Wednesday, June 24, 2009

履物

Okay, enough of this frivolous chatter about love and reality and art -- it's high time I discussed some serious matters in this blog. I commence with a haiku I composed the other day:

あいさつを
ちゃんとしないと
地獄行く

Aisatsu o
Chanto shinai to
Jigoku yuku


If you don't always
Say your greetings loud and clear,
You will go to hell.

This is a known fact, and an important one, and there should be more poetry written about it, I feel. Poets neglect the important things. But I digress. This is about the souls of my students. Today I was encouraged to attend a morning assembly at one of my elementary schools. At this assembly I was shocked and saddened to learn that there are, among the seemingly innocent students, a handful who are already on the road to eternal damnation. This was poignantly demonstrated by the principal, who enacted scenes of sin in front of everyone: responding to a greeting of "Good morning!" with only a small mumbled "Mornin'" and no eye contact; or, even more shockingly, not returning the greeting at all. What are the consequences of this? As the principal reminded everyone, "From one greeting, smiles and kindness are born," and in turn, "From one smile, happiness and pleasure are born." There you have it. What kind of asshole would intentionally abort happiness? In closing, he emphasized to everyone that true greetings come from the heart, and if you're only going through the motions (because, say, your principal shamed you into it...) no smiles or happiness or pleasure will result.

That's all well and good, but greetings are not the only important thing. It would be, one might argue, rather narrow-minded of a school to talk about nothing but greetings at every school assembly. (I'm sure the fact that the other two assemblies I've witnessed at this school have focused on nothing but greetings involved some sort of random sample bias...) There are, of course, other roads to hell, and so I was relieved when the topic shifted to the other official goal of the school:

Lining shoes up neatly.

I was happy to learn that all of the students had become experts at storing their outdoor shoes properly when they go in and out of school. However, that is not the only time they change shoes. That's right: what of the slippers in the bathrooms?

Well. That's a completely different story. Words fail to describe the horror, so we were treated to a slide show, featuring pictures of the entrance to each of the six bathrooms taken on May 14th, and again yesterday. Gasps and shocked laughter filled the room as each photo gradually came into view. The girls' bathroom on the second floor yesterday was the closest to acceptable, with only one slipper slightly askew. ("So close!", many cried.) None of the boys' bathrooms could be looked upon without a severe grimace. Many of the slippers faced out rather than in, and often the two slippers in a pair were separated by at least two or three inches. In one case one slipper was flipped sideways! This was in the third floor boys' room, and quite likely the fault of the one brazen sixth-year boy who raised his hand when the teacher asked if there were any students who never gave any thought at all to lining up the slippers neatly.

There may be no hope for him -- I bet when you say "Good morning!" to him he growls and spits on you too -- but it's the dozen or so students who admitted to occasionally forgetting to think about the slippers for whom I'm most concerned. They are not, I believe, beyond salvation. The other teachers at the school clearly believe this too, and have gone to great lengths to implement a plan to set these young souls back on the path of righteousness: Tape. As of today, on the mat at the entrance to each bathroom, three pieces of tape have been thoughtfully placed, indicating exactly where the three pairs of slippers ought to be lined up.

I will be at this school again two weeks from today, and I can only hope that there will be another assembly at which I can learn, ideally with visual aides, the results of this intervention. I would hate to return to America worried that many of the children I have grown to love were becoming the kind of people who would forget to line up the bathroom slippers.


* * * * * * * *



Yeah....true story. I was sitting in the back of the room trying not to just crack up. I actually have some serious thoughts on all of this comically intense focus on seemingly superficial things, but as the past few posts have taken themselves perhaps a bit too seriously, I'll save that for another time. (Always happy to babble if asked, though!) Instead I'll close with another haiku, and because I'm lazy, I'll translate this one with Babel Fish:

ぬるぬると、
一体何が。。。
あ、なるほど。

Nuru-nuru to,
Ittai nani ga...
Ah, naruhodo.


Slipperily,
One something...
Oh, the extent which becomes.

As a side note, if anyone who reads this knows any Japanese: I hereby open up a competition to create the best haiku that ends あ、なるほど。 (You can change the あ I guess...just there had to be five syllables.) There will be prizes. Exciting prizes. So send me your entries. ^_^

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The China Seas

I'm unsure whether to delete the post two before this one. One the one hand, why keep it? I was just feeling frustrated with the world and with myself and wanted to send out negative vibes, but now I have no desire for those vibes to remain in existence. However, maybe I want to remember that morning and remember that frustration. Do I? Will leaving up that post make a difference in what I remember? If I come upon it in twenty years, will the emotions rush back? Do I want them to? For now, I think I'll leave it. No revisionist history.

Meanwhile I re-read 365 Views of Mt. Fuji yesterday, the first novel by Todd Shimoda, author of The Fourth Treasure which is an artistic masterpiece and my favorite novel. I had read 365 Views before, sometime in high school, and I remember my reaction as being basically positive but somewhat ambivalent, and in any case not very intense. I wanted to re-read it now that I’ve lived in Japan and even been to Mt. Fuji. I thought maybe it would have new meaning for me, somehow.

Well: this time, I had one of the strongest and most conflicted reactions that I can remember having to a book. Some lines made me catch my breath with their sudden wisdom. Sometimes I felt so suffocated I had to take a break from reading. Some of the sensuality was vivid enough that I felt embarrassed to be sitting in the teachers’ room at school; sometimes it plunged me into depression. I emerged at the end of the school day, having read constantly all day with breaks only for two classes, feeling rather dazed and disconnected from the world I seemed to be inhabiting – I remember gathering my things up from my desk, walking to the genkan to change my shoes, climbing into my car, all while feeling rather confused about what exactly I was doing here and why any of it was important.

Perhaps a few words about the story are in order. I summarize The Fourth Treasure to people, if I want to be as brief as possible, by saying that it’s about how meaning is created through consciousness. At a similar level of abstraction, 365 Views is about the constant fight against emptiness and meaninglessness. While The Fourth Treasure, in the end, leaves one with reassurance that the little things can add up, that lives can come to mean something, that connections can be real, 365 Views is much more ambivalent: can emptiness be staved off without caving to insanity? What is insanity anyway? What is art? What is important? The predominant mood of the book is of isolation and confusion, and in the end, the narrator, who started out being criticized by everyone around him for being so ordinary as to be practically worthless, ends up letting go completely of any desire to be part of society, to form any human connections. The only thing that comes to have meaning for him is creating the perfect pattern of colors, textures, and shapes. How do we take this? Has he escaped a superficial, boring, thoughtless existence, and discovered a deep inner well of artistic feeling? Or has he descended into insanity, given up on what’s real and retreated into himself, imagining meaning and power in a pile of trash?

The book is, I believe, quite flawed. Some of the characters are just slightly too odd, slightly too symbolic, to feel human. And too much is left unexplained and unexplored. I approve of stories where not every detail is filled in, where the reader is asked to intuit and infer and make connections on her own. However, there’s a line beyond which the story just becomes frustratingly confusing, rather than complex or thought-provoking. I believe there’s too much we’re left not understanding at the end of this book, and not even really feeling we know how to guess at. While The Fourth Treasure succeeds in embodying what it’s trying to show you – the gradual build-up of meaning and power – 365 Views relies too much on just shoving the big questions right at you. It lacks subtlety.

However, if the goal was to leave the reader disturbed and confused, I suppose I can’t accuse the book of falling short of that goal. But why did it affect me so deeply right now? I don’t entirely understand, and what I do understand I don’t know that I can articulate. I suppose I’ve been worrying, more than I ever bothered to in high school, about whether I have anything deep to contribute to the world, and what the hell that would even mean, and whether it should matter. In this book, you either lead a meaningless, artless life, or you go mad. That’s a frightening world. I suppose the book succeeds well enough in conveying the inevitableness, the inescapability of this, that I found it suffocating. Maybe I felt accused of being one of those empty, worthless people, who stop at official Scenic Viewpoints and spend four and a half seconds at each painting in a museum and never really understand or contribute anything. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s too ready to worry that perhaps, after all, I ought to be building mountains out of trash in an old submarine factory. Maybe I’m too ready to believe that everything I find deep and powerful is really nothing, and all the real meaning is just beyond me.

Now that it’s been twenty-four hours since I finished reading it, I’ve re-emerged from that world and don’t feel suffocated and disoriented by it anymore, which is making it harder to find the right way to explain how it felt and why. I wish we were fifty years in the future when books can be uploaded directly into your memory so that I could just zap it to all my friends and then we could actually discuss it. However, we’re not there yet, and I don’t think that overall I like this book enough to encourage anyone to actually spend all the hours to read it. I’m sure there are better books out there on which to spend that time. But it is thought-provoking, if nothing else. I plan to read it again in twenty or thirty or fifty years, and see how my reaction has changed.

I add, "The onsen in quite pleasant."

"Pleasant," she repeats. "Enjoyment. Could that be considered an aesthetic, or an emotion? And is it a function of the object or the person experiencing it?"

What?


I would like to know whether it means something when I feel overwhelmed or touched. Whether it's possible for me to think something is deep or powerful that isn't, or whether my reaction by definition imbues it with meaning. Is it true that recognizing power in things I experience means I have the ability to be profound, even if I can't find a way to create anything powerful myself?

From The Fourth Treasure:

The more she gazed into the inkstone, the sharper and deeper the pain cut. But it was no longer just physical pain; the inkstone represented the pressing burden of shame that her affair had brought her, the crushing disappointment that caused her parents to loathe her.

She had found herself, her emotional self, her irrational self, through the inkstone. What she found wasn't intrinsically bad. She found that she could
feel: that she could love, that she could experience life on her own terms, not on her husband's or her parents'. The inkstone had also given her Hana. It had brought her to San Francisco, where she could exist on her own terms. It had given her Tuesday night dinners at the China Seas with Kiyomi.

I much prefer to believe that everything matters, that everything is deep if it feels deep. What's the point of thinking otherwise?

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Real

Remember how this feels. Because it's real.

He worried I would slip into a fantasy. But in fact I feel more at home in reality than I have in many months. I had been drifting, because the only language I'd ever been shown to try to express what was missing, what I wanted, what I feared -- even to myself -- was romance; and that led to the fantasy world that could never, and should never, exist.

Well, now I don't need language. Now I have a memory. And it is real. And this world is what I want.

Thank you.

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Fuck this.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Question

One of the best answers I have ever gotten to a question was from Ms. Dunnell, when I asked what animal she would be, and why. I would be a dog. Because then, I could show unlimited affection to everyone around me, and never feel self-conscious, and never be judged.

I think that is beautiful and powerfully sad. Why are we so terrified to express affection? Where does the impulse come from to hide how much you care about people? Is the thought of the affection being rejected or not returned just too painful? Is there anyone who honestly minds knowing they are loved? What are we so scared of?

On a different note, yesterday I got to scamper around on a giant sand dune waving my shawl in the wind, and it was glorious.

In summary: people are complicated; wind is awesome.