tang dynasty times

poetically we dwell (on the slopes of mount delectable)

   

"Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth" --Heidegger

Exiled on the slopes of Mount Delectable, I find things in a strange state of affairs. While the rest of us are encouraged of the need to "use" language in as clear, precise and factional manner as possible, our journalists seem to do everything but that-- as they seem more concerned with weaving narratives, making commentary and telling tales. 

This is something I really used to notice whenever I would travel back to the US. Where are: "just the facts, ma'am?"

I always find myself wondering this while at the same time the non-journalists around me remain engaged in a helluva lot of reporting. I call it the "what I did today" syndrome where people in many ways seem quite simply incapable of having an interesting conversation about anything that goes beyond personal reporting. The triumph of the self narrative-- in our age of memoirs?

Heidegger was categorically against this concept of language as some kind of "tool" that we "use" to make our inner world knoweable to the outer world. This was in great part because Heidegger discounted this idea of an encapsulated inner world. Da-sein as "being there." There is no being apart from the "there," right?

In his essay, Poetically Man Dwells, Heidegger suggested that the greatest danger language faces is its objectification as a kind of tool; as something that we "use." He was, of course, reacting against the triumph of the clear, precise and efficient use of technological language; that is, the triumph of journalistic speech. 

As is well known, Heidegger--like many before him-- held up poetry as being the ideal model for thinking; for poetry "speaks from out of an ambiguous ambiguity [zweideutigen Zweideutigkeit]." 

Heidegger's ambiguous ambiguity is not some sort of vagueness or inexactness between two terms (that a word is "wholly one" or "wholly the other" of two meanings) but rather ambiguity is a kind of indefiniteness or openness built into the poetic language itself so that the possibility of meaning is suggested or illuminated, not definited. It is, therefore, open-ended and relationally defined.

This is to celebrate the fact that the best things in life are not efficient--and sometimes the most engaging pieces of writing go through a lot of trouble to make very few points (the best avoiding making any points at all). It is certainly not easy to be ambiguously ambiguous, that's for sure.

Maybe is is somehow similar to the way that the finest landscape aintings have the power to  transport and affect us -- in their being a colloboration between phyisical form and human imagination. Poetic language, like a Southern Song landscape-- bathed in mist and drifting hazily in and out of focus-- draws a person in and creates meaning precisely because of its ambiguity. And it is this ambiguity, something that is characteristic of all the finest Southern Song landscapes, where the imagination of the viewer and the emotion of the landscape merge which is so profoundly moving. 

Dream Journey over Xiao Xiang 瀟湘臥遊図巻

ai weiwei and "das ding" (物)

He really grabbed my attention when he dropped the Han dynasty urn. Before that, I guess I didn't think much about Ai Weiwei. I am not a huge fan of conceptual art, and I had thought that Ai Weiwei takes conceptual art too far into the realm of the uber-personal; the uber-narcissistic. It just isn't my cuppa tea and yet...   I must admit, I found the photographs of him smashing the antique urns to be utterly arresting. And so I lingered there...

Ai was, in fact, smashing his urns right about the time I was reading later Heidegger with Burt Dreyfus at Berkeley. Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought was a book that profoundly changed the way I looked at the world, and his essay, "The Thing" (Das Ding), was one of the most interesting to me. Even twenty years later, Dreyfus' lecture on the essay remains vivid in my mind.

Illuminating what is the "thingness of things," Heidegger holds up the potter’s vessel as an example of Das Ding --and the way "things thing". He suggested that all civilizations began using clay (earth) to pro-duce and bring forth vessels. But it is not the form of the vessel, but rather within its function in which being can be understood. 

A vase is a thing which is able "to hold" and "to receive" --and hence its essence is in its void:

The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No – he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that hold.

Ai wouldn't have had to read Heidegger either, since 2000 years before Heidegger, Laozi said much the same thing when he identified the essence of the vase not in its form but in its function:

Fashion earth to make a vase from it: where there is nothing, there is functioning -use of the vase.

Ai Weiwei made a name for himself selling photographs of himself dropping valuable jars from the Han dynasty. Needless to say, antiquities collectors did not appreciate his activities. The critics, however, did --and they praised him for his iconoclastic sentiment, which they said “questions authenticity and value" (This is vis-à-vis the artist's own comment that the value of his photographs, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, has today exceeded that of the once-prized urn itself).

What would Heidegger have said about all this? Well, interestingly, Heidegger traces the German word for "thing" back to its original meaning of "to gather;" so that a thing can be said to gather meaning in the style of its shared understanding of function and use.

So, then what is Ai trying to do? If the meaning of the vase is in its void, by shattering the vase, is he not undermining its very being? Or maybe that is his point.

While not my cuppa tea, Ai gets more and more interesting.... for in addition to smashing old antique vases, Ai also took Tang dynasty urns and painted coca-cola logos on them or dipped them in cheap industrial paints in garish colors. Working in this manner, he transformed their traditional meaning and value as historical artifact turning them into contemporary fine art. And he does this basically by removing their historical value and treating them merely as a valueless materials for his contemporary fine art works.

Vandalism? --Or Homeric destiny?

In the end, as someone once said, without the stories we attach to the famous vases in our museums, they are after all just lumps of clay.

Heidegger insisted that the way works of art "work" is to articulate and illuminate the underlying understanding of being of a particular culture orworldview; and that this is the function of art--to reflect back to us our understanding of being (lichtung). And with that in mind, it was Ai Weiwei's final project with vases that really made an impression on me.

Called Dust to Dust, in this series, Ai took neolithic-age pottery and ground the ancient pots to dust. And then, recalling the way human remains were stored in funerary jars, Ai puts the dust of these old pots inside clear glass jars from Ikea--like someone keeping the remains of their parents in an old funerary jar in their garage, it somehow speaks so sadly about cultural and familial values unravelling (the ikea jars even standing as a strong symbol for the leveling tendancies of globalization where, Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness). 

Jars, of course, have always stood at the crossroads of human life and death-- so this all really works, doesn't it? It is stimulating, though provoking and in much the way Heidegger demanded, his jars light up something very significant about the culture from which the art was born.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: one cannot help to wonder--if Heidegger is right-- about what is says about the culture it is supposed to be reflecting? Neither personal nor narcissitic, I now think he might be one of the great artists of our time: Ai Weiwei.

Recommended: Dreyfus' Heidegger on Art. And, Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei? 

The Librarian Señor Borges

    "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." - Jorge Luis Borges”

Several years ago, life necessitated that I come down from the ziggurat. And, so I put down my books. Stopped traveling--even if just in my imagination. And, this went on for many years. Relentless work and practical daily life. 

But then one day I met a man named Voltaire.

He said, "Some people think reality is the thing. But not me. I prefer reading."

It was like receiving an electric shock, and I was reminded of all the books just sitting there on my shelves. From these recollections about my forgotten books, my thoughts naturally turned to Borges' Library.

What is the library of all libraries, it represents the universe itself.

A great man of learning, Borges was not only the librarian of the National Library of Argentina but he was also the blind librarian who presided over the labyrinthine library in the Name of the Rose as well.

In a universe where books and reality overlap, Señor Borges was a busy man.

We are told that the Library of Babel contained not only every book in the world, but every possible book in the world. All published in identical print and bound in identical red jackets, the books were lined up on unending shelves in an unending progression of hexagonal galleries which were composed of floor to ceiling books. In addition to the bookshelves, each gallery had a small bathroom and closet (where one could sleep standing up, he explains→ see more).

Travelers wandered the galleries searching and reading; reading and searching. The problem is that because of the great glut of information all the books remain totally useless to the librarians; that is because, "a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, is equivalent (as a source of information) to a library containing zero books."

And yet I have hope.

For, indeed, I wander around that library all the time. Last night, groggily traipsing on one of the library's upper galleries a big heavy book fell from the top shelf and landed right on my head.

Ouch!

Ah, Borges!

Opening the book, I turned to my favorite story of all: Averroes' Search. It is, I think, the most beautiful story in the world. Our man in Al-Andalus: Averroes-- he is so one-minded; so absorbed in his task of translating Aristotle into Arabic that he is annoyed recalling a dinner appointment he has that evening. A famous traveler, who claims to have traveled all the way to the Kingdom of Sin (known to us as China), had arrived in Cordova and was to dine in the home of Mr. Farach, the city's great scholar of the Koran. All Averroes wanted to do was work on his great task, however.

Working from a translation of a translation, Averroes' challenge was enormous. That evening, two words in particular were troubling him deeply. The words were tragedy and comedy.

In very much the same way as the Ottoman miniaturist, Master Effendi, who was struggling to understand the Renaissance paintings he had seen in Venice, Averroes had no way to understand the concepts of tragedy and comedy for they simply did not exist in his world. Multiple worlds imply multiple ontologies and epistemologies. That means, it wasn't just Averroes' problem, for no one in the entire world of Islam could fathom their meaning, as theater quite simply did not exist. Scouring the pages of the great philosophers of East and West, Averroes was at a loss to explain these concepts.

That is until he met that night at dinner the traveler back from Sin.

The three gentleman: a traveler, a Koranic scholar and the smartest man in the world, sat down to an evenings's meal. At first their conversation turned to the rose garden. Everyone knows this is my favorite scene in the story as I'm always trying to re-tell it. Farach, the traveler, notes that, "The learned Ibn Qutaiba describes an excellent variety of the perpetual rose, which is found in the gardens of Hindustan and whose petals, of a blood red, exhibit characters which read, 'There is no god but  Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.'"

The traveler goes on to tell of something fantastic he saw in Sin Kalan (Canton):

One afternoon, the Moslem merchants of Sin Kalan took me to a house of painted wood where many people lived. It is impossible to describe the house , which was rather a single room, with rows of cabinets or balconies on top of each other. In these cavities there were people who were eating and drinking, and also on the floor and also on a terrace. The persons on this terrace were playing the drum and the lute, save for some fifteen or twenty (with crimson-color masks) who were praying, sing and conversing. They suffered prison, but no one could see the jail; they traveled on horseback, but no one could see the horse; the fought, but their swords were of reed; they died and then stood up again."

Do you get it?

Of course, the traveler had been taken to a Chinese theatrical performance. Think Chinese Opera. Think Kabuki and Noh.

Averroes and the Koranic scholar-- even the traveler who had seen it with his own eyes-- have no real way to comprehend the concept as in their world, theater and story-telling did not yet exist.

And we thought Heidegger's translator had problems? Indeed, the story does not have a happy ending.

Borges ends his story with the following words:

I remembered Averroes who, closed within the orb of Islam, could never know the meaning of the terms tragedy and comedy. I related his case; as I went along, I felt what that god mentioned by Burton must have felt when he tried to create a bull and created a buffalo instead. I felt that the work was mocking me. I felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what a drama was without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, wanting to imagine Averroes with no other sources than a few fragments from Renan, lane, and Asin Palacios.

I spent all night imagining them.

And there you have it: a woman who is imagining Borges, who is imagining Averroes, who is imagining Aristotle. Happy Birthday Señor Borges--is there anything you haven't read? 

Picture: the Minaret of Samara; thought by some to be the ancient Library of Babel

 

In Praise of Heroes not Saying Stupid Things

-- In Carthage (from the Peony Archives)

Standing beside the large window that overlooked the harbor, they stood silently watching the sea. She stood just behind her lover, trying to gaze out in the same direction in which he was silently staring. His gaze, sang the poet, so faraway that, 

his lips were immobile
like a seashell where the roar is hidden, and the horizon
in his goblet was still.

It was warm and she could feel the sunlight streaming in from the window. Flinging off her shawl, she stood dressed from head to toe in the luxurious purple robes that had made her ancestors so rich that they could send their daughters out across the sea to establish Kingdoms of their own.

A Queen, she stood in a cloud of perfume. Jasmine and sandalwood, frankincense and lemons-- she walked in bare feet over carpets covered in rose petals. Yet, it was the smell of the sea which lingered so undeniably.

Trying to follow his eyes out toward the horizon where he was looking, no matter how hard she squinted, she couldn't see past the intense glare of the sun shining off the water.

The Poet sang of what happened next-- of the Queen, whose

love
was just a fish—perhaps which might
plunge into the sea in the pursuit of the ship,
and knifing the waves with the supple body,
perhaps yet overtake him—but he,
he in this thoughts already strode upon the land.
And the sea became a sea of tears.
But, as one knows, precisely at the moment
of despair, the auspicious wind begins to blow.

And the great man left Carthage.  

And thereafter history has questioned whether he really was all that.

Cut him some slack

my friend, Conrad-- an expert in these matters--once remarked,

is it that we have become so Greek that we are no longer able to understand the Romans?

I mean, I guess you could say, he really had to do his duty, right? Pious Aeneus.

Or, is it that we are no longer able to really daydream? For the Queen, walking in a cloud of fragrant dreams was not really thinking clearly, was she? As Conrad teases:

While Dido in a Bed of Fire,
A new-found way to cool desire,
Lay wrapt in smoke, half Cole, half Dido,
Too late repenting Crime Libido

In complete disgust, Conrad's friend the Count had called him "a sod and a wet blanket," suggesting that, "Dido must have really killed herself because she wouldn't believe that she fell for that???"

Indeed, in her distress

She stood before the bonfire, which her soldiers
had kindled by the city walls,
and she envisioned between the flame and smoke of the fire
how Carthage silently crumbled
ages before Cato’s prophecy

Dreyfus seems to think likewise, complaining that the real nail in the coffin was not only did he say, "Honey, I've got bigger fish to fry," but that he had to gone on and add "but even if I didn't have to obey Zeus and leave, I still wouldn't stay with you as in truth I would probably choose to go back to Troy if I could...." Couldn't he have let her down a little more gently, really?

This is what just baffled Dreyfus, who suggests that, it's hard not to dislike him really.

The Count was similarly annoyed with the invocation of Zeus... for as he remarked :

 Zeus has nothing to do with it. This is the sod part.(And it can be admirable: look at Odysseus, who is always, always, in every instance, the better man. Baby, he says to Calypso, you are everything a man would ever wish, but I love another. Calypso hates it, and can’t come to terms with it for seven long years. But in the end she does. And she does because at least she knows she is not being lied to, made a fool of, cheated. Usually — sometimes — even a woman spurned can admire character in a man).

I tend to agree. Character is everything-- and Aeneas was no Odysseus, that's for sure. Really, is it any wonder that Dido lamented? But as I suggested to Caesar this morning, as the philosophers suggest, fate is probably nothing more than a person's character and their chosen path. Yet, "chosen" is probably itself ambiguous as it doesn't necessarily mean "to choose" does it? As in fact, in the end what is a person's fate but one's charater plus the world one is thrown in? Look at Aeneas. Did he choose what he wanted to do or did he merely do what was felt necessary given the man he was and the world he was embedded? 

Amor Fati, whispered Nietzsche.

A man with a mission, and yet, I just cannot help-- in praise of daydreaming; in praise of desire; in praise of heroes not saying stupid things-- to side with the Queen.

**

Below Joseph Brodsky's Dido and Aeneas is the from BBC's Vanity Fair. Rebecca Sharp's dazzling rendition of Dido's Lament:

DIDO AND AENEAS, by Joseph Brodsky

The great man stared through the window
but her entire world ended with the border
of his broad Greek tunic, whose abundant folds
resembled the sea on hold.
And he still stared out through the window, and his gaze
was so far away from here, that his lips were immobile
like a seashell where the roar is hidden, and the horizon
in his goblet was still.

But her love
was just a fish—perhaps which might
plunge into the sea in the pursuit of the ship,
and knifing the waves with the supple body,
perhaps yet overtake him—but he,
he in this thoughts already strode upon the land.
And the sea became a sea of tears.
But, as one knows, precisely at the moment
of despair, the auspicious wind begins to blow.
And the great man left Carthage.
She stood before the bonfire, which her soldiers
had kindled by the city walls,
and she envisioned between the flame and smoke of the fire
how Carthage silently crumbled
ages before Cato’s prophecy.

 

 

 

The Quiet American (and the Blackened Canteen)

 

M. tells me he is lying on the couch with a stiff drink watching the movie, The Quiet American. He says, "It reminds me of you." Well, how can I resist? Unfortunately, I don't have a couch, but like many women the world over, I keep a bottle of booze under the sink. Warming up Sachiko's homemade plum wine, I recall the old US Embassy in Saigon. It had clearly seen better days, but as of 10 years ago, at least, it was still standing-- right up alongside the muddy Saigon River.

Yeah, The Quiet American.

Even after all the books I read before the trip, staring up into the glaring sunlight toward that famous flat rooftop, I wondered yet again, "Why on earth did America choose to go to war with Vietnam? What could it possibly have mattered?"

You see, all this talk about universalist and particularist theory has never been about me uncovering the various and sundry looming differences between East and West-- but rather it is a plain and simple distaste for ideology-led policy. For as I always like to repeat, much damage has been caused in the world by the perhaps good-intentioned wish to "share the good news." Whether its the universalist principles in Plato or Christian evangelical philosophies or whether its the kind seen in Marxism or even globalist economic policies, when states attempt to universally apply what are universalist philosophies the results can be oppressive-- especially when seen from the long view. For in the end, as a wise man once said, we cannot save each other, all we can do is inspire and stand witness.

A die-hard existentialist, I guess I stand with the Swiss. I believe that the function of the state is to provide for the people of that state first. Food, water, clean environment, education and social welfare. Humanitarian aid and free trade next. Other than that, when it comes to taking a stand or making an ideological commitment, I am just not sure that is something for nation-states to do-- as I think this is something that each individual person needs to take a stand on. It's bad enough when a state seeks to impose its ideology on its own people but to then export it?

This morning, the Good Professor sent me a copy of Roger Ames's translation of Sun Tzu: The Art of War. He mentions that it could be useful in roughly drawing out the distinctions between ancient Chinese and "Western" thinking, especially as the latter emerges from Greek and Christian thought. In particular, concerning my last post, Plato versus Mencius, I thought this below was pretty illuminating about what I believe is the significant difference between a universalism based on the concept of objective Truth versus a "Confucian sensibilty" based on shared dispositions.

In contrast with its classical Greek counterpart where "knowing" assumes a mirroring correspondance between an idea and an objective world, this Chinese "knowing" is resolutely participatory and creative-- "tracing" in both the sense of etching a pattern and following it . To know is "to realize," "to make real." The path is not a "given," but is made in the treading of it. Thus, one's own actions are always a significant factor in the shaping of one's world."

Is this not the existentialist political manifesto par excellance? A sensibility to shared values and a deep commitment to an embodied realization of subjective truth. Or in the words of Master Yangming, the unity of knowledge and action (知行合一) says in a nutshell, “If you want to know bitterness, you have to eat a bitter melon yourself.”

Human association, community, and personal freedom, stresses Camus. This is the existentilaist credo.

A friend in Japan, Robert Yellin tells me about his father, Jerry Yellin, a decorated soldier in the war against Japan who is now doing all he can for peace and reconciliation. His story as seen in the book video is so very moving and incredibly reminds me much of the small meetings between vets that I heard about or saw in Vietnam a decade ago, which happened on the same local level-- sometimes resulting from just one American vet going back there to find someone or something...Indeed, I will never forget the vets I met or spoke to in Vietnam. An army of amputees, and agent orange bare forests, I don't know how many times Vietnamese people would come up and ask me if I was American. Taking my hands in theirs they would say, it's time for friendship. That was a long time ago and I am sure everything has been utterly transformed. Personally, I will never forget some of the stories I heard from American and Vietnamese vets there. In Saigon, we were staying in a seedy hotel not far from the old embassy (pictured at top) and there was this older American gentlemen down slurping his pho every morning for breakfast. One morning, he suddenly struck up a conversation with me and hearing how he has returned to Vietnam over and over (not easy travel back then from the US)- I asked him why. And he said, "I cannot get the beauty of this place out of my mind." Interesting since he must have seen such horrors there.

Years later, I would meet the leader of a WWII veterans group in Japan through an introduction of my Aunt's who is active in an airforce widow's association in Honolulu. For years, this older gentleman and I corresponded--his Japanese was so formal and old fashion, it was pretty much impossible to decipher. But he always repeated how happy he was that now instead of war between our countries, there were weddings. This is not surprsingingly the title of Yellin's more recent book, Of war and Weddings.

**

Links:

Jerry Yellin's The Blackened Canteen (the video is very moving--I just ordered the book)
Carthage at war (I am re-listening to the Hannibal lectures) and always up to chatting about the Punic wars
The Iliad and What it Can Still Tell us About War
Coady's Just War on Philosopher's Zone

Also a link to a petition against a planned aquarium in Kyoto which goes against public sentiment (they are planning to build in where a public park now stands!)

On knowing as doing and doing as being, see Master Yang's unusual epistemology

1945 Outstanding Gun Camera Raw Footage from Japan

 

Heidegger's Translator- Part 5

    

Yesterday, the illustrious Charles W. Hayford made a public confession, in which he said:

My name is Charles and I'm a Wikipedia addict.

Like many others, he is talking about the trials and tribulations of writing and editing wikipedia articles.

Not all that I long ago, I wrote a post (here) about the manner in which google has completely transformed the profession of translation. I described a situation whereby nowadays, rather than being surrounded by books with time and space to really get just the right wording, non-literary translators are basically aiming at more of a machine-like quality-- so that Japanese word x is always translated to English word y and all the proper nouns are run through google to find the established (standardized 定訳）translation.

Many of my clients, in fact, want precisely that machine-like quality-- no matter how badly it may sound.

In my post, I chose google-- or as translators often refer to it as St. Google. I could have just as easily used wikipedia or some of the online dictionaries I use, which are based on the very same principles however. Yesterday, in fact, I was working on a translation about the history of Xiamen, and I chose all the English spellings and conventions based on several wiki articles. Wiki is also where I found all the standard translations of some short stories by Lu Xun I required. Indeed, if it's good enough to appear on wikipedia, even if a book by an established scholar says something different, my translation agency most probably would still feel more confident with something online.

Without a doubt, having these online tools raised the quality of my finished product yesterday- in particular in terms of standardization and a certain kind of accuracy.

However, in the same way that Nicholas Carr asked, Is Google Making us Stupid? I think that Charles Hayford is wise to step back and ask, "Is this necessarily a good thing?" He brings up some really good points in his Post, which I really recommend.

While the eminent Mr. Conrad Roth has many of the same worries and concludes here that,

Mark my words, the internet is going to make bloody idiots of us all, soon enough. It won't be Facebook or Myspace—although they will help—it'll be EEBO, Wikipedia and Google Books

I have another friend-- a man who has studied such things in the Russian Academy of Sciences, who insists that,

I firmly believe that this ability makes us more intelligent, not more stupid, but it is true that:

>>The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

It's a medical fact that new information, novelty, releases a flood of dopamine (a neurotransmitter associated with motivation and pleasure) in the nucleus accumbens in the brain. New information acts on the brain in the same way cocaine does (release of dopamine in the brain), only at a lower level. The Internet gives us the ability to search and quickly find new bits of information at will and forms the habit of moving from one juicy bit to another in endless succession. Thus, the Internet serves as a drug, and Internet users are drug addicts. I guess modern writers have to consider that they are talking to a bunch of stoners who constantly need extra accumbal stimulation; as for all those geniuses from the past, when they launch into a three-page description of evening clouds, etc... oh, it's all over for them!

Even though I am one of those endangered cloud watchers, still I bet no one will be surprised to hear that when it comes to the Internet, rather than being on the pro or con side, I remain in the "let's think about it" camp-- as I guess I think it all comes down to forcing oneself to step back and take a moment to decide how exactly we want to relate to this technology.

Indeed, like all technology, the Internet aims at a kind of transparancy so by virtue of its own stunning Efficiency, it makes other practices become obsolete. And whether this is a good thing or not, I think it depends on one's aims.

It's like TV. In no way do I think it is a categorically bad practice (that is, the practice of watching TV) And yet, when I sat back and really reflected on it, I realized that, it's not for me. Nor are cars or cell phones. In the same way, I am interested in how I can

relate myself to technology in a way that not only resists its devasatation but also gives it a positive role in my life

And I agree with Dreyfus that this is perhaps the question of our generation.

The other evening a friend, who is also a translator (of not one but three languages) mentioned how when he lived in a remote area of Africa, he worked under the slowest Internet connection in the world. My immediate feeling was: Never! I mean really, because of the languages involved looking things up in a dictionary (even an electronic one) would be painful-- unbearable, in fact. Not to mention, the quality of my finished product (as defined by my field) would plummet.

But, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water either. Are you like many others who perhaps read a lot less books nowadays?

Dreyfus, in the same essay, has a chart to compare the two styles of information/knowledge organization:

LIBRARY CULTURE	INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CULTURE
Careful selection a. quality of editions b. perspicuous description to enable judgment c. authenticity of the text	Access to everything a. inclusiveness of editions b. operational training to enable coping c. availability of texts
Classification a. disciplinary standards b. stable, organized, defined by specific interests.	Diversification a. user friendliness b. hypertext–following all lines of curiosity
Permanent collections a. preservation of a fixed text b. browsing	Dynamic collections a. intertextual evolution b. surfing the web

Dreyfus didn't include this but I absolutely agree with Charles that online sources have encouraged a kind of anti-intellectualism disguised as anti-elitism (so in this sense, Conrad's conclusion may have a real point). Dreyfus sums up that,

It is clear from these opposed lists that more has changed than the move from control of objects to flexibility of storage and access. What is being stored and accessed is no longer a fixed body of objects with fixed identities and contents. Moreover, the user seeking the information is not a subject who desires a more complete and reliable model of the world, but a protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons. In short, the postmodern human being is not interested in collecting but is constituted by connecting.

For more on our Internet selves, why not ask Kierkegaard what he thinks about the Internet!

Personally, I wonder what Borges would have thought? Speaking of which, I just read that the gorgeous New Library of Alexandria doesn't have enough books!

**

And for the record, I agree with Languagehat, who in a recent post about the pleasures of creating wiki articles, said, "It's nice to feel I'm contributing to the sum of human (or English-speaking, at any rate) knowledge in this way." While I've never participated in wikipedia except as a "consumer"-- I can understand wholeheartedly why someone would want to contribute (for that's what it is: a contribution).

Living with Wikipedia: It's Here to Stay by Charles W. Hayford

Looking forward to part 2.

**

And for my fellow translator of three languages-- this was perhaps the Golden Age. Hear about Caliph al-Mamun's glorious dream here.

Not recommended reading: The future of planet google.

 

under a flame tree (with you & confucius)

 

The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own --Goethe

Many of the Readers of these Pages will remember how I love to be surprised by mountains. It is probably mainly because I am from the desert-- and in the dry desert air of Los Angeles, the mountains never move. They are ever present-- standing in allurement. Similarly up in the very high plateau of the Himalaya, where the air is crystal clear and it’s quite simply too high up to rain or snow, so too are the mountains always visible, beckening.

In contrast-- here in Japan, where they are often hidden behind clouds, mist and haze, you could forget the mountains are even there for a great part of the year. On particularly clear days however-- like yesterday--- suddenly you are taken completely aback. Wow! Was that mountain always there?

Well, I love that. I love being surprised by mountains. Or being rained on by flowers-- flame trees and sakura. Happy spring.

*

I have been re-reading Mark Lilla's superb article--written in 1999 for the NYRB-- on the publication of the collected letters between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (thanks Carl). Their correspondance is incomplete with over 3/4 of the letters written by Heidegger, still- as Lilla expertly points out--there is so much of interest in them. Probably more than anything in his article, I appreciated what was a very illuminating discussion of the concept of passionate thinking (where knowing is being or thinking as an end in itself?). It was this commitment to the life of the spirit, says Lilla, that served as the foundation for Heidegger and Arendt's unique and long-lasting friendship.

She called Heidegger a "hidden King"-- and without a doubt, it was his philosophy which drew her to him and it was also that which would create such strong ties as to be almost hard to really understand-- given the circumstances.

Lilla asks, "What does philosophy have to do with love?" and without skipping a beat answers:

"If Plato is to be believed, everything. While not all lovers are philosophers, all philosophers are, for him, lover-- indeed they are the only true lovers because they alone understand what lovers blindly seek."

I agree. And I also like to think of this spiritual place in which love and passionate thinking come together to create bonds between people. This "intellectual passion" perhaps is more than anything pure Hannah Arendt:

"What was experienced was that thinking as pure activity-- and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge nor the drive for cognition-- can become a passion which not so much rules and oppresses all other capacities and gifts, as it orders them and prevails through them. We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback."

"Thinking" as an end in itself; "thinking" as passion and life-invigorating-- that this could form the most extraordinary kinds of bonds between people should come as no surprise. And yet, in today's world, maybe it does come as a surprise (so accustomed are we for searching out emotional intimacy based on emotional intimacy...?) What do you think?

Still, no matter how much one may understand the basis of their friendship, that it survived the realities of Heidegger's turn to Nazism is not as easy to grasp, it it? For it has become clear that he was in fact an active participant (and not just swept along with the tide of the times in Germany). Jaspers cut off ties for years with "the King," but Arendt-- for whatever reason-- remained loyal to him in many ways right till the very end of her life.

Heidegger was not the only Nazi with a Jewish lover.

In January, I received a comment from Ken Thomas to my old Hannah Arendt post which included the detail that the infamous Nazi "architect" Eichmann also had a Jewish lover. It is something that has stuck in my mind for months. How do such moral blindspots come about? (Namit emails me this morning to say, "people compartmentalize.")

Many of you will remember our conversations here and here concerning Confucian Virture as "Really Looking." Perhaps you will recall that I tried to argue that, rather than being some kind of internal inward-looking (where outer actions are aimed to be harmonious with internalized moral convictions) that in fact, virtue should always be based firmly on-- indeed, it demands-- a kind of "other-focused" aesthetic seeing. I quote from Ken Thomas' comment here: 

What Arendt claimed-- which she underlines with the fact that Eichmann had a Jewish lover-- was that Eichman was incapable of "seeing things from the other person's point of view"-- of imagining what it was like-- of putting himself into another's mind or experience-- a capacity necessary for political action and the existence of the political realm itself. He-- his flaw, perhaps a modern flaw, or the consequence of totalarianism, or (this is not Arendt:) just a vicissitude of history-- was the banality of his lack of vision, his self-ishness, the cognitive flaw that meant he could not think in a particular way--

The banality of his lack of vision.

Interestingly, Heidegger too warns us against this kind of banality (or habitus). A friend reminds me hat it is the lack of vision that is our undoing (ie "dasein only understands itself in the LIGHT of possibility").

For whatever reason, it seems to me that human ethics require this kind of Other-oriented vision or Other-looking. Heidegger-- ironically-- called for the same thing when he posited that ethical action needs to be based on embodied temporality-- otherwise the dangers of "selective seeing"  (totalitarianism or blindspots in our vision) would be inevitable.

Engaged, embodied seeing...Interestingly, it is something shared by both Heidegger's existentialist concept of "care" (maybe gotten from Kierkegaard's "truth which cannot be objectified but only experienced in relationshp") and Confucian ethics (authentic being found in our everyday relationships).

**

At this point, I turned to the great Gialbo for help. And, he sent along a very interesting paper written by Chenyang Li in which Li argues that the foundation of Confucian normative action as jen 仁 is nothing but a commitment to "caring" 愛 for Other. And, just like with Heidegger, "other" is not just any other (or a universal other); nor is it an other with whom one enters a kind of contract (of mutual benefit, etc.) but rather it is a commitment to caring for those other people who come into our lives. Parents and children, neighbors, friends-- basically all the people who crash into us. (And, I would like to posit that if there is emotion, then this can be a "virtual embodiment" as well). 

In Confucian normative ethics, then, this concept of "care" is mapped on to  jen 仁, however, this is unfortunate as  jen 仁 is signifying more the person who has achieved "care," whereby care is  愛 (love, affection→ care) for Significant Other-- and again, I cannot stress enough, from Heidegger to the Feminist philosophers who made the ethics of care famous to the Confucian philosophers, this Other was not those people we pick and choose but rather treating with care those people who are part of our world. (and it is "the world that decides," he says).

The ethics of care, then, stands in very direct contrast to Kantian and utilitarian ethics. As Li points out, while the Confucians saw this in filial piety, the feminists saw this in a mother's love for a child:

"Relations between mothers and children should be thought of as primary, and the sort of human relation all other human relations should resemble or reflect." --Virginia Held

And with this idea, I enter a beautiful garden.

I have been reading-- and have been overwhelmed by-- Robert Harrison's book, Gardens and the Human Condition. The book significantly (to me) starts off with a chapter titled, "The Vocation of Care." 

If the perfection of human happiness is glimpsed in the vision of an exquisite garden-- if paradise is a garden, which of course I am sure it is-- then what is required of us more than care? Care as feeling (significance) and care as embodied cultivation. I had never thought about this before reading his book, but Harrison's words in fact echoed deeply within my heart: for no matter what kind of garden-- no matter how fertile the soil may be-- in the end, the cultivation of a garden requires one to be committed to giving more than they receive. Indeed, most successful endeavors in life-- even things like writing a book, or a love affair, marriage; true friendship, or philosophy; all kinds of passionate thinking-- I think (actually, I am sure) that all these things have a similar commitment of giving more than you expect to receive. The cultivation is an end in itself-- the flowers being perhaps just a reward....That is to say, I realized "last night as I was sleeping" that it is Ithaka itself which is the garden.

 

Top painting "Going Home" by Le Thanh Son and one of my favorite images of paradise-- again-- below.

in the mood (online)

Always in the mood (see part 1), I like to imagine the way that Nietzsche stepped out into the dark velvety Venice night. Surrounded by the sound and smell of water, a mood overcomes him like a song:

My soul, a stringed instrument,
sang to itself, invisibly touched,
a secret gondola song,
quivering with iridescent happiness. 

And he asks, Did anyone listen to it? In this way the philosopher is asking, is not anyone else "tuned in" to this mood of Venice?

I think it is obvious to most people that cities or places have moods. And that arriving in a new city, the mood of the place will be felt to us if we are attuned to it. Venice-- like water and velvet; Vietnam like the sound of a flower blossoming-- we can feel the underlying values of being, time, and place in part through mood. Indeed, this is how Heidegger said we experience our being in the world as existing in place and in time (da sein= being there; being in).

What happens, then, to our ability to be attuned to mood when we go online? (An important question as more and more us are inevitably interacting with the world via our software.)

**

As I have mentioned here again and again, he is a man who lectures on Heidegger like he is composing Persian love poetry. And, it is to this man's work that I have remained devoted to for some 20 years.

Almost everything Dreyfus says somehow rings true to me. Yet, reading and thinking about his take on this question about meaning in the age of the internet, I think I perhaps dis-agree with him. It must be a first. In fact, though, I felt a mild intuitive doubt reading his earlier essay, Kierkegaard on the Internet, but it was with his more recent article Faking it, that I finally figured out what was bothering me.

In the article, Dreyfus starts off with Pascal's famous expression of existentialist anxiety:

The drawbacks of our own world are obvious. We are bounded by fallible individual and group perspectives, experience physical and mental suffering, and sense the vulnerability of all we care about. We can try heroically to confront the world we are thrown into, face up to our situation, and struggle to live in a way that accepts and incorporates our vulnerability without despair. But as the 17th-century existential philosopher Blaise Pascal pointed out: "Men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, [so] they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all." Pascal calls this escapist approach "diversion" and gives as examples of diversions billiards, tennis, gambling, and hunting.

According to Dreyfus-- and I agree-- rather than face the risks and anxiety head on, in general people prefer to divert their attention. That is, they placate themselves with what German philosopher Wolfang Welsch calls our contemporary endless parade of amusements.

Fundamentally concerned about living a real and meaningful life-- and as my friend Paul insists, the two are connected-- Dreyfus is uncomfortable with a virtual 2nd life because it is at base a pleasurable diversion; that is, it lacks any real risk or deep commitment. In the essay about Kierkegaard, he is even more persuasive when he discusses the way that online, people are much more apt to cut and run when things take on risk. Or when in the cost benefit analysis, things seem inefficient. Online interactions,therefore, almost by definition lack the commitment of real life one's. And that is why they can be said to lack reality and meaning.

His second issue is concerning the issue of collectively felt moods-- again, see part 1. Here is Dreyfus:

Heidegger would point out that a minimally meaningful life requires sensitivity to the power of shared moods that give mattering to our world and unity and meaning to events. Indeed, focal occasions require a shared mood, as well as the sense of all who are present that they are sharing and contributing to that mood. This sharing creates a sense of a self-contained world.

The thing is, while I wholeheartedly agree with Dreyfus' worries, I am just not sure that mood depends as much on embodied know-how as Dreyfus believes. The Readers of These Pages will not be surprised to learn that I feel that mood (both personal and collective) is experienced fundamentally on the level of imagination. 

As Robert Harrison suggested:

"mood is a form of attunement between nature and spirit; between habitat and inhabitant" 

In this way, borrowing Nietzsche's image, if mood reverberates within us, like sound reverberating within the interior of a violin after it is bowed, it becomes embodied-- for as Sepp Gumbrecht suggests, in the same way that a violin will internally reverberate when bowed, mood is internalized in the sense that it becomes almost impossible to really differentiate between outer environment and inner self. Indeed, the two are inter-dependent.

For example, I have talked at great length in these pages about the way the mood of place can have such a tremendously deep and indelible impression on a person. But for me, so tied is this feeling of being moved by place to the workings of my inner world that some of these imaginable landscapes I have never  actually traveled to; they are, nonetheless, no less significant to me.  That is to say, some of the places that have most moved me are places I have never been to-- some are places I have only dreamt of. I mean, just thinking of Venice, the mood I feel about the place probably has more to do with Mann's Death in Venice then it does to my actual embodied experience there. Reading, for example, can serve in this way to light up our focal practices-- so why not dreaming or virtual experiencing?

Another way to approach this is to ask, when people change languages or cultural context, does their online behavior change? That is, to what extent do we bring our understanding of being with us online?

Is it that virtual interactions, because they inherently lack commitment or risk, that they fail or is it rather that due to the technology that those who already exist in an ontology where people are thought of as resources or that amusement is given a central place in life, that this will only be intensified? In other words, would the people spending time amusing themeselves on 2nd life otherwise be living deep and committed lives? Or would those who are seeking amusement, seek amusement online or off; and those who seek a risk-free environment be prone to that offline as well?

Just speaking from my own online experience--which is long and very extensive (since I work online as well as spend so much time interacting online) as well as is bilingual, I think I have found-- at least in my own case that ontological moods and approaches are carried straight along online so that:

For example, those who live in a technological understanding of beingwhere everything is viewed in terms of cost/benefit and efficiency, will manifest this even more intensely online. To say this another way, those who will not commit or cut ties online, in all probablty are just those kinds of people, I think, given their worldview and the technology and anonymity-- rather than causing this, only accentuates it.

Also, for example, in my very long and extensive Japanese online experience, I have never felt this same will to delete in Japanese. I am not on Jpse facebook, however, so I cannot say whether those in a Japanese envrionment would be quite so apt to say, "just un-friend him." But my Japanese virtual experience is very much characterized by trust and commitment; as well as sensibility or high responsiveness to mood. Hierarchical language too is carried over online so that if the commitment to formal hierarchical forms is avoided in real life, this is carried online and vice versa for those who use these forms, they continue to use them online.

It is not as if the technology someone frees us from moods that surround us.

Every online group or association has a kind of culture and mood, and that a mood can be experienced collectively online is very much in the realm of possibility-- because of course we are using language or images-- all things which have long transmitted human experience.

The boundless human proclivity and capacity to imagine-- I know, Our Man in Beijing and Our Man in Stanford would neither one of them approve to life online (in fact, I think persuading Dreyfus would be far easier). And yet, there you have it, because I do believe (based on my embodied and imagined experience) that true committed friendship, romance and meaning can and is found online as well as off.

Namit, I know what you're thinking!!!!!!! 

**

Stay tuned for Part 3 on mood and the rain

Artwork at the top by MW Nolden-- isn't it incredible?

L'Age d'Or, 1985
SX-70

in the mood with heidegger

 

--from the peony archives

 Gondolas, lights, and music-- he insinuated that I was moody; telling me I do "a good imitation of a nut."  (Can you believe it?)

"That's good," I thought, recalling a poem about Venice written by Nietzsche. Robert Harrison, talking about the Philosophy of Moods, describes how Nietzsche-- a man of many moods-- once sang the poem in the middle of the night on a train from Turin back to Germany in a state of madness:

At the bridge of late
I stood in the brown night.
From afar came a song:
as a golden drop it welled
over the quivering surface.
Gondolas, lights, and music--
drunken it swam out into the twilight.

My soul, a stringed instrument,
sang to itself, invisibly touched,
a secret gondola song,
quivering with iridescent happiness.
--Did anyone listen to it?

Nietzsche in the mood.

Talking last time about the imagination, Bezdomny had remarked that, 

Trouble is we still live in an age of bread and circuses. Any real enchantment or imagination any of us may have will immediately be shot down as the ravings of a nutjob

The ravings of a nutjob-- don't you love it? But, nut-imitation skills-- or any imitation skills really!-- are not a bad thing to have, if you think about it. Remember how much pleasure Masetto had in Book Three of the Decameron? (Well, at least at first!) 

You remember,

 as the dawn was already changing from vermilion to orange, as the sun hasted to the horizon, the queen rose and roused all the company.

And carrying out her duty, she appointed Filostrato to be storyteller of the day. In those days, storytelling was important business and Filostrato took his job seriously-- telling the group about the young man, Masetto da Lamporecchio, who so pines for the lovely ladies of a nearby nunnery that he "feigns to be dumb" in order to obtain a gardener's position at the covent, whose women,

with one accord make haste to lie with him.

Listening to the story, who among the assembled ladies and gentlemen were not moved?

Why tell stories if no one is any longer capable of being moved by them, right? I have been spending a lot of time talking about imagination and storytelling, but, in the end perhaps what I am really trying to get at is this capacity to be engaged with life. That is, one's capacity of being moved by mood.

Being in the mood.

As I said here,

I know some of you may blame Peerless Helen. I mean, of course, all those dead Trojan soldiers for one thing. Virgil, too, I think came down hard on her. But, it's interesting to note that the ancients themselves had a more ambiguous understanding of Helen, whom they called, Peerless Among Women. For the ancients lived in great awe of the moods-- and so in one sense that great Mood that overcame Helen inspiring her--overcoming her--to run away with Paris, well by acting on it, was she not going with the Flow (it is hard in a sense to judge now because we cannot but help see it through Christian or even Roman terms, can we?) The above is pure Dreyfus-- but I like it.

And so, when my man Caesar called me moody, I asked him whether he thought that someone not prone to moods would be able to truly be moved by things? That is the question, is it not? If the strings are not pulled pretty tautly on the stringed instrument of our souls, nothing will revereberate within us. So, no, I don't think the opposite of "high strung" is laid back. I think the opposite is 鈍感= dull, insensitive, obtuse, flat.

This is much on my mind since I've been thinking of Heidegger and his concept of mood. For Heidegger, moods are very different from how we ordinarily think of them today. As Dreyfus explains

Until recently, if philosophers thought about moods or feelings at all, they thought of them as inner mental states. On this view, often called "Cartesian" after the French philosopher René Descartes, people are not really in a mood but moods are in people. A person's private feelings are expressed (made outer) by bodily movements, which can then be observed, interpreted, and responded to by another person through his or her movements.

For Heidegger, then, moods are not something inside a person but rather are something that a person can be in. That is, moods come over us; overcoming us. The German word famously reflects this, as  philosophers like to remind us that die Stimmung [stimmungen?] means mood in terms of atmosphere ("ambiance"). Often likened to music or to weather, Heideggerean mood wraps itself around our bodies. It is something that we unconsciously attune ourselves too. Indeed, it is one way we have to grasp the way the world discloses itself to us.

Robert Harrison explains it thus:

"mood is a form of attunement between nature and spirit; between habitat and inhabitant"

People are wrapped in mood. This is different from emotion, like anger or sadness, which has a cause. Mood is something more general that comes without cause from outside us-- like a song, calling. Hence, moodiness could be seen as a kind of sensitive attunement.

Nietzsche steps out into the dark Venice night. Surrounded by the sound and smell of water, a mood overcomes him like a song-- quivering across the surface of the water.

Gondolas, lights, and music--
drunken it swam out into the twilight.

And he asks, Did anyone listen?

It is not unlike a Confucian scholar whose meticulous actions-- perfectly attuned to the situation-- are guided by a Confucian sensibility, or mood. Like the sound of jade reverberating off the walls of the great hall, the Confucian scholar just feels it-- this thing called virtue or proper conduct is something to which he attunes himself as embodied know-how guided by mood. And as Robert Harrison's guest, Sepp Gumbrecht suggests, in the same way that a violin will internally reverberate when bowed, this mood is internalized in the sense that it becomes almost impossible to really differentiate between outer environment and inner self as they are indeed inter-dependent.

Mood is how we situate ourselves in our circumstances sensitively. That different cultures across geography and time have emphasized or have sought to cultivate this sensibility to a greater or lesser degree is commonsensical. Sepp Gumbrecht holds up the ancient Greeks as one culture that placed great emphasis on cultivated sensibility (think of Helen of Troy). But we can also think of this in terms of cultivation in Confucian traditions. Confucian sensibility. 

And so as a Medieval lady in Japan is overcome by longing during the time of long June rains, far away in in Florence, a group of ladies and gentlemen gather around the fountain in the garden to tell tales. As Filostrato tells of the wondrous adventures of the young man Masetto in the convent of young ladies, those listens were envloped in a wondrous and intoxicating mood. And who among those present was not moved? 

And I leave you with Saburo Teshigawara's dance piece exploring stillness (danced to music by Gurdjieff).

poetically man dwells (a note to eric selland)

 "Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth."

I am listening to another thought-provoking Entitled Opinions show-- this time on later Heidegger. "Poetically Man Dwells"-- in several of his essays on poetry, Heidegger suggested that the greatest danger language faces is its objectification as a kind of tool; as something that we "use." He was, of course, reacting against the triumph of the clear, precise and efficient use of technological language-; that is, journalistic speech. 

I have said this here before, but we find ourselves in a strange state of affairs. While the rest of us feel the need to "use" language in as clear, precise and factional manner as possible, our journalists seem to do everything but that-- as they seem more concerned with weaving narratives and making commentary. This is something I really notice when I travel to the Western part of the empire. Where are "just the facts please?" I always find myself wondering as those non-journalists around me remain engaged in a helluva lot of reporting.

Heidegger likewise was categorically against this concept of language as some kind of "tool" that we "use" to make our inner world knoweable to the outer world. This was in great part because Heidegger discounted this idea of an ecapsulated inner world. Da-sein as "being there." There is no being apart from the "there," right?

It's the basic old Whorf hypothesis about language shaping our world, but two different Facebook associates posted this article from Newsweek to their status bars last week, "Why Language May Shape Our Thoughts." Probably anyone who speaks two languages that are linguistically far enough apart can attest to the way a person changes according to the language they speak.

To wit, last week, Madame Huizi (also known as my mom) looked at me and said, "You know, it's like you are a different person this time." I smiled because I knew exactly why she felt that way. I have spent the past 4 years in rather extenuating circumstances, such that 95% of my communicating with other people was in Japanese. It was the only language I use for communicating with people at home, for work, with Adonis and my online life too was basically all-Japanese. Starting this blog was a surprising endeavor in that it brought English speaking friends, and then with the start of my facebook life, well, it was just a matter of time before I started reconnecting with all kinds of old friends... In my current state of exile on shores delectable, those statistics are surely reversed. Japanese is at an all time low and except for work-related missives and some emails to Adonis' father, I am back to thinking and dreaming in English. 

The result? Well, my own mom says it's like I am a different person. For Madame Huizi to see me acting more "native" to the culture here would be a positive thing. To me, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other. That is, I agree with Herr Heidegger that language opens up worlds for us; it makes possible different ways of being or different styles in thinking.

It is not we who speak language, said the philosopher, but language that speaks us.

And, I do think that Japanese is very much more condusive to being poetical or to telling tales. (I am sure that my classical Japanese literature professor in grad school told me that 物語する　"telling tales" was a poetical way of referring to making love. I think he said that, but I could have just imagined he said that too). Japan, too, is becoming increasingly under the gun to order things in terms of efficiency-- so it is probably only a matter of time before Japan takes on this kind of journalistic expression as a standard for "good writing." And a day may come when people no longer shed a tear when statues are destroyed thousands of miles away or no longer take sides in the battle of the blossoms. For now, though, I do think that my conversations are richer in many ways in Japanese.

 Without warning
a window on one of the upper floors flew open—
wind had caught the casement, a silken length
of curtain filled like a billowing sail ---

Some of you will remember our friend the Count. A veritable Joseph Conrad, he is so linguistically talented that he continually took my breath away. I am not sure I know many native English speakers who have as strong a command of English as the Count does as a second language. He is also proficient in Chinese, Japanaese and French (he says he can't speak Thai, but that is unlikely I think). He once told me that he regretted making English his main language for thinking and dreaming. He said, "I can't really communicate the way I'd like in English-- communication styles being restricted to reporting and people only seek to talk about the efficient. I prefer to talk of minutiae."

The Dear Readers of these Pages will agree, I am sure that the most delightful things in life are found in inefficient details-- in the stort-telling.

If we agree that language opens up possibilities and worlds, then it stands to reason that a person will undergo a change in the way they think depending on the language they are thinking in. And no matter what language that is, Heidegger felt that poetry served as a model for what thinking should be.

  —the bees
began to stream out from her hair, straight
to the single opening in the high facade. Inside,
a moment later—the sound of screams. --Eleanor Wilner 

That is to say that poetry is top priority. Poets alone among us perhaps remain committed to asking the important questions about our being in the world. In the ambiguity of their ambiguity (another favorite Heideggerism of mine!) they seek to light up possibilities of being that are open to us; lighting up the everyday to us. The poet, therefore, stands with her eyes open; attentive. 

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."

Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.

the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"--Machado

**

Written as I imagined myself talking about all this at Yuzu with my dear associate, Eric Selland. My translations done years ago (that Eric inspired me to dig out) are uploaded above in the Chieko Poems category. The only poems ever written by a man for his wife in the history of Japanese literature, they are (I recall hearing) the largest ever best seller in poetry in Japanese publishing history. 

It's hard to believe but a whole year has past since I started the blog. I decided to take down the picture of the woman I dreamed about and put my facebook profile photo up instead. I changed my About Page as well. The Tibetan woman's photo is there where it will always remain, on my dream post about her-- I still can hardly believe I found a photo so closely resembling a woman I dreamed myself to be-- to be so beautiful....