Cornering

[muckefuck]

Damn that flu really killed the head of steam I'd built up on my reading. Nothing worse than being so miserable you can't even bear to open a book. In any case, I finally reached the end of Sōseki's slim 草枕 (lit. "Grass pillow"; translated by Alan Turney as The three-cornered world). Ultimately there was more narrative tension than I expected from what is essentially a self-indulgent essay on aesthetics with characters and dialogue, but still this is the kind of work that demands to be read slowly. Although Sōseki (or at least his unnamed alter ego) comes off as quite insufferable in it, I find myself receptive to some of his ideas.

For instance, he has a bead on what makes nature so restorative, at least for monkey-minded busybodies like me. As much as I enjoy cityscapes, it's impossible to navigate them without getting caught up in the tangle of human relationships. I can't view human choices neutrally; I constantly have to judge them. Whenever I see a contretemps at a crosswalk, I'm always mentally reckoning Who was more at fault? The driver or the pedestrian? I gaze at gardens and I see neglect; I look in windows and see bad decor. In a sense it's stimulating, but it's also plain exhausting.

With nature, it's just much easier to take things where they are. It's not a question of whether a pine tree "should or shouldn't" be growing in a particular location; it is and that's that. Maybe it'd be a nicer view without it but nature doesn't give a damn what you consider a nice view. You're just lucky it lets you see anything at all instead of striking you down with river blindness or a sudden infarction. Of course, no landscape most of us has ready access to is purely "natural"; for all we know that pine tree could've very well been deliberately planted in a WPA reforesting effort. But in that case there's enough of a remove that the possibility doesn't occur to me, so there's no judgment triggered.

This notion is trotted out in the first chapter and becomes the underpinning for his thesis, which is the need for objectivity in order to create great art. I question that--some of the greatest artists ever have been anything but dispassionate--and it becomes a springboard to some more dubious pronouncements about the creative endeavour (and some mediocre poetry). But for all his sniffing about his own refined taste, it's at least a somewhat democratic view: We may not all have the capacity to create great art, but in theory we can all strive to achieve the mindset which is a prerequisite for it.

I'm not wild about Turney's translation. There are some obvious problems with it. For instance, in the passage "you would find yourself bemused by the knowledge of what this world can do to a man, and life would become unbearable", I can't imagine "bemused" accurate reflects the original. It's also pitched very generally, to the point of telling us how many syllables are in a haiku and footnoting "Noh" and "Kabuki" in order to clarify that these are "form[s] of traditional Japanese drama". Also (and here's my sniffiness showing), it's tough to take someone seriously as an Orientalist when they butcher Zhuge Liang's name, but I'll be generous and ascribe some of these decisions to a clumsy editor.

While reaching the end, I decided I needed a break and a change of pace so I started Su Tong's 河岸 (lit. "Riverbank" but translated by Howard Goldblatt under the title The boat to redemption). (It was either than or Mo Yan's Garlic ballads [天堂蒜薹之歌]; the Old Man tried to interest me for Dai Sijie, but he seemed like more of the same.) I wondered alloud to monshu why I was reading it since I have rather unlovely memories of the previous novel I read from him. But if there's lot of nasty people being nasty to each other in his work, at least stuff happens. After a spate of very cerebral Japanese novels, I could use a little incident, even if it is series of metaphorical kicks to the head.

Comments

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Interesting, because while I'm increasingly viewing human affairs as an "ecosystem", if only to preserve my sanity, I'm terribly judgmental about nature. When Kusamakura was published, human affairs had a smaller effect on other species - today, evidence of disruption is everywhere.

What I look for in nature is "deep time" - the sense that current patterns and arrangements of organisms have their roots in very long-running processes that have been unchanged for thousands of years. Even small human disruptions are evident against the ancient order. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it is, exactly, that I'm seeing, and I think it is the "inefficient partitioning of resources". A very old-growth forest has a certain arrangement of plants that, for example, doesn't let a whole lot of sunlight go unused. But a second-growth forest hasn't had enough time for all the species to jostle around in order to get that result.

This is just aesthetics, not a whiff of science in there. But yes, I do get very judgmental about where pine trees are growing, and most of them are WRONG!!! LOL.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Okay, fuck this. I'll try commenting again once LJ stops flipping the fuck out for five minutes.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Okay, third time's a charm.

Second-growth forest can also be the result of purely "natural" causes, such as forest fire and overgrazing. Yeah, the reason we have too many deer nowadays is human intervention, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened before for other reasons, such as a temporary crash in the canid population.

As monshu can tell you, I am also annoyed and offended by the "inefficient partitioning of resources". But if there's one thing I've learned in my time, it's that nature doesn't give a good goddamn about such things. As Annie Dillard put it, it "works by hecatomb". You could be the most efficient organism ever to occupy your ecological niche, but any day a new threat could come along (like a comet or an exceptionally lethal virus) and boom!, that's all she wrote.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Yet still, the effects of a forest fire are not the same as logging - there are plants that actually require fire, and are poised to spring up in its aftermath, in ways that logging does not support. Again, this is because fire has been a constant force for millions of years. Even fire itself is not what it used to be, because fire suppression has made fires less frequent and more intense.

There really is nothing, short of meteor strikes, that compares to the human influence in ecosystems. Even straight erosion is now a human dominated phenomenon, with correspondingly unprecedented effects.

Again, I don't know for sure if untouched ecosystems are systematically, aesthetically different from human-influenced ones - it's hard to know because there is so little left - but I have a pretty strong sense that they are. I'd love to figure out a way to test that hypothesis, because I think that un-touchedness actually IS the aesthetic we crave; historically it is what wandering humans perceive immediately before a population boom, as they expand into uninhabited territory, so that people with a great yearning for this aesthetic might be exactly the ones that tend to found new populations. If there were (implausibly) a gene that made people seek that, it would experience enormous positive selective pressure.