Solipsism

I don't know how to think about war.

I know how to be against war, but that's easy, that's simple. I don't know how to think given the reality of war. I don't know how to think about scenarios in which every option involves death. Not just death: the conscious decision to cause death. I don't know how to get past "this is wrong" to "what is least wrong?"

Today someone told me that America had no choice but to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. That Japan refused to surrender. That the other choices would have involved more long, drawn out military campaigns that would have resulted in higher total casualty. That retreating would have meant letting a power-thirty militaristic government remain in power. That we couldn't do that, for the good of the world.

I didn't pay detailed enough attention in history classes to counter those statements with similar statements about the military strategy, alternative courses that would have resulted in a grand total of fewer lives lost.

And if I can't counter the assertion that dropping the bomb led to the fewest deaths in the long run, and if I'm theoretically against deaths, then how can I argue that dropping the bomb was wrong?

I don't know, because nothing in my life has prepared me to be able to think about the world in those terms. I can't counter that argument or accept it. So I just emerge confused. And crushingly, suffocatingly sad.

Is there any more powerless feeling than thinking that the little boy on the tricycle I saw at the museum in Hiroshima had to die that morning because it was best for the world in the long run?

I don't know how to think that. Even if it were, in some abstract sense, true. I don't want to know how to think that.

Does that mean I just want to barricade myself behind a wall of unrealistic, over-simplistic pacifism and refuse to deal with the nuances of reality? Probably.

I don't know how to absorb that kind of reality yet.

In more positive news: On the subway on my way home tonight there was a guy with the quadratic formula tattooed in large print on the inside of his left forearm. This prompted a young man standing near me with his girlfriend to discuss with her whether we can consider mathematical truths to be the most pure, irrefutable form of truth that we'll ever encounter in our lives -- if you accept the postulates, everything else follows by pure logic. She tried to counter that accepting postulates meant that it wasn't pure universal truth, and he responded exactly as I do to that point: at their heart mathematical statements are all conditional statements, conditional on the postulates and definitions you are working with, and as conditional statements are logically, irrefutably true. He then pronounced her a skeptic, and asked whether she went as far as solipsism, believing that the only reality she could be sure of was that she exists; her response: "I'm not even sure of that..." As I was about to get off at my stop he observed that I was smiling at their conversation: "This woman is smiling at our philosophical conversation," he said to her. So I laughed and apologized for eavesdropping, told them it had been very interesting, and got off the train.

An amusing little snippet of experience, and it cheered me up a lot, at least in the moment. But also somewhat sad. I liked them. And my chances of ever talking to them again are almost zero.

These lyrics are unrelated except that they also almost made me cry today, in one of those sudden floods of significance that I talked about in the previous post. I've even attempted to translate for you. ^_^

肌寒い日が続く　もう春なのに
目覚まし時計より早く起きた朝
三人分の朝ご飯を作るきみが
そこに立っている

The chill doesn’t lift, although it’s spring;
This morning I woke up before the alarm.
Cooking breakfast for the three of us,
You are standing right there.

きみだけが　きみだけが
そばにいないよ
昨日まですぐそばで僕を見てたよ

Only you…only you…
are missing from my side.
Until just yesterday, you were right here watching me.

きみだけを きみだけを
好きでいたよ
きみだけと きみだけと
歌う唄だよ
僕たちの 僕たちの
刻んだ時だよ
片方だけ続くなんて
僕はいやだよ

Only you…only you…
You were the one I loved.
With only you…only you…
My song is sung.
It should be us, both of us
passing this time together.
Continuing all by myself…
I can’t stand it.

物の哀れ

Apparently the only books I feel like reviewing on here are Todd Shimoda's novels. What I really want to say would involve spoilers and I don't want to spoil it, even for people who think they'll never read it -- I even wish I hadn't read the comments on the back cover of the book because they gave me too much of an inkling about where the story might go and I spent too much of the time comparing the plot to my suspicions, rather than letting it unfold on its own terms. So I won't say everything I want to say.

The central concept of the book (entitled "Oh!"), is 物の哀れ, mono no aware. One possible criticism of the book is that it spends a bit too much time trying to tell you exactly what mono no aware is, through both discussions between the characters and interspersed "exhibits" -- short paragraphs explaining the history and different interpretations of the concept (there's a list of references for the exhibits in the back). In the balance between showing and telling, I would have liked the book to lean a bit farther away from the telling side. JDIC, my first go-to source for Japanese words, defines it as "strong aesthetic sense; appreciation of the fleeting nature of beauty; pathos of things." As simple and inadequate as that definition is, it may have been all the book really needed to tell us explicitly; it should be the job of the story to deepen our understanding indirectly.

When I last talked about Todd Shimoda's books, I complained that 365 Views of Mt. Fuji left me feeling too desolate, like the only options are to live an empty life or to go mad, while the message of The Fourth Treasure is more positive: meaning is built up through all the little things in our lives. Distilled in the same way, Oh! is about the different ways that each person experiences the world and the overwhelming emotions it can invoke -- some successfully, some less successfully, but everyone struggling and everyone unique. In this way, the strength of the book is in its less developed characters -- the random people that the narrator meets on his quest to feel something deep. My favorites are an innkeeper who writes (mediocre) poetry and a convenience store clerk who studies accents, but there are others -- bartenders and museum curators and an aspiring translator and a go player and a performance artist who reenacts group suicides...along with the four members of the "suicide club" that initially fascinates the narrator. What separates those who find a way to live from those who decide to die? The book, to its credit, doesn't really try to offer an answer, but we are invited to muse upon whether the answer has something to do with mono no aware. It is suggested more than once that suicide for some people may be the ultimate act in a quest to feel something, to understand the most intense emotions, those which come from a sudden perception of the fleeting nature of life and the sadness inherent in the aesthetic world (whatever exactly that means). This is an interesting idea but hard for me to relate to, since I've never been able to picture wanting to commit suicide.

I'm more interested in the characters who were able to live, who managed to find a balance, a way to exist in the world with all its sadness and fleetingness, in whatever way they could -- to appreciate it, find meaning, find an outlet, find a place. And I'm more interested in the over-explained concept of mono no aware itself, because it comes closer than any other philosophy that I've encountered to saying something about the way I experience the world. I feel ridiculous writing on this blog with any sort of confidence that I understand this subtle, delicate old Japanese philosophy instinctively -- how can I know? Maybe what I think I understand isn't it. Maybe I'm just overly emotional and immature and want to latch onto something that sounds like a fancy poetic concept to make myself feel special rather than pathetic. But everything I read about the idea, everything I felt like the book was trying to say, felt so natural. Like finally, a word for those moments when I feel a surge in my chest that I can't describe, that isn't about happiness or sadness but just about suddenly feeling like I brushed against something true about the universe. Finally a word for the satisfying yet crushing sadness that anything beautiful provokes. For how overwhelming tiny moments can be for no reason I can explain.

Maybe part of my frustration is almost the opposite of the frustration of the narrator of this book: I feel so much, and yet am helpless to express any of it because...well, I just haven't figured out how. And I am not trying to claim that my emotions are somehow deeper or more intense or more nuanced than anyone else's. Not at all. I can't say anything about anyone else's emotions, just that mono no aware feels important to me. And I want to express it. And I can't.

I idiotically left the book at home when I came back to New York, so I can't quote the section I want to quote, but I will quote myself, in a blog post from last spring, and you'll just have to take my word that this almost exactly parallels a passage in the book:

And already, green is beginning to take over, more and more of the petals are on the ground becoming muddy and wilted. They'll probably be gone within a week, and I don't think I'm going to take any more pictures of them. I know I am not the first person to realize this, but somehow it hadn't occurred to me before: the cherry blossoms aren't beautiful in a way that can be captured in photographs. They're temporal art, ephemeral; their power involves the flow of time and how they come and go. Yes, they're gorgeous -- but taking pictures, in some way, just misses the point. And I think that's why I know, even as I feel those pangs of loss, that the loss is part of the beauty, and I want to experience the blossoms within the movement of time, without trying to freeze them.

So you won't see any big album of cherry blossom photos on my facebook page. But if you ever want to begin to understand them, then come to Japan -- not in the spring, but say, in January or so. Spend a couple of months shivering under a kotatsu wondering how long you can wait before plunging into the cold to get yourself a glass of water. Drive along the narrow gray roads under low clouds drizzling rain and sleet for what feels like weeks in a row. Wait until you feel like winter will never end. And then...then you'll know how beautiful cherry blossoms really are.

Underlying

In phonology class we talked about phonemic versus phonetic transcription: phonetic transcriptions attempt to capture the sounds as they are actually articulated, while phonemic transcriptions aim to represent how we represent words at a mental level, before articulatory rules transform some of the sounds. In order for something to count as a phoneme, it has to be in contrastive distribution with other phonemes. In English, the vowel known as "schwa" -- an unstressed vowel as in the first syllable of "potato" -- is not considered a phoneme because its appearance is completely predictable: it shows up when there is no stress on the vowel, and not otherwise. So it's not a distinct phoneme.

This raises the question of what the "underlying" vowels are in words that have a schwa. One way to try to tell this is by adding stress to the word, like you were saying it pointedly and angrily to someone who refused to understand you. So picture yelling "PO-TA-TO, you moron!" The first vowel turns into an "o", right? Or we can look at derived words: to find the second vowel in "metal", look at "metallic". But these options aren't always available -- what's the second vowel in "button"? It's hard to stress the second syllable without making it sound like a different word, and if we want derived words we have to make them up...can something with the quality of a button be...buttonic? How do we pronounce that? Anything we come up with is necessarily rather contrived.

So I was thinking about my name, which has in fact two schwas, and trying to determine the underlying vowels. And it seemed immediately obvious to me that the vowel in the first syllable is really an /i/ -- that is, a "long E" sound as in "me". This didn't seem as obvious to the few people I mentioned it to as it did to me, which made me wonder why I thought of my name that way.

I realized yesterday that it's because that's how my Grandma Serry says my name: Ree-becca.

So that's what my name is, underlyingly. /ribEka/

I'm still trying, however, to figure out what Adam's name is. If it's like "atom", then judging by "atomic", should it be /a/, like "Bob"? Thoughts? ^_^;

Asymmetry

We talked briefly in conversation analysis last semester about what characterized "institutional" talk, as opposed to "ordinary" conversation, and the basic answer was: asymmetry. In an institutional setting, participants in an interaction fill asymmetrical roles, which affect the organization of talk at various levels: turn-taking (e.g. a teacher may self-select as next speaker but students need to be selected as next speaker by the teacher before they can take a turn); sequential organization (e.g. in a classroom setting, a common sequence is Question, Response, Evaluation, while in ordinary conversation, the evaluation step is typically absent); and overall structure of the talk (e.g. only the teacher can initiate closing of a given sequence or a class period). There is also asymmetrical access to knowledge: one person is often the "expert" who knows more about the topic under discussion or the action being undertaken than the other(s) -- for example, a psychiatrist is considered qualified to practice therapy only after years and years of gathering knowledge, and it is for access to that knowledge that people pay. Similarly doctors, teachers, waitresses, tech support people, etc. gain the right to fill their roles through specified knowledge.

And then there was a third, perhaps the most confusing, and we didn't dwell on it for more than a sentence or two because it wasn't that important: Asymmetry in rights to knowledge. That is, is it really how much the teacher knows that gives her the right to act, in terms of the conversational structure, as the teacher? Or is it that very role that gives her the right to have it assumed by all participants that she is more knowledgeable than the students? The example given in class was of a patient in a doctors office who, in this modern age, had been able to go onto webmd.com or something and extensively research her symptoms before going to the doctor. However much she may think she knows, chances are this knowledge will be dismissed in the interaction with the doctor, because she is not the one with the right to expert knowledge. This example reminded me of the worst doctor's appointment I ever had, from which I emerged crying, when, among other problematic things, the doctor responded to my statement that I had an infection on my thigh with a smirk and a "well, alleged infection -- we don't know what it is yet." Yes, I concede that he went to medical school and I didn't, but my mother did, and she had examined it; and the doctors who treated an identical-looking rash on my roommate did, and they had found it to be a staph infection; and I knew, through discussions with my mom and previous experiences with doctors, that the signs of infection are swelling, redness, and heat. So to have all of that background and knowledge dismissed with a smirk felt like a slap in the face. Definite asymmetry.

Well. Right now I'm sitting in a coffee shop near the classroom in which Adam is teaching the first of his three classes, and I've been moody and sulky for the past couple hours. Granted, this might have something to do with having gotten up at seven -- my body sure isn't happy with me -- but it also has to do with rights to knowledge, and that is why I felt the need to drag you through all that technical sludge up there. Because I spent two hours this morning, from eight to ten when I should have been sleeping, in the math clinic at which Adam had to work, trying to work on extracting pitch graphs from audio files but by and large failing since the ambient noise was too great to hear my headphones well. So instead I was mostly eavesdropping on people working through algebra and calculus problems with Adam or the other clinician. And there was I, knowing at least as much algebra and calculus than any of the graduate student clinicians, Adam included...and no one asked me anything. Even Adam seemed slightly confused and/or irritated when I tried to peer at the problems he was working on and offer suggestions. I was sitting right across from him, and the other clinician would be busy working with another student, and still Adam would interrupt him, "Hey Dan, could you look at this one? What do you think?"

I'm not angry with Adam and I'm certainly not angry with any of the other people there, who had no reason to even suspect that I was qualified to answer calculus questions. Maybe Adam just didn't want to bother me and distract me from my work. Maybe he's just in the habit of appealing to his fellow clinicians there. Maybe he was acting on some conscious or subconscious sense of the institutional structure that barred me, in the eyes of the institution, from having the right to act as a math expert. This isn't a complaint against him, but it surprised me how much it bothered me, this mismatch between my self identity as an expert math clinician and my institutional role of random visitor with no right to expertise. I'm not sure what the moral is, except just to notice that it can be painful, and that institutional setting really does have power over how interaction is structured, and how it can make people feel. I suppose this is something to be conscious of, as a teacher, tutor, doctor, therapist...your role may give you power, but you have to be conscious of the consequent powerlessness of everyone else, and the identity and expertise that's robbed from them by the institution.

Or perhaps the moral is that I oughtn't get up at seven in the morning.

Red Rocks

Last Saturday I fell down.

It wasn't a big deal -- my left knee got slightly scraped, didn't break the surface, it stopped hurting within ten minutes. Adam and I had hiked up the beginning of the Red Rock trail, a simple stroll for anyone with any real hiking experience, which does not include me. The first ten minutes of the path consisted of narrow channels of red rocks covered in dusty gravel -- and it was the gravel, I knew from the beginning, that would be my undoing. The rocks I could navigate as long as they were reliable footholds, but the gravel slipped out from under you if you gave it half a chance. Nevertheless, we made it to the end of that section of path. Rested. No more gravel: Adam climbed a large pile of impossibly-wedged rocks to get the best angle for a photo and I surprised him by following. Surprised myself. We followed the loop path around the back of the giant red rocks that jutted up toward the sky, took a detour right to the foot of the largest ones. I sat on the top of a narrow boulder onto which I had raised myself by pushing against the rock in front of it. We looked down on all of Boulder and tried to see the math building.

And then, on the last leg of the loop, where the path opened up and it was nothing but a gentle downhill slope back to the top of the first path, back to the pile of stones I had so masterfully conquered -- perhaps I had gotten cocky, too cocky to give the gravel that had just made its return to the scene the respect it was due. My right foot gave way as I placed my weight on it, skidded forward, left leg bending and scraping the rough ground. Startled, aching, a bit shaken up, I let Adam lead me over to the rocks we'd rested on earlier, to the one at the perfect height for sitting. I looked at my leg. Slightly red. The pain was fading. I brushed red dust off my jeans.

I was okay.

There is no point to the story, except that I'm incredibly happy that I fell down. I am not physically adventurous, and I accept that about myself. Skidding over a bit of gravel and slowly stepping my way up a small pile of boulders is about as far as I'd want to go. But, limited as my domination of the physical world may potentially be, there's still something so satisfying about pushing myself, just a little. Going far enough out of my comfort zone that I might slip, I might fall -- I never fall. I never let myself. I never leave solid ground.

But on Saturday, I did. And I was fine.

I will, hopefully, post something longer here soon -- I've had an incredible few days, as I am apt to do when visiting Adam, including musings on my relationship to the passage of time, deception and trickery, the most overwhelming present I've ever gotten, lots of math, an utterly failed job interview, a successful quest, stairball, thorns, and incredibly high altitudes (high enough to compress the air in a bottle of water on the way down!). But I don't have time to post about any of that right now. The point is: the world is to be experienced. No matter what, I'm almost always happier on days when I've done something, even as small as just going outside and walking. I need to remind myself of this sometimes.

Okay okay gotta go -- time for us to look at the pictures we took today! :-)

Meta

I've been thinking about my thoughts.

Yeah -- try it. It makes my head spin. What are your thoughts like? Do they come in words? Sentences? Images? Emotions? Something else for which there is no word? What are they?

Aly commented the other day that she doesn't think in words, and it blew my mind. If you don't think in words, what do you think in? Images, she said, or emotions. Yeah, but...they must also come with words, right? I think in words...don't I? Do I? At this point I started trying to notice the nature of my thoughts and my head exploded. Well -- it felt like it might. The best I could do was to state that my thoughts tended to involved a word, maybe a few words, not fully-formed sentences, but...something...linguistic. I remembered noticing a few minutes before that the tiny gold threads woven into Aly's sweater sparkled pleasantly. How had I thought that? Had there been words? "Sweater"? "Gold"? "Sparkle"? "Pretty"? Or had it been just the thought? I couldn't remember.

Since then I think I've gotten slightly better at noticing my thoughts without exploding, and I have come up with the following observations:

1) This is, perhaps, obvious, but I do not articulate silently to myself everything that I must on some level think: if I open the cabinet to get my toothbrush, run it under the sink, and spread toothpaste on it, I am not narrating these evens to myself, nor do I give myself verbal commands before performing these actions. So the thought that I can represent on this blog only as "I am now going to brush my teeth so I'd better get out my toothbrush," or something like that, occurs and causes me to send signals to my muscles without any language being involved.

2) Since it is possible to have reactions (such as laughing, crying, anger) without being able to articulate what caused them, then it follows that not all emotions come with words -- if they did, then putting them into words would not be such a challenge.

3) This is (to me) more interesting than either of the first two observations, both of which I think were pretty obvious. But the fact is that the majority of time there are words -- clauses, even -- running through my head. But these words are...I'm not sure quite how to put it...they're quotes, in some way. Not just me talking to myself in that moment. Rather, they are things I have said, or heard, or a song that's in my head, or a potential version of something I may say, write, or hear later -- dialogue or narration from a story, or something I need to ask someone in the near future, or how a phone call I'm worried about might go, or an idea I had I wanted to mention to Adam, etc. What's interesting to me is that the language is situated somehow: it's not just me thinking to myself. However, it is rare that there isn't some sort of language running through my head.

4) Perhaps this is obvious too -- but when I try to think about or remember any thoughts I've had, it appears in words. Interesting that this appears to be a difference between cognition and meta-cognition.

5) I don't think I would ever use the word "images" when describing the quality of my thoughts.

Those are my observations, but it's clear from what Aly said that they are not universal. I'm so curious to hear how other people experience these things. Thoughts? ^_^;

Love letters

Okay here is a poem I -- uh, found, somewhere. Yeah, I found it. It was written by someone I don't know at all. And I'm posting it on my blog because...ummm....

Okay okay so I wrote it. And I didn't even put it in Babelfish! Gasp. It's not very good but I started writing it when I was half asleep last night and freaking out about an odd pain in my leg, and I decided why not go ahead and actually write it. But! The content of this poem comes entirely from my vivid imagination, and not at all from my life. Do not assume that any of the examples apply to me. None of them do! They're completely fabricated.

Okay okay okay so maybe the Care Bears matchmaking one is real. But that's it!

(In all seriousness: there is a mixture.)

NOTE: Oh, yeah, the column here is kind of narrow, so not all of the line breaks are intentional. Sooo if you think a line break is bad -- just assume it wasn't really a break!

Anyway, poem:




If you die today
they will find everything.

The handcuffs tucked away in your bottom drawer;
the stories you never deleted from your computer,
from when you were eighteen and thought
that a ten minute sex scene needed fifty-seven pages
of heaving breaths and locked eyes
to be adequately expressed.
They’ll discover your notebook,
the little green one, from middle school,
where you recorded in detail your whole matchmaking scheme
for all the Care Bears
(and Care Bear Cousins);
and the pictures you swiped from the school yearbook pile of your crush,
just to gaze at them and feel your chest ache.
They’ll have to clean under your bed,
digging through a sea of Ruffles Potato Chip bags with just the crumbs left,
only to find dust hiding old underwear, and that one scandalous leather costume
you wasted a hundred dollars on
when you thought first loves lasted forever,
at least for you.
Your computer will be open to anyone curious,
looking for touching love letters in your gmail (with the saved password).
But all your chat log can reveal is your clinginess,
all the fights over nothing,
and they won’t understand,
because they weren’t there, late at night,
and those fights weren’t meant for them.
What will they think of your internet history?
You can’t tell them that a friend linked you to that hentai site as a joke – really!
Will they raise their eyebrows at each other, agreeing silently that they never really knew you?

They won’t see
all the thoughts that hover just out of your reach, in the dark
just before sleep,
when you’re so close to having something to say…but you don’t.
You’ve said nothing.
You’ve left nothing.
Nothing of the self you know you are.
You’ll become a jumble of embarrassing secrets with no one left to keep them.

If they want love letters,
they should dig through the drawers in your old room,
past hidden pad wrappers and ancient crumpled tissues,
past the Consumer-Reports-like rating system for all the boys in your class,
and open the handmade envelope addressed in careful cursive.
There they will find the shy love note that Sally finally wrote
to Encyclopedia Brown,
when she just couldn’t hold it in any longer.
At least, she would have written it, if you had your way:
Because no love, if it’s real,
should ever stay silent.