'Pop', as Canadians call it, or 'soda', as most Americans dub it, isn't all that popular here in Japan, so perhaps this new line of Pepsi products found at my local FamilyMart is designed to stoke some interest?
PEPSI WHITE: PEPSI AND YOGHURT FLAVOR
Hmmm.
Tempting, but...
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Monday, November 03, 2008
WHERE I'M SUPPOSED TO FINISH
A few weeks back I was sent to Nagoya for ten or eleven days, filling in for a sick teacher at an all-women's university in Japan. (They still have those here.) I caught the shinkansen, or 'bullet train', there and back, and on my return to Yokohama, after settling into my seat, I soon realized that everybody around me was smoking.
Exactly how and why I stumbled into the smoking-car of the shinkansen remains a mystery. (They still have those here -- places set aside for smokers.) And I was too whipped to walk to another car and find another seat. (My ticket was for a non-reserved seat, so technically I was well within my rights as a tax-paying American to sit up and stand up and find another place to rest my body. And actually I'm not a tax-paying American, just a Canadian in Japan, but it sounds better the first way, because nobody ever talks about their rights as Canadians, let alone a Canadian's rights in Japan, so it would kind of stupid to just, like, put it out there, that phrase, so it sounds more natural, more confident, to consider myself a tax-paying American.) So I sat there and let the smoke settle around me in gray-purple clouds of condensed ash.
I started to wonder about the smoke itself -- the particles and atoms and molecules and all that sort of stuff. What if they were conscious? I don't think they are, because nobody's ever proved that atmos and nuclei have a thinking, beating brain within their structures. (Which makes me think: Are atoms made up of atoms? Are cells made up of smaller cells? And where do quarks fit in with everything? Isn't everything essential unstable and separate on the sub-atomic molecular level? If that's so, how could the train remain solid, hovering above the tracks, when way down deep we're all somewhat sliding in that mysterious ether of life?)
Still. It's entirely possible that the tiny particles that make up smoke are, in fact, alive and alert. A strange existence, that would be. Pumped out into the air after being sucked through a tube and into someone's mouth. Hurtling around left and right, back and forth, your ultimate destination a cosmological crapshoot. Of course, if they were alive, these atoms, I'm sure they'd be small, so tiny that their brains would barely register as brains, but still -- they might be able to feel something, regardless of their size. I've read somewhere that mosquitoes only live for like a day, so maybe the lives of smoke particles are the same, and maybe their receptivity towards pain is roughly equivalent to that of a mosquito's.
And then I suddenly realized that my existence was not so different from these tiny bubbles of smoke. There I was, stuck in a train, rocketing through time and space. If I were an atom of smoke in somebody's mouth, expelled into the atmosphere, I'm sure the experience would be roughly equivalent to me as a full-sized human, sitting comfortably in a bullet-train. The only difference being that I knew my end point. I knew where I was supposed to finish. The atoms in the smoke were shit out of luck, in that regard, and as the train belted through the dark Japanese night, past silent towns and indifferent mountains, I made a conscious decision not to curse the smoke or the smokers surrounding me. Everybody's got it a bit rough.
Exactly how and why I stumbled into the smoking-car of the shinkansen remains a mystery. (They still have those here -- places set aside for smokers.) And I was too whipped to walk to another car and find another seat. (My ticket was for a non-reserved seat, so technically I was well within my rights as a tax-paying American to sit up and stand up and find another place to rest my body. And actually I'm not a tax-paying American, just a Canadian in Japan, but it sounds better the first way, because nobody ever talks about their rights as Canadians, let alone a Canadian's rights in Japan, so it would kind of stupid to just, like, put it out there, that phrase, so it sounds more natural, more confident, to consider myself a tax-paying American.) So I sat there and let the smoke settle around me in gray-purple clouds of condensed ash.
I started to wonder about the smoke itself -- the particles and atoms and molecules and all that sort of stuff. What if they were conscious? I don't think they are, because nobody's ever proved that atmos and nuclei have a thinking, beating brain within their structures. (Which makes me think: Are atoms made up of atoms? Are cells made up of smaller cells? And where do quarks fit in with everything? Isn't everything essential unstable and separate on the sub-atomic molecular level? If that's so, how could the train remain solid, hovering above the tracks, when way down deep we're all somewhat sliding in that mysterious ether of life?)
Still. It's entirely possible that the tiny particles that make up smoke are, in fact, alive and alert. A strange existence, that would be. Pumped out into the air after being sucked through a tube and into someone's mouth. Hurtling around left and right, back and forth, your ultimate destination a cosmological crapshoot. Of course, if they were alive, these atoms, I'm sure they'd be small, so tiny that their brains would barely register as brains, but still -- they might be able to feel something, regardless of their size. I've read somewhere that mosquitoes only live for like a day, so maybe the lives of smoke particles are the same, and maybe their receptivity towards pain is roughly equivalent to that of a mosquito's.
And then I suddenly realized that my existence was not so different from these tiny bubbles of smoke. There I was, stuck in a train, rocketing through time and space. If I were an atom of smoke in somebody's mouth, expelled into the atmosphere, I'm sure the experience would be roughly equivalent to me as a full-sized human, sitting comfortably in a bullet-train. The only difference being that I knew my end point. I knew where I was supposed to finish. The atoms in the smoke were shit out of luck, in that regard, and as the train belted through the dark Japanese night, past silent towns and indifferent mountains, I made a conscious decision not to curse the smoke or the smokers surrounding me. Everybody's got it a bit rough.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
HALFWAY THERE
The problem with starting a blog is that you're supposed to continue writing the blog, daily, or else people stop reading and move on to other, more interesting blogs, leaving your intermittent ramblings and infrequent posts hanging off a tree on some virtual but nevertheless tangible cliff in cyberspace. Or perhaps I should say that starting a blog isn't a problem, but continuing one is, because it's easy to start something, to take that initial big-toe dabble in the deep-end, but somewhat more mundane and difficult to continue, which involves follow-through, patience, dedication, intent. Commitment, in other words.
But what is one 'committing' to, when it comes to a blog? If you're a published author, you're basically comitting to creating something interesting every day so your fans will keep on clicking onto your site and, hopefully, when your new book arrives, they'll be tempted, if not compelled, to buy it, because they've been reading your words every day and you've therefore infiltrated their brain and consciousness in such a way that to not buy your book will make them feel guilty everytime they read your latest blog entry. If you don't have a book to plug, which I don't, then there must be some other, compelling reason to keep your blog going. If it's just a list of your daily habits, then it seems to me that a blog is little more than narcissism writ small, projected large. Better not to commit, and type nothing, then commit, and tell everybody what you thought of the latest political tornado that seems to be hovering on the horizon, interspersed with what you think of Obama and Pailin and the faltering economy, words and opinions that are multipled a milllion times by a million bloggers across the Internet, so if you're adding anything to the conversation, it's little more than a faint echo of everybody else's electronic voice. (Which in and of itself is an elitist thing to say, I know, because the great benefit of blogging is that it gives ordinary people access to the world, and who's to say that somebody's isolated opinion on the weather or the economy or Palin might not strike some other person in Pakistan or Pennsylvania as insightful or even moving, but I guess I just mean that it's not for me, that style. I used to keep a diary about what I thought about life, but only I read it, and I don't want this to be a diary, because, quite frankly, my diary was fucking boring to begin with.)
I haven't written much the last few months because I've been trying to study Japanese a bit more, which sounds pretentious in and of itself, the kind of statement one makes to make oneself sound somewhat sophisticated and oh-so-much-more worthy than those stuck in the monlingual rut of their own linguistic existence, and the statement because even more pretentious when I say that I've been reading, by and large, baseball books in Japanese, because the prose is straightforward, and the vocabulary is not so difficult, and although I'm not a huge baseball fan, meaning keeping track of statistics and who's winning and who's losing and the nuts-and-bolts of the game itself, I am a big fan of the mythology of baseball, its characters, its history, its mythic hold on the family and the North American consciousness (to those who give a shit about it, anyway), and since Japanese baseball seems to have a similar hold on the Japanese consciousness, reading about it in Japanese seems like a pretty tactile way of grasping the Japanese character itself, which also sounds pretentious, because who am I, one man, to understand a hundred and twenty million people under the umbrella of 'Japanese'? And to do so by reading about baseball, no less? (Cut to an image of me talking to myself, authentic-Scott to doppelganger-Scott, at a dimly-lit party, Authentic-Scott saying: "Yeah, I've been reading books in Japanese about baseball." Doppelganger-Scott's thought bubble floating overhead: "Who's this dickwad?")
My level in Japanese is such that I can read any given page of a pretty standard book and understand, I guess, sixty to seventy percent of what's going on, perhaps a little less, which means that there's often, if not usually, a few words in each sentence that I don't get, but what I've gradually learned is that language itself is a fairly potent, malleable force. Meaning, words have power, and those words that you do understand in a sentence -- namely the nouns and the verbs -- will carry you past all that other stuff that you don't understand in a sentence.
Which I'm learning is a lot. I majored in Creative Writing but I have a very poor understanding of English grammar itself, the labels and the mechanics and the means by which it all works. I understand and deal with language on an instinctual level, but when you learn another language you're forced to learn it, to a certain extent, on the grammatical level; your instincts from English don't necessarily carry over, and if they do, then they're probably the instincts you don't want to respond to in the first place, because Japanese is so different from English that to rely on your English grammar knowledge as a crutch is not only foolish but suicidal. It won't get you where you want to go, and will instead leave you underneath the snow-tires of the monster truck that is the Japanese language itself.
And part of the reason why I've become more interested in Japanese is that I'm trying to figure out why I read what I read in English, and why I write what I write in English. David Foster Wallace, a great writer who hanged himself to death a few months ago, was always an idol of mine in university, and he always seemed to be operating on cylinders attached to engines whose sounds I could barely hear, let alone dream of constructing myself. (The fact that these
imaginary engines were actually attached to hypothetical vehicles that moved across vast literary distances, and that I could only hear the engines but not see or sense the actual truck itself, made me feel simultaneously small and ambitious.) So when you come across a writer whose sense of the world is empathetic and so acute, and who understands and assimilates and dispenses information at such an astonishing rate of insight, you have to ask yourself: Can I do so, too?
And the answer is no, probably not, at least not as well, but that's a given, because most people in the arts are not nearly as good as those they look up to, but then it would be a quiet forest indeed if only the most melodic birds sang, or so the saying says, and I guess it's true, but then the question becomes: What kind of song do you want to sing?
In blog-terms, since I guess that's what I'm talking about, the question is then: What do you write about, and why do you write it? I've always wondered what it would be like if everybody across the earth was suddenly forced to just tell everybody else all the intimate, vile details of themselves that they purposely keep off their blogs, just to see if anybody would keep reading. Because it seems that some blogs become nothing more than vanity projects, the equivalent of the Polo shirts we all coveted in Grade 8 because that meant that you were somehow in tune with the zeitgeist of adolescent coolness. What about a day where all the blogs just became repositories of the way people truly often feel about themselves?
And yet that in and of itself is another extended form of vanity, I suppose, this notion that displayed grief and loathing and anxiety and fear is somehow special and unique. What you're actually doing when writing a blog is trying to communicate something, but that choice is what's in your control. How others read it, respond to it, react to it, is up to them. The vanity comes in the presentation, and since most of life is vanity, keeping up appearances, trying not to look like a schmuck if only so you can keep your job and not be hassled by the police for looking like a vagrant, it's simplistic and somewhat adolescent to assume that we can get ride of those instincts in the blog-world, since blogs are all about vanity.
(Except what's interesting in Japan is that most people in their blogs are very coy and discrete about what they reveal, rarely showing pictures of themselves, often not even giving their names. And yet there are more blogs written in Japanese than any other language combined. Total. I don't mean percentagewise. I mean more blogs are written in Japanese than the mass accumulation of all other words in all other languages. Or maybe it's just English. At any rate, the Japanese like to blog, but their virtual selves are a carefully encoded construction, a vanity parcelled out in selected doses spread across certain areas of interest.)
Which is all a long-winded, winding and somewhat whiny way of saying that becoming interested in another language like Japanese is helping me to become more interested in English, and vice versa, and when I write in English, I want it to mean something, and if I don't think it will mean anything, then I'd prefer not to write anything. Different parts of the brain are being activated when I try to read in Japanese, and it makes the experience of reading itself, always my greatest pleasure, suddenly new and vivid and alive in a way that it hasn't been since I was eight or nine years old, and I would like that process to be present in my own writing, even if it's only for a blog. (The experience of gradually being able to read, even only a little bit, in another langue is somewhat like finding a way to eat other than through your mouth, or realizing you could sing through your belly button. Different noises from different places.)
And so choosing not to blog about all the stuff I've been trying to read in Japanese is a choice that's made mostly because I don't think it would be very interesting, and I want my writing, whether it's in an email or through this blog, to be interesting and insightful on some level. I've also become a little bit tired of my previous essay-style type stuff, since it seems like I'm always trying to arrive at some 'moral of the story' at the end of a post, like those NBC promos from Saturday morning cartoons when we were a kid -- 'and that's one to grow on -- and maybe that particular style is also a way of pretending that the stuff I've been writing about which has been eating up your time has been actually interesting and insightful, but it seems to be my verbal tic, and asking me to stop doing it that way would be like asking me to write with my right hand, simply not possible, so I'll at least try to shake it up a bit every now and then, even if I can't eliminate it altogether.
Now, having just said all that, about what might not be interesting to you but important to me, Japanese and baseball and bla-bla-bla, I may, indeed, try to write (at erratic intervals, of course, because I'm an erratic guy) more about what studying Japanese is like, simply because that seems to be what's occupying a lot of my time these days. (Outside of little things like work, eating, sleeping, etc.) Whether or not you find that to be an interesting topic is outside of my realm of control.
But I think words matter, if only because they are the way we bridge one form of self (me) to another form of self (you). Through reading. Through writing. Words have weight. Reading Japanese makes me feel oddly connected to all those anonymous dudes and dudettes who first started to draw and shape and extrapolate from its Chinese characters all those millenia ago, and I feel oddly young when trying to understand what is trying to be said. Writing English gives me a chance to see if I can get intangible concepts into my head into a somewhat more tangible, if not likeable, form.
I know I've been somewhat lazy in my posting, and I can't promise any future topics will be interesting for you or even comprehensible to me, but if I occasionally write something that compels you to completely cross that bridge of self from 'me' to 'you', or only shamble halfway over, uncertain of whether's it's even worth continuing on to the other side, I'll be happy. Even getting somewhere halfway, whether it's in studying Japanese, writing a blog, or attempting to engage a fellow confused and struggling human, is good enough for me.
But what is one 'committing' to, when it comes to a blog? If you're a published author, you're basically comitting to creating something interesting every day so your fans will keep on clicking onto your site and, hopefully, when your new book arrives, they'll be tempted, if not compelled, to buy it, because they've been reading your words every day and you've therefore infiltrated their brain and consciousness in such a way that to not buy your book will make them feel guilty everytime they read your latest blog entry. If you don't have a book to plug, which I don't, then there must be some other, compelling reason to keep your blog going. If it's just a list of your daily habits, then it seems to me that a blog is little more than narcissism writ small, projected large. Better not to commit, and type nothing, then commit, and tell everybody what you thought of the latest political tornado that seems to be hovering on the horizon, interspersed with what you think of Obama and Pailin and the faltering economy, words and opinions that are multipled a milllion times by a million bloggers across the Internet, so if you're adding anything to the conversation, it's little more than a faint echo of everybody else's electronic voice. (Which in and of itself is an elitist thing to say, I know, because the great benefit of blogging is that it gives ordinary people access to the world, and who's to say that somebody's isolated opinion on the weather or the economy or Palin might not strike some other person in Pakistan or Pennsylvania as insightful or even moving, but I guess I just mean that it's not for me, that style. I used to keep a diary about what I thought about life, but only I read it, and I don't want this to be a diary, because, quite frankly, my diary was fucking boring to begin with.)
I haven't written much the last few months because I've been trying to study Japanese a bit more, which sounds pretentious in and of itself, the kind of statement one makes to make oneself sound somewhat sophisticated and oh-so-much-more worthy than those stuck in the monlingual rut of their own linguistic existence, and the statement because even more pretentious when I say that I've been reading, by and large, baseball books in Japanese, because the prose is straightforward, and the vocabulary is not so difficult, and although I'm not a huge baseball fan, meaning keeping track of statistics and who's winning and who's losing and the nuts-and-bolts of the game itself, I am a big fan of the mythology of baseball, its characters, its history, its mythic hold on the family and the North American consciousness (to those who give a shit about it, anyway), and since Japanese baseball seems to have a similar hold on the Japanese consciousness, reading about it in Japanese seems like a pretty tactile way of grasping the Japanese character itself, which also sounds pretentious, because who am I, one man, to understand a hundred and twenty million people under the umbrella of 'Japanese'? And to do so by reading about baseball, no less? (Cut to an image of me talking to myself, authentic-Scott to doppelganger-Scott, at a dimly-lit party, Authentic-Scott saying: "Yeah, I've been reading books in Japanese about baseball." Doppelganger-Scott's thought bubble floating overhead: "Who's this dickwad?")
My level in Japanese is such that I can read any given page of a pretty standard book and understand, I guess, sixty to seventy percent of what's going on, perhaps a little less, which means that there's often, if not usually, a few words in each sentence that I don't get, but what I've gradually learned is that language itself is a fairly potent, malleable force. Meaning, words have power, and those words that you do understand in a sentence -- namely the nouns and the verbs -- will carry you past all that other stuff that you don't understand in a sentence.
Which I'm learning is a lot. I majored in Creative Writing but I have a very poor understanding of English grammar itself, the labels and the mechanics and the means by which it all works. I understand and deal with language on an instinctual level, but when you learn another language you're forced to learn it, to a certain extent, on the grammatical level; your instincts from English don't necessarily carry over, and if they do, then they're probably the instincts you don't want to respond to in the first place, because Japanese is so different from English that to rely on your English grammar knowledge as a crutch is not only foolish but suicidal. It won't get you where you want to go, and will instead leave you underneath the snow-tires of the monster truck that is the Japanese language itself.
And part of the reason why I've become more interested in Japanese is that I'm trying to figure out why I read what I read in English, and why I write what I write in English. David Foster Wallace, a great writer who hanged himself to death a few months ago, was always an idol of mine in university, and he always seemed to be operating on cylinders attached to engines whose sounds I could barely hear, let alone dream of constructing myself. (The fact that these
imaginary engines were actually attached to hypothetical vehicles that moved across vast literary distances, and that I could only hear the engines but not see or sense the actual truck itself, made me feel simultaneously small and ambitious.) So when you come across a writer whose sense of the world is empathetic and so acute, and who understands and assimilates and dispenses information at such an astonishing rate of insight, you have to ask yourself: Can I do so, too?
And the answer is no, probably not, at least not as well, but that's a given, because most people in the arts are not nearly as good as those they look up to, but then it would be a quiet forest indeed if only the most melodic birds sang, or so the saying says, and I guess it's true, but then the question becomes: What kind of song do you want to sing?
In blog-terms, since I guess that's what I'm talking about, the question is then: What do you write about, and why do you write it? I've always wondered what it would be like if everybody across the earth was suddenly forced to just tell everybody else all the intimate, vile details of themselves that they purposely keep off their blogs, just to see if anybody would keep reading. Because it seems that some blogs become nothing more than vanity projects, the equivalent of the Polo shirts we all coveted in Grade 8 because that meant that you were somehow in tune with the zeitgeist of adolescent coolness. What about a day where all the blogs just became repositories of the way people truly often feel about themselves?
And yet that in and of itself is another extended form of vanity, I suppose, this notion that displayed grief and loathing and anxiety and fear is somehow special and unique. What you're actually doing when writing a blog is trying to communicate something, but that choice is what's in your control. How others read it, respond to it, react to it, is up to them. The vanity comes in the presentation, and since most of life is vanity, keeping up appearances, trying not to look like a schmuck if only so you can keep your job and not be hassled by the police for looking like a vagrant, it's simplistic and somewhat adolescent to assume that we can get ride of those instincts in the blog-world, since blogs are all about vanity.
(Except what's interesting in Japan is that most people in their blogs are very coy and discrete about what they reveal, rarely showing pictures of themselves, often not even giving their names. And yet there are more blogs written in Japanese than any other language combined. Total. I don't mean percentagewise. I mean more blogs are written in Japanese than the mass accumulation of all other words in all other languages. Or maybe it's just English. At any rate, the Japanese like to blog, but their virtual selves are a carefully encoded construction, a vanity parcelled out in selected doses spread across certain areas of interest.)
Which is all a long-winded, winding and somewhat whiny way of saying that becoming interested in another language like Japanese is helping me to become more interested in English, and vice versa, and when I write in English, I want it to mean something, and if I don't think it will mean anything, then I'd prefer not to write anything. Different parts of the brain are being activated when I try to read in Japanese, and it makes the experience of reading itself, always my greatest pleasure, suddenly new and vivid and alive in a way that it hasn't been since I was eight or nine years old, and I would like that process to be present in my own writing, even if it's only for a blog. (The experience of gradually being able to read, even only a little bit, in another langue is somewhat like finding a way to eat other than through your mouth, or realizing you could sing through your belly button. Different noises from different places.)
And so choosing not to blog about all the stuff I've been trying to read in Japanese is a choice that's made mostly because I don't think it would be very interesting, and I want my writing, whether it's in an email or through this blog, to be interesting and insightful on some level. I've also become a little bit tired of my previous essay-style type stuff, since it seems like I'm always trying to arrive at some 'moral of the story' at the end of a post, like those NBC promos from Saturday morning cartoons when we were a kid -- 'and that's one to grow on -- and maybe that particular style is also a way of pretending that the stuff I've been writing about which has been eating up your time has been actually interesting and insightful, but it seems to be my verbal tic, and asking me to stop doing it that way would be like asking me to write with my right hand, simply not possible, so I'll at least try to shake it up a bit every now and then, even if I can't eliminate it altogether.
Now, having just said all that, about what might not be interesting to you but important to me, Japanese and baseball and bla-bla-bla, I may, indeed, try to write (at erratic intervals, of course, because I'm an erratic guy) more about what studying Japanese is like, simply because that seems to be what's occupying a lot of my time these days. (Outside of little things like work, eating, sleeping, etc.) Whether or not you find that to be an interesting topic is outside of my realm of control.
But I think words matter, if only because they are the way we bridge one form of self (me) to another form of self (you). Through reading. Through writing. Words have weight. Reading Japanese makes me feel oddly connected to all those anonymous dudes and dudettes who first started to draw and shape and extrapolate from its Chinese characters all those millenia ago, and I feel oddly young when trying to understand what is trying to be said. Writing English gives me a chance to see if I can get intangible concepts into my head into a somewhat more tangible, if not likeable, form.
I know I've been somewhat lazy in my posting, and I can't promise any future topics will be interesting for you or even comprehensible to me, but if I occasionally write something that compels you to completely cross that bridge of self from 'me' to 'you', or only shamble halfway over, uncertain of whether's it's even worth continuing on to the other side, I'll be happy. Even getting somewhere halfway, whether it's in studying Japanese, writing a blog, or attempting to engage a fellow confused and struggling human, is good enough for me.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH II: SEARCHING FOR ALTERNATE ROUTES
Yesterday afternoon, while browsing in a used bookstore here in Baguio, a young Filipino man in his late twenties approached me. He seemed to be around my age -- am I still qualified as a young man? -- and normal-looking enough. (I didn't notice until later that he was clutching a small purple pillow to his chest.)
"Can I ask you a question?" he asked.
"Okay," I said.
"Do you know anything about...brain...taps?"
Slight pause on my behalf.
"Sorry?" I said.
"Do you know...information...about...wire...in the brain?"
Suddenly Dan Rather flashed in front of my eyes. Or an image of him, or a memory of him, ten, fifteen years ago, when a mentally disturbed person accosted him outside of the CBS studios and repeatedly asked him: "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" (This incident was later immortalized in a song by R.E.M. titled with that very phrase.)
I thought to myself: This guy's not all there.
It was then that I noticed the pillow, and the slightly dazed, somewhat placid smile stuck to his face.
"Sorry," I said, walking away, despite his polite protestations.
I could be wrong. That nice young man might not have been slightly psychotic, but I didn't want to take the risk. Playing the incident over again in my head, I wondered if somehow I was the one who was out of line, refusing to answer a stranger's simple request.
However, he didn't ask me about brain research, or books on the brain, or anything remotely rational. He inquired as to my knowledge of brain taps and wires in the brain. You know. The usual stuff you ask strangers in a bookstore.
Let's assume that that man was mentally ill.
What is it like to look through the world wielding those thoughts? Does he know that he's a crackpot? Is he aware of his problem? Somewhere in the hard-to-reach inroads of his imagination, is he conscious of the fact that his words and gestures and actions and intent are nonsensical to the rest of society?
Or is he further gone than that, I wonder. Has he reached a point where the illogical becomes logical, where simple thoughts and benign propositions have somehow become skewed and off-kilter. Every thought is an avenue leading to a dead-end, though he's always able to spin himself around and head off in another direction, searching for alternate routes.
All of us are inevitably stuck inside of ourselves, so that everything has to be made to somehow seem to make sense to us, even when we're not entirely sure what we're doing with our lives. We can thus rationalize everything on a daily basis and clumsily make the enormous puzzle pieces of our erratic live into a larger, coherent picture. It's what we need to do, if only to make it through this day before waiting for the next.
What happens when the puzzle pieces don't fit anymore? When you're stopping random people in shopping mall outlets and asking about wires-in-the-brain?
If there is a soul, an essence of ourselves, trapped inside our lonely, damaged minds, in such a case is it silently shrieking, embarrassed by its outward manifestation?
Or is it content, this soul, to sit back and allow the brain and the mind and the tongue and the lips to say whatever needs to be said, no matter how foolish or insane.
I would like to think that it's only the outer part of our human form that can lose touch with the world around us. I want to believe that there's an essence, a wisp of ourselves, that cannot be damaged or frayed. That lies in wait, knowing that other, more interesting realms lie just around the corner, where brains are never tapped, and remain free from wires, forever.
"Can I ask you a question?" he asked.
"Okay," I said.
"Do you know anything about...brain...taps?"
Slight pause on my behalf.
"Sorry?" I said.
"Do you know...information...about...wire...in the brain?"
Suddenly Dan Rather flashed in front of my eyes. Or an image of him, or a memory of him, ten, fifteen years ago, when a mentally disturbed person accosted him outside of the CBS studios and repeatedly asked him: "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" (This incident was later immortalized in a song by R.E.M. titled with that very phrase.)
I thought to myself: This guy's not all there.
It was then that I noticed the pillow, and the slightly dazed, somewhat placid smile stuck to his face.
"Sorry," I said, walking away, despite his polite protestations.
I could be wrong. That nice young man might not have been slightly psychotic, but I didn't want to take the risk. Playing the incident over again in my head, I wondered if somehow I was the one who was out of line, refusing to answer a stranger's simple request.
However, he didn't ask me about brain research, or books on the brain, or anything remotely rational. He inquired as to my knowledge of brain taps and wires in the brain. You know. The usual stuff you ask strangers in a bookstore.
Let's assume that that man was mentally ill.
What is it like to look through the world wielding those thoughts? Does he know that he's a crackpot? Is he aware of his problem? Somewhere in the hard-to-reach inroads of his imagination, is he conscious of the fact that his words and gestures and actions and intent are nonsensical to the rest of society?
Or is he further gone than that, I wonder. Has he reached a point where the illogical becomes logical, where simple thoughts and benign propositions have somehow become skewed and off-kilter. Every thought is an avenue leading to a dead-end, though he's always able to spin himself around and head off in another direction, searching for alternate routes.
All of us are inevitably stuck inside of ourselves, so that everything has to be made to somehow seem to make sense to us, even when we're not entirely sure what we're doing with our lives. We can thus rationalize everything on a daily basis and clumsily make the enormous puzzle pieces of our erratic live into a larger, coherent picture. It's what we need to do, if only to make it through this day before waiting for the next.
What happens when the puzzle pieces don't fit anymore? When you're stopping random people in shopping mall outlets and asking about wires-in-the-brain?
If there is a soul, an essence of ourselves, trapped inside our lonely, damaged minds, in such a case is it silently shrieking, embarrassed by its outward manifestation?
Or is it content, this soul, to sit back and allow the brain and the mind and the tongue and the lips to say whatever needs to be said, no matter how foolish or insane.
I would like to think that it's only the outer part of our human form that can lose touch with the world around us. I want to believe that there's an essence, a wisp of ourselves, that cannot be damaged or frayed. That lies in wait, knowing that other, more interesting realms lie just around the corner, where brains are never tapped, and remain free from wires, forever.
Monday, September 15, 2008
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: R.I.P.
Last week I found my copy of David Foster Wallace's mammoth novel Infinite Jest in a closet in my parents' house in Oxford Station, Canada, and this morning here in the Philippines I read that the celebrated author had committed suicide by hanging himself in his home in Claremont, California. He was 46 years old.
Wallace was one of those writers who made you want to quit writing. Meaning, he was so good, so sharp, so compassionate, so bizarre, so perceptive, that anything you tried to write not only paled in comparison but seemed downright pathetic in comparison. I read him at the age of twenty and wondered who the hell this guy was, and how the hell he managed to write a 1200 page novel with dozens of pages of fictional footnotes that nonetheless remained absolutely riveting. The book was about a tennis academy, a halfway house for recovering addicts, and a film so entertaining that people literally laughed themselves to death. The notion that we are competing against ourselves to death, medicating ourselves to death, entertaining ourselves to death -- this was what Wallace was getting at. He never wrote another novel after this, but his short fiction and lengthy journalistic pieces are a worthy continuation of his singular, eclectic mind.
He was a satirist with a heart, alongside a mind that thought things that nobody else thought, or, if they did, they never said. His journalism on such diverse topics as the 100th ranked tennis player in the world, the films of David Lynch, the absurdities of modern-day cruise ships, the genius of Roger Federer, the wonders of Illinois State fairs, amongst others, made you think not only about how mundane most non-fiction writing was, but how life itself could be viewed from an alternate perspective. If you looked close enough, like Wallace did.
I got the chance to meet him when he gave a reading in Toronto in the mid-nineties. He signed my book, and I asked him for some advice on writing. He recommended taking writing workshops, which I was already doing, and really listening to my teachers, which I probably wasn't. In recent years Wallace himself taught creative writing in California. He was, by all accounts, a vigorous, inspiring teacher. As the school semester is undoubtedly just beginning, I can't imagine what his students are feeling right now.
And for all of his mathematical logic, brilliant, withering sarcasm and convoluted, meta-fictional plots, Wallace was chiefly concerned with feeling. How to feel in a synthetic world. How to not allow ourselves to be numbed to death by the corporate mendacity of modern society. How to connect to others, if only through prose.
This is the subject of a commencement speech he gave, the best commencement speech I've ever heard, or read, the type of speech that acknowledges to young people how bloody hard life is, but how there is a way to retain a smidgen of humanity, if we try very hard and stay wide awake:
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
Last week I was flipping through my old copy of his book. He was alive then. He's not now. That disconnect doesn't make sense to me. How we are here then, and can be gone now.
And I keep thinking: What would Wallace have made of that?
Wallace was one of those writers who made you want to quit writing. Meaning, he was so good, so sharp, so compassionate, so bizarre, so perceptive, that anything you tried to write not only paled in comparison but seemed downright pathetic in comparison. I read him at the age of twenty and wondered who the hell this guy was, and how the hell he managed to write a 1200 page novel with dozens of pages of fictional footnotes that nonetheless remained absolutely riveting. The book was about a tennis academy, a halfway house for recovering addicts, and a film so entertaining that people literally laughed themselves to death. The notion that we are competing against ourselves to death, medicating ourselves to death, entertaining ourselves to death -- this was what Wallace was getting at. He never wrote another novel after this, but his short fiction and lengthy journalistic pieces are a worthy continuation of his singular, eclectic mind.
He was a satirist with a heart, alongside a mind that thought things that nobody else thought, or, if they did, they never said. His journalism on such diverse topics as the 100th ranked tennis player in the world, the films of David Lynch, the absurdities of modern-day cruise ships, the genius of Roger Federer, the wonders of Illinois State fairs, amongst others, made you think not only about how mundane most non-fiction writing was, but how life itself could be viewed from an alternate perspective. If you looked close enough, like Wallace did.
I got the chance to meet him when he gave a reading in Toronto in the mid-nineties. He signed my book, and I asked him for some advice on writing. He recommended taking writing workshops, which I was already doing, and really listening to my teachers, which I probably wasn't. In recent years Wallace himself taught creative writing in California. He was, by all accounts, a vigorous, inspiring teacher. As the school semester is undoubtedly just beginning, I can't imagine what his students are feeling right now.
And for all of his mathematical logic, brilliant, withering sarcasm and convoluted, meta-fictional plots, Wallace was chiefly concerned with feeling. How to feel in a synthetic world. How to not allow ourselves to be numbed to death by the corporate mendacity of modern society. How to connect to others, if only through prose.
This is the subject of a commencement speech he gave, the best commencement speech I've ever heard, or read, the type of speech that acknowledges to young people how bloody hard life is, but how there is a way to retain a smidgen of humanity, if we try very hard and stay wide awake:
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
Last week I was flipping through my old copy of his book. He was alive then. He's not now. That disconnect doesn't make sense to me. How we are here then, and can be gone now.
And I keep thinking: What would Wallace have made of that?
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU SIGNED UP FOR: THE 'NOW', THE 'EGO', AND HOW HE-WHO-DIES-WITH-THE-MOST-TOYS IS NOT NECESSARILY THE WINNER
A few months back I read an article about a female weightlifter who was forced to rearrange her life due to the unexpected demands of a son diagnosed with autism. Wailing and screaming and smearing his own shit on the walls on a regular basis, this kid, as much as she loved him, stretched the limits of her parental affection.
"This is not what I signed up for," she told her pastor.
"This is exactly what you signed up for," he said.
What does that mean, exactly? That a lifetime of caring for a non-responsive child incapable of reciprocating affection is what she secretly had in mind all along? Or is there a deeper, more philosophical layer to be discovered within the seemingly glib answer provided by her pastor?
Eckhart Tolle's book A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life's Purpose reminded me of this woman's story.
I guess you could call it a 'new-age' book (if that term is even still in use), seeing as it concerns itself primarily with questions revolving around life, living, and the ultimate meaning of everything. Oprah picked it for her book-club, and even extended her reach by doing a series of an online, interactive interviews and seminars with Tolle.
It's actually quite a fascinating examination of two facets of human existence that we all too readily take for granted: the nature of time, and the nature of our own ego.
Let's take the first one -- time.
We tend to live either in the past or the future, constantly re-running previous mistakes (or victories) in our mind, or else longing for some yet-to-arrive moment that will magically land us in that place where we know we truly belong.
As Tolle points out, though, the reality is that we live in a constant stream of 'now'. There is only ever this moment, a continuous, free-form flow of 'present tense'. There is no 'future' to get to, because we only experience life in the present.
Consider this extended quotation from the book:
"...There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment: as a means to an end, as an obstacle, or as an enemy...To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
When this pattern becomes more pronounced, and this is very common, the present moment is regarded and treated as if it were an obstacle to be overcome. This is where impatience, frustration and stress arise, and in our culture, it is many people's everyday reality, their normal state. Life, which is now, is seen as a "problem", and you come to inhabit a world of problems that all need to be solved before you can be happy, fulfilled, or really start living -- or so you think. The problem is: For every problem that is solved, another one pops up. As long as the present moment is seen as an obstacle, there can be no end to problems. "I'll be whatever you want me to be," says Life or the Now. "I'll treat you the way you treat me. If you see me as a problem, I will be a problem. If you treat me as an obstacle, I will be an obstacle."
...A vital question to ask yourself is: What is my relationship with the present moment? Then become alert to find out the answer. Am I treating the Now as no more than a means to an end? Do I see it as an obstacle? Am I making it into an enemy? Since the present moment is all you ever have, since Life is inseparable from the Now, what question really means is: What is my relationship with Life?"
Admittedly a little abstract and hippy-dippy, Tolle's thoughts nevertheless resonate. How do we approach the present moment, since that's all we will ever have?
Tolle's approach to the Ego is equally fascinating (at least to me).
We tend to to take the Ego for granted. It's the part of ourselves that wants and needs, desires and craves recognition, or achievement, or a constant state of more.
But what is it, exactly? What is this 'self' that we strive so hard to protect?
Eckhart recommends, essentially, taking a step back from your thoughts so you can become aware of your own consciousness.
Consider:
"...I usually congratulate people when they tell me "I don't know who I am anymore." Then they look perplexted and ask, "Are you saying it is a good thing to be confused?" I ask them to investigate. What does it mean to be confused? "I don't know" is not confusion. Confusion is: "I don't know, but I should know" or "I don't know, but I need to know." Is it possible to let go of the belief that you should need to know who you are? In other words, can you cease looking to conceptual definitions to give you a sense of self? Can you cease looking to thought for an identity? When you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are, what happens to confusion? Suddenly it is gone. When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself."
(pg.90)
Ah, yes, but Western society pretty much demands that we 'define' ourselves from the get-go of life, and this definition gains the most currency when it is solidified as power and strength to the nth degree. We exist in a continuous stream of antagonism in which we are told that in order to succeed, we must be better than others. When others fail, we win. That seems to be North American ethos. We must 'succeed' by harnessing our energies towards some future moment that may or may not arrive, one that is usually attained by ensuring others are not as agile as ourselves are left by the wayside. The present moment is nothing more than an obstacle to be overcome so that future 'happiness' can be ensured, independent of others, fixated only on our own longings and craven wants.
Again, consider:
"...The world will tell you that success is achieving what you set out to do. It will tell you that success is winning, that finding recognition and/or prosperity are essential ingredients in any success. All or some of the above are usually by-products of success, but they are not success. The conventional notion of success is concerned with the outcome of what you do. Some say that success is is the result of a combination of hard work and luck, or determination and talent, or being in the right place at the right time. While any of these may be determinants of success, they are not its essence. What the world doesn't tell you -- because it doesn't know -- is that you cannot BECOME successful. You can only BE successful. Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment. And what is that? There is a sense of quality in what you do, even the most simple action. Quality implies care and attention, which comes with awareness. Quality requires your Presence..."
(pg.270)
Success as 'a successful present moment'? This is not what we are taught in school. Success means getting, hording, accumulating, crossing the line first, leaving others in our wake.
Yet, in the midst of illness, we see that Tolle's words make sense. When one is stricken, there is nothing to 'get'. You are immobile. You are inert. All you can do is exist in the moment, independent of anything else. In a world where most believe that those with the-most-toys-at-death win, such a notion is, indeed, almost revolutionary.
Part of his approach to the 'moment' I find somewhat fascinating, if only because it's simplicity hints at a larger complexity. There is our inner purpose and our outer purpose, Eckhart believes, and most of us are obsessed with our outer purpose.
For example: Let's say you want to cross the room to open the window because it's a little bit hot inside. If asked the purpose of crossing the room, most people would say: "Well, I'm doing it to open the window." Eckahrt says, in essence, no. You are crossing the room to cross the room. That's your inner purpose. Your outer purpose is to open the window; your inner purpose is to be present in the moment, and in the moment you are crossing the room, so that thus becomes your purpose.
Another example: You are ordering food at a restaurant, talking to a waiter or a waitress. Your outer purpose is to order food; your inner purpose is simply to connect with the person you're talking to. The ordering of the food thus becomes a by-product. When you are seeking to connect, regardless of the intent, then life itself becomes that much more smoother, and enjoyable, and fulfilled.
The problem lies in our ego, that aspect of our consciousness that wants to be loved (or feared). Some people's egos are plain to see, based on their cars, their looks, their expressions, their demeanor. Others are more covert, but we all have them, these egos. The secret is that everybody feels insecure inside, uncertain of life, but we have to pretend that we're not, and so the more we achieve, the more we can show others that we are not insecure, even though we are. We are slaves to this desire for prominence. All squabbles, conflicts, games and wars are founded upon this notion: In order to feel good about myself, I must prove that others are inferior. If I fail to do so, then that must mean I am inferior. So I need to train harder, work harder, to prove that this is not so.
And what is this strange, constant voice that is doing all the talking? That ego in the back of our heads. But if you are aware of that voice, conscious of its insistence, then that is the first step in rendering it moot. There is the awareness (the ego), and the awareness behind the awareness (your true being).
Or perhaps I should say, 'Being', with a capital 'B'. As Tolle states:
" As you long as you are unaware of Being, you will seek meaning only within the dimension of doing and of future, that is to say, the dimension of time. And whatever meaning or fulfillment you find will dissolve or turn out to have been a deception. Invariably, it will be destroyed by time. Any meaning we find on that level is true only relatively and temporarily.
For example, if caring for your children gives meaning to your life, what happens to that meaning when they don't need you and perhaps don't even listen to you anymore? If helping others gives meaning to your life, you depend on others being worse off than yourself so that your life can continue to be meaningful and you can feel good about yourself. If the desire to excel, win or succeed at this or that activity provides you with meaning, what if you never win or your winning streak comes to an end one day, as it will? You would then have to look to your imagination or memories -- a very unsatisfactory place to bring some bigger meaning into your life. 'Making it' in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don't make it, so you need other human beings to 'fail' so that you your life can have meaning.
I am not saying here that helping others, caring for your children, or striving for excellence in whatever field are not worthwhile things to do. For many people, they are an important part of your outer purpose, but outer purpose alone is always relative, unstable and impermanent. This does not mean that you should not be engaged in those activities. It means you should connect them to your inner, primary purpose, so that a deeper meaning flows into what you do..."
(pg. 263-264)
Is this 'inner' primary purpose' to be found in constantly doing more, getting more, working more?
What of the weightlifting mother, the one with the autistic child? Her dreams of a loving, nurturing bond between herself and her child have been shattered. There is nothing for her to do, get or work towards for her child, because he will always be alone in his own little bubble.
But she has the present moment to live within, and perhaps that is enough. As Tolle quotes the secret to life from the mouth of a mystic: "I don't mind what happens to me."
You are exactly where you are supposed to be, because there is nowhere that you are supposed to go.
Tolle's work is not for everybody. It requires a belief system that is non-dogmatic, beholden to no single religious or spiritual principle, and it's out of step with what today's cultural mores deem relevant. And it is, of course, more than a little, well, flaky.
But I'm more than a little flaky, too, so I appreciate his desire to expand human consciousness. And I'll probably write a bit more about this book in the near future, so -- you've been warned!
As the title suggests, there is a 'new earth' we are all unconsciously developing. And if you believe in evolution (as Tolle certainly does) than where are humans headed? What are we evolving towards? Surely he-who-conquers-most-and-survives-with-the-most-toys-and-the-hottest-
trophy-wife can't be the point of it all. If we started as fish in the ocean, then made it up onto to land, then transformed into apes, then transcended into humans, well, what's next? This can't be the end of consciousness.
Perhaps in ten thousand years our distant ancestors will look back on us with great mirth, at these stressed, anxiety-ridden individuals so obsessed with proving our own significance through ultimately silly and pointless ritualistic games and facades. Everyone practically panicked with pride, locked into the past, terrified of the future, ignoring the present moment that truly connects us with each other, not realizing that life itself is exactly what we signed up for, and everything else is an ornament.
"This is not what I signed up for," she told her pastor.
"This is exactly what you signed up for," he said.
What does that mean, exactly? That a lifetime of caring for a non-responsive child incapable of reciprocating affection is what she secretly had in mind all along? Or is there a deeper, more philosophical layer to be discovered within the seemingly glib answer provided by her pastor?
Eckhart Tolle's book A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life's Purpose reminded me of this woman's story.
I guess you could call it a 'new-age' book (if that term is even still in use), seeing as it concerns itself primarily with questions revolving around life, living, and the ultimate meaning of everything. Oprah picked it for her book-club, and even extended her reach by doing a series of an online, interactive interviews and seminars with Tolle.
It's actually quite a fascinating examination of two facets of human existence that we all too readily take for granted: the nature of time, and the nature of our own ego.
Let's take the first one -- time.
We tend to live either in the past or the future, constantly re-running previous mistakes (or victories) in our mind, or else longing for some yet-to-arrive moment that will magically land us in that place where we know we truly belong.
As Tolle points out, though, the reality is that we live in a constant stream of 'now'. There is only ever this moment, a continuous, free-form flow of 'present tense'. There is no 'future' to get to, because we only experience life in the present.
Consider this extended quotation from the book:
"...There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment: as a means to an end, as an obstacle, or as an enemy...To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.
When this pattern becomes more pronounced, and this is very common, the present moment is regarded and treated as if it were an obstacle to be overcome. This is where impatience, frustration and stress arise, and in our culture, it is many people's everyday reality, their normal state. Life, which is now, is seen as a "problem", and you come to inhabit a world of problems that all need to be solved before you can be happy, fulfilled, or really start living -- or so you think. The problem is: For every problem that is solved, another one pops up. As long as the present moment is seen as an obstacle, there can be no end to problems. "I'll be whatever you want me to be," says Life or the Now. "I'll treat you the way you treat me. If you see me as a problem, I will be a problem. If you treat me as an obstacle, I will be an obstacle."
...A vital question to ask yourself is: What is my relationship with the present moment? Then become alert to find out the answer. Am I treating the Now as no more than a means to an end? Do I see it as an obstacle? Am I making it into an enemy? Since the present moment is all you ever have, since Life is inseparable from the Now, what question really means is: What is my relationship with Life?"
Admittedly a little abstract and hippy-dippy, Tolle's thoughts nevertheless resonate. How do we approach the present moment, since that's all we will ever have?
Tolle's approach to the Ego is equally fascinating (at least to me).
We tend to to take the Ego for granted. It's the part of ourselves that wants and needs, desires and craves recognition, or achievement, or a constant state of more.
But what is it, exactly? What is this 'self' that we strive so hard to protect?
Eckhart recommends, essentially, taking a step back from your thoughts so you can become aware of your own consciousness.
Consider:
"...I usually congratulate people when they tell me "I don't know who I am anymore." Then they look perplexted and ask, "Are you saying it is a good thing to be confused?" I ask them to investigate. What does it mean to be confused? "I don't know" is not confusion. Confusion is: "I don't know, but I should know" or "I don't know, but I need to know." Is it possible to let go of the belief that you should need to know who you are? In other words, can you cease looking to conceptual definitions to give you a sense of self? Can you cease looking to thought for an identity? When you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are, what happens to confusion? Suddenly it is gone. When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself."
(pg.90)
Ah, yes, but Western society pretty much demands that we 'define' ourselves from the get-go of life, and this definition gains the most currency when it is solidified as power and strength to the nth degree. We exist in a continuous stream of antagonism in which we are told that in order to succeed, we must be better than others. When others fail, we win. That seems to be North American ethos. We must 'succeed' by harnessing our energies towards some future moment that may or may not arrive, one that is usually attained by ensuring others are not as agile as ourselves are left by the wayside. The present moment is nothing more than an obstacle to be overcome so that future 'happiness' can be ensured, independent of others, fixated only on our own longings and craven wants.
Again, consider:
"...The world will tell you that success is achieving what you set out to do. It will tell you that success is winning, that finding recognition and/or prosperity are essential ingredients in any success. All or some of the above are usually by-products of success, but they are not success. The conventional notion of success is concerned with the outcome of what you do. Some say that success is is the result of a combination of hard work and luck, or determination and talent, or being in the right place at the right time. While any of these may be determinants of success, they are not its essence. What the world doesn't tell you -- because it doesn't know -- is that you cannot BECOME successful. You can only BE successful. Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment. And what is that? There is a sense of quality in what you do, even the most simple action. Quality implies care and attention, which comes with awareness. Quality requires your Presence..."
(pg.270)
Success as 'a successful present moment'? This is not what we are taught in school. Success means getting, hording, accumulating, crossing the line first, leaving others in our wake.
Yet, in the midst of illness, we see that Tolle's words make sense. When one is stricken, there is nothing to 'get'. You are immobile. You are inert. All you can do is exist in the moment, independent of anything else. In a world where most believe that those with the-most-toys-at-death win, such a notion is, indeed, almost revolutionary.
Part of his approach to the 'moment' I find somewhat fascinating, if only because it's simplicity hints at a larger complexity. There is our inner purpose and our outer purpose, Eckhart believes, and most of us are obsessed with our outer purpose.
For example: Let's say you want to cross the room to open the window because it's a little bit hot inside. If asked the purpose of crossing the room, most people would say: "Well, I'm doing it to open the window." Eckahrt says, in essence, no. You are crossing the room to cross the room. That's your inner purpose. Your outer purpose is to open the window; your inner purpose is to be present in the moment, and in the moment you are crossing the room, so that thus becomes your purpose.
Another example: You are ordering food at a restaurant, talking to a waiter or a waitress. Your outer purpose is to order food; your inner purpose is simply to connect with the person you're talking to. The ordering of the food thus becomes a by-product. When you are seeking to connect, regardless of the intent, then life itself becomes that much more smoother, and enjoyable, and fulfilled.
The problem lies in our ego, that aspect of our consciousness that wants to be loved (or feared). Some people's egos are plain to see, based on their cars, their looks, their expressions, their demeanor. Others are more covert, but we all have them, these egos. The secret is that everybody feels insecure inside, uncertain of life, but we have to pretend that we're not, and so the more we achieve, the more we can show others that we are not insecure, even though we are. We are slaves to this desire for prominence. All squabbles, conflicts, games and wars are founded upon this notion: In order to feel good about myself, I must prove that others are inferior. If I fail to do so, then that must mean I am inferior. So I need to train harder, work harder, to prove that this is not so.
And what is this strange, constant voice that is doing all the talking? That ego in the back of our heads. But if you are aware of that voice, conscious of its insistence, then that is the first step in rendering it moot. There is the awareness (the ego), and the awareness behind the awareness (your true being).
Or perhaps I should say, 'Being', with a capital 'B'. As Tolle states:
" As you long as you are unaware of Being, you will seek meaning only within the dimension of doing and of future, that is to say, the dimension of time. And whatever meaning or fulfillment you find will dissolve or turn out to have been a deception. Invariably, it will be destroyed by time. Any meaning we find on that level is true only relatively and temporarily.
For example, if caring for your children gives meaning to your life, what happens to that meaning when they don't need you and perhaps don't even listen to you anymore? If helping others gives meaning to your life, you depend on others being worse off than yourself so that your life can continue to be meaningful and you can feel good about yourself. If the desire to excel, win or succeed at this or that activity provides you with meaning, what if you never win or your winning streak comes to an end one day, as it will? You would then have to look to your imagination or memories -- a very unsatisfactory place to bring some bigger meaning into your life. 'Making it' in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don't make it, so you need other human beings to 'fail' so that you your life can have meaning.
I am not saying here that helping others, caring for your children, or striving for excellence in whatever field are not worthwhile things to do. For many people, they are an important part of your outer purpose, but outer purpose alone is always relative, unstable and impermanent. This does not mean that you should not be engaged in those activities. It means you should connect them to your inner, primary purpose, so that a deeper meaning flows into what you do..."
(pg. 263-264)
Is this 'inner' primary purpose' to be found in constantly doing more, getting more, working more?
What of the weightlifting mother, the one with the autistic child? Her dreams of a loving, nurturing bond between herself and her child have been shattered. There is nothing for her to do, get or work towards for her child, because he will always be alone in his own little bubble.
But she has the present moment to live within, and perhaps that is enough. As Tolle quotes the secret to life from the mouth of a mystic: "I don't mind what happens to me."
You are exactly where you are supposed to be, because there is nowhere that you are supposed to go.
Tolle's work is not for everybody. It requires a belief system that is non-dogmatic, beholden to no single religious or spiritual principle, and it's out of step with what today's cultural mores deem relevant. And it is, of course, more than a little, well, flaky.
But I'm more than a little flaky, too, so I appreciate his desire to expand human consciousness. And I'll probably write a bit more about this book in the near future, so -- you've been warned!
As the title suggests, there is a 'new earth' we are all unconsciously developing. And if you believe in evolution (as Tolle certainly does) than where are humans headed? What are we evolving towards? Surely he-who-conquers-most-and-survives-with-the-most-toys-and-the-hottest-
trophy-wife can't be the point of it all. If we started as fish in the ocean, then made it up onto to land, then transformed into apes, then transcended into humans, well, what's next? This can't be the end of consciousness.
Perhaps in ten thousand years our distant ancestors will look back on us with great mirth, at these stressed, anxiety-ridden individuals so obsessed with proving our own significance through ultimately silly and pointless ritualistic games and facades. Everyone practically panicked with pride, locked into the past, terrified of the future, ignoring the present moment that truly connects us with each other, not realizing that life itself is exactly what we signed up for, and everything else is an ornament.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
WHY SO SURPRISED?
I didn't catch the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics last week, but the general reaction to the whole spectacle seems to have been: "Wow."
Which is what the general reaction to the opening ceremonies of any Olympics should be, but it seems like this 'wow' could have had another thought added to the end, namely: "Wow -- so this means China is serious, I guess..."
Serious about what? Global domination, becoming a world superpower, ensuring that Asia's rise will keep on rising?
Something like that.
The thing is, I feel like we in the West (even though I'm writing this in the East) constantly underestimate Asia in general, at almost every level.
How can that be? Countless books published on what seems like a weekly basis trumpet China's rise, and India's rise, and yet I feel like there's a still a certain amount of ignorance as to what Asia is all about. What it represents, where it's been, and where it's going.
(Of course, the label 'Asia' is largely meaningless, given how vast a landmass it is, and how varied the various countries underneath that generic label actually are, but we humans like to categorize, so 'Asia' it must be.)
A few months ago while working in Japan I read an interview with an American translator of Japanese, who was raised in Japan by American missionaries. She made an interesting comment, one that I'd never before considered from that particular angle. Westerners, she believes, tend to unconsciously dismiss Japanese ideas and beliefs. This is not to say that Westerners are ignorant of them; one only has to review how paranoid everybody was twenty to twenty-five years ago about Japan buying up American land and companies to recognize that the Japanese influence clearly made itself felt. Yet we tend to look at Japan mostly through the prism of its entertainment, its kitsch, its odd but alluring history. Films like Lost in Translation and The Last Samurai celebrate a Japan immersed in its own foreignness, impenetrable to western understanding. Everything Japanese is seen and depicted as either somewhat goofy, or strange, or funny, or downright weird. (Or else noble and dignified.)
Keeping what that American translator said in mind (whose name escapes me), I think it's not all that much of a stretch to extend her criticism towards the way that Westerners look at Asia as a whole. We take the strange parts, the exotic parts, and fetishize them for our amusement. Everything is either locked in the past or part of some odd, futuristic frenzy. We see the surface and the glitz, without bothering to take the contraptions apart and study the somewhat greasy and ordinary nuts and bolts that make them tick.
This is not to deny how fun the pop culture of these Asian lands can be, or negate what joy sheer entertainment, for entertainment's sake, can truly exude.
But the startled, surprised and amazed reaction to the Olympics' opening ceremony made me think that we in the West are no closer to understanding, or more importantly, anticipating what Asia is up to than we ever were, despite the advances in communications and technology.
My own pet theory? That Canada and America as countries are adolescents, full of energy and optimism to burn, and we're not all that interested in lands with cultures and traditions that were ancient even before we were born. We don't like to listen to our elders, and besides, we're not too interested in what they have to say in the first place. They're up to something, to be sure, these old folks are, but we have better things to do, and more interesting avenues to explore.
There is a big difference between countries and civilizations that are thousands of years old, complete with their own indigenous languages, and those that are mere hundreds of years old, still figuring out who they are and what they stand for.
I have a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that we will keep being surprised by Asia in the decade to come, again and again, and we will not wonder why we are surprised, which will, perhaps, be the scariest thing of all.
Which is what the general reaction to the opening ceremonies of any Olympics should be, but it seems like this 'wow' could have had another thought added to the end, namely: "Wow -- so this means China is serious, I guess..."
Serious about what? Global domination, becoming a world superpower, ensuring that Asia's rise will keep on rising?
Something like that.
The thing is, I feel like we in the West (even though I'm writing this in the East) constantly underestimate Asia in general, at almost every level.
How can that be? Countless books published on what seems like a weekly basis trumpet China's rise, and India's rise, and yet I feel like there's a still a certain amount of ignorance as to what Asia is all about. What it represents, where it's been, and where it's going.
(Of course, the label 'Asia' is largely meaningless, given how vast a landmass it is, and how varied the various countries underneath that generic label actually are, but we humans like to categorize, so 'Asia' it must be.)
A few months ago while working in Japan I read an interview with an American translator of Japanese, who was raised in Japan by American missionaries. She made an interesting comment, one that I'd never before considered from that particular angle. Westerners, she believes, tend to unconsciously dismiss Japanese ideas and beliefs. This is not to say that Westerners are ignorant of them; one only has to review how paranoid everybody was twenty to twenty-five years ago about Japan buying up American land and companies to recognize that the Japanese influence clearly made itself felt. Yet we tend to look at Japan mostly through the prism of its entertainment, its kitsch, its odd but alluring history. Films like Lost in Translation and The Last Samurai celebrate a Japan immersed in its own foreignness, impenetrable to western understanding. Everything Japanese is seen and depicted as either somewhat goofy, or strange, or funny, or downright weird. (Or else noble and dignified.)
Keeping what that American translator said in mind (whose name escapes me), I think it's not all that much of a stretch to extend her criticism towards the way that Westerners look at Asia as a whole. We take the strange parts, the exotic parts, and fetishize them for our amusement. Everything is either locked in the past or part of some odd, futuristic frenzy. We see the surface and the glitz, without bothering to take the contraptions apart and study the somewhat greasy and ordinary nuts and bolts that make them tick.
This is not to deny how fun the pop culture of these Asian lands can be, or negate what joy sheer entertainment, for entertainment's sake, can truly exude.
But the startled, surprised and amazed reaction to the Olympics' opening ceremony made me think that we in the West are no closer to understanding, or more importantly, anticipating what Asia is up to than we ever were, despite the advances in communications and technology.
My own pet theory? That Canada and America as countries are adolescents, full of energy and optimism to burn, and we're not all that interested in lands with cultures and traditions that were ancient even before we were born. We don't like to listen to our elders, and besides, we're not too interested in what they have to say in the first place. They're up to something, to be sure, these old folks are, but we have better things to do, and more interesting avenues to explore.
There is a big difference between countries and civilizations that are thousands of years old, complete with their own indigenous languages, and those that are mere hundreds of years old, still figuring out who they are and what they stand for.
I have a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that we will keep being surprised by Asia in the decade to come, again and again, and we will not wonder why we are surprised, which will, perhaps, be the scariest thing of all.
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