Ignoring the elephant in the living room

There's something for selective amnesia or strategic episodes of blindness. Life, and modern society could not, would not function without the ability to ignore the basest, most hideous implications of our lifestyle and social system.
Perhaps this is what Gus Van Sant had visualized when he made Elephant?

The ivory tower

jiyugaoka-watchtower
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

The world is constituted by text and numbers. By text, I mean interpretations and representations; numbers on the other hand signify standards and measurements. I've spent the last 10 years focused almost exclusively on the former, but I think it's about time I turned my attention toward the latter.

Another thought: misunderstandings principally occur not because our answers contradict, but rather because we are intent on confronting different questions. I can't help thinking this is somehow fundamental to the problems between China and Japan; one side may ask how horrible Japan's war conduct was, while the other may be concerned with the question of whether Japan was worse than the imperialist powers, or even the Chinese Communist Party. Of course that's all unspoken, but it operates as a subtext to all the meandering discussions over numbers killed, numbers raped, numbers subjected to experimentation. It's funny how those arguments also reduce to an objectivity-subjectivity dilemma; more irreconcilable text and numbers.
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A metaphor for the banality of nationalism that just hit me: This is my flag. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Private battles, private triumphs

I considered long and hard whether or not to post up a presentation I recently gave at a family reunion, because it's intensely personal, and at times neither logical or methodologically rigorous. It's a product of my private mental battle with the field of Japanese history, and my own family. But personal as it is, this is where I stand on Japan, China and History.

I've been running. Recently, I shelled out for a pair of new running shoes, not the 'heavy man's running shoes' that have been weighing my feet down like squishy anchors. These are the new Asics DS-XI which seem to approximate a beloved pair of trainers I had in Japan, but which seem to have been discontinued.
I'm a shadow that haunts these idyllic streets. When I run, I trace the same paths as every other suburb-dweller, but only when they're asleep or away at work. Nobody sees me, and I see nobody. Today, I clocked a mile at 5:31, my fastest time in 14 years. And nobody saw :P

Burgeoning on the bough

Backyard pear tree
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Summer deepens in NJ; cucumbers are ready, and seem to grow an inch a day. Meanwhile, pears are languidly plumping themselves up on the bough. I can scarcely wait until September.

Novel 396 was intended to be Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, but I was forced to abort after only the first, "The Good Anna." I was much more interested in Truman Capote's dazzlingly wicked Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. There's a half century between these two female character studies, and also a certain gender and orientation gap between Capote and Stein. Not surprisingly, there's not much to see in common between the two. In one sense, the stern, German scolding Anna, would be quite the match for the bewitching, impetuous, and ultimately damaged Holiday Golightly. Why do I feel like I've met various versions of Holly somewhere? And why does it seem like Murakami Haruki's various female characters tend to bear much in common with her? There's a silky dose of Sputnik Sweetheart in there. And perhaps Wild Sheep Chase as well. What is it with male authors and their fixation with call-girls? (I'm not fishing for a response actually, I know the answer instinctively.)

Stein on the other hand, is a bully with prose. The originator of the slightly deranged "a rose is a rose is a rose," she makes it her mission to bring the world back into our language, which has become so comfortably empty that we no longer see or smell the "rose" anymore. Her three lives thus are filled with the air of everyday real life, with all its cumbersome verisimillitude.

One more comparison before I sleep. Park Chan-wook's Old Boy is a pale shadow next to Lady Vengeance. Same auteur, same obsession with revenge, same arty cinematography. Yet, "The Monster" and Geumja are such completely different creatures. I won't reiterate my feelings about Lady Vengeance except to say that it has heart, humor and pathos despite its viciousness. I couldn't help thinking of Old Boy as lying within the precincts of the Hollywood "thriller" genre where an elaborate 'game' mysteriously unfolds between two competing males intent on bettering each other. As a 'game', it seemed emotionally thin despite its bewildering complexity, including wave upon wave of deception, (overly)dramatic revelation and the plot's strange reliance on hypnotism and suggestion. Silly and nightmarish at the same time.

Snuff Film (Horror of Modernity)

Ok, to continue the haunted musings from my last post, I want to talk about animal babies. Cute, miniature versions of our furry friends, just re-proportioned in the perfect way to elicit even more of our cuteness reflex. Over the past few days I've started noticing how many babies there are around this NJ suburb. From my window I just saw a fat rabbit diffidently heading my way, hop by tentative hop. When it arrived within 5 feet of me (behind a reflective glass window, naturally), I noticed its objective; barely visible within a clump of grass was an oblong lump of brown fur with ears protruding from the anterior end. Yes, it was creeping up to check on a 'lil baby rabbit, still so young that it could only manage awkward, stumbling hops.

Yesterday, before the torrential downpour, I noticed a mockingbird fluttering within the rhododendron bush a few scant feet from my desk and computer. I was mid-thought about how the hell it got caught in there, when I noticed its rhythmic pecking motion; it was feeding a wee little birdy version of itself, itself perched on a lower branch. Oddly, there was no nest there, just a baby. Maybe they had been evicted by a deranged spouse; perhaps the bush was only a way-station on a long, lonely Exodus beyond cruel central NJ (more on that below).

Canadian Geese, those plump, brown-feathered avians with curving ebony necks, begin life just like chickens: covered in yellow fluff. Reminds me that "nature's first green is gold." A few years ago I was jogging beside the canal when I was cut off by a parent goose leading a column of goslings across the path. I jogged in place for about a minute to give them the space to dive into the water on the other side. A cyclist coming my way heeded these diminuative pedestrians and patiently waited as well.

But, our modern world isn't always that forgiving. Last week on the left-most lane on the NJ Turnpike (the HOV lane) I swerved off to the shoulder to dodge a similar line of downy goslings following Mother Goose. I was traveling with traffic, at about 65 miles an hour. In my rear-view mirror I saw an SUV behind me swerve slightly as well; I have no idea if it avoided an almost certain smushing. They had three lanes to cross before they would reach (polluted NJ) marshland. How on earth did they get to the middle divider of the Turnpike? How many made it?

Seen in a sardonic light, I was an unwitting participant in Frogger. In a less humorous light, I was party to one of the myriad ways we've contrived to kill nature. Our industrialized world is full of sharp surfaces, engines that crush and smash, poisons that kill over time. But we're mad because we think it's a proper trade-off for all the goods and services that we can now consume as a result.

D' (riding shot-gun) remarked that the (cute) row of geese reminded him of a Chinese movie about a fetching young duck-herding orphan, and her tribulations in a small village in Inner Mongolia. Yes, but that was a heart-warming domestic drama about human kindness winning over a selfish mother-in-law. This was a snuff film.

Memento Mori <- the reason I count down.

Novel 397 was Concrete Island, again by J. G. Ballard. The count-down continues.

Immediate points of comparison:

Woman in the Dunes

Robinson Crusoe

Empire of the Sun

Oh right, the third one is also by Ballard, so of course there are grounds for comparison. But what's intriguing is how their commonalities shine through all their obvious contrasts: how can a description of civilian detention centers in Shanghai during WWII be so thematically similar to a tale set in 1970s London? Concrete Island describes a man's ludicrous but meticulously contrived confinement on a wasteland 'island' hemmed in between newly constructed highways. Here, Ballard's prose reveals the same obsessive/self-destructive attachment to the place of confinement, in London as in Shanghai; vividly he describes the convoluted psychology that selects its own punishment, and stubbornly clings to it. You see a similar twisted obsession with one's bodily deterioration, and a mad yearning for death.

I believe that Ballard is in a sense repackaging the visceral insights of his wartime experience into a modern allegory.

The accident that throws him onto the island, the tribulations that obstruct his early attempts to escape, his ultimate fatalistic attachment to it, are first and last self-inflicted. On one level, they result from his indiscretion (driving too fast so that his car plummets onto the island in the first place), but on another, are a result of a wider culpability. This is a tragedy that oozes out of the modern life we have consented to living, the devices we have chosen to surrounded ourselves with, and the cold embrace of the city around us.

The novel ends on an eerie note, but therein perhaps we can draw some amount of comfort; all of this before our eyes is as fleeting as a dream on a spring night, teetering on the edge of collapse, and even in the most advanced city in the world the jungle is never far away. Perhaps it is only in the state of nature that we can clearly see what is truly necessary, and what is truly valuable.

Through a Glass Darkly

waffles
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

The waffled ceilings of Lourie-Love Hall will stand for another year, I have learned, as the university debates whether to allow students the freedom to customize the rooms there for its final school year. Of course I did my own customizations back in 1992-1994. Who can forget the Skinny Puppy poster that leered over campus? The relentless Ministry beats that came from my window (and that once attracted a crowd of like-minded outsiders)?

Of course I know that I am a different person today, and my vision of the world then was but a pale refracted shadow, the imperfect knowledge of an imperfect and not-fully grown man. But when I looked up as I fell asleep I would gaze at these waffled ceilings, even as, inches away, the chill breeze darted in and tickled my cheek (in my memories, Princeton is always a chilly late-September. I will miss Lourie-Love Hall).

Finished novel 398, now looking for 397.

Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, is the (semi-autobiographical) story of Jim, a British boy born of global capitalism, raised in Paris of the East, Shanghai. The narrative follows the "terrible city" as it stumbles forward in its old habits (costume balls, nights at the clubs, etc) even as war unfolds around its hapless British and Americans residents. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, they find themselves turned overnight into enemy citizens in occupied Shanghai, and are summarily rounded up.

I won't bother to re-narrate how the proud British, the wiley Americans, the vengeful Eurasians, all slowly starved to death covered in flies, ravaged by disease and mosquitoes, unmourned, in the civilian camps outside Shanghai. What is striking is how Jim, a child, becomes acclimatized to the conditions at the camp, to the state of war, to the disingenuous and hopeless optimism the adults were compelled to express to them. What horrified the adults most was that Jim was beginning to enjoy the war and the life in the camps; that he resented the American air raids that threatened to end the war, that he was afraid to ever leave the camp.

The work is therefore an exemplary bildungsroman, a coming of age tale refracted through a particular lens. Therein, its narrative illuminates a social order teetering on the precipice, and the way a young mind can naturalize death's constant companionship. I could certainly never write a work of such power from behind the windows of Lourie-Love Hall. What possible inspiration could I draw from waffled ceilings?

One final comment about war and subjectivity, two of my pet terms for 2006.
The novel chronicles 1941-1945, ostensibly the years of the "Pacific War." Yet, the conditions that brought the killing (and dying) to Shanghai (and China) began long before "the war," and continued uninterrupted beyond its much ballyhooed closure. Ballard prophetically responds to the announcement of the "end of the war," with an exclamation that he was thus witness to "the start of World War III."

And all through it, the Chinese, as coolies, amahs, chauffeurs, thugs, pickpockets, and most commonly of all, corpses, retain their impenetrable silence. Their subjectivity is silence; they are executed, they are abused, they watch, all without a shred of interior dialogue. It is as if the narrator is incapable of imagining, much less, writing their emotions. Save for one final quip, Chinese death is part of the natural landscape (Jim feels more affect for the bayonetted Japanese pilots). But here I will quote that one exceptional moment of empathy (at length):
Provoked by their curious but silent audience, the sailors began to jeer at the Chinese. At a signal from an older sailor, the men unbuttoned their bell-bottomed trousers and urinated down the steps. Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs of urine formed a foaming stream that ran down to the street. When it reached the pavement the Chinese stepped back, their faces expressionless. Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies and peasant women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would punish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge.

Written in 1984, Ballard would not have been able to ignore China's rising role in world affairs. In our own context, his statement has two ominous dimensions, even as his prophecy's credibility becomes substantiated day by day by world events.
1. The crime that would be repaid upon the rest of the world is none other than the erasure of Chinese subjectivity. The fact that Chinese death meant little to either the Japanese or the foreign contingent implied that they failed to register as human deaths. They could not be imagined as humans, in much the way you might identify with a protagonist in a novel. (That is what I mean by subjectivity.)
2. That frightening debt can only be repaid with none other than an equivalent dehumanization of the rest of the world, this time by the Chinese.

In that sense, Jim's final moment of empathy, insufficient and futile perhaps, is not only a warning but an epiphany as well. We are made to realize the pain and anger in each of those silent Chinese deaths scarcely mentioned in Jim's narrative, hinting at an alternative/obverse narrative shadowing the entire novel. From a Chinese perspective, that is. Is Ballard not saying that if the rest of the world cannot overcome this subjective gulf, then it deserves the revenge that surely is coming?