I don't ask these questions out of regret or doubt, but I think this point will show me something about myself. I can't see it yet, but I sense something there.
I am reading William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive and there was an interesting passage I read on the train ride home tonight. I love the synchronicity of my life. I quote and hope Gibson-san does not mind:
Gomi
Thirty-five percent of landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century's systematic dumping. Gomi, there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, sorted, carefully plowed under.
London's relationship to gomi was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi, of structure the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she only begun to understand; they inhabited it.
Why? I had a very strong chance of getting into Cambridge University if I wanted to. I was working at one of the most prestigous institutes. I was reasonably well respected. But I felt empty. The country was a beautiful green, but the skies were so gray. When it was beautiful, it was unbelievable, but most of the time the weight of the centuries, the institutions, the country, the romans, the struggles, the ghosts, the people was too much. The English inhabit their gomi and their gomi fills them. It was everywhere. In every building, every road, every field, every back garden. But it was also in every single English person. For over 2000years the English have lived in the past. This is why they put so much energy into preserving their history. But oh it is so easy to be swayed by it, by the magnitude of that preservation and that focus. Yes I miss England, but I also know I am not one to live in the past. I know in my soul that the East is both more ancient and more alive, and it will be the future. It is my future.
So I cry a tear, I say goodbye, and I let go.
Time to till the gomi under and build a new.
2 comments:
I'm curious to hear how you think the East is different in this regard from the United States. From a material standpoint, we have almost no sense of history, no collective longing to preserve more than a handful of buildings from the past (our gomi). Even our institutions are subject to near-constant challenge. The US is in a constant state of evolution. Technology invention largely happens here, while successfuly technology application seems to be lead from the East, particualrly Japan. Religion seems to be our primary gomi, especially fundamentalist Christianity. As a society, it is what we cling to, - desperately - hoping to preserve an idyllic vision of the glorious way things used to be. Or more accurately, the idyllic vision of the glorious way we desperately want to remember the way we wish things used to be, while forgetting all the bad parts. To that, I say, bring on the bulldozers!
I think the biggest difference in Japan is that the culture is even more consumer oriented than America. The level of purchasing and shopping is staggering. People have no attachment to their possessions here. They are so quick to discard and get something new. Americans still cling. Jeans and a T-shirt, the standard American youth uniform for example - a relic of the 1950's. Fashion here changes so fast, and it sweeps through the culture like a wave, and before you know it 50% of the women on the street are wearing the new fashion.
The surface of Japan and the Japanese is gomi that has not yet been discarded - even when it is on everyone knows it is temporary. Gomi in America has to be decided.
Post a Comment