. It really would be worth listening before it is too late.

Bill McGuire is the director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre. His book Surviving Armageddon: Solutions For a Threatened Planet is published by OUP. His next book, What Everyone Should Know About the Future of Our Planet: And What We Can Do About It, is published by Orion in January next year.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

a certain slant of light

2011-06-05T04:47:00.023+09:00

They are but fleeting, evanescent 'spots of time', yet can so overwhelm you when they happen, because the unbearable truth they contain is only made bearable in this way --

By clearing a lucent passage through the narrow and ill-lit corridors of the moment.

The truth to which poetry alone gives access -- those 'necessary and difficult things', as Italo Calvino once put it: realising the proportions of life, the place of love in it, its force and rhythm, the place of death, time, loss, sadness, irony.

Life-defining, difficult beauty.

And the musician-poets who consistently capture and give a shape to this experience are so very few in the anguished dying world we live in. Those who do not compromise and remain experimental, risk-taking, but also giving, generous to the others they help and welcome into their projects.

I guess that's what distinguishes a true artist from a self-absorbed fake or failure. This capacity for remaining obstinately open to themselves and to others, vulnerable yet ever-evolving, unfolding always in astonishing ways.

The most beautiful voice in the world indeed.

An older, shorter version of 'A certain slant of light', now part of
David Sylvian's new album Died in the Wool (May 2011).

Music: Sylvian/Bamg/Honore Words: Emily Dickinson

A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
’T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ’t is like the distance
On the look of death.

--Emily Dickinson, from The Complete Poems, Part Two: Nature, LXXXII.

the marvels and mysteries of Japanese mentality, again

2011-06-03T22:30:00.022+09:00

TEPCO execs bowing and apologising for the nth time since the 3/11 disaster;
(or: how the Japanese seldom feel sorry or apologise for what they really should)
http://www.businessandleadership.com/leadership/item/30213-tepco-president-resigns-as

Instead of looking at the mysterious dangers of nuclear power, we should be looking at the mysterious, and now it seems dangerous, workings of the Japanese mentality and bureaucracy....

The Fukushima disaster should be forcing a lot more people in Japan to think a lot more deeply about the way their society operates.

--Gregory Clark, The Japan Times, June 3, 2011.

Amazing indeed how often, all too often in modern history the Japanese insular mindset has gone on automatic pilot and blindly headed towards self-destruction, heedless of the consequences. It just doesn't seem to know how to stop.

As a longtime foreign resident, what truly astounds me is how the Japanese remain so mistrustful of and, deep down, hostile to foreigners (especially when the latter lay bare the flaws and absurdities they would rather keep hidden from the world).

With their complacent bureaucracy, their inept and corrupt politicians, their apathetic people, their aloof, self-absorbed intelligentsia, and their third-rate education system, why the hell should the Japanese so badly need outside enemies?

As scapegoats for their own spiritlessness and lack of moral fiber?

* * *

The Fukushima disaster and Japan Disincorporated
By GREGORY CLARK
The Japan Times, Friday, June 3, 2011

The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant disaster is being used to convince the world that nuclear energy generation is inherently dangerous, especially in earthquake-prone Japan.

But the two other nuclear plants facing the Japan quake area — Fukushima No. 2 and Onagawa — came though fairly unscathed even though the force of the quake well exceeded the level they had been built to withstand.

The disaster at Fukushima No. 1 was due almost entirely to an act of unbelievable stupidity — placing a nuclear plant with its emergency power and pumping equipment on a coastline protected by a mere 5.7-meter sea wall in an area with a far-from-distant history of double-digit-size tsunamis.

Admittedly the plant had been designed mainly by the U.S. General Electric Co., which, one assumes, would not have been quite as tsunami-conscious as its Japanese partners. But why did the Japanese side say or do nothing either then or later — despite frequent warnings of tsunami vulnerability, one reportedly only three years before the fatal accident?

Instead of looking at the mysterious dangers of nuclear power, we should be looking at the mysterious, and now it seems dangerous, workings of the Japanese mentality and bureaucracy.

True, when it came to the nuts and bolts of nuclear power generation the Japanese industry seems to have done as well as most in building plants that can operate with reasonable safety records. What few seemed to realize was the damage that could result from two serious cultural flaws. One is the way Japan's tight groupist consciousness prevents the inflow of needed ideas and advice from outside. Tokyo Electric Power Co. (the firm holding the monopoly for electricity production and supply in the Kanto and neighboring areas) was, like quite a few other firms and industry groups in Japan, proud to think of itself and its industry as a mura (village) — self-contained, self-sufficient and able to fight off any intrusion by outsiders.

The result was the dangerous complacency that I saw so alarmingly in my several years on several nuclear industry committees, and that Prime Minister Naoto Kan correctly described as the "myth of nuclear safety."

The other cultural flaw is Japan's ingrained aversion to contingency planning — thinking about the worst that can happen and planning to avoid it.

Writing in Japan's leading economic newspaper, Nihon Keizai, senior staff writer Yasuhiko Ota quotes a top METI official as saying: "It is regarded as immoral for a company responsible for the safety of a facility to assume that the worst could happen. People tend to criticize such companies by questioning why they would contemplate such possibilities."

This is an extraordinary situation in a modern 21st-century society — a primitive, preternatural, bad joss fear that thinking about the worst will somehow create the worst. Obviously it should have no place in the nuclear industry, even allowing for the industry fear that any admission of weaknesses would strengthen the anti-nuclear lobby.

Admittedly, the nuclear power industry has also had to contend with an environment lobby determined to keep the coastline free of concrete barriers.

The Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka has had to be closed down mainly because it too lacks adequate tsunami barriers along its attractive beach front.

The anti-public works lobby add to the drumbeat with the slogan "welfare before concrete." (What are they saying now when they discover that the lack of concrete to protect Japan's fishing ports has done very severe damage to the welfare of the many good people in some of those ports?) In the case of Fukushima, they did not need much more concrete anyway. All the Tepco people had to do was move emergency equipment to higher land away from the ocean front. The refusal to do this, or even think about it, verges on the criminal.

The Fukushima disaster should be forcing a lot more people in Japan to think a lot more deeply about the way their society operates.

When the crisis hit, those well-paid, elite-educated Tepco semi-bureaucrats (the company was notorious for its close links to the government) could do little more than make constant ritual bows of apology; they left everything to their dedicated subordinates to handle.

The Tepco president, in effect, went to bed for some weeks; he could not stand the strain. The one thing they all seemed able to get right was the angle of their bows and the placement of hands along impeccable trouser creases. The government has now appointed a committee headed by a Japanese history professor to advise on cleanup and plans for the future.

I discovered what the professor knows about disaster relief as a member of his 1995 post-Kobe earthquake committee, where I was told that if helicopters had been used to drop water on the house fires threatening to engulf the entire city, the people trapped below might have been crushed by the weight of the water. The primitive logic seemed to be that it's better to be burned alive by fate than be hurt by a deliberate act of officialdom.

Today, the government, big business and the history professor fret over the official debt problem as an obstacle to funding disaster recovery efforts. Here, too, Japanese "village" thinking seems quite unable to cope with the fiscal tsunami about to arrive. All they can propose is raising taxes — thus further cutting spending and slowing the economy — and slashing tax revenues, which will, as in the Koizumi years, add to the very debt that is supposed to be cut.

Meanwhile, the conservative, stuck-in-the-mud planners refuse even to consider the simple solution to the official debt problem recommended by some competent outsiders, monetization, by which either the Bank of Japan buys noninterest-bearing government bonds or Tokyo issues its own currency, as Japan did so brilliantly in the past when it pulled itself out of the 1930s' Great Depression well ahead of others.

I recently attended a news conference and had a chance to ask Economy and Fiscal Policy Minister Kaoru Yosano why Japan could not do this in an economy where inflation — the usual problem with monetization — seemed unlikely. All he could do was recite the BOJ, bureaucratic and big business dogmas, namely that inflation WAS likely and it would depreciate the currency. Yet most foreign experts would agree that mild inflation and some currency depreciation are just what Japan needs to get out of its chronic economic woes.

What has gone wrong? The critics used to talk about Japan Incorporated — an economic juggernaut powered by a nexus of well-trained, motivated bureaucrats and sharp businessmen keen to take over the world. At the time, Japan seemed to have the people and energy to do that. Postwar reconstruction efforts made them think more about the national rather than the group mura interest.

Today's Japan looks more like Japan Disincorporated. Or as they put it in Japanese, shoeki (ministry interest) has become more important than thekokueki (national interest). Attitudes have become more tribal, and not just in nuclear energy.

Whether it is political factions, pensions, public works, the economy in general, foreign policy (toward North Korea and Russia especially), the Okinawa base problem, the justice system, the education system or even public safety (Kan once had to fight a lonely battle simply to get the bureaucrats to admit to the dangers of importing untreated AIDS-tainted blood), Japan today seems quite unable to find the will or the means to solve immediate national problems.

On almost every front it is being overtaken by the China it once used to ignore, patronize or look down upon. Decades of complacent "Japan as No. 1" self-satisfaction and a grossly distorted elitist education system have produced a leadership unable even to realize self-destruction when they see it.

Today's global pity for Japan's nuclear and tsunami woes could easily turn into global contempt.

Gregory Clark, a longtime Japan resident, is involved with education problems and is a commentator on economic and foreign affairs. He is author of "The Japanese Tribe" (1978) in Japanese.

I shall search through all the lands

2011-06-03T00:32:00.001+09:00

To tell you from the start, I have lost him whose hand and eye are gentle; I shall go to seek him of the slender eyebrows, wherever the most generous and fairest of men may be.

I shall go to the midst of Gwent without delaying, to the south I shall go to search, and charge the sun and the moon to seek for him whose hand and eye are gentle.

I shall search through all the lands, in the valley and on the mountain, in the church and in the market, where is he whose hand and eye are gentle.

Mark you well, my friends, where you see a company of gentlemen, who is the finest and most loving of them; that is he whose hand and eye are gentle.

As I was walking under the vine the nightingale bade me rest, and it would get information for me where was he whose hand and eye are gentle.

The cuckoo said most kindly that she herself was quite well informed, and would send her servant to inquire without ceasing where was he whose hand and eye are gentle.

The blackbird told me she would travel to Cambridge and Oxford, and would not complete her nest till she found him whose hand and eye are gentle.

I know that he whose speech is pleasant can play the lute and play the organ; God gave the gift of every music to him whose hand and eye are gentle.

Hunting with hawks and hounds and horses, catching and calling and letting slip, none loves a slim dog or a hound like him whose hand and eye are gentle.

--from the Welsh; popular song; sixteenth century, in A Celtic Miscellany, Sel. and Trans. by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 112-13.

the world is alive

2011-05-31T03:52:00.002+09:00

A poignant reminder in this most precarious, saddest, happiest of seasons.

Poised between weariness and hope.

Longing and waiting.

In the rain.

* * *

Winter and Summer

All the sweetness of nature was buried in black winter's grave, and the wind sings a sad lament with its cold plaintive cry; but oh, the teeming summer will come, bringing life in its arms, and will strew rosy flowers on the face of hill and dale.

In lovely harmony the wood has put on its green mantle, and summer is on its throne, playing its string-music; the willow, whose harp hung silent when it was withered in winter, now gives forth its melody -- Hush ! Listen ! The world is alive.

--from the Welsh; Thomas Telynog Evans; 1840-65, in A Celtic Miscellany, Sel. and Trans. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 87.

tatemae & honne (3)

2011-05-28T01:36:00.030+09:00

Goodness gracious.

Even in their 'unpredictability' these chaps can be depressingly predictable.

It seems that friendship for them is some kind of ledger book, where favours gained and given are regularly and painstakingly tallied.

Everything is subjected to the strictest calculations.

Anything offends their fragile egos, anything makes them change their minds and loyalties, anything un-balances their damn books.

If at least they told it loud and clear or spat it out, for God's sake. But no. These folks are so repressed that they pile up resentment and cowardly slam the door in your face when you least expect it (well, not anymore really; you become so used to their duplicity that they no longer catch you off-guard).

A gross, gross mistake then to expect things like candour, integrity or character from people who seldom look inside themselves to discern right from wrong. Individual conscience and guilt just do not seem to form part of their moral landscape. Facades are everything.

The other day an expat friend told me that their murky mindset is neither right not wrong but just not right for him, personally. Instead, I would rather conclude that our moral worlds are just way too different -- that we perceive the world in radically distinct, incommensurable ways.

With few, very few exceptions, no common ground is possible, alas. (Nor do most of them have the time or interest outside their regimented routines and habits of thought to establish any.)

Yet I cannot say I have closed the book(s) on the Japanese, because I have never kept any books from the very outset.

'Friendship' accountancy is simply not my cup of tea. I won't let go of what is for me the last stronghold of uncalculatedness, spontaneity and freedom, whatever the cost.

For the sake of sanity.

Cassandras...

2011-05-25T19:43:00.011+09:00

To those dear souls who still believe that all-nuclear Japan is a wonderfully safe place to live in this period of widespread seismic activity and that the 3/11 catastrophe was an 'exception', here are some disquieting thoughts.

Perhaps Bill McGuire, one of the world's leading volcanologists who once claimed that 'Tokyo is the city waiting to die', should rephrase his (in)famous motto into something like 'Japan is the country waiting to die'.

(I doubt whether this would do much to awaken this apathetic people, though.)

* * *

The Nuclear Disaster That Could Destroy Japan – On the danger of a killer earthquake in the Japanese Archipelago

Hirose Takashi
Translated and with an introduction by C. Douglas Lummis

Translator’s note

(Nuclear) Power Corrupts

A puzzle for our time: how is it possible for a person to be smart enough to make plutonium, and dumb enough actually to make it?

Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years, which means that in that time its toxicity will be reduced by half. What could possess a person, who will live maybe one three-hundredth of that time, to produce such a thing and leave it to posterity to deal with? In fact, “possess” might be the right word. Behind all the nuclear power industry’s language of cost efficiency or liberation from fossil fuel or whatever, one can sense a kind of possession – a bureaucratized madness. Political science has produced but one candidate for a scientific law - Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. But the political scientists haven’t noticed that the closest thing we have to absolute power is nuclear power. Nuclear power corrupts in a peculiar way. It seems to tempt the engineers into imagining they have been raised to a higher level, a level where common sense judgments are beneath them. Judgments like (as my grandmother used to say) “Accidents do happen”.

At their press conferences, the Tokyo Electric Co. (Tepco) officials say, as if it were an excuse, that the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan were “outside their expectations”. Look it up in the dictionary; that’s the definition of “accident.” For decades common-sense opponents of nuclear power, in Japan and all over the world, have been asking the common-sense question, What if there is an accident? For this they were ridiculed and scorned by the nuclear engineers and their spokespersons. We, suffer an accident? In our world there are no accidents!

Playing with nuclear power is playing God, which is by far the most corrupting game of all.

In Japan, one of the loudest, most persistent and best informed of the voices asking this common sense question has been that of Hirose Takashi. Mr. Hirose first came into public view with a Swiftean satire he published in 1981, Tokyo e, Genpatsu wo! (Nuclear Power Plants to Tokyo!).(Shueisha) In that work, he made the argument that, if it is really true that these plants are perfectly safe (“accidents never happen”) then why not build them in downtown Tokyo rather than in far-off places? By putting them so far away you lose half the electricity in the wires, and waste all that hot water by pumping it into the ocean instead of delivering it to people’s homes where it could be used for baths and cooking. The book outraged a lot of people – especially in Tokyo – and revealed the hypocrisy of the safety argument.

In the years since then he has published volume after volume on the nuclear power issue – particularly focusing on the absurdity of building a facility that requires absolutely no accidents whatsoever, on an archipelago famous as the earthquake capital of the world. Again and again he made frightening predictions which (as he writes in the introduction to his latest book Fukushima Meltdown (Asahi, 2011) he was always praying would prove wrong. Tragically, they did not. In the present article he reminds readers that the recent earthquake was not the last, but one in a series, and that the situation at Japan’s other nuclear power plants is as dangerous as ever. The nuclear power industry would like us to believe the 3/11 catastrophe was an “exception”. But all accidents are exceptions – as will be the next. CDL

C. Douglas Lummis is the author of Radical Democracy and other books in Japanese and English. A Japan Focus associate, he formerly taught at Tsuda College.

===============================

Earthquakes and Nuclear Power Plants

The nuclear power plants in Japan are ageing rapidly; like cyborgs, they are barely kept in operation by a continuous replacement of parts. And now that Japan has entered a period of earthquake activity and a major accident could happen at any time, the people live in constant state of anxiety.

Seismologists and geologists agree that, after some fifty years of seismic inactivity, with the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (Southern Hyogo Prefecture Earthquake), the country has entered a period of seismic activity. In 2004, the Chuetsu Earthquake hit Niigata Prefecture, doing damage to the village of Yamakoshi. Three years later, in 2007, the Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake severely damaged the nuclear reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. In 2008, there was an earthquake in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures, causing a whole mountain to disappear completely. Then in 2009 the Hamaoka nuclear plant was put in a state of emergency by the Suruga Bay Earthquake. And now, in 2011, we have the 3/11 earthquake offshore from the northeast coast. But the period of seismic activity is expected to continue for decades. From the perspective of seismology, a space of 10 or 15 years is but a moment in time.

Because the Pacific Plate, the largest of the plates that envelop the earth, is in motion, I had predicted that there would be major earthquakes all over the world.

And as I had feared, after the Suruga Bay Earthquake of August 2009 came as a triple shock, it was followed in September and October by earthquakes off Samoa, Sumatra, and Vanuatu, of magnitudes between 7.6 and 8.2. That means three to eleven times the force of the Southern Hyogo Prefecture Earthquake. As you can see in the accompanying chart, all of these quakes occurred around the Pacific Plate as the center, and each was located at the boundary of either that plate or a plate under its influence. Then in the following year, 2010, in January there came the Haiti Earthquake, at the boundary of the Caribbean Plate, pushed by the Pacific and Coco Plates, then in February the huge 8.8 magnitude earthquake offshore from Chile. I was praying that this world scale series of earthquakes would come to an end, but the movement of the Pacific Plate shows no sign of stopping, and led in 2011 to the 3/11 Earthquake in northeastern Japan and the subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.

Is the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant Safe?

There are large seismic faults, capable of producing earthquakes at the 7 or 8 magnitude level, near each of Japan’s nuclear plants, including the reprocessing plant at Rokkasho. It is hard to believe that there is any nuclear plant that would not be damaged by a magnitude 8 earthquake.

A representative case is the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant itself, where it has become clear that the fault under the sea nearby also extends inland. The Rokkasho plant, where the nuclear waste (death ash) from all the nuclear plants in Japan is collected, is located on land under which the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate meet. That is, the plate that is the greatest danger to the Rokkasho plant, is now in motion deep beneath Japan.

The Rokkasho plant was originally built with the very low earthquake resistance factor of 375 gals. (Translator’s note: The gal, or galileo, is a unit used to measure peak ground acceleration during earthquakes. Unlike the scales measuring an earthquake’s general intensity, it measures actual ground motion in particular locations.) Today its resistance factor has been raised to only 450 gals, despite the fact that recently in Japan earthquakes registering over 2000 gals have been occurring one after another. Worse, the Shimokita Peninsula is an extremely fragile geologic formation that was at the bottom of the sea as recently as the sea rise of the Jomon period (the Flandrian Transgression) 5000 years ago; if an earthquake occurred there it could be completely destroyed.

The Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant is where expended nuclear fuel from all of Japan’s nuclear power plants is collected, and then reprocessed so as to separate out the plutonium, the uranium, and the remaining highly radioactive liquid waste. In short, it is the most dangerous factory in the world.

At the Rokkasho plant, 240 cubic meters of radioactive liquid waste are now stored. A failure to take care of this properly could lead to a nuclear catastrophe surpassing the meltdown of a reactor. This liquid waste continuously generates heat, and must be constantly cooled. But if an earthquake were to damage the cooling pipes or cut off the electricity, the liquid would begin to boil. According to an analysis prepared by the German nuclear industry, an explosion of this facility could expose persons within a 100 kilometer radius from the plant to radiation 10 to 100 times the lethal level, which presumably means instant death.

On April 7, just one month after the 3/11 earthquake in northeastern Japan, there was a large aftershock. At the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant the electricity was shut off. The pool containing nuclear fuel and the radioactive liquid waste were (barely) cooled down by the emergency generators, meaning that Japan was brought to the brink of destruction. But the Japanese media, as usual, paid this almost no notice.

The Hamaoka Nuclear Plant and the Approaching Killer Earthquake

The Hamaoka Nuclear Plant is located at Shizuoka City, on Suruga Bay. Despite predictions of a magnitude 8 earthquake on Suruga Bay, it has continued in operation. If you look at the illustration showing the configuration of the plates beneath the Pacific Ocean, you will see that there is a point at which the Philippine Sea Plate, the huge Pacific Plate, the North American Plate, and the Eurasian Plate all meet; directly over that point is the Japanese Archipelago. And the very center of the area where these four plates press together is Shizuoka.

As shown in the chart below, large scale earthquakes in the eastern and southern seas have occurred regularly at intervals of between 100 and 250 years. Today in 2011, 157 years have passed since the Great Ansei Earthquake of 1854, so we are in a period when the next big one could come at any time. And the predicted center of this expected major earthquake is – though this is hard to believe – exactly under the location of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant. (Editor’s note: On May 6, 2011, following a request from Prime Minister Kan, the Hamaoka Plant was temporarily closed in light of the prediction that there was an 87% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or more would strike the area in the next thirty years.)

And sonar readings at the site indicate that from thirty years back the Eurasian plate has been bending, which means that it is in a condition where it can be expected eventually to spring back.

--Hirose Takashi and C. Douglas Lummis, "The Nuclear Disaster That Could Destroy Japan – On the danger of a killer earthquake in the Japanese Archipelago," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 21 No 2, May 23, 2011.

life is elsewhere

2011-05-25T01:18:00.008+09:00

After an exhausting day putting up with too many of these atrophied creatures who seem afraid of their own shadow, and culminating in a surreal train ride among zombified salarymen clinging to their briefcases as if to a crucifix, one badly needs to come to one's senses and feel alive and free and responsive.

These guys are dead, most definitely -- and somebody has forgotten to bury them.

* * *

We are forces on the move, we are free, because we shed the images of ourselves as we go, and do not whip around to gather them up. We are active because we release our fevers and our fervors into the things we pass. We are strong because we discharge our forces into things that roll and rise. We laugh because we release our light and our warmth gratuitously, without asking in return, feeling happiest, as the sun does when it pours the excesses of its gold upon the seas. We are free because we are not imprisoned in our form or in our forces.

--Alphonso Lingis, Wonders seen in Forsaken Places (Chester Perkowski, 2010), p. 132.

exit wounds

2011-05-23T21:56:00.002+09:00

Not that it can ever be mended with dirty pictures and colourful balloons, but at least we can turn the never-ending pain of departure into a thing of beauty.

Like this song -- and, for that matter, all the others by these lovely architects & engineers building their huts on the tiny, storm-bruised plots inside of us.

Permission still fully valid.

Longshore Drift - Sweet Billy Pilgrim from Frances Main on Vimeo.

Pinch and tug the skin
And all those pillow fights and Sunday mornings
Hurt like shiny pins
And every earnest kiss departing
Leaves an exit wound
But we can patch it up with dirty pictures
And colourful balloons

http://www.sweetbillypilgrim.com/lyrics/longshore_drift.html

if he should die while I was gone

2011-05-21T15:41:00.009+09:00

Though battered and subdued, the heart still lives -- and loves, loves this poem by Emily Dickinson and what David Sylvian has done with it in his new album.

If there's a name for shattering beauty, this is it.

I Should Not Dare by Samadhisound

I SHOULD NOT DARE TO LEAVE MY FRIEND

I should not dare to leave my friend,
Because—because if he should die
While I was gone, and I—too late—
Should reach the heart that wanted me;

If I should disappoint the eyes
That hunted, hunted so, to see,
And could not bear to shut until
They “noticed” me—they noticed me;

If I should stab the patient faith
So sure I ’d come—so sure I ’d come,
It listening, listening, went to sleep
Telling my tardy name,—

My heart would wish it broke before,
Since breaking then, since breaking then,
Were useless as next morning’s sun,
Where midnight frosts had lain!

--Emily Dickinson, from The Complete Poems, Part Four: Time and Eternity, LXXVI.

hands have no tears to flow

2011-05-20T20:49:00.014+09:00

The poem was written in a wholly different context -- public, political -- but it has been in my mind a lot ever since I got the paper.

And I have been thinking how this forceful separation between hand and heart, so contrary to my innermost beliefs, becomes sometimes a necessary evil. (A temporary one though, I hope.)

How, to keep life open, to feel alive and continue to grow and reinvent yourself, you must perforce bring certain things to a closure, however heartbreaking this is.

For a greater good.

To let the hand have dominion for once (as the ailing heart still lags a little far behind) -- and sign the damn paper.

No more tears to flow.

* * *

THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;

These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

A goose's quill has put an end to murder

That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften

The crusted wound nor pat the brow;

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

Hands have no tears to flow.

--Dylan Thomas

a letter in a bottle

2011-05-19T22:58:00.016+09:00

Sad indeed how, in their self-absorption and masks, people here seem so pitifully blind to its signs, to its precarious conditions of possibility.

To the intimate bonds of trust, to the promise and risk of close friendship.

To the last remains of our humanity.

A letter put in a bottle and cast into the sea; or an extended hand, half waving, half drowning -- so endangered and fragile has it become.

And thus all the more precious.

* * *

It has long seemed to me that a friendship where one does not teach one another becomes shallow and meaningless. Everyone who, while wandering along the shore of whatever continent or island, has found a letter put in a bottle and cast into the sea, has found a friend.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. viii.

writing matters (3)

2011-05-17T23:09:00.017+09:00

I return to it ever so often, because herein lies its imperative, its pleasure, its despair, its endless beauty.

Finding the right words.

To whomever, I will keep on writing thus. Even if at the risk of being misunderstood, distorted, smeared. (As you invariably are.)

Does it matter, anyhow?

Because it is always to a past or to a future friend that you write.

Never here, he or she has already left -- or is as yet to arrive.

My beloved absent.

* * *

Nowadays people only write letters to record requests, transactions, and detailed explanations, or to send brief greetings. When they want to make personal contact, they telephone. Conversation by telephone communicates with the tone and warmth of the human voice, but what moved one deeply can only be shared through language when one has found the right words. Finding the right words takes time, and the one to whom they are addressed is no longer the one you thought he or she was when you wrote. One sends one's letters to an address he or she has left.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. vii.

twists of fate... (4)

2011-05-16T04:20:00.008+09:00

Well, this one has really nothing to do with the previous twists.

It's in a category of its own, violent and tender, frail and strong, bold and bashful, ridiculous and lovely.

A twist, nevertheless.

Because it's just what you'd expected from a flesh-and-blood beloved.

And couldn't find.

* * *

I smashed my wings
against the rain-soaked deck
and was happy you lifted me
into your safe fingers and palms.
If not too disgusted, hold me
close forever keenly.

--Barry MacSweeney, 'Looking Down From the West Window', from Pearl, in Wolf Tongue (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2003), p. 195.

twists of fate... (3)

2011-05-11T01:54:00.011+09:00

... or how much less fun life would be without certain amusing sexist stereotypes.

A recent chat with a friend has brought back memories of this absolutely glorious videoclip, which I so much cherished in my salad days.

Some displays of masculinity are eternal indeed, like the white knight upon a fiery steed or the superman sweeping you off your feet.

The crack of the whip, the pistol point, the shiny, racy red car...

And these lovely lads, of course.

Still holding out for a hero, after all these years!

Bonnie Tyler, Holding Out for a Hero

Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where's the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and turn and dream
of what I need

[Chorus]

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life

Somewhere after midnight
In my wildest fantasy
Somewhere just beyond my reach
There's someone reaching back for me
Racing on the thunder end rising with the heat
It's gonna take a superman to sweep me off my feet

[Chorus]

Up where the mountains meet the heavens above
Out where the lightning splits the sea
I would swear that there's someone somewhere
Watching me

Through the wind end the chill and the rain
And the storm and the flood
I can feel his approach
Like the fire in my blood

twists of fate... (2)

2011-05-10T02:02:00.000+09:00

... or the knight in shining armour on the psychiatrist's couch.

Happens a lot.

twists of fate... (1)

2011-05-06T21:46:00.009+09:00

Dicksee, Chivalry, 1885.
Source:
http://www.qwiki.com/q/?_escaped_fragment_=/Damsel_in_distress

... or how so very often the would-be saviour, the rescuer of damsels in distress turns out to be the one in dire need of being saved (from himself).

Or how the smasher ends up smashed.

Goodness gracious, how I hate sanctimoniousness indeed. More and more.

half life, imperfect

2011-05-05T23:11:00.000+09:00

I hadn't listened to it for such a long time, perhaps out of fear of its bleak spell, of its truth. But today I let it soak me through and through again, and the message remains as baffling as ever.

And yet so consoling, and yet so sad, when there is nothing else.

* * *

MANAFON
lyrics & vocals: David Sylvian

music: Dafeldecker / Fennesz / Moser / Rowe / Sylvian

There's a man down in the valley
Who doesn't speak in his own tongue
He bears a grudge against the English
The tune to which his songs are sung

There's a man down in the valley
Who is moving back in time
It's a physical ascension
You can watch him as he climbs

The farmer's wives are at their windows
They've seen him wind his way for hours
They tell the kids to lower their voices
And pretend that they are out

There's a man down in the valley
Trying to stop time in its tracks
His boots lie heavy on the grasses
But it keeps on pushing back

And his wife she was a painter
But now she stains the altar black
He's out bird watching on the islands
And she wishes he'd come back

There's a man down in the valley
And he dreams of moving west
Of battles raged against the furies
That might see him at his best

There's a man down in the valley
Don't know his right foot from his left

Don't know his right foot from his left

(Source: http://www.davidsylvian.com/texts/lyrics_and_poetry/manafon_lyrics.html)

inadequacy

2011-05-04T21:36:00.005+09:00

How to put this, when you never listen to the things I so badly want and don't want to say?

That when I speak to you I'm a small shark swimming around and around an uninhabited island.

Toothless, to no avail.

* * *

Speaking is difficult and one tries
To be exact and yet not to
Exact the prime intention to death.
On the other hand the appearance of things
Must not be made to mean another
Thing. It is a kind of triumph
To see them and to put them down
As what they are. The inadequacy
Of the living, animal language drives
Us all to metaphor and an attempt
To organize the spaces we think
We have made occur between the words.

--W. S. Graham, from 'Approaches to how they behave' in Collected Poems 1942-1947 (London: Faber, 1979), p. 170.

being alive

2011-05-03T20:37:00.005+09:00

Some people, some things are still worth waiting for, though - and for this particular one I waited over a year. An immense joy to find it inside my mailbox yesterday. I shall immerse myself in it as soon as I finish some pressing tasks on my desk.

I've been reading each and every work by Tim Ingold and never cease to be amazed at how he gets better and better every time.

And how can you not feel energised by someone who proposes such an exhilarating and, at the same time, sensible, down-to-earth approach to scholarship?

Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources but not the ground we walk, the ever-changing skies, mountains and rivers, rocks and trees, the houses we inhabit and the tools we use, not to mention the innumerable companions, both non-human animals and fellow humans, with which and with whom we share our lives? They are constantly inspiring us, challenging us, telling us things. If our aim is to read the world, as I believe it ought to be, then the purpose of written texts should be to enrich our reading so that we might be better advised by, and responsive to, what the world is telling us. I would like to think that this book serves such a purpose.

--Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. xii.

More, much more on this soon...

in transit

2011-05-02T22:17:00.002+09:00

Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). It follows that in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized.
--Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 13-14.

* * *

And does it follow, I wonder, that the woman who does not patiently wait nor weaves nor sings, Penelope-like, but journeys and sails away is disgracefully masculinised?

Or does this woman cross into some liminal space where she remains forever untouchable, unrecognisable, neither home nor away, unloving beloved, loving unbeloved?

Forever in transit. Intransitive.

the face beneath the mask

2011-04-30T16:52:00.006+09:00

And then there is the underside, the dark, amorphous, mad, violent one, when I attempt to see beneath the mask.

The unsettling, multifaceted truth it conveys is unbearable to most, and that is perhaps why we so obsessively seek and stick to masks - our safely diurnal contours and forms.

Hiding the fear of disclosure and, above all, of being disclosed.

Unveiled, blurred.

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait (Looking Right), 1964
Source:
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/francis-bacon/study-for-a-portrait-looking-right

When I look at you across the table, I don't only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.
--Francis Bacon, in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987).

the erotics of trust (2)

2011-04-28T22:26:00.001+09:00

How often am I aware that others are only dealing with some role I occupy
in a society, some pantomime I am performing, some set of clothes and
haircut I am wearing.... while I am thinking for myself and acting on my
own, behind the image they see!
--Alphonso Lingis, Trust.

* * *

It's so rare, but it can happen, even in the least hospitable place for trust.

When someone I know nothing about and who knows nothing about me approaches, nearly touches the real me.

The core me.

Because s/he sees the face without the mask, the (inter)face between body and soul.

Before - beyond - all labels, gender, class, family, country, culture, interests, impossibilities.

Before words, beyond fear.

Evanescent, uncapturable face, but it's there - it was.

It can happen.