extreme fruition

if you can tell the sweetness of a fruit before eating it by the width of its inner stem, what can you tell about a person by the extremeness of their conditions? against common logic, the thinner the stem, the sweeter the fruit.

Another dream sequence I had last night following a plethora of recent readings and news events...... (To be noted, I do not encourage any form of the violence displayed here -- it may be better to think of this as an alternate 'dream-Kelsey' than the one you are possibly already familiar with...)



I walk into a local cheap restaurant with my friend, M---oka. It's small and lined with booths, one across the way featuring lifesize replicas of the Sesame Street characters Bert and Cookie Monster (Ernie wasn't favored enough in Japan's televisioning programming to earn a place next to Bert anymore). As we slide into our seats toward the kitchen door, I notice two young girls sitting quietly, pensively even, just a couple of booths away on the side opposite of the entrance. One of them faces directly away from the window. She looks disturbed, perhaps even on the verge of tears, yet subtley so, such that no one in the restaurant other than myself has apparently noticed something is wrong with her. At that moment, I pick up one of the waitresses talking about the girl to the restaurant manager, not far from where M---oka and I are sitting. My brain at first has to make the quick switch to 'Japanese mode' before I can follow, but I quickly come to realize what's going on.

"That girl over there has reported herself a rape case. The rapist appears to be her father," the waitress whispers in an uneven tone.

The manager gives a scowl. "Dame yaro. No good. There's nothing we can do. We mustn't get involved in family affairs."

Without another thought, and while my friend looks at me in awkward confusion as I stand up, I march over to the other side of the room and approach the little girl.

She is so small, can't be over eight years old, yet seems to have accepted the burden of years beyond her time tragic understanding in which only a truely traumatic experience can result. She slowly looks up to me as I lean down next to her. Her hair falls straight down her back, like most Japanese hair but characteristically brown, her eyes shining weakly, as though teasing one to think of them as the entrance to timeless portals to another reality. She is technically still new to this reality.

"Hello," I say. She responds with a quiet hello. I decide to assume for now that she can speak English.

"Did someone hurt you?"

She glances away for a moment then back and gives a brief nod of her head. I can feel the eyes of the waitress and manager finally noticing me from the entrance of the kitchen door. I probably don't have much time.

"Is he here now?"

"Yes," she whispers.

I stand back up again. "Where is he?"

She looks back over her shoulder at the window. She says nothing. I walk outside into the dead, chilled evening air and stand behind a row of cars facing the restaurant. I look at her through the window from that distance and point to the first car. She shakes her head and does again at the second car. As I walk around to the next one, I see it's a blue Lincoln convertible, imported perhaps directly from the States with the driver's steering wheel noticeably kept on the left side. In the seats, laughing and romping in a manner I should have noticed earlier were two men and two women, one of the men still wearing his navy uniform. I look up and see the girl, still unalarmed and pensive, staring at me. The crowd in the car are too high strung and wrapped up in themselves to notice me behind them.

I look at her and point to the man in the backseat. He has characteristically brown hair, just a shade lighter than the girl's, and an even tan. He must be in his late thirties. Through the glass, I see her barely visible nod, accompanied by the frightened eyes of the restaurant workers peeping from the edge of the window pane.

I walk around to the side of the open car and look down at him. He bursts out laughing just at that moment from something someone else said, then follows the finger of the woman with eyes caked in mascara sitting next to him to face me. We look into each other's eyes for a moment, and then, without any premeditation on my part, I begin to punch him. I sock him in the eye and then round him in the jaw. The first hit had apparently been enough to knock him senseless. The other people in the car simply watch in horror, his friend apparently too shocked to try to react to the offense. I look at his face again for a moment and realize he's still conscious enough to probably know what I'm saying. I shout in a voice firm with conviction, "We do NOT rape in this country... We do NOT hurt innocent people in this country!" A fraction of a second passes -- an intense moment of time where I feel both the burning rage I'd already displayed and, at once, a well of deep sorrow for this man and the depravity he has embodied -- before I turn back the way I came into the restaurant.

My friend still sits on his side of the booth motionless when I walk in. Without asking, I take a small plush doll we'd found at a flea market that sits on his backpack and return to the little girl. I lean down again to give it to her, and she smoothly accepts it without a word, holding it to herself, calmly admiring it. The scene I had just made in my first true fit of physical violence slowly creeps back into my awareness, just as the waitress calls out to me.

"O-kyakusama? [Sir?] Denwa desuyo. [You have a phone call.]" She holds the receiver out to me from afar, standingly bravely but still with a tinge of apprehension from the door to the back of the restaurant.

"Moshi moshi? [Hello?]" My voice dulls against the cardboard boxes sitting against the walls in the dimly lit storage room interior. I speak in Japanese, as has become my custom with phone calls from strangers.

"Yes, this is Yamamoto Eri from the headquarters in ------ Town," she recited in her smooth and unsettlingly emotionless Japanese. "Would you please report to the nearest police station for questioning?" The question was of course not anything close to being a request as it was an indirect order.

I paused a second, then replied, "Shall I accompany the other man involved?"

"...Excuse me?"

"I mean, I'm not saying I didn't do anything wrong here, but there were two people involved in this and one of us did something far more reproachable, after all." I realize that no one is watching me, so I walk with the wireless receiver out the back of the restaurant and into the street. I feel my lungs thirsting for air from the cramped molding room.

"...Sir, we can't properly make these decisions over the phone. I assure you that the authorities are doing things by their proper procedure. Would you please make your way to nearest station as soon as possible?"

I turn around at an abrupt noise to see the blue convertible peeling down the street, running from nothing nor no one, away from the scene. It's too far away for me to see if the two little girls are inside or not, though I nonetheless search for that characteristic brown hair in the back seat.

"...Sir? ...Ano.... Hello?" she stutters a bit as she switches to English, no longer containing the air of authority her early monotone had given her. "Let me... Let me help you. I want to help."

The night humidity sits heavily on my chest, seeming to cling to everything around me. It's heavy yet utterly ineffective.

"Listen, ma'am." My abrupt American manner breaks through in the switch to English. "You wanna help me? You can start by doing your job, dammit. Stop making people like me have to take over where you guys are failing. Your government's the one that allows bastards like the guy I hit to stay in this country, and then pays the media to display their offenses as though they're distinctive of all Americans, or all foreigners even. It's sick. You wanna help me? You guys really wanna help me? Wake UP!"

I hit the off button and take a moment for myself in the dead atmosphere of the city's outskirt buildings and shops. Down the street, a couple of trees limp pitifully from their concrete and woodchip holes in the sidewalk. A line of salarymen step out of a part Pachinko arcade, part bar facility even farther down the way, their ties hanging around each other's necks and reddened foreheads, shouting and laughing. It'll be another couple of hours before they return home to their families, perhaps grabbing the newest stranger-girl voyeur magazine on the way home for reading on the train.

I take three slow breaths and head back toward the concrete figure of the restaurant.

US marine held over Japan rape

A US marine has been arrested in Okinawa, Japan, on suspicion of raping a 14-year-old girl.

Sgt Tyrone Luther Hadnott, from Camp Courtney base, is alleged to have raped the local girl in a parked car.

The 38-year-old denies the accusation but has admitted to forcibly kissing the girl. He has not been charged.

About 20,000 US troops are based on the southern Japanese island, and relations are tense after previous prosecutions for crimes committed against locals.

more...

New US rape allegation in Okinawa

By Chris Hogg BBC News, Tokyo

Another US military serviceman has been detained over an alleged sexual assault on Japan's southern island of Okinawa.

In the latest of a string of incidents involving US troops, the man is accused of raping a Filipino woman at a hotel.

The alleged rape happened before a 24-hour curfew was imposed on US troops, their families and civilians working for the military on Okinawa.

The focus on crime by military personnel in recent days is affecting relations between Japan and the US.

more...

A Sneaky Attack on Japan
The Once-Rising Sun Hasn't Set Yet
By: Paul J. Scalise

Surprise, surprise: Japan is not perfect. Make way for Alex Kerr, the latest plaintiff in the ongoing case to put Japan and its Western fan club on trial for misrepresentation, sloppy journalism and downright fraud. In his new book, Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Japan, even the subtitle suggests an anecdotal polemic confronting one of the most controversial subjects in Asian studies: What is the true Japan?

more...

t
he par
am
te
r
s
be
tween wake
&
sl
ee
p
e
n
caps
ul
at
e th
e w
or
ld we
'd for
eve
r
per pet u ate
...,
.
.
.
if
we
could on
ly re me
mber
upon
open-
ing our eyes
.



a poem to tom -- one of the few human beings in the world who defies all parameters in the shaping of a new world, and to whom i wish a very happy birthday

I look at a human being, even myself, and I see a fish, a monkey, a giant bacterium anomaly. A package of somatic intention, a temple of neurosynapses immersed in hairy foam rubber and assorted juices. I see a vector, a cloud of lines of embedded code, all projecting the phenomenon of difference.

How shall I address difference? Of so many things, difference seems to be a phenomenon – a deduction – concerned with distance: a farthering and isolating, then a bringing together, a uniting (or reuniting). These are the properties of a mosaic, with inconsistent fragments arranged together to eventually result in something (somehow) coherent. Difference is art and science, in purpose and in recursive motion. It is the permanent subject of mathematics.

Motion also requires time as well as distance. Emotion overwhelms the observer of excessive difference, striving with all due efficiency and means to recalibrate a worldview that incorporates, assimilates, homogenizes the disparate halves of known and unknown (familiar and unfamiliar). Indeed, difference is not heterogeneity, but the quaking phenomenon of experience between the heterogeneous and homogeneous. It is an elementary, essential rudiment to equilibrium and to relativity.

We – I – might feel morally compelled at times to minimize difference, but it absolutely mustn’t be mistaken for minimizing violence. We – I – mustn’t mistake stagnation for equilibrium. Peace is neither the ability to become, nor the state of becoming, accustomed to difference; peace is the side effect of complete recognition of the necessity of difference to health and progress. (In this way, peace can never actually be a goal per se, anymore than the Buddhist or meditator can call Enlightenment a goal.) Social progress will not come through a blindness or ignorance to difference, nor even a mere toleration of it; it will come through the transition from a fear of difference (a phobia of the unfamiliar) – the outcome of a geopolitically sensitive, culturally developed caution for impermanence and change, and coupled with a millennia-old biological inclination for conservativism toward one's immediate environment – to an appreciation of it.

Walking away

thinking

of what I said

disappointing

eyes

that I impose

on their faces

in contrast to

those imprinted

along nerve endings

the face of a better me

better to me

of course

but dare I ask

me to whom?

who stands the greater

of me as their object?

who waits for me

to evolve?

involving (of the) Super-fluous-

ego

in the next class

we'll demonstrate transitives

& intransitives

and the continuous form,

it's all a matter of pragmatics

.

reawakening alternatives for moral paradigms

China's thriving Confucian schools

By Jill McGivering BBC News

Parents believe studying Confucius benefits the whole of society

As soon as they walk into the tiny school, a converted apartment in a tower block, the children are bundled into grey cotton wraparound robes, fastened at the back with modern Velcro.

Flowing sleeves flap round their wrists, square black hats wedged on to their heads - some, too big, slip down over the eyes.

The children, from three to six years old, have come to special weekend classes to learn the teachings of China's ancient sage, Confucius.

Read more...

marginalized by bifurcation and simulacre

独裁者

it is important that we not view fundamentalism in an improper light; for by 'fundamentalist' in its colloquial usage, we often mean to simply imply an 'extremist,' and by 'extremist,' to take an extreme stance. in this layout, however, things are unfortunately distorted from the inside out. for we still view an extremem as a bilateral product, a position that is necessarily accompanied by a remote and more often than not dialectic converse, an opposite extreme. we view the extreme this way instead of as the nuance of an extremity, a line of growth projected outward from an indeterminable center of an asymmetrical body (indeed, indeterminable precisely due to this asymmetry). that is, not as a choice between the left and right hand, as (more or less mistakenly) posited on nearly all forms of modern globalizing governmental structures, but as the protrusive skeletal framework to one of multiple fingers, or manner of excess, like the penis or the nose, that shows no resemblance even to branching. while we have split the brain in two to further attempt to explain away our everyday behavioral functions and peculiarities via centralizing them in either one or the other half, we have maintained the heart’s basic holism, even allowing its oddly nonbisymmetrical shape and location on the left side of the chest. the circulatory system’s excessive faculty, serving the function of that name. the timelessly depicted rendezvous point for excessive emotion and stir for mobility. it is in fact the heart, not the head, that better portrays the nature of the extreme, to which the negative connotation in ‘extremism’ may be attributed where the results appear violent or undesirable. make no mistake, though, that we are all necessarily extremist at some frequent points in our lives, climatic stages to an unraveling storytelling and process of reasoning.

this more realistic portrayal of extremism is the only way through which to properly view fundamentalism. for in deriving the concept from the term’s ethnological roots, we understand it as an extremist adherence (which may or may not be conservative) to the most base literary fundamentals of a schooling. the Universal Darwinists are cemented to the principles of natural selection, with signs of their extremism appearing in the disregard (if not complete denial of) the other essential functions to evolution – ‘survival of the fittest’ is the world’s Absolute creed. the Sunnies and the Shi’ites now continue to dispel their rage of their political differences through violence and war sponsored by their each absolutely infallible version of Islam – despite that the Islamic doctrinal differences at the base of the politics is so trivial that such hatred and killing could hardly be proclaimed to have religious purposes in mind. and there are of course those Christians, most renownedly labeled fundamentalist Christians, who have perhaps spanned the course of history longer than any other form of fundamentalism (albeit in a wider variety of manifestations). it is also perhaps the most formidable fundamentalism, second to only one other in the world (which i will get to in a minute) but at the same time invariably linked to it. for Christianity, in its fundamentalist form, unlike the structure of Islamic fundamentalism which is foundationally religious and stems into a disparate but inseverable political arena, is political throughout; that is to say that the religion and its contextual political environments have since its propagation been so interwoven that the differences between them have by this day and age become inscrutable. thus why the insistence of a separation between church and state has nevertheless mostly resulted in its failure. thereby, the number one fundamentalist operation, so covert and widespread now that few would not hesitate to call it that, is the adherence to an American-based ultracapitalist model around which all developing conformist countries and globalizing societies revolve, beset from the start with past colonialist influences and reformations to thus be so conducive to this way of (the more subtle and thus perhaps more dangerous) neocolonialism.

if we approach these real world schemas with the left-hand-right-hand gestalt of extremism, we can, however painfully, justify these courses of theory and action as a very far right wing affiliation (the Son sits at the right hand of the Father), just another sort of manifestation within the diverse spectrum of beliefs. as such, it deserves the respect and toleration that all sorts are due, especially amid the ever growing awareness and necessity for international, intercultural cooperation. but that is precisely what throws fundamentalism outside of the categories for belief systems at the pragmatic stage – for Christianity rises among Christians, but fundamentalism is itself blind to the veracity of its host beliefs except as to whether or not the conditions of the host are sustainable – for it is at its rudimentary praxes uncooperative, unnegotiable. fundamentalism is not any kind of belief; it is a function by which a system of beliefs can assume a tyrannical or at least dominant position against other systems. and what is partly so dangerous about this is that it does not retain itself within the order from which it originated but breaches all manner of diplomacy, protruding further and further into eventually raping the substances of other intermingling orders – überChristians are captured by the fabricated rhetoric of politicians raving world progress in the name of the Father and are at once moved to challenge, and respond to being challenged by, the sciences, in converting by forgery the observations of their religious reality into those of a scientific one (i.e. Creationism); Universal Darwinism not only confounds the sciences (for it is not itself a science but an approach to science) by castrating of them their necessary degrees of complexity and permanently vague teleological conclusions (wherever they have any), but also destroys God. it is thus not anything so innocuous as a choice of the right versus the left (which is itself too limiting a model by which fundamentalism can operate), but an uncompromising literalism with solely proselytizing intentions, a forceful insemination by a distorted and relentless intercultural phenomenon.

miss truth

One of Science’s main contentions with religion is in its handling of the truth. For in this day and age, only religion can hold a person’s appreciation for lies, for this is most often how it reveals to us the truth. Indeed, some truths can only be understood through lies, which are not really lies so much as mistruths, imaginary elements that provide the contrast that is sometimes our only means to perceiving an important aspect of the real. As such, both conservative sciences and fundamentalist Religion (what we can call the ‘pseudoreligious’ in the same way that we call methods and institutions sub par of the natural sciences pseudosciences) make the same mistake in assuming that all knowable truths are explicit – with conservative science belaboring the attempt to make what is knowable explicit, and fundamentalist Religion what is explicit knowable. Both miss entire dimensions of reality, dimensions that are real as that they are manifest in the physical and mental and spiritual aspects of human being, and that are missed due to this myopic, monist and even violent assumption concerning the nature of truth. Only the spiritually healthy perhaps can develop an experienced appreciation for mistruths.

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

-- Thomas Paine

a supposition for spirituality

involutionary niche 1: conservative ritualism

this is the most stagnant of the niches in spiritual development and is primarily a top-down determined expression of a religion's or culture's (mostly past) intention to incarnate the spiritual into symbolically meaningful praxis. the ritual performed from this niche in its relationship to one's spirituality greatly resembles the crossword puzzle or riddle to one's mentality, or even masturbation to one's physicality, in that at most it sustains or merely stimulates the faculties of the respective aspect of human being. change in respect to the ritual is mostly passive, derived from custom or ruling (thus the top-down scheme), and in fact the conservatism of its application requires a minimal of internal reflection or external informative influences.


involutionary niche 2: symbolistic institution

this requires knowledge of the ritual, if not the ritual itself, but expands it into the symbolic order of the religion or culture, as the responding procedure to the event of inquiry regarding the ritual -- the consensus to the inquiry 'why do we do this?' as it might possibly be answered with regard to the nature of what is spiritual. manifest ritual is explained through its relationship to the world.

(here is born the misconception of disparate worlds of being, that is, not that different modes of being [that accompany the diversity of perspectives and responses a person or a people may have to the world] occupy one existence ["we're all in this together!"] but that separate dimensions of existence [e.g. the divine and the natural] mysteriously occupy different times within one's singular mode of [potentially eternal] being. thus, we can also see from this the drive to submit oneself to [supposedly] unending occupation by forms of a separate existence as a goal to one's spiritual development [i.e. the invitation for the presence of christ to never leave me throughout my temporal Earth-based life].)

thereby, ritual is signified, made significant, by the education of its indoctrinated meaning. this niche is occupied by the greatest number of those whose vocation or inclination is to share doctrinal information ('spread the "Good News"') as it is by those who relate a tradition's signifiers to life as the final significance (or aspect of the final significance) to living.


involutionary niche 3: spiritual roundedness

the conditions of this niche have undoubtedly been most affectively experienced (though perhaps not yet sufficiently explained) by the world's most sincere mystics. however, most of these have likely failed to fulfill the niche, as i believe it requires as much a growing religiopolitical awareness as (if not more in the beginning than) the full-fledge impression of the real upon the sensible. for we must understand here that the real does not contain distinctions between the aspects of human being, and so the mental is as essential to pronounce in the symbolic order as the physical if the demands of the niche are to be met. human history and cosmology are quickly becoming active ingredients to this awareness and seem to promise to resolve the ritual to the most necessary praxes per individual or people, to suffice and sustain the remaining priorities of the spiritual that institutionalized religion and culture (qua State) cannot. (it may even require a further breach in consciousness that characterizes the stereotypical enlightenment of mystics, and scientists or artists.) among the terms of its range of perspectives is a dissolution of the human/divine dichotomy, and may include the same of the staticity to the self/other, Self/Other binaries. in any case, i believe it entails a consecration of the All, with oneself as fundamentally divine and Natural, as opposed to a consecration of merely one or the other. in a sense, it is dialectic, but to posit it in its explanation as merely a dialectical process is to miss by far the elements of its verity.

just the other day....

The Church

and the Word

the

tatemae & honne

of the West.

To stress

works

but give little

signification

to what they

imply;

to judge without

knowing someone.

I

say to you now,

that there is

no

better human.

A function

a

function

-- add the element

of

love

but don’t forget

the variety of

our effects.

There is
surface
and there is depth.
The
waters bow
under in
some

the universe

caves in on itself

bends

in

at the center

to see

another part.

Where in space

and

time it does this

we attribute

everything;

we

foolishly wish

not to see

the absolute arbitrariness

of

it.

We tie
all significance
to the
face

like a line

to a bobber

-- is this
a good spot?

--

unaccustomed to

the fact

that it simply happens
it
must
happen.

That which pulls

us in

isn’t hidden

; it

just

isn’t

seen.

By all means

love the

face: plucking

out our eyes

is to throw away

a Go
d-gi
ve
n

miracle,

a furtive center
to so
many joys.

And yet,
couple your sight
to your
sensitivity

and witness

the

unbearable

simultaneity

of the
Many-face and the

One-.

as such

how can
anyone
love
and
hate

?

A person seeking inner development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one’s mind. They must be so incorporated into one’s being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never conclude anything inwardly about these truths.

-- Rudolf Steiner



whether or not this altering of the soul by one's "own will-power," this lifting oneself by one's bootstraps, is a metaphysical possibility is against the point. the power of self-discipline, in both the effects and process, is a remarkable thing. there is also, as is obvious here in steiner's last statement, an incredible amount of faith that is required that these things will come with time. but such is the importance of the means, the process, even sometimes over the ends.

"Teaching is only demonstrating

that it is possible. Learning is

making it possible for yourself."

-- Paulo Coelho

「指導というのはなにかの可能性を

学習者に示すことだ。そういう可能性から

できるようになれる行為は、学ぶといわれている。」

－パウロ・コエーリョ

(my translation)

repe(a)t(ition)

globalized song

Death teaches us, not

that we should do as much

as

possible

while we're alive,

but

that we,

within the span

of

our lives, must

discover

what is meaningful

for us

to do

.