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I've been interested in writing a story recently- and perhaps converting it into a screenplay later on.
31 minutes ago, 17 Moments of Spring said:
thank you!!!
From a "Different kind of Luxury"
"I speculate that perhaps the familiarity and comfort I feel in this house is a result of Oizumi’s refusal to prioritize getting a job done in the least possible time with the least possible money. Maybe this is the reason why the things he says seem so casual, yet, when I listen to them, they reveal themselves to be so deeply considered. "
“Oh, that? I’m used to it. We all live with contradictions. You have to decide which contradictions you can abide with and which you cannot. For me what cannot be tolerated are the things that threaten the kiseki of life itself.”
I pull out my pocket dictionary to look up the word. The definition, in tiny letters on the small page, reads “miracle."
"People in groups get together and do things the same way as everyone else in order to avoid anxiety, even if those things have no meaning at all. For example, wearing a necktie has no meaning. If wearing a necktie would prevent you from getting a cold, I’d wear one!
“If you join some kind of association, your own true way of thinking gets shackled. You do things just to give yourself that feeling of ease.”
The word in Japanese that Oizumi uses here, anshin, literally translated, means “peace-heart,” but is used every day in Japan to mean the absence of worry, of relief from fear. As Oizumi uses the term, however, it’s almost as if anshin is a cowardly place people retreat to, and it’s definitely something that he doesn’t want to control his life.
“In a group, just saying hello and greeting people can become unnatural. Especially if someone in the group has some high rank. You start to speak with them in a way that’s completely fake. It’s not like he’s actually that amazing, it’s just his position in the company or group. The reason people give high-ranking people respect is because they have a problem with their own self-valuation. It’s probably why they joined a group in the first place—that and their own pride. They want to look good as a member of an important group, a group with such important members. This pressure is incredibly strong in Japanese society.”"
"This gives credence to Oizumi’s point that when you get even a little bit of wealth or power, you start to feel superior and you miss things: you perceive less, understand less. Then you start to lose out on so many fascinating things. Oizumi explains, “Most older Japanese feel that Korea’s culture isn’t as advanced as theirs, while European culture is more advanced.”"
"
“Well,” I say, “Europe has a long history too.”
“No way! That place is frightening.”
“Frightening?”
“Yes. I went to Italy, Spain, Milan, Florence, and all the buildings were made from stone—the churches, the castle walls, and ramparts. Now, how did they make that? That would take a tremendous amount of energy. In those days there were no bulldozers. Everything was done by hand. A place with that many stone buildings would have needed some kind of slavery system to build them. When I saw that I thought, Wow, Asia was still relatively peaceful back in the olden days. Also, all the big wars of the modern age have come from Europe, haven’t they? There’s something there that’s just frightening.”
I smile again. I’ve never thought about it that way, but once he says it, I can see what he means."
“Of course there’s the music from Europe, ‘classical,’ but I actually really don’t much like it. You go into some department store here in Japan and they’re playing Vivaldi or something. ‘Dum-dum-dum-dee-tee-dum!’ “Oizumi puffs out his chest. “Then people start to feel like they are aristocrats.” He holds his head high, looking down, conveying the pomposity of the customers. “Then everybody feels like purchasing things. It’s got that kind of magic to it."
"It would be a mistake to take the words out of their environment, of his amusement at our human follies. I think that Oizumi’s willingness to go beyond what is commonly encouraged in polite conversation also explains some of the power of his thought."
Indeed, in his next comment, he looks straight at me and says in a manner that could even be interpreted as challenging, “I know you are a writer, so this might seem a little rude, but I believe that words, and especially written words, are the best way for humans to deceive, cheat, and trick one another.”
"the presentation is all so neat and sharp that it is hard to remember that the booklet’s purpose is to get a group of villagers to consent to a plan that could poison them and their descendants for the next ten thousand years."
“But for me, it’s just the opposite: I get scared when I am busy. For one thing, I might get in a rush and forget something and have an accident working with my kiln. But even more importantly, if I’m too busy, I might overlook something magnificent and splendid, like a rare mushroom in the forest … and who knows when I might see such an amazing thing again?”
“Of course there’s some need for money, but when you use money to solve problems, the necessity to think for yourself disappears. You can resolve all your difficulties by using money, or buying a product to fix it for you. Just like being a member of a large group or organization: you can let the group do a lot of the thinking for you. But for me, the opportunity to think for yourself is too valuable to be wasted that way. And who knows how long we will be here? We’ve got to treasure the time we have.”
So many people believe—perhaps without thinking about it too much—that the newest must be the best.Because we live in the flow of time, we will necessarily get alienated from what happened last year, and even more so from what happened last century. If we only apply the blunt instrument of “progress” to the making of choices about our lives, we sever our connection to the intelligence of the past that had been tempered over so many hundred generations. We disinherit ourselves from these ancient and intricate understandings.
It seems to me that Nakamura’s answer to this dilemma is one that preserves the essence and sensibility of a traditional way, and continues the vital cross-fertilization with the realities of our own time.
“A craftsperson’s job is half meditation, half creation. It takes creativity to design whatever you are working on, but it takes meditation to do it right. Making things with one’s own hands cultivates a certain generosity and openness of the heart. It nourishes that state of mind in the craftsperson themselves, which is intimately connected with an entire way of life.”
“That is part of it. Most people spend their time relating entirely to things that are made solely for the purpose of keeping the economy spinning, of making money for someone, such as television and television shows, and eating food that’s not good for them. And to get that money, everyone throws away their own time that was free before, even if the work they do is not useful. Everyone around them thinks it’s natural and normal. Even though they’re incredibly busy on the physical, body level, moving around all the time, they are empty on the level of the spirit.”
“So why do they do it, do you think?
“Because they don’t stop to consider, Why is it that I as a human am alive?”
"“If you give all your energy to something, that action is evolving you, whatever you are doing. Just like in Hinduism, there are many yogas: Shakti yoga, karma yoga, hatha yoga. If you use up all of what you were given, and give your best in your normal, daily life, then naturally and automatically you will come closer; some spirituality will appear. "
Although one could view Murata’s years in India as a complete waste of time, for him that kind of a life was a foundation for how he lives now. When he needs to spend hours out in the rice paddies in the blazing sun on a humid day, he’s got that patience. When he collects firewood in the fall for the coming mountain winters, and has to cut a big log with a handsaw and walk it all the way home, he’s not cursing the time it takes, or wishing he had a chainsaw to speed up the process. And he can spend up to eight hours a day practicing the flute. He’s enjoying himself thoroughly.
“Actually, this is the Zen way. It’s not like you think, with the reins pulled tight all of the time. Some periods, of course, are very strict, but others … are looser. If things are too strict, you can’t continue your practice.”
it’s the same way he lived in India: he is not in a rush. He graduated from the school of no hurry.
“If you don’t have a whole lot of unsatisfied people, the economy stops dead, doesn’t it? And then the entire society is in trouble.”
In fact, Gandhi’s ideas about the centrality of hand labor to living a satisfying, meaningful life affected her deeply.
On 9/5/2018 at 5:42 AM, Cult Icon said:It seems to me that there's no real "master text" on this. Various psychologists, scientists, and dating coaches have material that illuminate elements of gender behavior and it's necessary to screen a lot of material for insights.
his books seem interesting too:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26747
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Buss
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/
QuoteDavid Buss is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His primary research focus is on strategies of human mating. He is most well-known for his studies on mate selection, tactics of mate attraction, infidelity, tactics of mate retention, tactics of mate poaching, and the mating emotions of jealousy, lust, and love. He has taught at Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas.
His recent research focuses on the dark side of human nature, including conflict between the sexes, jealousy, stalking, intimate partner violence, and murder. He also has active research programs on the mating emotions and the psychology of prestige, status, and reputation.
David has authored several books for wide audiences, such as The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, and textbooks such as Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind.
“When I quit my job working at the refinery, I knew if I didn’t do what I really wanted to do then, that when it was time to die I would be left with regrets,” he says.
Tibetan wood-block prints have thus been created from four elements: the depth of the artisan’s spiritual faith, the harmony of the materials with each other, the heart of the individual craftsperson, and the powerful wood carving skills of the Tibetan people as a whole. By tightly binding these four elements with each other, the very beautiful world of the wood-block print has been created. It is not just a form of art.
Reading this, translating it phrase by phrase, I’m starting to understand a bit of Ito’s fundamental sadness. He is running against the current of this era. He struggles in his essay to render this culture and craft of Tibetan wood-block prints and the values embodied in them to a modern society that, at least from its outward appearances, does not seem to care. And I think this explains Ito’s melancholy to some extent: so many beautiful things in this world are disappearing, and he feels that loss keenly.
"
Long ago the artistic vigor and talent was focused on beautiful displays of artwork for festival days or at weddings, or as paintings for the gods themselves. But now this energy has all swung around toward making paintings as items for sale, and the quality of the original wall paintings has been neglected. I wonder if this is unavoidable in the ordinary course of things.
Everywhere in the world you can see this common property, our cultural heritage, being turned into money, and this is just one example of it. For the purposes of turning everything into economics, the nature and good culture of the whole earth—which are our common property—are being destroyed, and even the continuance of life itself is threatened; this is our era."
"And now, sitting with me, Ito lets out just a little bit of his disappointment at what’s happening on this earth. “For the sake of money, and for the sake of ‘economic activity,’ people try to change things, products, works of art—everything—as quickly as possible. To win at competition, everyone tries to make new things as quickly as possible. "
34 minutes ago, 17 Moments of Spring said:
his books seem interesting too:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26747
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Buss
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/
Yes, David Buss is excellent and is heavily sourced by many. I flipped through a copy of "desire" last year. I also listened to the audio for "Why Women Have Sex: Women Reveal the Truth About Their Sex Lives, from Adventure to Revenge" and it matched the material in the classic study "Secret Garden: Women's sexual fantasies". Both helped me understand their inner, mostly unconscious motivations better and how they are designed to constantly judge men.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Women-Have-Sex-Everything/dp/0312662653
Eventually, Wakako says, she tired of all the exhibitions and the work of bringing the paintings down to Tokyo, hanging them, and cleaning up afterward. She decided to give it up. Just as she hadn’t sought out recognition and “success” from the world, neither did that success and recognition in the fancy Tokyo art world con her into doing something that felt unnatural.
. Sitting here with my friend in a farmhouse in the mountains of Japan, I find my way of seeing the world start to deepen and change. All these little, unlooked-at details create the fabric of memory. By writing them down, we are refusing to let the experiences of our lives get subsumed in the tsunami of time, the onrush of the next, and the next, and the next. I think of so many travelers (myself included) zipping from one location to the next, taking photos of scenery or a building. Have I been missing the beautiful in the obvious?
Gufu had a lot of time in India because he didn’t waste money. Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is. Why do so many people value money so much that they trade in most of the years of their life in order to get it?
Traveling cheap means giving up a lot of comfort. But when we make calculations about discomfort, we have to remember not to ignore the many discomforts of striving to produce income: the hurry, stress, and humiliations in the workplace that happen when we turn the hours of our lives into cash.
As he traveled, the journals grew organically, evolving as he did. The early ones, when he was still figuring
out how to move around in this foreign place, were more like collections of notes. As he became better at the logistics of living on the road, “more space opened up in my heart and my mind,” and the journals began to have richer, more detailed illustrations. Soon the journals began to change him: he was still the same person, but his way of relating to the journey was different. The journal-keeping was a way not just to preserve the experience but to intensify it as it was happening, a means for a fuller interaction with life. And then, when he got home, the journal could be a connection with that richer, more intensified world.
Eventually the journals became the primary reason for staying on in India: the recording of experience became one with the experience itself.
I think of him making his way almost unnoticed through Indian society, living virtually without money, on his own, a slight person keeping to himself, sketching all day and sleeping on the floor of temples, but having, if anything, a more profound experience than many other travelers, one that continues to feed him even to this day. And that life set the tone, and was the proving ground, for the life he lives now.
“When someone creates a kind of art for the very first time, it is …” he pauses, his voice compacted in his throat, as if he were rendering the intense twisting effort of the artist, “a difficult, strange thing. Then he makes—or someone makes—the same thing again, and again. Over hundreds of years all kinds of people make it, and lots of personalities and individualities get put into that one item. Along the way people start saying to each other, ‘We don’t need this part, and that part, it’s too much trouble, let’s cut it out.’
“In Japan this is said to be the virtue of folk arts—all the ‘unneeded’ parts have been taken out. They make the exact same bowl for two hundred years, and gradually that single person’s individuality completely disappears. It gets standardized, it becomes …” he pauses and then uses the English word, “it becomes ‘simple.’”
To Gufu, perhaps, it is simplification that is the problem. He prefers rough, unsophisticated, and unexpected work. He’s constantly searching for that power.
“I think it’s partly because of the lack of publicity of their work. They keep making things with the original aesthetic. It remains in India, and in Mexico too: all those skeletons. Not so much in other parts of Asia, perhaps because there’s been so much ‘development’ and economic growth.”
“Maybe it’s also because aboriginal people live the way they always have. Their way of surviving is what you call in English ‘primitive.’ Thus their way of thinking stays primitive. Each person’s way of life influences their tastes, so if you live at a certain level, you like things that are at that level. Or so it seems to me.”
“Honestly, I think it is impossible for me to make a real primitive piece of work because my way of life is not primitive, and neither is my head. And there are many good parts of Japanese culture, even if they are not primitive—even in the midst of so many material objects that have been over-publicized. So I think the things that I make are really a combination of the two. In any case, I don’t want to make an exact copy of something that an aboriginal person has done. But I try to pull out the essence from the primitive places in their work, and then I just relax about it and let that mixing occur.”
“Once you make your dream into actuality, the dream itself ceases to exist. But if you stay in the world of your dream, your imagination can expand and expand. That’s a characteristic of the dream. If you are always stuck in reality, your thinking doesn’t spread out and grow in the same way.” Then he adds, somewhat poetically, “Because, as for reality, there is but one.
“On the other hand,” he says, “if you stay in your imagination all the time, soon your dream doesn’t work anymore because dreams need reality as nutrients. Without nutrients, animals and plants die, and if the nourishment for your dreams runs out, the world of the dream gets smaller and smaller and eventually dies. So you need both: dream and reality, imagination and actuality. Thus you have to talk to all kinds of people, look at many kinds of plants, eat all kinds of things to make your imagination new, to keep that interior world fresh. Then your own world can expand and can grow.”
“Having money and having a lot of material things is not always bad,” he responds philosophically, “but when that becomes everything, when it becomes more important than human feelings, than the heart, then it is a mistake.”
“When we speak of human beings, they are just weak in that way. Rather than relating to others, people just keep trying to increase the number of things they have, and going farther inside of the world of relating to those things, or relating to the internet, even though the relations with your family or other people around you, or relating to our own hearts and emotions, is much more important.”
“If people don’t have money, that bad tendency stays hidden, even though almost all people have it. It would be better to be a person without that tendency, to have money and not have that weakness come out. But this is really difficult. People with a spiritual or religious quality to themselves, even if they have a lot of things, they’ll be OK. Or for the few people who don’t have that bad part, they can get rich and it’s not a problem. But average people get ruined by having things. They become less and less able to think about anything besides themselves, or their things, or money. This tendency is quite close to our essential nature as human beings.”
x
“It’s important to me to be someone who has time,” he says. “There’s a term we have in Japanese, furyu: the characters are ‘wind’ and ‘flow.’ Someone with furyu has time to write haiku, or can appreciate flowers, and they have space in their emotions to look at the moon or the stars. They’re not too busy working or making money. Those people who don’t have furyu are not full people.
“That’s why I don’t want to work in a city. I’m not interested in competing with other people or giving up my own way of thinking and way of doing things. If I chased after money, I wouldn’t have my freedom anymore. For me, it wouldn’t be worth it. I enjoy my life too much just as it is.”
But as for making things, well … that’s like making garbage. Working in some plastic factory, or making anything—somewhere in your heart you’ve got the feeling that junk is being made. But helping with someone’s garden, or cutting tree branches, it might be fun. And if you do maintenance, your heart doesn’t become strange or unclean.”
I smile. He’s worried less about running out of money than about his mind and heart getting “off” or unclean.
“But you have chosen a job that is making things.…”
“Yes. That’s why, as much as possible, I try to make things that are not garbage. That’s also why I don’t make too many things. If you make too many things, even if they are good things, they become garbage. The world already has too many things. And the things that I make are very difficult to turn into garbage. Pottery will return to the earth, and become soil again.”
Almost everyone wants their lives to change, and they’re making a lot of effort toward that goal. But me, I don’t do much of that. Because even if you push things to change, they might not. And if you don’t do anything, they might change anyway. So I don’t try to force the impossible. If a change doesn’t come, there’s probably no need for it. And if there is a need, the impulse ‘Do it this way’ will come from my surroundings without any effort or thinking on my part."
In reality, behind me there is some kind of ‘power’ acting, like a guardian spirit. I feel that. Somebody, something like a spirit says, ‘Work!’ Then—Go!—I work. It creates a feeling inside of me that says No matter what, I just have to do it.
“But just now, I don’t feel that very much. And in times like this, if I don’t have the feeling, I can’t produce very good work. I’d be just like some employee of a company—I hate the company and I hate what I’m doing, but I’m told to do it by the boss, and I do it for the money. So until the energy flows into me, I don’t do it. To say it better, I can’t do it.
“And there are a lot of things I want to do in life. I am not sure which is my main road. But even though I may not find it before I die, that doesn’t bother me. So these days, I am just setting everything in place, waiting to get pushed from behind, or pulled from above.
That’s why the most important aspect of my life is freedom. And that’s why I chose this life in the mountains, to be around nature and to be free.
“Whatever your purpose in life is, you can’t push yourself into it. Otherwise it’s something you are doing just in order to have a job. Doing things ‘in order to’ or ‘for the purpose of’ is no good. I want to do what I really, really want to do. Then—yes!—I’ll do it, right now.
"
I also think about how many people in the industrialized world die soon after their retirement from the effects of an incredibly taxing work life, where almost all waking hours are given over to the production of money.
Gufu Watanabe left a tremendous opus, not only of pottery, but of drawings, sketches, and cultural observations of India. He had lived out a true philosophy, and had a spiritual life influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity."
Bringing the bloom in to put in a vase for Atsuko, I feel keenly what was once just an interesting idea, a cultural aspect of Japanese aesthetics: the awareness of “the impermanent nature of all things.” I never understood how impermanence could be beautiful. I can’t claim to now, but the extraordinary wonder I experienced when I walked through these gardens with Gufu so often over the years has deepened inside me, now that much of that beauty has passed. It’s not the same, I admit, as being among all those specific blooming flowers in their profusion. A huge part of me wants things I love to stay just as they are, indefinitely. But I also now feel how their passing has enriched the beauty of them inside my mind and heart. And for this moment, the flower, and I, are here. The pottery exists, like my book with Gufu’s stories exists, and will outlive me.
As we drew closer, we could make out a white hanging lantern, Japanese style—white paper with black calligraphy on it, lit by a candle inside. And then we saw that it was Gufu, coming down to guide us, not with a flashlight, but elegant, simple, and pure, in the old style, walking down the road. To greet a friend.
“Surrounded on all sides by the inconvenience of countryside living, you can get a rich enjoyment of the flavor of your own humanness.”
I can tell that Yamashita doesn’t have one shred of attachment to these accomplishments, or any feeling of entitlement about the respect he should get for having these letters after his name. His voice is exactly the same answering my questions about his scholarly work as it is when he tells me about raising chickens "
“But what about the hours you might have taken to grow the vegetables, harvest and cook them? That process is connected. You feel a sense of time. The process itself is life. Just popping something in the microwave, ching! It doesn’t give you a sense of life.”
“So if I’m out in the world enjoying organic green tea from Japan, somewhere here there’s somebody doing the squat labor of pulling this weed?”
He smiles an ambiguous smile, and nods. I notice the incredible drama of the sky and mountains behind him. Then he says, laughing, “You are drinking my sweat and my tears! It’s the Grapes of Wrath, exactly.”
Trying to put it delicately, I mention that it’s a long distance from teaching Meiji-period Japanese literature at a university.
“It’s OK,” he says. “I don’t mind too much. And it won’t last forever. It’s a kind of yoga practice. Or to say it in a Buddhist way, a type of kugyou.” When I look up the word, the dictionary equivalent in English is “asceticism” or “penance.” The ku is the same character for “painful” or “bitter.”
“Doing this kind of work, no one’s watching me. And it’s good to be outside.”
"Somehow, I feel, it’s not quite fair. But then I consider that if we in the world want to drink organic tea, someone has to do this work, and it’s pure classism on my part to think that people with a lot of education should somehow be above it."
“Well, I can have time. If I want to go to the tea plantation at seven, I can go, or if I want to go at twelve, or if I want to leave at any time, I can leave. It’s up to me.”
“But,” I say, trying to get at the core of things here, “a lot of people in the United States are working and are busy doing things from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep. It’s ‘work, work, work; do, do, do.’ And not everyone is getting rich doing this. Being busy isn’t all about money.”
He smiles knowingly, and says, “But usually, they are busy for money.”
“I don’t like it either,” he replies in his easygoing way, “but as the Zen priest Dogen Zenji said, ‘Keep meditating. Keep meditating.’” He nods. The words come from a calm place inside, like an underground lake. “When you are driving, just drive, keep driving, don’t think. When you are digging a field, don’t think. You can’t stop thoughts coming up, but you can release your thinking, and then it goes by itself. You may say …” he searches for the right word, “absorb yourself in doing it. And for that, a simple kind of action is better. In computer work, it is difficult.”
Now we’re drinking coffee at a small café along the road and I ask him about his current life, contrasting it with the Chinese Tang Dynasty ideal of the hermit in the mountains, “separating yourself from the dust of the world.”
He smiles. “I live in the dust, but I am not stained. It is a Zen teaching: to get enlightenment here in this life, you do not need to go to the Himalayas. Get it now, here. What is important to me is to continue my daily life. If that changes, then still it is important to continue. If it’s a good life.”
“None. We have a Japanese saying, ‘Even one second ahead of you is darkness.’ I don’t have any regrets, or anything where I’m saying, ‘This is repellent. I don’t want to do this.’”
“Do you have any words of advice to my readers?”
“Yes.”
I wait.
“Don’t imitate our life. Please learn from our life. Build up your own new life. Just be as much like yourself as you can be.”