BROADLY SPEAKING

Twenty years on, one of the most remarkable aspects of PULP FICTION's legacy is that remains pretty much the only movie that was universally acclaimed by both the snootiest of cineastes and the most non-discerning beer-drinker. Broadly speaking, all social, racial and economic classes watched that flick, loved that flick, sometimes for the same reasons, often for others. You could appreciate its storytelling quirks on a purely cinematic level, but also investigate how it was upending recent filmic conventions. It was both high and low, crass and cultured. There was no box in its overall square that it could not in some way check solely by itself.

That's both enormously gratifying when it comes to looking at 'art', but also somehow saddening when applied to our lives. I keep thinking: Is there a single person or concept in life that could take what PULP FICTION accomplished with film and transfer it over to this plane of existence?

Meaning, there must be a method by which we can somehow attempt to satisfy every end. Not to be 'all things to all people', or a two-faced brown-noser; as Christopher Hitchens said when speaking of Clinton: "He who is charming to everyone cares about nobody in particular." I'm trying here to get to a more ethereal concept of life that we can nevertheless somehow ground in ourselves. There are political candidates who change how they speak when they talk to different groups, and marketers who try to hit every demographic, but these are practical methods enforced to favor their own craven goals, and I'm trying to hypothesize if there is some kind of way to consolidate all aspects of life into one total package that results in the end being more than sum and hum of its starts? Not religiously; not scientifically, even. Something that over time becomes self-evident.

Art looks for cohesion designed to produce an effect. PULP FICTION assembled a motley convergence of parts that produced an entertainment machine which most of the world's culture as a whole loved to watch rev and burn. Life, with its religious and political and social confusion, usually lacks any kind of unifying crescendo.

Who knows? Perhaps life as a force is building towards something. Maybe the past hundred thousand years of random evolutionary development are merely the first few funny scenes in a Tarantino-like opus. The high and the low, the funny and the grotesque, the mundane and the mythical -- all of humanity's past has been awkwardly mashed together in a prelude which has led up to now. There could be a culmination coming. Reversals of plot and expectations, just like PULP FICTION did.

Life on this earth might just be gearing up for a 'furious vengeance'-style speech like Samuel Jackson gave at the beginning and end of the film, only the real words that we say would not be tinged with the threat of violence on the way. Who would give such a speech, whether it's myself or yourself or the planet as a whole, I can't say. Probably not even verbalized. Maybe it will be in our actions. A kind of group physical cohesion that leads back to the solitary mental space in our skulls, a mutually-knit sweater we spot in the rag-tag assembly of insects and animals and peoples and countries that all seem to think they're separate and distinct. Perhaps we'll wake up one day and realize that the epic movie of our mutual co-existence can tangibly work on all different planes of reality. Everybody getting something out of it. Casualties for some, to be sure, but also redemption for a few. On the whole, as the credits roll, a deeply philosophical experience, yet with a retro surf-soundtrack kind of vibe. Life as an inflated Tarantino concoction that contains something for us all. I could see myself digging that.  

THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY (and its minor gifts)

THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY, a non-fiction book by Robert D.Kaplan, looks at the shaping of history by examining  the very contour and location of the lands in which it transpires, arguing that it's not only 'great men' or common folk that turn the tides of fate, but also the (mostly) accidental geographical placement of where they grow up. 'We are where we live', I guess you could say, and I wonder if it might be possible to take this macro-historical-endeavor and sharpen the lens of its focus onto our own lives.

For most of us, the first eighteen-or-so years doesn't give us much choice as to where we plant our feet. Family takes care of that. I got stuck with Canada. (Not a bad place to be moored.) Abroad, mention the word 'Canada' and the response is usually a variation of 'safe' or 'beautiful nature'. Can't hurt to have a reputation to life that. And probably pretty spot-on. Looking back on my own life, it is often this sense of 'nature' that informs my memories -- walking to the bus stop while fluffy snow flakes fall on a head still shower-wet; the first honey sunshine of spring cutting through the quad and into my dorm; my feet hot on the boards of a dock as I hurry to jump into the cool lake of summer; autumn cross-country trails, leaves falling over uneven ground that I quickly trod. Thinking this way, can I even begin to separate myself from the axis of that place?

Even now, when I think of where I've lived, whether it's St.Catharines or Toronto, Manotick or Yokohama, Baguio or Fujisawa, the aural-oddness of the names contrasted so closely with each other seems to represent not only their linguistic divisions, but also some crucial aspect of their physical selves. In my head is a bewildering collision of drizzling snow and typhoon-level rain, Mekong sunshine and mountain-night shadows, the dripping sweat of Japanese summer and Ontario winter's frozen snot. Did I become one with these places, or did they use and abuse me with indifferent natural glee?

Such a hostile title -- THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY. Makes sense, though. At least for a book about the cruelty of historical trends,where people are just fragile pawns in the topography that traps them. Can it apply to us, though? Individuals, not nations? Are we basically fucked, depending on where we are born? I'm not talking in terms of family or jobs, friendship or love, because we can get those, earn those, but in both the broader and more linear sense.

The old saying says: "Wherever you go, there you are." Observably true. Yet wherever we land, something else holds us up. Weather and grass and concrete all amix. We usually pass through it, endure, snapshot it and post it. How the natural concoction of elements creeps into our cells and enlightens our aims is something I'd like to take more and more note of as I continue to arrive.      

COUNT THOSE HEARTS

 “Ennui is the condition of not fulfilling our potentialities; remorse of not having fulfilled them; anxiety of not being able to fulfill them, — but what are they?...If there were no parents to make us try to be good, no schoolmasters to persuade us to learn, no one who wished to be proud of us, would not we be happier? What monster first slipped in the idea of progress? Who destroyed our conception of happiness with these growing-pains?”

                                                                                                                                                               -- Cyrill Connolly

At one point in the film adaptation of David Mamet's play EDMOND William Macey states: "Nobody's keeping score, and nobody cares." This is meant (I'm assuming) as an existentially blunt comment on the complete and utter indifference of modern society to one's own puny angst. On that level, Mamet was right, but looked at another way, everybody cares. Your entire family is keeping track of what you are doing, wondering if your progress (or lack thereof) might mean that they could have fucked-up in the way you were raised. Your friends are quietly, obsessively noting what neighbourhood you live in, and how much money you make in comparison to them. Your co-workers are casually checking your moods to see if you're in synch with their own moderate level of unease. We're all in this together, as the saying goes, but that's not always a nice motto.

This notion of competition is built-up in our systems of life from the day we are born. How soon do you learn to walk, talk; when do you leave your diapers behind and master the potty; at what stage do you no longer need the nightlight, is it too soon or just right. Then school starts, and whoo-boy. if it's not the classroom, it's the playing field, and if it's not the soccer pitch, it's the brass band, and for the next twelve years it's a mad mental race to see who's better than who in all the dumb ways that we measure progress in our lives. 

I used to come home from school soon after I started kindergarten and tell my mum that everything at Pine Grove was going just fine; only a phone call from the teacher blew my careful cover to bits. I guess I did nothing but sit in the corner and cry (although I don't remember this), so my parents racked up a system of star-points-on-a-chart, wherein if I did certain activities, I'd get a nice blue sticker, and once a certain number was reached, I could nab a STAR WARS action-figure. (That I remember, because I eventually ended up with the Han-Solo-in-Hoth-arctic-gear.) Lesson I Learned: bribery works wonders to make a system bearable.

In adult life, the bribery is our salary, and everything else that we need to make our lives hum and flow. Yet: What do we need, exactly? A nice house? A good car? A better house? A snazzier car? The envy of our peers, whom we don't even like? 

Life seems to be set-up as an obstacle course solely designed so we can validate ourselves. Justify our lives. Is it all just a grossly inflated version of Hollywood's Golden Globes? Here you have an organization composed of fifty-odd foreign journalists, the views of which nobody in the entertainment industry actually respects in the least, yet because the ceremony itself serves as a harbinger of what the Oscars might enable to their careers and their pockets, people get actively, genuinely excited about the whole banal thing. It affects salaries, careers, lives, to the point where the stars are teary-eyed and choked up because they got an award from a group that they not-so-secretly don't even consider to be all that genuine or legit. If entire business (and familial, and societal) entities and structures are set up with cheese as the goal at the end of the maze, does it matter in the end who put the cheese there to begin with? It's still what we're supposed to be after, so of course we're exalted when we get to it first.

Yet where would we be without this urge to progress? Didn't humanity as a force evolve in the first place because some humble life form slipped out of the water and made its way onto land? Without desire, there is no hunger, literally and figuratively. Perhaps it's in-built in our genes, this need to constantly, relentlessly test ourselves against others, in sports and the arts, among family and friends. If you do tune in and drop out, embracing nature as it is, look out. You're going to be getting some pretty stray looks from those all around you. (Don't you get that life is supposed to be a never-ending slog to prove our own worth via jobs and 'success' and zeros in the bank account?)

What else can we do, though? This urge to better ourselves is often humane and just; it elevates families, brings people up and out of poverty. Drive can quite often lead us somewhere actual. The competitive gene might be crucial to keeping us fed and healthy, for without it we might just sloth around on the beach and let ourselves starve to death. 

Even so, I circle back to when we used to give each other Valentine's Day cards back in primary school, and everybody would figure out who got what and from whom, and you'd tally your score, and at the end of the day you kind of knew where you stood. We were, what, seven, eight years old? Already learning about life's means of affection. Unconsciously (or overtly, with a sulk) wondering what we might do to up our own ante, so that next year's batch of folded red hearts on stapled-looseleaf would carry a little more weight in our knapsacks on the long walk back home.    

WHO NEEDS ENGLISH, ANYWAY? (AND WHO NEEDS JAPANESE?)

The publication of an English translation of Japanese author Minae Mizumura's book THE FALL OF LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF ENGLISH higlights a trend in recent Japanese non-fiction, a warning shot fired over the supposed worldwide supremacy of the English language, but it also brings to mind how important language is not only to narrative, but also to our most private and personal sense of ourselves and our place.

I haven't read the book, but Mizumura, a novelist and academic, seems to be arguing we should be vigilant in protecting our own native tongues against English's constant spread -- not only for the sake of preserving one's own language itself, but also for purely artistic and aesthetic purposes. Her caution is replicated, to varying degrees, and for different purposes, in bookstores across Japan.

I've got two paperback Japanese books that I hope to start reading fairly soon, both proclaiming the importance of the Japanese language to Japan; one's title translates as 'The Theory Of Why English Conversation Is Unnecessary'(more or less), while the other proclaims 'In The Japanese Language, Our Good Fortune Lives (according to my undoubtedly clumsy translation).

From my casual, completely non-scientific browsing through bookstores over the past couple of years, these types of pro-Japanese-language (or anti-English education) books seem to be steadily on the rise, probably because of the fact that a) the ability of the Japanese to speak conversational English remains abysmally low, especially when compared to their Asian counterparts in nearby countries, and b) the Japanese government is steadily increasing the frequency and age at which young students first encounter English in school. (Although, even with these improvements, there is no real effort to close the linguistic gap with Korea or China.) Japan is falling behind in English, steadily, almost intentionally, and more than a few Japanese scholars think all that's just fine.

Why are so many so afraid of English over here? Ostensibly, one reason might be that the Japanese language is so difficult to learn that children should get a good grasp of its basics before moving on to other separate tongues. This is true, but only to an extent; children in general are remarkably, even bewilderingly good at learning two languages simultaneously (while also chewing gum at the same time), and any adjustments to the Japanese school schedule would not significantly detract from Japanese language education.

There is also a corporate, strictly-business-related consideration in avoiding anything English. Yes, the world is getting smaller, and yes, more and more companies are globalized, which makes English fluency paramount to international success, but Japan is also so strong as an economic power (currently number three in the world) that the urgent need to radically transform their way of conducting trade and commerce is not exactly keenly felt.

Another, seemingly minor but actually sort-of-significant explanation for the less-than-stellar enthusiasm for English in some quarters is a purely practical one -- namely, who's going to teach it? I mean, REALLY teach it. It's now beginning to be taught in junior high school, often with the aid of native speakers from overseas, but most Japanese teachers can't speak the language much at all, resulting in some pretty staid classes. The style is similar to the way young Canadians (attempt to) learn French in Ontario public schools -- a lot of rote memorization, with few opportunities for natural conversation. It's hard to transform one's English-education system when the scholastic culture itself can't meet the demand with a qualified supply. (The obvious answer would be to support a massive influx of even more native-English speakers to teach junior high school-level classes, but the resulting loss of jobs for Japanese educators makes this less than ideal.)

A slightly more plausible reason for this resistance to early English education in many vocal segments of the Japanese intelligentsia is due to the role that the Japanese language plays in one's sense of patriotic self. Indeed, Japanese students study the rudiments of Japanese language, grammar, narrative and poetry in a course called 'kokugo', which literally translates as 'national language'. (The word 'Nihongo' is mostly used to refer to the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language to outsiders.) If you think about the word 'English', there's no nationality attached to the composition of the word; it is what it is -- a language that's learned by everyone all over the word. Yet 'kokugo', as a word, explicitly links itself to the country itself, the state and its structure. Other than old-timers who learned the language in wartime colonial outposts, Japanese is restricted to one people and place, its study and usage almost exclusively limited to either natives or foreigners who wish to live in that country. Unlike English, the language derives and sustains its texture in a specific locale. To degrade it by diminshing its significance, to lessen its importance, or even abandon the tongue altogether (which was seriously suggested by some Japanese reformers over a century-and-a-half ago, when the country first opened up) is, in a very real, potentially painful sense, to tarnish the Japanese people's own conception of themselves.

For without language, what are we? Immersed in English from the get-go, native speakers rarely have to question its place in our heads because we don't often allow nany (or any) other languages to sneak in. Only when confronted by cultures where English is of secondary important does one start to realize that it is but one tongue of many, with its own assess and faults. Many Japanese people, especially older ones, view the Japanese language as a rich source of inspiration, a unique celebration of a specific sense of humanity; English is an intrusion, and a rather clunky one at that. In a group culture like Japan, it's obviously the language that binds the individual to another, and it separates this racial group from all others, letting it attain a uniquely distinct status. To be Japanese, is to speak Japanese, is to become Japanese. (All others need not apply.)

In essence, the Japanese language is the narrative of the Japanese people, just as native speakers of English use its idiosyncrasies to narrate the story of our lives. I want to explore this notion of 'language as narrative/narrative as life' in another blog post, but I think it's not unfair to state that who we are in our heads, the stories we tell to get by, achieves concrete form in the world soley through language written down or uttered. To even contemplate another language achieving primacy in the culture is to risk speculation of what might be lost from oneself over time, if only obliquely.
Such a loss of living-texture-via-language might be (inadvertently) hinted at in a stray comment from Katy Waldman, reviewing Mizumura's book in a recent SLATE magazine column. Coommenting upon a puzzlingly vague passage in the book, Waldman writes: "...I have no idea why Mizumura airdrops this quoted anecdote into her book — the sentence ends and she never remarks on it again. Still, its striking..."

This confusion on Waldman's part (and I'm purely speculating here) seems to me an affirmation of a particular Japanese style of thought. The Japanese language is known for its diversions and by-ways; much is left unexplained, up for you to decipher. Walmdan hints at this quality in the first part of her quote, but then goes on to admit that its very inclusion is certainly 'striking'. She wants to know more, understand more, and perhaps it's the very odd and open-ended insertion of the passage that feels distinctly Japanese. (In Japanese, I might add; an English version of the same text necessarily morphs what works in one language into an oddity in the other.)

Even in translation, we can see how a fragment of Mizumura's distinctly 'Japanese' way of thought and composition -- in both the linguistic and cultural sense of the word 'Japanese' -- can't help but be maintained. In terms of resolving how best to protect one language from another, even while welcoming another voice to the table, Mizumura's 'striking', if puzzling, composition choice in that passage seems to prove that the very essence of a person and a place can survive the Pacific gulf between language itself, and perhaps that simple idea in the end is a good place to start.

 
 

Mickey Rourke in BARFLY

I once washed dishes at Caddyshack's Bar and Grill in Manotick, Ontario. The morning and evening shift. Nothing much happened in the morning. Scraping leftover burnt toast off of the plates under hot running water, mostly. In the evenings, close to midnight, sometimes shit went down. One night, in the middle of my ten-minute break, while standing at the bar outside of the heat of the kitchen, watching hockey highlights on SportsDesk, I saw some drunk dude take his fist to the left ear of a Yuppie-looking type who had mouthed off to him just a few seconds before. Dark red blood just sort of spurted out of that ear like a sprinkler coming to life. The other regulars seated on stools at the bar looked up for a second or two, then turned back to the tube.

I don't drink, or hang out in bars much, but Mickey Rourke in BARFLY seemed to nail it for me. Written by Charles Bukowski, that derelict poet of the bottle, and directed by Barbet Schroeder, the movie sticks a charismatic drunk at the centre, then lets us watch him as he revels in his self-imposed trade. Finding an alcolohic friend in Faye Dunaway, the two of them drink, fight, sleep together, argue. Languidly look for jobs. The film doesn't romaticize Rourke's character; he does that all for himself. A not-so-subtle self-portrait of screenwriter Bukowski, we get an inflated idea of what alcohol can do for one's life. When given a choice between a shot at literary stardom and an upper-class fuck, Rouke does what's expected -- he goes back to the bottle, and let's have one more round for the road.

Soon after meeting him, Dunaway tells Rouke that he has the oddest of demeanours, as if he thinks that he's truly 'bluebood'. I got that vibe, too. His character seems to be performing for himself and the world throughout the course of the film; he delivers almost every line in the same upward swing. He is, for the most part, an amiable drunk, and he likes where he is. Rourke doesn't celebrate the life of an alcoholic; he just portrays its logic. Everything else is subordinate to the next shot of rum. Given this fact, let's just enjoy the mild buzz.

I'd somehow or other never seen this film until now, and I'm thinking that this might contain one of the two or three best performances in American cinema of the Eighties. Rourke is one of those actors, like James Caan or Charles Bronson, who doesn't even seem like he should be an actor at all, which is why he's so good. Simultaneously centred and off-base. You truly believe that this guy (both Mickey Rourke and his character) has come from somewhere else, a scary joint far, far away. That he's had a real life of some kind, not solely some cocked-up backstory. This character is a man who has somehow inflated himself even as he continues his descent. He has his own codified sense of nobility and logic. He wanders through life hungover or drunk, but he nevertheless exults in his presence as the King Of His World. I can't imagine another actor pulling this role off, or even giving it a real shot. The movie is a little bit hammy at times, and bluntly obvious at others, but Rourke is so grandiose in his full-of-shitness that he charms you to watch, just like all good drunks tend to do.

By the time the end-credits roll, he's pretty much in the same place that he began, doing the same stupid shit, cheered on and high-fived by the usual sad saps at the bar, but the movie almost made me feel that this was in fact a good end. 'Let him do his own thing', was what I was thinking, and it's a credit to Rourke that his talented scuzz of a character actually comes across as his own kind of hero, with us as his enablers. Human sleaze, if not uplifted, at least piggy-backed, with the audience the one on their knees, carrying all that dumb weight. What a performance!

We all know how this kind of life will turn out, (as do those smack-dab in the middle of it), but the film also reminds us that there's not all that much you can do, so pay your respects while you can. People are going to strike blows to the ear, and blood will gush out. They'll clean themselves up and be right back tomorrow. Until they aren't. In the meantime, let them put on their show, while we sit back and watch and nurse our own gaping wounds. BARFLY kind of gets that the human spectacle  might be sad and hilarious, horrific and humane, but at least at the bar there are fellow sadsacks around to see and be seen. Sometimes an audience is enough.

'HELLO, I'M A JEW'

It's very hard to dissect and examine what you never encounter. I recently came across a Japanese book whose cover art depicted a Japanese fellow and a Caucasian bloke, amiably chatting above the black title font, but it's the name of the book that made my eyes pop. 'Hello, I'm a Jew!', which, in Japanese, doesn't sound quite so strange as its English translation (I'm hoping), but it's still quite the sight.

The population of Japanese Christians steadily hovers around one percent, so it's not as if the country as a whole is overtly familiar with Western religions; add Judaism to the cultural conversation, and you'll soon find that your spiritual chat will probably end pretty fast. The Japanese simply don't know all that much about the topic. Having said that, I'll contradict myself, because there are a lot of books published about Judaism in Japan, often explaining the historical and contemporary ins-and-outs of the Middle East (lack of) peace-process. Those are often pretty high-brow, intellectual-type stuff. This particular book is in the form of a 'taidan', a conversation between two prominent people about a particular topic or theme. The result is personal history mixed with historical detours, one that's much more accesible to the average Taro on the train.

(Why the West doesn't have this kind of two-dudes-chatting non-fiction book mystifies me. Maybe it's simply tradition. We narcisstic Westerners, as raging individualists, traditionally think of a 'book' as one smarty-pants author telling us what's the real deal; in the East, in a group-consensus environment, it's natural that a subject is only comprehended if it's part of a dialogue of some sort. Here in Japan, you'll often find two notable folks from different fields -- a writer and a composer, or a Buddhist monk and a philosopher -- commenting on various aspects of national and international events, arts, sports, whatever. Published in an interview-style format, it allows you, as a reader, the chance to compare different views and see where you fit in.)

Roger Pulvers is an American Jew who received his Australian citizenship before eventually settling in Japan as a writer and teacher over forty years ago. His colleague here is Inuhiko Yomoto, a Japanese author and professor who has studied extensively about (and within) the Middle East. Together, they chat about Pulvers childhood, his first-hand experience of Judasim, what being a 'secular Jew' is all about, why peace with Israel and Palestine is such a head-scratcher, in addition to many entertaining detours about the role of Jews in American comedy and film, and why so many twentieth-century screen actors scrapped their ethnic-sounding names. The result is a free-flowing, back-and forth investigation of one man's life as a Jew, in Japan and abroad, mingled with a scholar's investigation into his ground-level experiences in a faith that is foreign.

The Japanese reading public annually ingests thousands of titles relating to foreign affairs, but this kind of intimate talk has a more delicate slant to what's an extremely loaded topic. 'Loaded' for the West, anyways, but in Japan, there's not much historical baggage attached to the role of the Jews or their place in the world. This kind of 'blank slate' effect certainly has its downsides, namely, that there remains a notion of the 'Jew' (with a capital 'J') that often seems cobbled together from outdated stereotypes -- that of the rich, moneygrubbing, financially successful insider, resulting in niche-books being published proclaiming to tell you how to quickly get rich 'like a Jew'. When you've never been around something -- whether its a person or culture -- you tend to either degrade or glorify its composition or effects. Stripped of its ethnic, historical and spiritual roots, Judaism as a concept in Japan still remains pretty vague, so the monetary aspect of the culture has been rather crudely shoved to the forefront of discussion. Japanese love to classify things, and perhaps this obsession with the finanical wherewithal of the Jewish people is a small result of that fetish.

There are, of course, Japanese academics who specialize in the Jewish experience, but for the average salaryman and his wife, the topic is not one that readily comes up over miso soup in the morning. Why would it? I can't imagine that there are a lot of Jews in Japan, and a lack of exposure to anything inevitably results in broad strokes. I barely even understood anything about Judaism until my  university days (and I still don't know all that much), and I grew up in a country and culture that was much more multi-cultural than Japan. If you're not surrounded by the actual stuff of a culture, you don't know where to begin, or even possess the inclination.

(Related to that point, I have to go back and re-read Canada's literary legend, Mordecai Richler, because while I've read most of his books, I devoured them at a time when I didn't think all that much about his Jewishness, or even understood what his ethnicity might mean to his work as a whole. Same goes for Woody Allen and Philip Roth -- loving their work, but not connecting the cultural dots, or even knew the dots were waiting to be linked.)

Mainstream books like this one, that you can find in an ordinary bookstore, at least allow the Japanese people to be introduced to a vastly different experience of life, via two people shooting the shit. I first saw a copy of this book in the university bookstore, then accidentally spotted another one on the shelf in the school's library. Some twenty-year old Japanese kid might encounter this in a similar way. buy it or borrow it, and learn something new, thereby erasing a few stereotypes in the process. Globally-speaking, that ain't half-bad. (And I wish I had come across something like this when I was that age. The world would have shrunk a bit sooner for me.)  

THERE'S A WORD FOR THAT

It's shortly after midnight, and you're lying in bed. Frozen. An immense, paralyzing, invisible weight is pushing you down. Some kind of unseen spirit is apparently having its way with your limbs. Denying you moblity. Not allowing your legs or your arms to reach out or touch down. Scary shit.

Has this actually happened to you at any point in your life?  I'm guessing no. Not to that extent, anyways. In Japan, however, it's apparently a common enough occurence that there's an actual, honest-to-God word for the situation, what they call "kanashibari."

Which leads me to ask: Which comes first, the experience or the word? If a language doesn't have a name for the emotion or action, can the real thing even be said to exist? What we can do if we can't say what we've done?

Another example: The word 'natsukashii' in Japanese referrs to seeing or hearing or encountering something that reminds you of the past, which is essentially in English what we call 'nostalgia'. That word, the English word, is not something we pull out every time we see or smell something new that reminds us of something old. You don't often hear people mutter: "Wow, this makes me feel nostalgic." Yes, we might sometimes say "This reminds me of..." or "I remember when..." at a memory that's suddenly been nudged into place, but these are kind of clumsy phrases that lack any class. 'Natsukashii', however, is commonly used in Japanese conversation, and, because this is so, does this mean that people are more finely tuned in to their own vanished past? Because they can access this rather ordinary word whenever a nostalgic feeling bubbles up, does it thus allow them to become more sensitized to surroundings that might link them to yesteryear?

As new words creep into English, their persistent usage also often bleeds over into physical states. Think of all the Internet-related vocabulary that's popped up here and there in the last fifteen years. I'm talking about 'surfing the web' and 'browser', 'website' and 'blog', 'link' and 'clickbait', that last word especially a fond one of mine. 'Clickbait' always reminds me of 'jailbait', which in itself is a hell of an odd term to explain. There's something midly illicit and tempting about 'clickbait', a clever resonance in one's mind that tends to mimic the virtual rush that one feels when clicking on a link to a site that one feels might be of note. (Or even just fun.) All of this web-connected vocabulary did not exist when I was a teen. Now, quite obviously, it does, and it's here, and it's real, and beause I can access these terms they solidify concepts in my head that my mind can then use. They refer to actual things that have real weight in the world. Nothing theoretical to be found.

Yet it's somewhat easy, even harmless, to find cool real-life aspects of words that lack emotional punch; genuine, almost-shitting-your-pants emotions can result in psychic gaps. Another Japanese word, 'hazukashii', might must make my case. The dictionary defines its English counterparts as 'embarrassed', 'shy' or 'ashamed'. Think about that for a second. 'Shy' is quite a different level of inverted beast than 'embarrassed', which is light-years lower on the negative-emotional spectrum than 'ashamed', but one word in Japanese is suitable for all these concepts. This is quite common in the Japanese language; there are single adjectives such as this one whose specturm of meaning is considerably wider and denser than their English cousins.

What's the implication? I'm spitballing here, but because this Japanese word, 'hazukashii', pretty much contains a spectrum of feelings whose intensity varies, does this mean that a Japanese person's emotions are necessarily denser and deeper when that word is employed? If a kid's zipper on his jeans is down in class, and I point it out to him, and he mutters 'hazukashii', does the inbuilt intensity of his emotions greatly outrange what a Western student's own feelings might encompass? After all, the Japanese boy only has one commonly-used word to search for to express his discomfort, and at its base it embodies varying different levels of shame. 'Hazukashii', a word that runs the gamut from 'embarrassed' to 'ashamed', thus seems to trigger depths of emotion that allow its user to indulge in its most negative slant.

(Oh, and on a tangent, is there a new phrase I hate more than that of 'trigger warning'? Designed to warn people reading a novel or magazine article of sensitive material to come that might shatter fragile minds, it seems more akin to a parent covering their child's eyes when a love scene comes on the screen. If you're old enough to be reading a magazine article or a novel of note, you should acknowledge that not everything in life goes down as sweet as Country Time Lemonade. Such a usage, for me, seems to imply that adults need to be vigilantly on guard against anything that might slightly disturb their thin mental space. God forbid that we should have to deal with unpleasant aspects of our past or present. Such a disclaimer reduces us all to pre-adolescents who demand constant supervision. And, related to this topic, I fear that the steadily-prevalent employment of this lame fucking phrase will find a conduit into life, make its users more emotional and meek, less willing to engage in themselves or their troubles, or even life's unexpected stimulation.)

It's easy to talk about computer-vocabulary or common human emotions, but I keep thinking back to the beginning of thos post, to the possible-you paralyzed in your bed, and I'm probably contradicting my 'trigger-warning' rant, but what do you want from me -- words drive me mad, they have such flimsy ways. You see, I'm thinking 'kanashibari, and wondering if the Japanese had this experience much more often in the past, which is why that word exists? Or did the word come into being after only isolated cases, which then gave permission for people to manifest its symptoms as part of their own illnesses?

I don't know, and it's obviously a chicken-or-the-egg kind of deal, but there's another layer here that frankly makes me uneasy. This notion that there are aspects of the human brainstem that are so susceptible to mere words. That we might incorporate their meaning into our lives, our night-lives in particular. That we might brood on their implications, and mutely watch as they quickly come to life.

And I say all pf this because there are numerous emotions I feel that have yet to be named, those two-in-the-morning stirrings in the head that border on the wavy brink between death's border with life. Often we'll feel daytime moments of bliss that feel nothing less than unique, almost intoxicating, and English doesn't always do justice to that short spurt of glee, but the darker stuff also dwells down in rooms we can't find, usually in hidden locked doors that patiently wait for our keys.

Maybe we should stop while we're ahead, in terms of naming anxieties that seem to drift through our night-selves. All this linguistic-comparing and coining of funky new terms is, to be sure, such great mental fun, but goddamn, humans quite often don't handle this stuff with the care that it deserves.

You see, some Japanese man or woman tonight will awake in the a.m. from the fiercest of dreams. Nightmares no more, but suddenly realizing that they are immobile. Immediately their mind will revert (or retreat) to that word 'kanashibari'. All of its symptoms will flash through their head. They will choose to believe they are held hostage to that word.

If I could, I would sneak into that room, and mind-meld with their temple the way Mr.Spock does, then erase that sneaky word right the hell out of their brain. I don't know if this would work. I'm not sure if that distraught soul would still just lay there in great fright. I can't be certain that we dictate what words do, or if they use us for their whims. Yet I'm willing to leave some things unnamed, to let certain doors remain locked, and I'd gladly etch-a-sketch 'kanashibari' right out of existence, and all the other bad words from your head, even just for one night. 'Use it or lose it', they say, and I'd like to test that one out.