[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.]
Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry though, I won’t stay long, I’ve got to get back to his place for tea.”)
There are a few recent sources of this existential torment, some familial, others external (uchi to soto, as Japanese has it; I’ll come back to this directly): however, on the principle that one shouldn’t wash one’s dirty linen in public, even the semi-public readership of this blog[1], I’ll limit attention to the external influences, which until last night involved only Youtube and Facebook status posts (albeit through a complex chain of other URLs and sundry mouse-clicks), but which now includes Libya.
The first is a kind of memento mori, a shocking reminder that we rarely consider where the time goes, and what we’re doing with it, or realize how little there might be, until it is too late. It started last night, when I received an invitation through a Linked-In group (ELT Professionals Around the World) to participate in a contest:
It’s not the story itself that is so distressing, though it certainly confirms the notion that the Japanese enjoy expressions of eccentricity distinct from those of the typical English weirdo. What's troubling is Scott’s final comment, which comports so well with my own main worry about bringing up children in Japan. As I’ve noted in other posts, I'm not concerned about their personal safety, or their physical health—especially if we can enjoy the slightly fresher air of the mountain—nor do I worry about the kindness and generosity of friends and family (uchi ‘home’), which is no different from anywhere else, as well as I can determine. It’s soto that promotes insomnia, mild panic, and has me wondering about going back to England pronto: the feeling that unless you are with friends, you don’t actually exist for other people. It’s not only my incompetence with the language that leads me to believe that Hell—or its Shinto equivalent—would freeze over before anyone would strike up a conversation with a stranger, or even spontaneously offer to help an obviously lost tourist clutching a map. The evidence is just too easy to come by. Which all makes the mask thing so much more insane, as Cormac pointed out: no-one here could care less about those they don’t know—not enough to even look at them—so why bother covering up? Perhaps Tim’s comment sums it up best…
Better get back to the garden, as Voltaire advised a while back: more family news in the next post!
PS. A few moments after I had posted these words came the news of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Not Lisbon, perhaps, and no mention of Pangloss, but uncanny nevertheless...
 |
| Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion) |
There are a few recent sources of this existential torment, some familial, others external (uchi to soto, as Japanese has it; I’ll come back to this directly): however, on the principle that one shouldn’t wash one’s dirty linen in public, even the semi-public readership of this blog[1], I’ll limit attention to the external influences, which until last night involved only Youtube and Facebook status posts (albeit through a complex chain of other URLs and sundry mouse-clicks), but which now includes Libya.
The first is a kind of memento mori, a shocking reminder that we rarely consider where the time goes, and what we’re doing with it, or realize how little there might be, until it is too late. It started last night, when I received an invitation through a Linked-In group (ELT Professionals Around the World) to participate in a contest:
Calling all ELT Professionals! Do you accept the Do-Nothing Teaching Challenge? I invite you to participate in a contest to see who can accomplish the most in their classroom by doing the least.
The immense attractions of such a competition should be evident to the meanest intelligence (certainly to the laziest): this is the kind of lateral thinking—inverse, rather than lateral, really—that one cannot help but embrace with blasé enthusiasm. The implication that some near imperceptible gesture of the left eye brow following ten minutes of silence might bring about an exponential increase in vocabulary acquisition, or ToEFL proficiency scores, is well-nigh irresistible. So far, though, I have suppressed the temptation to sign up, lest this demonstrate that I am already doing too much—people can be tricky). But this didn’t stop me from clicking on the poster’s profile, and following some of his external links. Which led me to TED (www.ted.com, to which I’ll may return, if for no other reason than it seems to show that large corporate entities are not necessarily antithetical to creative or intellectual activity, even if this is generally true)[2]. Which in turn led via a Palestinian-American poet to the proximate cause of my discomfit: this Youtube video of Douglas Adams, author (in case you didn’t know) of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, which is incontrovertibly one of the finest comic creations of the last 30 years. In the footage—a wonderfully anachronistic term—Adams was filmed giving a lecture at University of California, Santa Barbara concerning lemurs (aye-ayes, in particular), komodo dragons, and other rare and endangered species of Madagascar and Indonesia:
 |
| Click here for the video |
It’s just brilliant: David Attenborough with humour and caritas, as diverting as it is informative. It's also unconsciously ironic, for within a few days of this lecture on endangerment and extinction, Adams’ own life was extinguished, snuffed out by a heart attack. Prior to this, he had been a fit 49 year old ex-pat, working out regularly, and living a good Californian life with his partner and young daughter. As I’ll be a rather less fit, considerably less renowned, 49 year old ex-pat in a couple of weeks, it’s all a bit too close for comfort. I even spent a day in the early nineties at UCSB, where I was offered my first temporary teaching job. There can be few more pleasant places to give a valedictory lecture, I suppose, but for all that I’d like to know in advance that it was indeed the last talk. That’s the unsettling part: the suddenness of it all. Adams was a very smart man, more importantly, he gave the impression of being a very humane and caring one: what other message might he have had for us, had he known that 'this was it', especially since he had lived beyond 42 (which is, you should recall, "The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything")? You can follow this link to some of his best quotes, but these give a flavour of his phenomenal wit and intelligence:
- Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'
- If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
- The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another – particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
- Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
- My favorite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.
What an awful loss, the more so since our society recognizes and rewards baneful mediocrity, applauds shallow incompetence, and readily elects the sanctimonious and deceitful hypocrite. I would name names, but no-one needs a libel action, so we can stick to initials: DB (writer), JB (singer), AB (politician). A curious coincidence about those bees, eh? Go figure. And those are just representatives of the legion of inconsequential personalities with station above their ideas, to invert a cliché, who we consider worthy of praise and six figure salaries. I apologise for the the unusually misanthropic tone, though as I said earlier, you were warned.
A second cause of discombubulation was my friend Scott Koga-Browes' posting of an article about mask-wearing among Japanese. The link and the following commentary are posted here.
It’s not the story itself that is so distressing, though it certainly confirms the notion that the Japanese enjoy expressions of eccentricity distinct from those of the typical English weirdo. What's troubling is Scott’s final comment, which comports so well with my own main worry about bringing up children in Japan. As I’ve noted in other posts, I'm not concerned about their personal safety, or their physical health—especially if we can enjoy the slightly fresher air of the mountain—nor do I worry about the kindness and generosity of friends and family (uchi ‘home’), which is no different from anywhere else, as well as I can determine. It’s soto that promotes insomnia, mild panic, and has me wondering about going back to England pronto: the feeling that unless you are with friends, you don’t actually exist for other people. It’s not only my incompetence with the language that leads me to believe that Hell—or its Shinto equivalent—would freeze over before anyone would strike up a conversation with a stranger, or even spontaneously offer to help an obviously lost tourist clutching a map. The evidence is just too easy to come by. Which all makes the mask thing so much more insane, as Cormac pointed out: no-one here could care less about those they don’t know—not enough to even look at them—so why bother covering up? Perhaps Tim’s comment sums it up best…Then, just when I had worked through these immediate issues, Gaddafi starts aerial bombing of his own civilians, and with that piece of news, the early death of a man who had already given us so much, the mystifying celebration of the inept and the petty talent, and the blankness of the other in Japanese life pales into bourgeois insignificance. Sometimes, mostly perhaps, the world is sfu: to put it more poetically, a vale of tears.
PS. A few moments after I had posted these words came the news of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Not Lisbon, perhaps, and no mention of Pangloss, but uncanny nevertheless...
[1] To those ten or so friends and others who regularly return to this pages, including those that I don’t know personally who live in Falkirk, Kettering and Alsace—Statcounter provides such details—thanks for reading! I’d write this anyway without you—as expiation and catharsis zugleich—but knowing that someone takes an interest, when there are millions of such blogs out there—provides an additional incentive to keep going.
[2] The most impressive aspect of this site is not the calibre of the featured artists, writers and thinkers—which is high, but not overwhelmingly so—but the quality of critical feedback from other viewers of the website. Of course, by comparison with the average Youtube comments, the ranting of an overexcited gibbon would count as an insightful carefully considered response; even so, TED commentary is uncommonly good.
Comments