This is the soundtrack for my life these days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PT90dAA49Q&NR=1. Watch it. That's all I can say about it. It will change your life if you let it. I mean, it will work in concert with a bunch of other things to produce an actual change in your life if you are willing to put in the necessary commitment. That's actually my favorite thing about my current life in Japan. I love my job. I love my students and I love the growing and blossoming daily interactions that I am able to have with them. I love my friends, I love bowling, I love playing tennis on Thursday evenings. I love onsens. I love a bunch of stuff about life right now, but more than anything I love the opportunity that Japan has provided me to re-write myself as I would like to see myself re-written.
What exactly does that mean? When you find yourself in a place you've always known, it is very easy, extraordinarily easy, to surrender to what you've always been; however, when you find yourself in a place that's almost entirely new, then you notice that the cords that bind you to your past suddenly have acquired a new sense of slack. In that wiggle-room between who you think you are and who you think you can be there is plenty of space to make moves that need making.
And yet that's neither here, nor there, even as it just so happens to be everywhere. For a long time I've been looking for something. I remember sitting in Dick Mastellar's office, trying to discuss a Hemingway novel with him. He wanted me to look at just how artfully Hemingway had constructed a world or despair and defeat, and I wanted my reading material to provide me with a world of hope and victory, regardless of how crudely it happened to be rendered. I'm sure he was very frustrated with me, because anyone who has actually studied English Literature knows that such a world is really nowhere to be found.
Which doesn't mean that such a world doesn't exist.
For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a writer. Then I gave it up. Now the sinusoidal phases of the universe are on the upswing and I wonder again if I don't have something worth writing locked up in this brain of mine. In truth, it's beyond wondering, because I think I may have found that thing I was looking for and slowly in the deep, milky recesses of my brain coalesces a something that is not the icy shore of a lake in war-torn Europe. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet, but it might just be a bottle and it might just bear flame.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
A Wordsmith is Reborn
It's a new year which strikes me as a convenient time to make this a new blog. No mission statements but I've rediscovered something I lost and I feel the need to wave it across the sky like a flag of flame because if that's what I want it to be then that's what it is.
If that's what I want it to be then that's what it is. Background? Just what you need. In high school I had a really great teacher, maybe my favorite ever, and on his wall he had a quote from some old dude which essentially made the claim that in poetry there was beauty, and in science there was death. This was something I identified with for a long time. Words, my friends, are the substance of life, the primary means of transmission of love of strength of courage of fear of hope of dreams of death of despair of the whole far-flung spectrum of the human experience whereas science, science is numbers on a black-board. My whole being boils down to some random gravitational constant, you say? I am nothing but polypeptide bonds nd nucleotides scribbled on cell walls, is it? POPPYCOCK!! Give me the Word and I will write you a Hero. Give me nucleotides and I will flush them down the toilet.
I have come a long way since then. Words would be tough without nucleotides, for one, and there is a vast and iridescent gallery of worlds which you cannot access with words alone. It turns out that the poem is not the final authority on what is, and Science is far from the outstretched sterile arm of death. We are products of a natural world that is far more than human, yet armed with Science we can be more than what we always have been and diligently chart our location in a universe that expands far beyond the limits of the mind. It is, of course, with the mind that we comprehend the universe, but only if it is turned out into it.
But where does that leave words? For a while in the dust. For a while in the dust, but in my quest to figure out what exactly it is we are and what exactly it is this is they have risen again like an endless spectral host, shimmering in the sunlight and shapeless against the stars motionless yet poised to move at... a word. Science has taught me that reality is fixed, that it moves according to patterns, rules, laws of nature, and IT DOES! It does those things and moves as it does, IT'S REAL! But reality is also a great and barely bound swirl of potentiality waiting for a wordsmith to come along and command it to move. Nature has laid the groundwork and the backdrop over billions of years of slow, measured churning, combining and recombining, trial, error, the slow, gradual accretion of complexity where it is warranted, and it continues to. It will continue to somewhere perhaps endlessly into the farthest reaches of time. But here, in this moment, in my very human life, WORDS CONSTRUCT REALITY and what I say goes if I say it loudly enough. Remember that for that is now what this blog is about.
If that's what I want it to be then that's what it is. Background? Just what you need. In high school I had a really great teacher, maybe my favorite ever, and on his wall he had a quote from some old dude which essentially made the claim that in poetry there was beauty, and in science there was death. This was something I identified with for a long time. Words, my friends, are the substance of life, the primary means of transmission of love of strength of courage of fear of hope of dreams of death of despair of the whole far-flung spectrum of the human experience whereas science, science is numbers on a black-board. My whole being boils down to some random gravitational constant, you say? I am nothing but polypeptide bonds nd nucleotides scribbled on cell walls, is it? POPPYCOCK!! Give me the Word and I will write you a Hero. Give me nucleotides and I will flush them down the toilet.
I have come a long way since then. Words would be tough without nucleotides, for one, and there is a vast and iridescent gallery of worlds which you cannot access with words alone. It turns out that the poem is not the final authority on what is, and Science is far from the outstretched sterile arm of death. We are products of a natural world that is far more than human, yet armed with Science we can be more than what we always have been and diligently chart our location in a universe that expands far beyond the limits of the mind. It is, of course, with the mind that we comprehend the universe, but only if it is turned out into it.
But where does that leave words? For a while in the dust. For a while in the dust, but in my quest to figure out what exactly it is we are and what exactly it is this is they have risen again like an endless spectral host, shimmering in the sunlight and shapeless against the stars motionless yet poised to move at... a word. Science has taught me that reality is fixed, that it moves according to patterns, rules, laws of nature, and IT DOES! It does those things and moves as it does, IT'S REAL! But reality is also a great and barely bound swirl of potentiality waiting for a wordsmith to come along and command it to move. Nature has laid the groundwork and the backdrop over billions of years of slow, measured churning, combining and recombining, trial, error, the slow, gradual accretion of complexity where it is warranted, and it continues to. It will continue to somewhere perhaps endlessly into the farthest reaches of time. But here, in this moment, in my very human life, WORDS CONSTRUCT REALITY and what I say goes if I say it loudly enough. Remember that for that is now what this blog is about.
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