Tokyo Babylon

I write this blog in the obscure hope that writing it will make me a better person. My one great fear is that for all my ideas, and perhaps insight, that I never do anything about it. My idea for greening Tokyo by assembling a list of groups that would benefit from the multiple benefits - social, environmental, conservation, amenity etc seems on the surface to be a good idea but then again you never really know until you try.

I’m looking for a job these days. Something part-time that will get me out and maybe allow me to meet the people that will help me kick start my idea. I’ve taught English for years and it can be spiritually rewarding to work with people in a non-traditional educational environment, but the career ladder leaves a lot to be desired. It’s also a hamster wheel. It stops occasionally to let the accomplished hamsters get off and let the clueless ones on, but you’re running the same course all the time, for a short time. I know for sure that a career for me isn’t Goodbye Mr Chips working a conveyor belt.

That’s why I obsess over nature and taoism. It gives me the idea that if you spend a lot of time designing in harmony with nature that you wont spend a lot of time in maintenance, since it will be sunshine driven, gravity fed and critter regulated. I find the idea of producing something that lasts because it’s a completely closed recycling engine to be immensely attractive. It’s doing things right the first time to produce perpetual motion that needs only tweaking now and again. Imagine the kind of world we would have if we made things that way. My food grows itself, my medicine too. My energy comes from the sun and the wind. My house produces resources and isn’t a money pit. I have the freedom to learn about the things I want to do. People will tell you that you are so small and that the world is so big. They don’t know about doing things right the first time then moving on and doing it right somewhere else.

Bill Hicks, the now lamentably dead American comedian and social commentator, once said that humanity was ‘a virus with shoes’. He was thinking of viruses as being solely the scourge of the planet. However if you ask a Russian doctor chances are he’ll tell you about bacteriophages, viruses that eat germs. The idea being that if you get a very small number of virus fragments into a problem rich environment, such as a sick human being whittled away at by a  drug resistant superbug, that the phages will spread and multiply till the job is done then die off. People talk about innovation spreading like a virus and indeed when you consider how quickly information moves through networks there do seem to be some parallels. The point I am trying to make is if we really are a virus then the choice facing us is whether we want to be ebola or a bacteriophage. Written about in those terms the world is actually an incredibly small place when you think about it.

The writer pauses for a moment while his building shakes due to an earth tremor, that’s Tokyo for you.

It seems to me that human ingenuity is balanced with ‘whatever!’ as the Americans would say. We’re capable of doing better than we are. But society as much as individuals lacks goals, the system just lumbers along like some godawful mystery tour. We built it, now we need to find out if it’s taking us where we want to go. My contention is that it is not.

Seeking enlightenment used to be about going into the desert, finding a piece of silence and pondering for a while. Some time later, addle-brained from sun stroke, you would come back speaking in tongues only to have some Shakira dancing girl demand your head as a plate accessory. Today the road to silence seems to be ‘don’t turn on your tv’ because all it will do is spin you about and keep you off balance. The road back is as dangerous as ever however you can content yourself that your head will stay on your shoulders because the system is so much resilient than it was when Johnny ‘dunk them deep’ Baptist was around. Now the danger is that even when you come back that you will be ignored.

In Japan they have a saying. The nail that stands out gets hammered. Now there’s encouragement for people with future vision. I think the time of marketing just based on illusory product differentiation is over. I think people are searching for meaning in everything they do, whether it’s purchasing a product or deciding on a second career once the house is paid off. The American Indians believed that possessions makes slaves of us all. It certainly seems to be true that the more you have the more you work to maintain what you have. But the move from possession to searching for meaning does seem to answer that age old question - what do you give a man who has everything?

You give him a reason to live.

You give him the me he dreams of being.

The purpose driven life is scarey though. No wonder people procrastinate. The comfy armchair of oblivion is so so seductive. I’m scared too. Right now I’m at the shouting at myself phase.

Come on, you can do this! What are you waiting for?

Maybe I’m waiting for someone to hold my hand. A bit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid before they jump off the cliff trying to get to the river below. “I can’t swim. Cant swim? The fall will probably kill you. “

Oh alright then…

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” This quote has been an echoing whisper in the dark corridors of my unease for months now. Is this my way of telling myself that I should really be making a start on my legacy?

Legacy, now there’s a word you don’t hear much. By legacy what I mean is something you accomplish that will remain after you yourself have popped your clogs and shuffled off this mortal coil. Something which at the end of your life will have given your life meaning.

The father of a friend of mine, dying of alcoholism, would comfort himself in the fact that he had raised two sons and a daughter. That was apparently his legacy; that something that would comfort him in his dying moments. He did not die either easily or well but one can hope he held tightly on to that notion as his vision narrowed and darkened.

It seems to me that fewer and fewer people give much thought to pursuing their legacy. It used to be that people would say things like ‘if you can raise your children right and see that they have a good start in life that’s really all you can ask for’. Are any of us right to be satisfied with procreation and nurturing as the be all and end all of human existence? Deep down I don’t think anyone really is satisfied with that. I also think that this quiet desperation is something that far too many poeple believe has to be shouted down at all costs, even it is with the moronic cacophony of the trivial and the moronic.

So many people now live vicariously, relying on the witless veneer of famous lives. Name a broadcasting phenomenon today and I can pretty much guarantee that it is shallow, lowest common denominator and then some. There are ways out of this I expect, but pretty much all of them demand that you take your destiny by the scruff of the neck and drag it to where you want to go.

Whatever happened to the heroes?

However for most people the whirling mirage of Paris Hilton’s face, a warning to all of the danger’s of boxing or the continuing saga of Lindsay Lohan’s ‘any publicity is good publicity’ lifestyle is sufficient to blanket out the internal moans of quiet desperation. I remember chatting with an American woman who was studying Accountancy. I asked her whether she liked accountancy to which she replied ‘no, but what I want to do won’t pay’.

Am I the only person that thinks there’s something truly horrifying in what she said. I have to feed my stomach and ensure I have good hair care products so I’ll let my dreams and desires slowly die. Is this at the core of empty sexual relationships that focus on the physics of moving bodies; physical distraction to take you away from a sense of loss so enormous that to face it would destroy you. Is this why we have shows like the dreadful ‘fame as God’ American Idol and the denigration of all that is noble in the human spirit that we see on Survivor and Big Brother.

What does it say about us that we take delight in watching people in the limelight ‘being the worst that they can be’? Is it a sense of schadenfreude that as weak and hopeless as we are that we could never fall to the level of the pond scum of reality shows?

Come to Japan and you will see a nation of people that has developed chasing its own tail to an artform. Western people are powerless by and large, but it seems that we have to struggle with it. The Japanese are so beaten down by contrast that when you look at a poster of a man drinking beer he’s not smiling, he’s in pain, a picture of a stoic wound so tightly by his world that he needs chemical release. A prisoner in his own body.

So, let’s say it together….

I refuse to be a subject.

I demand to have a real voice in decisions that affect me.

I refuse to live isolated as modern life demands.

I will control my own destiny.