“Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!”
Nao, Jiko, and Ruth’s Song
[T]here are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like superstrength, and superspeed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people’s minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves just by being there. […] My dad seems to have found his superpower, [programming,] and maybe I’ve started to find mine, too, which is writing to you.
~ Nao, A Tale for the Time Being (389)
In A Tale for the Time Being (2013) by Ruth Ozeki, superheroes, cyborgs, Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, conscientious objection, and the saving power of intersubjectivity and connection through writing collide. In the autofictional tale (the mise en abyme, which is what the story is about — eternal return and infinite recurrence in the infinite worlds of the multiverse), novelist Ruth and her environmental artist husband Oliver live in Whaletown, British Columbia, where a plastic bag from Japan with a diary, a pack of letters, and a WWII kamikaze watch washes ashore in the year 2011. The diary belongs to a teenage girl named Naoko “Nao” Yasutani, who is writing from a French maid-themed hostess café in Akiba Electricity Town in Tokyo sometime around 2002. Ruth reads Nao’s diary aloud to Oliver and becomes invested, engrossed, and finally entangled in Nao’s story.
If I had to distill my impression into one thesis, I would say that A Tale for the Time Being imparts hope and love to a troubled world; it deploys the magic of Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, and the intersubjectivity allowed through reading and writing to transform the postmodern subject from spectator into historical actor. While we watch violent mass death, destruction, and ruin occurring in various parts of the world on blinking screens and feel mostly powerless to stop any of it, sometimes we can bend the laws of the physical universe to intervene and make a difference in the life of another person. When we save even one life, we have saved the whole world.
Both Ruth and Nao have lost their raison d’être and feel that they are wasting their time on earth. Feeling isolated and stagnant among “cloying, elegiac” memoir notes, Ruth suffers from writer’s block and severe disconnection after caring for and burying her mother:
[Ruth] missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. […] But here, on this sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing bamboo, she stared out the window and felt like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not getting any younger. She had fulfilled her promise to her father, and cared for her mother. Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell (61).
Like Ruth, Nao considers her life “lost time,” and it is fitting that she writes her diary inside the emptied red cloth cover of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Nao has resolved to kill herself after documenting the life of her great-grandmother Jiko Yasutani (in the English, given name – surname, order), an “anarchist feminist Zen Buddhist novelist nun” (29). Nao’s decision is a direct consequence her father’s resolve to commit suicide, precipitated by his layoff from his Silicon Valley company and subsequent move from Sunnyvale, California to Tokyo, where he remains unemployed, unmotivated, and immutably depressed. For Nao, a cascade of events results from this move. As the American transfer student in a Tokyo middle school, Nao experiences horrific bullying, including physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; she struggles to catch up academically, drops out of school, and falls prey to the perilous world of sex trafficking, where dangers lurk around every corner and her next date could “tie [her] up and put the plastic shopping bag from [her] new cardigan over [her] head and rape [her], and hours later the police will find [her] lifeless naked body bent at odd angles on the floor, next to the big round zebra-skin bed” (5).
As Ruth and Oliver catch up to the “now” of Nao’s story – the point at which Nao’s suicide seems imminent and inevitable, Ruth feels an urgency to intervene and save her. Oliver reminds Ruth of the asynchronous timelines of their respective stories, with Nao’s occurring sometime in 2002 and Ruth’s in 2011 (312-313). That’s when Zen Buddhism, quantum superposition and arrayed fractal time, dreams, mirrors, glasses, crows, Jiko – the Zen Buddhist nun, and the magic of writing conspire to enable Ruth and Nao to reach through time to touch each other (37). “Who had conjured whom?” Ruth asks herself (392). Did Nao conjure Ruth so that Ruth may save her? Did Ruth conjure Nao to transcend her atomization, spiritual and intellectual death, and existential ennui? Did Jiko, the enlightened being, summon Ruth to save Nao and her father, Jiko’s grandson, Haruki #2?
Recently I mentioned that I just finished reading Coraline with my kids, and one of the tropes we noticed was the special viewfinder that sees through the world of illusion and portrays things as they really are. And then we discussed the fact that in Aru Shah and the End of Time, the protagonist is given a special mirror that shatters the world of illusions. It's a device (macguffin?) that shows up in fantasy and hero's journeys. Then I was thinking about the special glasses in the proletarian sci-fi film They Live! by John Carpenter:
Ruth has three dreams in which she visits Jiko at her decrepit mountainside temple. In all the dreams, Jiko’s glasses and her computer, the old technology and the new, figure prominently. Jiko’s glasses allow Ruth to see and sense the dreamworld with new understanding (presumably with Jiko’s wisdom and perspective), and the computer acts as a kind of teleportation device – a wormhole or portal that grants her access, and as a magic key that enables transformation or metamorphosis, especially of Jiko into the Jungle Crow. Significantly, the computer also indicates that we are in a cybernetic universe. I’ll return to this later.
Dream #1.
In Ruth’s first dream,
The curve of the nun’s shaved head gleamed faintly in the moonlight, and when she turned her face, Ruth could see the light from the monitor reflected in the lenses of the glasses she was wearing, which had thick, squarish black frames, not unlike Ruth’s own. The nun’s face looked oddly young in the pixelated glow. She was typing something, carefully, with arthritic forefingers.
“S o m e t i m e s u p…” she typed. Her wrists were bent like broken branches, and her fingers curled like crooked sticks, tapping out each letter on the keyboard.
“S o m e t i m e s d o w n… […] Up down, same thing. And also different, too. […] When up looks up, up is down. When down looks down, down is up. Not-one, not-two. Not same. Not different. Now do you see?” (39-40).
Jiko’s riddle points to the relativity of positionality and expresses the universe as both non-monistic (not-one) and non-dualistic (not-two); maybe it’s both. Sometimes we are merging and dissolving with others, sometimes congealing and separating as discrete entities, and our consciousness, and matter / atoms – in birth, death, and rebirth; in the cyclical waves of return to order and to entropy and chaos – is always vacillating between the two. The instability of the female “I” (148) is its relationality, empathy, and quantum entanglements, which Zen Buddhism recognizes as the interconnectedness of all things (30) and which Albert Einstein identified as the illusion of our separation.
Dream #2.
Ruth has her second nun dream at the same temple, only now she can see more of the nun’s environment, making out the outline of a cemetery in the distance beyond the temple. She sees that
[i]nside the room, the harsh, cold light from the computer illuminated the old nun’s face, making her look haggard and sickly. She looked up from the screen. She was wearing the black glasses that were similar to the ones Ruth wore. She took them off and rubbed her tired eyes, and then she spotted Ruth. Unfurling the wide black wing of her sleeve, she beckoned, calling her closer, and then Ruth was beside her. The nun held out her glasses, and Ruth, realizing that she’d left hers on the bedside table, took them. She knew she had to put them on. She blinked. The lenses were thick and murky. Her eyes would need a moment to adjust.
No, this wouldn’t do. The nun’s lenses were too thick and strong, smearing and dismantling the whole world as she knew it. She started to panic. She tried to pull the glasses from her face, but they were stuck there, and as she struggled, the smear of the world began to absorb her, swirling and howling like a whirlwind and casting her back into a place or condition that was unformed, that she couldn’t find words for. How to describe it? Not a place, but a feeling, of nonbeing, sudden, dark, and prehuman, which filled her with such an inchoate horror that she cried out and brought her hands to her face, only to find that she no longer had one. There was nothing there. No hands, no face, no eyes, no glasses, no Ruth at all. Nothing but a vast and empty ruthlessness.
She screamed but no sound emerged. She strained into the vastness, pressing into a direction that felt like forward or even through, but without a face there was no forward, or backward, either. No up, no down. No past, no future. There was just this – this eternal sense of merging and dissolving into something unnameable that went on and on in all directions, forever.
And then she felt something, a feather-light touch, and she heard something that sounded like a chuckle and a snap, and in an instant, her dark terror vanished and was replaced by a sense of utter calm and well-being. Not that she had a body to feel, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, but somehow she experienced all of these sensations, nevertheless. It was like being cradled in the arms of time itself, and she stayed suspended in this blissful state for an eternity or two (122-123).
Dream #3.
[Ruth] is swimming now. She is cold and swimming, and the sea is black and thick and filled with debris. She starts to sink and the ceiling of sludge closes over her.
Sounds merge and separate, coalesce and differentiate. Words shimmer, a darting cloud of tiny minnows ripples beneath the surface of the water. […]
Feelings lap at her edges like waves on the sand. Jiko holds out her glasses, and Ruth takes them and puts them on because she knows she must. The murky lenses smear the world, as fragments of the old nun’s past flood through her: spectral images, smells and sounds; the gasp of a woman hanged for treason as the noose snaps her neck; the cry of a young girl in mourning; the taste of a son’s blood and broken teeth; the stench of a city drowned in flames; a mushroom cloud; a parade of puppets in the rain. For a moment she vacillates. […] In a split second, she makes a decision, and opens the fist of her mind and lets go (347-348).
Ruth appears in a mirrored room (348), the same one in which Nao has found herself just a bit earlier while with a sadomasochistic client (336). While the client is doing things to her body, sometimes rough and abusive things, Nao dissociates: “I just went to the silent frozen place in my mind that was clean and cold and very far away” (335). Nao’s ringing phone awakens her from her passivity and snaps her back into her body; she believes that Jiko’s calling, and the conscientization (Freirean word) of her love for Jiko, and her desire to protect Jiko from having her heart broken by a careless great-granddaughter who gets herself murdered, prompt Nao to save herself by escaping the violation (336).
Nao’s Song
Before she leaves, Nao looks at herself in the mirror without self-recognition (336). In Ruth’s final dream, she also encounters an uncanny reflection of her dream self – a fractalized alternate self from a parallel world, and then finds her reflection standing beside Nao’s reflection. “Don’t be fooled! her reflection howls as the room explodes into a vortex of mirrors and light” (349). Finally a pixelated crow emerges – her Jungle Crow – the Japanese crow that floated ashore with Nao’s plastic bag to Ruth’s remote community near Desolation Sound (349). The black Jungle Crow, who may be a metamorphosed Jiko in her black robes, brings Ruth to Ueno Park to meet Haruki #2 and relate Nao’s message to her father: don’t kill yourself, because then Nao will kill herself, too. You’re being selfish. Think of your daughter and don’t abandon her (352). Ruth succeeds, and Nao’s story continues instead of being cut short.
Haruki #1 & Haruki #2: Cyborgs, Conscientious Objection, and the World-Branching Significance of Every Choice
Haruki #1 and Haruki #2’s Song
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Conscientious Objector” (1934)
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~ Viktor Frankl
When I was in my old neighborhood one day, I found this book in a free library. It is a blueprint for successfully refusing the draft. I wonder how effective it was, if at all.
“Today many young men conscientiously object to participation in the armed forces – on political, moral, religious or humanitarian grounds […] If he is convinced that the war is unjust, he conscientiously objects to participation in the armed forces, or takes the much rougher course of accepting induction but refusing orders to take part in that particular conflict.”
~ Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, Handbook for Conscientious Objectors – Tenth Edition, October, 1968
While I was reading, I wondered if Jiko’s up, down, same thing; surfer, wave, same thing declarations were just nihilism in disguise; if everything is the same, even when it’s different, does nothing we do matter? Do the conditions we endure and the outcomes we achieve not matter? Was this the wisdom that she was imparting?
Later in the novel, we learn that Jiko’s son, Haruki #1, and Jiko’s grandson, Haruki #2, are linked by their indomitable wills and their shared decision to become conscientious objectors. Haruki #1, a philosophy student forced to become a WWII kamikaze pilot, chooses to crash his plane into the waves rather than kill for fascism. Half a century later, his nephew and namesake, Haruki #2, Nao’s father, is a computer programmer working in Silicon Valley in the late ’90s, charged with building the equivalent of an artificial intelligence interface; it is sold to the U.S. military, as it promises to enable “semi-autonomous weapons technology” and is designed to gamify mass destruction: “What made a computer game addictive and entertaining would make it easy and fun to carry out a massively destructive bombing mission” (307). Haruki #2 wants “to figure out if [there’s] a way to build a conscience into the interface design that would assist the user by triggering his ethical sense of right and wrong and engaging his compulsion to do right” (307-308). In other words, Haruki #2 wants to subvert and sabotage the deadly program. His conscience ultimately gets him fired, and he languishes until he and Nao discover Haruki #1’s conscientious objection and formulate the idea that Haruki #2 should create a cyber spider that erases a person’s digital archive, granting them the freedom of anonymity (382-383). In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff highlights the importance of this right in the digital age – the right to be forgotten.
The documentary film Beware of Images (2016) asserts that video games were developed as military recruitment tools for precisely the objective of gamifying war and desensitizing players to killing, making it fun and reconditioning them through dopamine hits in order to erase those pesky pangs of conscience.
The centrality of computers and of weapons technologies indicates that the novel, as in life, exists in a cybernetic universe at the nexus of modern warfare and information technology. Cybernetic theory explains that our social relations, culture, ideas, and reality are mediated by the algorithmic, automated feedback loops of information technology. On social media sites and in searches, we may believe that we are in control of the information we seek and consume, when our symbolic universe is actually being curated – algorithmically or agentively (by governments or companies who pay for access).
Otherwise known as cybernetic steering, this phenomenon explains what images and messages are presented to us; they become the ones we are more likely to consume in the attention economy. In turn, we mold our thoughts, feelings, and bodies and generally adapt ourselves to the information we receive through electromagnetic signals – on radios and screens and in cyberspace. Disparate information ecologies and advertising campaigns subject us to intense manipulation; we’re not as free as we think we are. While we may believe that we are sovereign beings who control the tools we use, the tools may be ruling us, steering us towards specific outcomes and choices – consumer, political, social, etc. “Lo! men have become the tools of their tools!” laments Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Neil Postman takes up the problem of humans becoming subordinated to their technology in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993).
In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Donna Haraway conceives of us as cyborgs – cybernetic organisms and human-machine hybrids – who may still exercise agency to disobey the programming of the corporate military state. While I have some qualms and disagreements with Haraway, she positions us as cyborgs because cybernetics and cybernetic warfare – command-control-communications-information technology, in military parlance – are the most powerful forces of domination controlling our lives, and, in the words of the Marxists, she does not want to cede the terrain of struggle by abandoning our posts in the border war: “The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination” (Haraway, 66).[i] Because cybernetics is the primary means of enslaving us, Haraway believes that subverting and transforming it is the key to our liberation: “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course,” Haraway asserts, “is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (Haraway, 67-68).[ii]
Both Harukis emerge in the text as rebellious cyborgs, subversive human tools of the military economy that impede its progress. For a film about conscientious and disobedient cyborgs, see the brilliant Sleep Dealer (2008) by Alex Rivera.
Ultimately, Jiko’s Zen Buddhist wisdom and the wisdom of quantum physics lie not in nihilism but rather in the idea that, as everything is connected and produces multiple contingent realities and fractal worlds, everything we do matters. Everything has cosmic significance — not only significance for ourselves but for the entire interconnected universe (the “butterfly effect”). Haruki #1 refuses to kill. Haruki #2 refuses to kill. While acts of conscience may not serve as the antidote to or cure for horror, they decrease the world’s suffering and generate beauty and goodness, which multiplies. Haruki #2 and Nao are able to heal from Ruth’s intervention and by learning of Haruki #1’s disobedience. Haruki #1 inspires Haruki #2’s determination to continue as a disobedient and subversive cyborg who sabotages the machines and jams the signals; Haruki #2 figures out how to do something worthwhile to erase his daughter’s abuse and shame in all the worlds and to liberate those who choose to exit the matrix.
Quantum Physics and Many Worlds
Zen Buddhism and quantum physics complement each other. Here is the quantum physics explanation for Ruth’s miraculous journey:
Oliver: “On a subatomic level, a single particle can exist as an array of possibilities, in many places at once. This ability to be in many places at once is called superposition. […] This quantum behavior of superposed particles is described mathematically as a wave function. The paradox is that the particles exist in superposition only as long as no one is looking. The minute you observe the array of superposed particles to measure it, the wave function appears to collapse, and the particle exists in only one of its many possible locations, and only as a single particle.’”
Ruth: “The many collapses into one?”
Oliver: “Yes, or rather, that was one theory, anyway. That there’s no single outcome until the outcome is measured or observed. Until that moment of observation, there’s only an array of possibilities, ergo, the cat exists in this so-called smeared state of being. It’s both alive and dead.”
“But that’s absurd.”
“Exactly. That was Schrödinger’s point. There are a couple of problems with this theory of wave function collapse. What it’s saying, by extension, is that at any moment, a particle is whatever it’s measured to be. It has no objective reality. That’s the first problem. The second problem is that nobody’s been able to come up with the math to support this theory of wave function collapse. So Schrödinger wasn’t really buying it. The whole cat business was meant to point out the absurdity of the situation.”
“Did he have a better idea?”
“No, but later on somebody else did. This guy, Hugh Everett, came up with the math to support an alternate theory, that the so-called collapse doesn’t happen at all. Ever. Instead, the superposed quantum system persists, only, when it is observed, it branches. The cat isn’t either dead or alive. It’s both dead and alive, only now it exists as two cats in two different worlds.”
“You mean, real worlds?”
“Yes. Wild, isn’t it? His theory, which is based on what he called the universal wave function, is that quantum mechanics doesn’t just apply to the subatomic world. It applies to everything, to atoms and cats. The whole, entire universe is quantum mechanical. And here’s where it gets really freaky. If there’s a dead-cat world and an alive-cat world, this has implications for the observer, too, because the observer exists within the quantum system. You can’t stand apart, so you split, like an amoeba. So now there’s a you who is observing the dead cat, and another you who is observing the alive cat. The cat was singular, and now they are plural. The observer was singular, and now you are plural. You can’t interact and talk to your other yous, or even know about your other existences in other worlds, because you can’t remember…” (398).
From this explanation, Ruth travels through her dream to jump from one branched or fractal world to another in order to prevent Haruki #2 and Nao from committing suicide or surrendering to despair. She accesses electromagnetic waves – “all the light we cannot see” – to move from one present world into the past one of Nao’s diary and change the outcome so that it becomes a different fractal world. All the storms, her and Jiko’s respective computers, and Jiko’s glasses comprise the “deep conditions of the universe” that make these shifts in contingencies and constellations possible. Together, Jiko, Nao, and Ruth restore lost time. (Personally, I think it was Jiko who engineered their convergence.)
Jiko’s Song
The Magic of Reading, Writing, and Zen Buddhism
“[I]f you do decide to read on, then guess what? You’re my kind of time being and together we’ll make magic!” ~ Nao
“The door to the invisible must be visible.” ~ Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, p. 411
“Mount Analogue is where peradam can be found, an extraordinary and crystalline object that can be seen only by those who seek it.” ~ pp. 411-412
Literature is indispensable, because it allows us to access other worlds and lives, both real and imagined, and it affects and moves us – intellectually, morally, emotionally, and spiritually. For all of us readers, we know the balm that a good book provides. Most of us find that the right book at the right time is magic; it heals our troubled minds and broken hearts, and its soul touches ours. Literature enables us to survive and endure. It acts as either a mirror or a window, or both, and tells us that we are not alone. It afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted; it makes the familiar strange and the strange, familiar. A good book turns the world upside down or rights it again, deepening our understanding and revealing previously hidden truths. Moving literature impacts the future choices we make and how we sense and move through the world.
In the beginning of the novel, when Ruth is stuck and disconnected, she mocks the idea of everyone becoming a writer, quoting Milan Kundera: “Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding” (26). It’s a pretty elitist, exclusive, and pompously presumptuous attitude towards writing, and in the end, Ruth seems to disprove it as an outdated and irrelevant concept that doesn’t serve her anymore.
The central problem for Ruth – the cause of her stuckness – is that she has been lacking connection that enables growth and mutuality. Each of us is both a being-for-oneself and a being-for-others, and on her remote island, Ruth has not been able to experience the sociality and stimulation that she needs. Her career is also suffering for it: “The tone of the writing bugged her – cloying, elegiac. It made her cringe. She was a novelist. She was interested in the lives of others. What had gotten into her, to think she could write a memoir?” (64).
Only in becoming a reader of Nao’s story and in interposing herself in Nao’s and Haruki’s lives does Ruth’s writing, life, and humanity become revived. Nao, an anonymous Japanese teenager – a literary nobody – wields the power of the pen to propel A Tale for the Time Being forward. Rather than cause an age of universal deafness and ignorance, reading an unauthorized, unhegemonic tale and engaging in writing – no matter how small and insignificant we seem to the prevailing epistemic authorities and literary hierarchies / to the forces of cultural hegemony – restore us to wholeness. Like everything else, writing is a willful act that matters. It matters for the writer, and it matters to the reader. Reading and writing enable self-discovery and self-determination; they restore our empathy, our experience of intersubjectivity, our humanity, and our ability to hear and tell stories that matter. Through Nao’s story, the text is able to explore the pain of others, from victims of Japan’s suicide forest to its victims of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, from the horrors of WWII to the grim sleepwalk into war in the wake of 9/11, where we became the evil that we deplored.
Through reading, dreaming, Zen Buddhism, and quantum entanglements, Ruth has a religious awakening – religious in the sense of witnessing the miraculous and of re-ligare (the Latin origin of the word “religion,” as in ligament); after a period of detachment and alienation, Ruth enjoys reconnection to herself and others.
Writing and reading are magic keys. They grant us the power of imaginary identification. Zen Buddhism is a magic key. Zen Buddhism also rearticulates quantum physics, stressing our interconnectedness:
The ancient Zen master had a nuanced and complex notion of time that [Ruth] found poetic but somewhat opaque. Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time … In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate (30).
Zen Buddhism frames enlightenment as home-leaving and creates worlds in which love and interconnectedness have the power to bend spacetime in order to save individuals from deaths of despair. Ruth’s name means home-leaving, so maybe her destiny is to leave home and get outside her dysconscious comfort zone in order to find her superpower and emerge as a hero (59). Home-leaving is an important concept in Zen Buddhism:
Home-leaving is a Buddhist euphemism for leaving the secular world and entering the monastic path […]. Zen Master Dōgen uses the phrase in ‘The Merits of Home-Leaving’ […]. [H]e praises his young monks for their commitment to a path of awakening and explicates the granular nature of time: the 6,400,99,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around (61-62).
One more thing. Haruki #1 is a student of Western philosophy, as is Haruki #2. In his secret, subversive letters, Haruki #1 counterposes Western philosophy and Zen Buddhism. Any worldview can be weaponized for killing, but Haruki #1 summarizes, “To philosophize is to learn to die” (323). Dōgen, on the other hand, says, “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things” (323). I suppose this could be a rearticulation rather than a juxtaposition or contrast, but to me it signifies that Western and Eastern wisdoms need each other. While Western philosophy teaches death, Jiko exhorts Nao and Haruki #2 to live (362). While old Japanese thinking reveres suicide, Japanese-American Ruth, whose Americanness makes her feel deeply inadequate regarding her Japaneseness, tells Haruki #2, You’re being selfish. Don’t kill yourself. Ultimately, it is Western and Eastern wisdom together that restore lost time.
Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!
[i] For Marxists, production is how we get the stuff that we need to survive – through toxins and ruinous extraction? through war, imposed scarcity, destroyed ecosystems, and mass extinction?; reproduction is social reproduction, or how the worker reproduces himself – his education and ideology, his skills, his formation as a docile worker-consumer; and imagination is self-evident. What kind of world do we want, and what kind of world do we have? How are worlds socially dreamed and socially constructed? What future worlds are imagined in art and culture?
[ii] In A Third University is Possible, la paperson decolonizes the cyborg, transforming it into a scyborg who becomes the “ghost in the machine” and doesn’t just redirect or détourné the system but rather destroys it from within, returning to something akin to a more Luddite notion of sabotage (shoes in the machines). Our digital enslavement in the matrix connects to Plato’s allegory of the cave and to Baudrillard’s postmodern variant – that is, his formulation of simulacra, simulations, the hyperreal, and a post-truth society; we now live in a time where we can’t tell the difference between the illuminated original images and the shadows projected onto the cave wall. Perhaps Haraway’s cyborg is more Baudrillardean and desires to transform the matrix, while la paperson’s scyborg is Platonic and attempts to escape the matrix. Which is better is a matter of ongoing debate.
I'm lying in bed in my van on the edge of the beautiful island of Mull, near Iona, reading a brilliant review of one of my favourite books of the past few years, and a comment by Cecile on her faraway lake. Interconnectedness.
Iona used to be the centre of the Western spiritual world. Now it is a remote, forgotten island off the coast of another remote Scottish island, Mull. The world used to connect by sea; now we connect by land and air. But I have excellent WiFi so here we are!
The blending of Zen Buddhist philosophy, quantum multiverses, and the power of the algorithm blew my mind when I read Ozeki's time shifter of a novel. I love the glittering brilliance of her mind, and her skill as a master storyteller.
I found Ruth's partner, Oliver, a fascinating character too. He is an artist who interacts with nature and nature's slow time with no concessions to a human audience. Art for its own sake which heals his fractured mind, as does Ruth's reading and writing.
Thank you for sharing your review, Rebecca. It is a fascinating and intellectually stimulating reminder of how I felt after reading about Time Beings. I'll listen to your music choices later. I don't want to disturb the gang of Oyster Catchers feeding on the shore near my van.
Was it Nocturnes? I recommended it to someone in need of short stories. But Ishiguro’s newest is a book with his lyrics for an amazing singer who is accompanied by her husband on saxophone. Apparently the hard cover is gorgeous, with beautiful drawings, and I think I have a friend who can bring it to me in June. Before deciding to become a writer, Ishiguro’s dream was to be a musician. So he writes lyrics, writes screenplays (Living is outstanding) and tried to write a children’s book but was told quite firmly by his daughter that it was far too frightening for children. Quite the Renaissance man.