logic of an agnostic pantheist

"This is what God said: 'I promise that never again will all people and animals be destroyed by a flood. I am putting my rainbow in the clouds. And when the rainbow appears, I will see it and remember this promise of mine.'"

for despite all claims to an omniscient God, God in fact has something of a bad, or at least imperfect, memory. it is a memory that needs reminders of promises, the promise alone unable to substantiate itself. God needs aids as we need them. this imperfect memory defeats, first of all, assumptions of omniscience, knowledge being only sustained memories, and complete knowledge entailing a working memory of anything and everything, alpha and omega, first and final cause. the act of forgetting -- Forgetting being actually inherent to everything -- could not be a possibility were it a true case of omniscience. so, God does not know all (and indeed CANNOT know all anyway, as a thorough study of prophecy would show).

secondly, God's imperfect memory begets an altogether different reading of the scriptures, if they are indeed supposed to be God's Word. the bible is no less a historical telling by way of selective memory than the histories of humankind produced by its own imperfect collective memories. were we even to propose that God would be at least less inclined to error in his telling than humans, it would no more depreciate the weight, the heavy burdenous weight, of the condition of a possibility (and therefore SOME probability) for error; nor can it stave off the more immense problem that with limited memory (of any sort!) there is inherently, indispensibly, a perspective, a point-of-view, and necessarily, simultaneously, a bias in what is Told. alternate histories must therefore have alternate Gods, differentiated and distributed by people (or, the more likely case, pre-differentiated and pre-distributed by something human but unconscious or subconscious), people who themselves have points of view and biases. God(s) must be pluralistic. monotheism in its strong form then can only exist emically, in those cases of violent (abridging, omitting) isolationism, in self-limiting; in its weak form, monotheism must equate itself with pluralism of a sort, a closet monolatrism, whereby, just like "Love", only the name and the act of signification itself of SOMETHING (always something different) can serve a base for union.

archiving a few notes from the past (couple of) year(s)

i've decided to copy some scribblings down here from a year or so of English bookreadings, podcast lectures, etc., as i sip through teeth a third cup of my own concoction of asparagus tea. these notes are not in full, not even a substantial fraction of the notes i've taken, and i know that i have many more in other journals; but the mad archiving machine has already awaken -- and some is better than none.


+ lectures on history by Rufus Fears:

--> "Signposts" of education in history:

"1 - Despite the importance of doing so, we do not learn from history.

2 - Science and technology cannot immunize us from history's lessons.

3 - Freedom, which Americans believe is longed for by people worldwide, is not a globally shared value. By contrast, desire for power, whether wielded as a despot, or as a benevolent empire or superpower, is a universal value.

4 - Known as the cradle of civilization, the Middle East has also been the graveyard of empires, no matter what their intention, as the Romans and so many others have learned.

5 - America will experience the same ultimate destiny as the memorable democracies, republics and superpowers of the past.

6 - Religion and spirituality -- and the lust for power -- are the most profound motivators in history.

7 - Nations and empires rise and fall not because of anonymous social and economic forces but because of decisions made by individuals.

8 - A true statesman possesses four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to build consensus to achieve that vision."


--> Three freedoms [paraphrased]:

national freedom -- independence from other nations
political freedom -- power of vote and rights as a citizen
individual freedom -- liberty to pursue happiness and live the way you wish (so long as it doesn't hurt others)

America's greatness stems from a balancing of these three freedoms.


[note: the mistake i belive Fears is making is in limiting his synopses of other countries to "not wanting freedom" -- that it "may" (as though he means to say 'will' and not the hypothetical 'would') be difficult to "transplant" our sense of freedom (that is, the balance of the so-called three freedoms) and way of living to other countries... as though he believes his own story of us as a "chosen people." he's also not being fair to the diversity of nuances to freedom, depending in part on culture. upon asking one of my japanese friends what kind of feeling she associates with the idea of freedom, she replied, "loneliness."]


--> 'Superpowers bring destruction upon themselves by getting too involved in others' business.' -- the lesson of hybris [hubris] (theological concept of "outrageous arrogance" -- later to mean "sin" in christianity -- at the base of which is free will.

[note: Fears believes we (Americans) are "the last great hope for mankind" -- based on the words of Abraham Lincoln. he also believes in an unchanging "human nature" -- and that this is what makes "the lessons of history eternally valid" (like laws of physics). "There's nothing wrong with wanting your country to be number one." i find this to be a very poor value in regard to international relations and international cooperative development. it's one thing to be loyal to one's country; it's another to proclaim oneself the best based on a limited perspective based on an even more limited set of values. Fears would obviously not like the notion of compassion much in this context.]



+ DECONSTRUCTION IN A NUTSHELL, by John D. Caputo:


"If a community is too welcoming, it loses its identity; if it keeps its identity, it becomes unwelcoming." (113)


"To give a gift requires that one then forget, and asks the other to forget, absolutely, that a gift has been given, so that the gift, if there is one, would vanish without a trace. If time is a calendar, a ring or annum, a circle or cycle, then the gift callus upon us to tear up the circle of time, to breach the circular movement of exchange and reciprocity, and in a 'moment' of madness, to do something for once without or beyond reason, in a time without time, to give without return.

"But that is impossible. To be sure. The gift is impossible; indeed, 'gift is another name for the impossible.' That is why we love it so much, like mad." (144)

[note: a thorough understanding of what Derrida means by "impossible" is important will shed light on the full message here. 'Im-/in-' having the same function here as 'important', 'impassioned' or as 'invenir' ('to come'), a 'coming into', thus a sort of 'into the possible' or 'making possible' (because, as a singularity, a singular event, each and every time, it isn't possible yet, is never entirely possible).]


"Learn BOTH to give AND to exchange; learn to see that each depends upon, invades, and interweaves with the other, and learn to keep watch, to see what is what, as far as that is possible. Know how impossible the gift is, how much it tears you out of yourself, and know how much you are intruding into your gift." (146)

--> "Commit yourself even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift...give economy its chance." -- Derrida


"The relation to the other -- even if it remains asymmetircal, open, without possible reappropriation -- must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic." -- Derrida


"Justice and the gift are impossible, THE impossible, which is my passion, that BY which I begin and am impassioned." (149)



+ THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA, by Umberto Eco

"To remember is to reconstruct." (25)

"Remembering is a labour, not a luxury." (?)

"To think that there are lunatics who drink to forget, or take drugs. Oh, if only I could forget it all, they say. I alone know the truth: Forgetting is dreadful." (?)


"To be intensely educated about the horror of sin and then to be conquered by it. I tell myself that it must be prohibition that kindles fantasy. Thus I decide that, if I am to escape temptation, I must avoid the suggestions of an 'education in purity': both are the devil's stratagems, and each sustains the other. This intuition, however heterodox, hits me like a whip." (396)



+ PATTERN RECOGNITION, William Gibson:

"There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comfortaing yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there." (304)


+ DUNE, Frank Herbert:

"There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace -- those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patters in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death." (380)


"Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretension. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man." (126)

"Prophecy and prescience -- How can they be put to the test in the face of the unanswered questions? Consider: How much is actual prediction of the 'wave form' (as Muad'Dib referred to his vision-image) and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What of the harmonics inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?" (277)




this will be all for now. fingers are tired, tea is gone, and i have other things to handle. peace, and happy readings.

the GoodHost

to my dear friend Kayoko, whose birthday was yesterday...

A tart smell

of
age and
pretty dresses
as she walks
into the
room
abandoning
for only A Moment
those at home

they need her
After All, leaving

them to
fend
forthemselves for
a
couple of hours,

she comes for
tea
and Conversation,
"Have you heard?"
she doesn't see the flowers
stem ends

pierced
by plastic

and soaked
in dirty water --

when she does finally
she tones silently
How
Pretty! they are --

"Such a Shame,
that boy,
what
a
Bright Young Man
he was becoming,"
sipping her tea&Conversation
with the nod of
her host

a neighbor,
a neighbor-hood-equal,
smelling older, who
cannot Afford
to
leave
the house

"And
How Is
your
husband?"

a carnation
wilts slightly,
almost but not
quite imperceptibly,
nods with
the host,
nods
to sleep
to death

"Yes..."

a pair of
swallows
skirt by the window
and
land for a
moment's gaze inwards

the host, as she is
a GoodHost
draws the
curtain over
the
outside

"Well, it's
Time to return.
They need
me after all" --

she hardly
notices
the
dandelion
she steps on
on her
way out the
front gate.

Inside
the arrangement
bends forward, bows
down
betrays itself
and the GoodHost
with
dew tears,

a Couple of Hours

After All,

is an eternity

for flowers.

The surface of
the
inland sea
smooth
appearing off-white and like
the blue
pale
of
robins' eggs,
millions
fast ened
togeth
er
and
teeming
with gaps
and cracks,
mouths feeding
on
oxygen;
and
all to keep
a float a
wrinkled top hat
steam boat,
rims
curled
in
ward
to
satisfy weary seabirds.

I
crescent
the staring moon
by squinting,
and
hail
the
wav(e)
ing
hand
of an
ignorant friend
trespassing
the risen
crest
of the
edge
of
the
surf.

(w)holier-than-thou

holes in ourselves. holes in each other. love is not a state but a motion (an e-motion), an intensity, a warmth and a 'warm feeling inside'. society is riddled with holes, multiplicities of holes. holes make up societies. and no more (nothing less) is the love-act than a holefilling, a voidlessening, a penetrating and filling of empty wombs and empty stomachs. empty lives. and equally, there is a motion or attempt to negate or prevent the love-act: the making of holes to retract the making of love, tearing holes in each other to watch our wounds gape and gasp for the first of two impossibles -- the reversible, reversibility itself. yet love, the love-act, only exists by way of a positive impossibility, an impossible of space rather than time: self-completion, a gestalt of the One over the many, a wholeness and a holelessness.

aesthetic change

the first sign of a changing aesthetic is a wide-spread self-consciousness (a political identity) of societal norms and convention. the "beauty" of (the aesthetic of) 諦め in japan is threatened by the pragmatist values of economically dominating America, which devalues the sheer acceptance of a difficult or antagonistic situation as cowardice -- precisely because it can now be identified. take the unspoken (now too often spoken) understanding between members of a japanese baseball game, that in the case of a batter up and one man on first base that a person is expected to bunt (even position themselves up for the bunt); were this spectacle observed in the States, the beauty of self-sacrifice would not even be an occurring thought, but would be returned with pure (very well expressed) hostility against the player. hence why the notion is up for review in this country, to the point that it becomes an object of obsessive intercultural critique, or one to be justified by (or to itself justify) identity. ("because it's japanese" -- not to be confused with a statement like "because WE'RE japanese," which would limit the extent to which the identified aesthetic could be given distance to allow for change.)

universality invenir

it is by way of the singular that universals come about! it is the coming of what can never be predicted, the future (always as future) and its chaotic and arbitrary (but more importantly chaotic) materialization of the present and whatever we may be inclined to call the "future-present," the "possible."

approaching meta-physics

to avoid the essentialism of conventional universalist or relativist labels -- that is, the essentialist universality of both: universalists claiming that we're all essentially the same while relativists claim a different universal that we are all irredeemably different -- to avoid this, it seems best to me to approach meta-ethics in cultural theory through respective emical or etical analyses; respective of multiplicities of contexts (i.e., cultures and histories). in any case, it requires a vocabulary devoid of the essentialist underpinnings of the former two terms.

differánce and multiplicities

where does Derrida's differánce fit into the multiplicities of traces? well, that's it, isn't it? as the "open-ended and porous receptacle of the uncontainable...an un-principle," it doesn't stand to fit in anywhere. it is the "quasi-condition" of the place where multiplicities are forged and conceived, the BWO over which they glide and accumulate; conceived in bunches, in arbitrariness, born as multiplicities themselves but in absence of a single time or place of conception. differánce not as the "midwife" -- certainly not as the "mother" -- but as the incestuous "bastard" without a name or face.


how can multiplicities be handled as the "primary" basic units everyone's looking for (but via an ANTI-reductionism) -- such as is proposed by Zizek? is it a joke?

if multiplicites are to be infinitely, indefinitely, inscribed by différance, the problem is one of 'specific' multiplicites -- perhaps a sort of oxymoron -- which are immediately dissembled upon their address by attention and meaning, not unlike the killing of Schrödinger's cat. yet to speak of multiplicities in an empty fashion is also a waste of time, i would think, and probably also irresponsible. i'll need more theoretical context from Zizek.

a showdown with my simulacrum (OR becoming an other)

the way a blind eye turns in on itself and magnifies the immanent -- i turned to me to propose a revelating experiment; no mastermind in his dreams could muster what it takes to invent such a scheme. for you see, it surfaces on what's already apparent: the surface of the mirror, the glass in the photocopier, bordering my words and a bright light; the internal architecture prime for reproduction, like a mime, smooth and without obstruction. if the machine of life can do this, why can't i?

slowly i began to reminisce, thinking backward and forward -- the mirrors, the glassdoors, the sidewalk's skyscrapers, a highschool photo album, the family videos. there were little tyke birthday parties on VHS, RGB settings just a faint tint too red; there were ceremonies and field trips, balls -- portraits that sleep on the shelves after invading the walls; stories by friends, at least the ones i've heard, girls telling boys telling boys telling girls -- a history, the way all histories are made: suggested, imagined, mutated and framed. i made it, my image, a copy of me.

and i put it to work: sit in that chair, at the desk, near the stairs, say hello but don't say hello if it isn't clear, sing the songs, do the dance -- and done! i was free. not from the cage of walls and windows beyond which the piercing light of the sun illumines the greens and blues and gentle greys of a nostalgic world of origin -- no, not free from that, but from myself. from me! god help it was irrational but one-hundred-and-two percent logical, a provision of intense proportions, expressing the given truth that we mustn't say yet we need to know: a copy does what a copy should do, stand in for what you want it to.

so i plugged my ears and strained my eyes and let my copy tell its lies. it tugged at me -- it beckoned me to come closer, but i was bolder, and older; and i stood in the fourth wall of each scene and at times viewed it like the screen of the TV in the den, up too loud, full of bad reception and barely perceptible glitches. it struck me then: the bad reception was on the side of me, the me in the TV: no life, no breath, no warmth, no hope, nothing but an empty image, hollow of meaning, of chemistry -- a disemboweled and distorted semi-simulacrum encoached in malformed phenomenology. and strike two: this frankenstein's monster of one-sided memories had the lethal potential to disown me, the me of the periphery.

it was all over, unless i made one final move, one last synaptic convulsion, capable i knew of sending me, both of me, flying and dying into the ocean of molten thalamic fluids of the acutely neurotic; but the alternative was intersocial death -- so i played my hand. i threw myself back into the material world, into the mind's colloquial Cartesian theater, threw back the metaphorical curtains and bent all subjective space-time to my volition. all the shadowy reflections of my past were nearly gone -- fed to the cogs of my creation, teeth still nashing and grinding, silently resounding 'more! more!' oh, i'd give them more. return to the faces of family and friends, their souls, their tongues, their eyes. their eyes -- looking at me and searching me for signs, signs, signs of consent, all the things we needn't say but we must know: agreement, acceptance, convenience, displeasures and pain, brought to the forefront to pave the way for novelty, for change. i took it all in, in a breath, and filled the vacuous concavities of the copy with their jabber, their stares, the perceived expectations substituting at times their presence. natural channels of irrigation formed, veins and arteries, stretching between this and all other copies, traversing thresholds, restoring promises, reviving broken hearts, and procuring lovers. and when i'd finished my deed and looked into it eyes, it deeply bowed to me, and that's when i realized: if i could make one and God could make two, then with a bit more work i could complete me with you. so i did, and all was good.

now there's one small problem with this picture, something i've failed to elaborate -- too late to solve it, too little time to make a lecture, so i'll just say it once here and now. you see the problem with a copy is if you give it all that's you, then you'll discover unspoken truth number two: a copy is a copy until that copy becomes you. and as i winced at its glitch of a grin, a thought at long last came to me, that what it was thinking was beyond -- no, wait, more than me. MORE than me. and in the breadth of three words, all was said and done, glasses the world over shattered over a blink's millennium. and when my eyes opened again, there was only one -- one me, one 'real', no casualties, and the thing that had made me was gone, empty as it was of life, of breath, of hope. and as i write, i wonder if i'll ever see him again -- no, surely not. but the point of this message that i'm writing here to you is, when you say i've changed, lord, you haven't got a clue. i've just done what every living being someday has to do; and if there comes a day i ask what's gotten into you, then you can remind me of this story, of the natural progression of reality and the eternal assimilation of the simulating entity: the me, the you, the me.

history lesson

the history of our lives does not distantly resemble the history of the species. moments of dire importance are edited out of the narratives, at most times in an entirely habitual manner. the majority of us, for example, disregard our dreams, giving them merely the passing significance of their probably having occurred but leaving it be that we don't remember them; despite how extremely beneficial our lives could be if we each possessed the ability to analyze them, examine them for their symptoms of our innermost unconcious world. we ignore the fact that they even temper us for the following day, can hold us chained to subliminal influences throughout our waking moments.

the narratives of human history are so very similar -- so many dreams have been lost, unrealized, only acknowledged to having probably existed, as we 'progress' to future series of narratives.

love must be another one of those easily forgotten things where the approach matters at least just as much as the content.

taiko alley

the vibrancy,
vibrations,
tastes of clouds through
the street,
wadaiko
pulses
tremor of
the
heart
still caught in
my lungs

baachans
sigh-ride
under
looming
palmtree fronds
on the
side walk

our blinders are at
the very least
opaque
and
iPod soundbytes
can't
hold
water.

Impress-ions
made
stone-on-cold
-hard-stone
with the
mot-
to : Be
a lava-rock,
Fill
and flow like
water.
trans
forms
others
thru
time.
But
even the soft
-est mineral
fails to
break,
the rivers
bed
is
the
lot
of them.

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.

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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?

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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.

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