WORDS TO LIVE BY

"All men are mad who devote themselves to the pursuit of power when they could be fishing or painting pictures or sitting in the sun."


-- A.J.P. Taylor,
historian

A LINK BEYOND LINKS

Is it better throughout the course of one's life to focus your individual efforts on one thing, and the achievement of singular competence, or examine many things, diverse and detached, and long for a universal link?

I ask because of interesting conversation with Japanese writer and thinker Kenichiro Mogi published in Sunday's edition of The Japan Times. Mogi states:

The way I see it is this: I come from a scientific background, but I also know many of my former classmates from the law department who have gone on to become government officials and corporate executives and so on. I know many art students and famous novelists in Japan. Also, musicians. Through meeting all these different people, I realize how divided modern society is.

I've discovered that even people with very high achievements actually live in a very closed context. Novelists only care about novels. Artists — painters, they only care about paintings. Musicians only care about music. Scientists only care about science. I find that very very unsatisfactory. That is why I try to push myself through all these different fields in modern society, in addition to doing my scientific work.

By doing that, I would like to make myself a kind of link, in the flesh, between these divided societies or subcultures. I think I'm doing an experiment with my own body. Maybe the product can be a book or a philosophy or a new concept or whatever, but I'd like to somehow, someday, reach or generate this something which would encompass all these myriad, miscellaneous aspects of modern life.

"I think I'm doing an experiment with my own body," Mogi says. In a sense, aren't we all doing that? We are a community and a context of one; we seek to become the kind of person that only we were meant to be. And yet to do that means that we have to exist within a community of others, who are also seeking the same purpose -- some consciously, deliberately, others collectively, in a trance. Mogi is hinting at something I've long struggled to articulate: the desire to understand life, and our relationship to it, with it, in a manner that is not limited to four or five seemingly random aspects of our personality, but instead embraces all of us, collectively, impassionately. Almost mathematically.

Just yesterday, at the bookshop, killing time before Spider-Man III, I flipped through the paperback edition of Haruki Murakami's book Underground, his interviews with the survivors and perpetrators of the sarin subway attacks in Tokyo a decade ago. One of the members of the cult talked movingly about his interest in Buddhism, in the impermance of life, and his quest to find a mathematical way to prove the Buddha's philosophies. A linear means to document the spiritual, I guess you'd say. Both Murakami and myself were somewhat flabbergasted at such an attempt, but then I thought about it; about the root of such a desire. Is what we do in life any different? We start a family and choose a job, and a street, and a house, and a TV, and a sofa, all of which we intend to use as a starting point by which we can order our lives. Perhaps we don't do such things by mathematical means, no, but still: we seek a balance, and when we feel that we've achieved such a balance -- when the sofa is in the right position, and the coke is properly chilled, and the fruits are sufficiently ripe --we indulge. We look to the physical world to prove the intentions that emanate from our innermost selves. Perhaps spirituality cannot be so similarly digested and delineated, but since our brains are the source of all of our worlds, and since these brains are nothing more than electrical circuits looping around a tactile blob of inert gray matter, perhaps some kind of statistical, measureable logic can be documented.

We usually unconsciously start with a checklist of ourselves and work from there: I like to write; to run; to read; to watch movies. Hence, ipso facto, ergo, this is me -- the sum of my parts. All these interests are balanced out by the sun and the moon, the cities and the wilderness that surrounds me. We find a context, or create a context, and within those boundaries we move and slide through the days and weeks of our lives.

But is there a means by which we can find the kind of symbiosis that Mogi seeks? If we are limited to one thing, our thing, as Mogi explains, a certain, inevitable level of limitation is constructed. The writer writes; the musician composes, or plays; the architect designs. We settle into our niche and try to find meaning through what we do, repeatedly. By the age of twelve or thirteen we've decided, more or less, what we like, and why, and we go from there.

And yet part of life also entails expanding our sense of self and our relation to those other 'selves' that are also trying to understand their place in their world. And since their place is next to us, literally, on the bus, or in the classroom, or across the factory assembly line, a certain kind of compromise has to take place. We give up something of ourselves so that the other entity in relation to us can more readily find their own level of comfort.

How do we then come to a satisfactory synthesis, if our own self-inflicted needs are increasingly to be balanced with the needs of others? If we truly want to understand life, in all its maddening complexity and inconsistency, how do we choose between A and B, left and right? Or can we, as Mogi is attempting to do, incorporate not only A through Z but also mathematics, and music, and cinema, and sport, and the Hungarian language, and the pursuit of the perfect cheeseburger, and on and on and on?

I'm reminded of a book I started but never finished, Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi, Or The Glass Bead Game, its photocopied brilliance abandoned by me in my apartment in Phnom Penh the Cambodian heat, and my addled brain, not conducive to philosophical translations. In the book a game has been developed that incorporates, through an intricate and escalating series of stops and starts, a series of tests that somehow link literature to music to science to religion.

Is that what we should be doing? Finding the links? Or is the ultimate joke of life that there are no links, that the 'me' that is separated from the 'you' will remain that way -- separate -- and any attempt at an all-embracing fusion of intellect and spirit and community and individual will remain nothing more than an intellectual tumbleweed wobbling its way through the dusty streets of the universe?

Perhaps.

But I want to keep looking.

I study Japanese to try to peel away a tiny piece of the universe that had remained unknown and invisible to me, but now reveals its essence in slow, tantalizing glimpses. I've seen the despair of the poor and the misery of the sick in Southeast Asia, and I wonder how it fits with the seemingly safe, snow-swept suburbia of my youth. I listen to the sound of my own voice as it modulates, wondering if its tone and timbre are connected to the deeper voice that writes these words and thinks these thoughts. I feel the heat on my forehead, a warm slap, and I compare it to Cambodia, and the Philippines, and a water-park afternoon from the end of high school, when the future was close, and the past even closer.

I will try to find a connection between all of these things. Perhaps, some day, such a circuit might lead to you, the person reading these words, the self at the center of your self.

And if I find such a link, or even come close, you'll be the first to know.

I'M BACK

One of the disadvantages to starting a blog is that the moment that you stop posting for days or weeks or even months at a time is that you, and others, start to see yourself as a bit of a slacker. Which is somewhat true, I guess, but if a blog is supposed to be a representation of yourself, virtually, then couldn't it be argued that the absence of such is simply a reaffirmation of yourself, in ACTUALITY? As in, reality?

Or it could just be a lame excuse for not writing more.

I'm guilty of the second, though I like the convoluted logic of the first.

How could one possibly be living in Japan and complain about not being connected?

I'm not sure, but that's my gripe. Not having a laptop, I'm at the mercy of internet cafes. Which is fine and dandy, as long as you're living in Cambodia and the Philippines, where internet access comes at fifty cents a pop. Not so tasty when Tokyo and its surrounding environs are your current abode, where hourly rates run to more than five dollars, give or take.

So that's my excuse: Japan is too expensive.

(It works for me, anyways.)

I've got a few blogs written up at home, on paper, which I'll eventually transcribe in the next few weeks. One has to do with diligence, and steadiness, and a 19th century French postman who constructed a monument to the power of persistence. The other has to do with Rocky Balboa, and Sylvester Stallone as a writer and director who has more than a few shades of Arthur Miller coursing through his veins. (I'm serious. Nobody said that you couldn't be arrested for human-growth hormones by Australian police and not be a writer of some distinction.)

I suppose I should be invading your mind with perceptive perceptions of Japanese culture, high and low, but I feel like I've said it before, or, if I haven't somebody else has, and better. Japan is like where you live, only more high-tech, and more civil, and more monolingual and monocultural. It's its own contradiction, for the moment you think one thing, Japan will contradict you, and itself. Kind of like most of us humans.

In the meantime, the rapid pace of life here, and the uncertainty of my own, has me wanting to latch on to things. I plan on buying a complete work of Shakespeare's plays tomorrow, if only because I figure I might as well finally tackle Shakespeare head-on over the next year or so. At the same time I'm slowly making my way, page by page, through various books in Japanese. Concentrating so slowly and carefully on Japanese words -- I'm lucky if I read a page a day -- has me longing somewhat to do the same in English. To rediscover in English what we take for granted. And who better to do that with than Shakespeare?

So the plan is to read Shakespeare and Japanese in limited measure, day by day. And see what it does to my head.

Be well, all.

TWO NEWSPAPERS, TWO HEADLINES, TWO DAYS APART

Here are two recent headlines from the two major Filipino newspapers, the type of headlines that would never, ever be seen in Canada:

"Limbo does not exist"

"Campaign death toll hits 22"

The first headline refers to a statement released by the Vatican that the higher-ups in the Catholic hierarchy have decided, after much internal deliberation, that there is no 'limbo', no place where the dead souls of children not yet baptized go to rest for all eternity. This was front page, above-the-fold, bold-black news here in the Philippines.

The second headline details the deaths of twenty-two officials running for public office during this hectic, maddening election season in the Philippines. That's right -- public officials, and the unfortunate bystanders caught in the way -- are routinely killed during election season. Shot. Stabbed. Bludgeoned. Blown up. Boom. Democracy at work. Pass the cheque.

Why would these headlines not be seen back home?

Religion and politics at work, essentially.

Canada is a religious country, yes. Well, not really. Perhaps. There are many Christians, many Muslims, many Jews, but we don't wear our faiths on our sleeves, and we certainly don't splash it on the front page of our daily newspapers. We keep it private, for the most part. Most Canadians couldn't tell you the particular faith of their elected leaders, and most Canadians couldn't particularly care, either.

Here, they do care, because almost everybody is a Christian, and most of those Christians are Catholic. (Not everybody, I guess. There is a substantial Muslim minority, mostly in the southern islands of the Philippines, and a small minority of that minority are the terrorists who are blowing things up left and right and trying to establish their own, separate country -- much like the Muslims in the southernmost part of Thailand. The Muslims here in Baguio are usually the merchants, staking out their corners on Session Road, selling the used clothes, jewelry, and assorted, bewildering knicknacks. Their children are also, usually, the beggar children.) In this Catholic country, if you are not religious, well, you're strange. Weird. A little odd. Everybody assumes you are, so they don't even ask. It's common for taxi drivers and teachers and the average folk to end a conversation saying 'god bless'. Almost every taxi, for that matter (and jeepney, too -- the half-bus, half jeep that serves as cheap public transport) is adorned with tiny crosses, miniature Jesuses, plastic replications of Mother Mary. E-mails end with 'God be with you'. Such an overt display of religiosity struck me, initially, as somewhat unsettling. Now I see it for what it is: the natural display of their innermost beliefs. Even now, as I type these words, the music here at the Internet cafe alternates between hard-core rap and Christian pop. There's no contradiction.

Which is why newspapers can get away with -- and, indeed, must-- proclaim major changes to the Christian doctrine up-front and big as life. When last year's film of Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code was released here, you would not, fucking, believe the controversy it caused. Its' rating as R-13 was front page news in all the papers. You would have thought Jesus himself was coming back to diss the flick. But so it goes. Religion is life here, and they treat it as seriously as life.

However, this is the Philippines, which means that it's poor, and massively overpopulated, a land where both divorce and abortion are illegal, and a country that was recently voted by foreign businessmen as the most corrupt in all of Asia, which means, ipso fact, that politics is a dirty, dirty business. I mean, shit, they have, on tape, the current president, Gloria Arroyo, fixing the last freakin' election, telling the chief election officer to make sure that she wins by at least a million votes. Due to the legality of the conversation's recording, however, not much can be done.

It starts from the top, and the sleaze slithers down. If I've learned anything from living first in Cambodia and now living here, it's that in poor countries politics is where the money is. Period. End of sentence. Full stop. Practically the only way to make any money is to become a politician, and once you are there, you want to stay there, forever and forever, the power and the glory, amen. President Arroyo was adamant about changing the presidency into a parliament system this year. Why? A president can serve only one five-year term; a prime minister can serve indefinitely. Big shock, her wanting a change.

So if you run for office here, you are upsetting the elite, the incumbents, and when you upset the incumbents, you could get killed. Not 'killed' as in you lose a shitload of votes; 'killed' as in shot in the head as you walk through your door. Out of all the countries in the world last year, which one was the most dangerous for foreign journalists, the place where more reporters were killed than anywhere else? Iraq? Afghanistan? Uh-uh. The Philippines.

Both of these -- the one about religion, the one about politics -- remind me of the vast gap that exists between where I'm from and where I am. This is a big, wide world, one where religion can hold sway and where public office remains a dirty, deadly business.

And at the root is poverty. Living without hot water. Generations of people living in shit and squalor. When all you have is shit and squalor, you look to the Lord. When all you have is shit and squalor, you will do anything, try anything, kill anything, to make your way up.

And stay there.

Two newspapers. Two headlines. Two days apart. The country in a nutshell.

All that's left to do is read between the lines.

Which is the work of a lifetime.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

So a troubled young man walks onto the campus of his university and kills thirty-two people. And an American Peace Corps volunteer named Julia Campbell is found dead in Ifugao province in the Philippines, not far from where I am, actually, and she was most likely raped, and killed, and left in the wilderness to die alone. And so we look at these events and we suck in our breath and look up to the sky, blue as it is, and try to understand why the world is the way that it is: brutal, unforgiving, merciless. And as we look at that sky we see the clouds, white and full, and the sun, bright and strong, and somehow the pieces don't fit; the ideas don't mesh; the emotions don't level out into something palatable and clear. If we are religious we thank the Lord above for granting us the mercy of His compassion, and if we are not we wonder what the fuck is going on. I mean, seriously. What, is going, on? (Something that the hundred-plus people killed in Iraq yesterday due to sectarian violence wonder daily.)

It all comes down to violence, and the sickness of violence, and the way that blood and brains and bruises make us wince and gasp. Something that makes us wretch and gag is not something intended to endure, let alone to advocate. It is not a sight to see, this violence. It is not something you put on a postcard and drop in the box, or boot up online, complete with vivid reds and deepest blues. We don't have blackened faces and torn-apart limbs as Polaroid mementos. All because pain hurts, physically and mentally, and we do not like to remember the things that make us hurt, and so we push them away, shut the door, chuck the key, fire up Idol. We don't celebrate that which wounds. We like to think that the goodness inside of us overwhelms the badness that has been so obviously manifested in recent times.

And yet by denying the violence we reduce it to an aberration, an anomaly, and if there's anything that history has taught us it is that violence has been, is, and will always be leaking out from our mouths and our fists. Until somebody sees our point.

I saw a play in Japan years ago about a student who comes into class and wipes out his comrades, and the message of his violence was clear: "You're not listening to me." That is what all violence is saying: You're not listening to me. We swear and we fight and kill and we maim because somebody is not hearing what we want to say, what lurks within us but refuses to come out.

We maim to communicate. The same way that we love and we console and caress and we stroke. You can't have one without the other. They come from within us, these touches and punches. We relish the one and abhor the other. And yet each reminds us of what we are capable of, and what we want others to understand about us. The nicest people I have met in the world have been Japanese and Cambodians, and yet these very same people, in the not-so-distant past, have committed perhaps the worst atrocities of the twentieth-century, on themselves and each other.

How do we explain it?

Somebody tell me. God, Buddha, Mohammed, motherfucking Dr.Phil -- tell me, please, why?

That's what it boils down to.

Why?

When the madness descends, we ask 'why', but we never ask 'why' when we are good to each other, kind to each other, helpful and considerate to friends and strangers alike. We take the angels of our better natures for granted. We do countless, endless mundane polite gestures of goodwill on an hourly, daily basis, and we give them, and we accept them, with nary a second thought. And yet violence has us questioning who we are and what we should be doing.

Maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe when violence becomes commonplace, ordinary and, yes, boring, that means we've reached a kind of tipping point. If we were to step back, step out, imagine ourselves as alien speices viewing the whole of humanity as a school project assigned for some intergalactic sociology workshop, perhaps a clearer picture would come into focus, a more sharper portrait of what us as humans actually are.

"Humans on the planet earth have raped, pillaged and murdered each other for countless millenia," such an alien scholar might write, "and yet each time an act of violence occurs in their otherwise civilized societies, humanity, on mass, reacts as if something unusual has happened. Numerous countries throughout this planet face war on a daily basis -- Iraq and Sudan being the most famous contemporary examples, where thousands are slaughtered on a yearly basis -- and yet when a few dozen are killed in one particular place these humans tend to question the very nature of their essential beings. Humans thus tend to be eternal optimists. Despite the historical and modern actualizations of violence that dominate their societies, they still have the capacity for shock and outrage at the actions of their fellow man. They still want to believe that they are more than what they are. They have yet to accept the history of violence and the inevitability of violence. They expect something different, and are surprised, horrified and traumatized when they receive more of the same."

Growing up means we accept the world as it is. There are bills to pay, jobs to go to, assholes to endure. Nobody gets out alive. But a part of us, despite our maturity, despite our knowledge of the past, despite the reality of our present, refuses to accept violence. Emotionally, spiritually, intellectually: we don't want it. We hate it. It forces the puke up inside of our throats, and we have to swallow the bile and feel it slide back down our throats and wait until it arises again, a week or a month or a year from now. We don't want to grow up, in other words.

I hope we never do.

TEN AFTER TEN, ALL THE TIME, OR HOW YOU, TOO, CAN WEAR THE TITANIC ON YOUR WRIST

As Socrates once said: "Sometimes the sublime subtleties of life need to be pointed out to us by twelve year old Korean students."

Maybe it was Descartes, not Socrates. Might have been Mao, actually.

In any event, it was my twelve year old Korean student who pointed out to me the other day that in almost every single watch ad you will see, the hands of the watch are invariably pointed to ten after ten.

I was trying to teach him something, but he turned the tables on me. There was an ad in Time magazine for a watch that cost, get ready, cue the music, $250, 000. What was so special about this watch? Why, it had pieces salvaged from the actual Titanic embedded into its structure.

That's right. You, too, can own a timepiece that has tiny metal fragments of the doomed cruiseship melted straight into its core, all for the reasonable price of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. American.

So I was trying to tell him that this was somewhat unreasonable, not to mention downright freaking odd.

Who would buy such a watch?

Is it good for picking up chicks?

You're sitting at the bar, sipping your gin and tonic, and up walks this blonde, and you say hi, and you point to your watch, and you say: "See this? Dropped a cool two hundred and fifty grand on it. See this metal? From the Titanic. Not bad, eh?"

At what point do national tragedies become fair game and prime fodder for our own captilistic, cannibalistic instincts? What's the statue of limitation on death? Because a lot of people died on the Titanic, and they're still dead, and it's somewhat creepy to be wielding the weapon of their destruction on your wrist.

What's next?

In ten, twenty years, are you going to meet some girl in a club, buy her a drink, sit her down at a table, at which point she'll open her mouth and say: "See that tongue ring? It's made from debris found at the World Trade Center?"

Sound impossible?

Not to me.

The Titanic tragedy was once the biggest, most tragic story of the century. And now you can put pieces of the boat in your watch for the price of a decent sports car.

But my student wasn't that interested.

"Ten-ten," he said. "My teacher in Korea told me that all watches in advertisements are set at ten-ten."

"Really?" I said.

I went home.

I checked.

Riffled through all the old Times and Newsweeks lying around.

And you know what?

The little bugger was right.

Next time you seen an ad for a watch, on a billboard, online, in a magazine, check out the hands. They will be at or near ten after ten.

It's like some little secret of the universe that has been unknown to me for years has finally been revealed.

Not only are there watches with pieces of the Titanic in them that sell for a quarter of a million bucks, but there are also ads for these little clocks that will always be set to ten after ten!

I feel like Jim Carrey in The Number 23, seeing strange patterns and shapes where none had existed before.

The moral of the story?

Always listen to twelve year olds. Korean or otherwise. They know what's cool in life. They know what's important. They've been to the places and listened for the sounds that we've long forgotten how to hear.

IN THE END, WE'RE ALL JUST CLERKS

The Good Shepherd is a great movie. Big in its themes, its ideas, its executions. Grand in its interweaving of the political and personal, the clerical and the tragic. Robert DeNiro's second film as a director -- after A Bronx Tale, years ago -- was dismissed by most critics and shunned by audiences when it opened in North America around Christmastime, but I'm telling you, The Good Shepherd is the real deal.

What do we owe ourselves? What do we owe our countries? Our families? How do we live with the decisions that we make? The film, written by Eric Roth, utilizes the complex prism of the C.I.A. to tell this story and ask those questions. We watch Matt Damon's character evolve through college and into a career C.I.A. man, step-by-step, in flashbacks and real-time, and through it all Damon maintains the same stoic, almost grim demeanour: rarely does a smile flash across this man's face. Rarely can we tell what he's thinking. Most of the time it seems that he doesn't know what he's thinking, either. That's the point. Lost in a labryinth of lies and deceptions, maintaining a moral code at all costs, he eventually comes to a point where loyalties intersect; where the right thing to do is impossible to ascertain; where good judgement merges with darker, fiercer instincts. One where we live with the decisions we are forced to make. Or choose to make, which can be even more tragic.

If The Godfather used the Mafia as a metaphor for the American experience, then The Good Shepherd utizilizes the C.I.A. for similar purposes. (In that regard, it's an interesting counterpoint to Norman Mailer's massive, majestic 1991 novel of the C.I.A., Harlot's Ghost.) Is it as good as The Godfather? No, but that's fine; almost no films are. But Francis Ford Coppola is one of The Good Shepherd's producers, and the film aims at similar ideals -- explorations of business and family, fidelity and trust in a world where neither notion applies, but both are expected.

The film is long, and slow, and it unfolds. It develops, then envelops. Everything is restrained, held-back, kept inside. Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, John Turturro, Billy Crudup, even Joe Pesci (!) pop up, but Matt Damon is the anchor. His performance is so low-key that it will probably put half the audience to sleep (as might the film, truth be told), but that's the point: these are men engaged in the most nefarious undertakings known to modern governments, and yet they must perform and act as if they nothing more than ordinary bureaucrats. These days, we want our actors to emote; Damon doesn't. He acts. Which might be even harder.

It has the density and complexity of a great novel, this film does, and near the end of the film, when things come together, when the pieces fall into place, it attains a sad and simple majesty that, yes, rivals The Godfather for emotional impact.

It's not for everyone, this film. It's pacing and its structure and its emotional complexity harken back to a different time, when people went to films for different reasons. Movies today, even the good ones, the Academy Award nominated stuff, relish and revel in pyrotechnics, computer-generated or otherwise. We want to see our actors explode with rage and anger; we want to see dramatic tensions unleashed in violence, verbal and physical. This is a film centred on quiet conversations in crowded bars. On the things left unsaid between fathers and sons. On mysterious looks across midnight streets. On the way a hat is placed just so, being noticed only by those who are trained to notice such things.

And it doesn't flaunt its depth, and its greatness. Its validity. That's the thing -- this flick is valid. My favorite line, a great line, the line of all lines, comes midway through the film, when DeNiro's character, one of the first C.I.A. recruiters at the dawn of the Cold War, hobbled by sickness, slumps into his car. He's explaining to Matt Damon where as an agent he'll go and what he'll have to do. Idealism doesn't come up. A film that previously allowed its characters to trumpet the necessity of God, and country, and stopping the spread of evil throughout the world, now dispenses with such obvious bullshit.

"In the end, we're all just clerks," DeNiro says. Offhand, almost.

And the car drives off.

That may sound like a throwaway line, but the timbre of it, the tone of it, the nonchalance, says it all.

In the end, we're all just clerks.

The tragedy of the film, the beauty of it, is that at the end you're left wondering: if that's the case, then was it all worth it?