The Disease of Disney and the Solace of Zen
Japan is an oyster whose pearl is the asceticism of Zen and the consequent aesthetic of minimalism. Thousands of years of philosophical struggle with the eternal questions of existence and thereafter run a deep course beneath its modernity. I have to admit I am deeply affected by it. It needs protection from the global consumerism that reduces the spiritual and intellectual quest to gift shop retail. Of the latter let me make some vitriolic comments.
Japan has a strange fixation with cartoon realities. Everywhere you go, the shops, the people, the tv programmes have elements of humanity reduced to the simplicity of animated creatures, anthropomorphised into stylised representations of human characteristics. If there were seven versions of the human condition then the Seven Dwarfs would represent them. Kuresawa’s The Seven Samurai would involve Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy et al being ‘collected’ by a central, smiling, androgynous hero to take on the mission of saving humanity. Or the more serious version would be found in the vivid, sometime violent and perverse renditions of a Manga graphic novel. Walk down the roads of Electric City in Tokyo and you begin to believe you are a figment of the Matrix and there is no separation between you and the virtual.
That is the every day. Then go to Disneyland and what is already a twee world becomes exacerbated into the outlandishly infantile. Here, the garish and the glitzy, the caricatured and the personified become a treacle of mawkishness, as devoid of the sweat, flesh and blood or intellectual curiosity of the human condition as it is possible to experience. Millions visit every week. They can queue up to an hour for ‘rides’ and if they manage three special attractions in a day’s slog, they go home happy. Do not imagine I am talking about children. From my viewpoint, primary school and younger ones were actually a minority. Couples, mature professionals, pensioners and every other age group and type of worker wander about with blissed-out expressions as they take in the Disney experience. This chasing of the dragon of fantasy is an addiction. A friend of mine, known internationally for his pithy and delightfully creative children’s books was once visited by the wife of the Japanese Ambassador to the UK with her about to be married daughter. They wanted my friend to sign some of his books created for five year olds. He learned that they would be added to a ‘shrine’ of artefacts that the daughter was gathering her marital boudoir. English and American children’s books are much sought after.
I visited Miyajima Island on my last day’s trip to Hiroshima. The usual tourist traps were full of souvenirs, superficial replicas of the Buddha through to ornamented rice paddles and sake bottles and cups. The narrow streets, despite the bitter cold, were thronging. Only twenty metres above the main shopping street is a wonderful Buddhist building of ancient, polished planks and massive columns. Peace and tranquillity rule. The structure radiates an imperative to ponder on the shortness and superficiality of life and what meaning might be squeezed from its fruits. While I was there, there were only a couple of other visitors.
Disney and the Buddha emphasise that life is but an illusion, an unrolling celluloid that one day will flutter off the reel. Take your pick as to which one offers a path to enlightenment.
Labels: Japan. Zen. Disney.
Masks or blindfolds
I am in Japan at the moment. It’s a relief to be back in a culture where there is no tipping of waiters, no backhanders to get things done, a country where people bow and show respect at all times (except the Yakusa!) . Not that I have ever been a traditionalist, bemoaning the behaviour of the young or writing hang ‘em-flog ‘em letters to the right wing press. Quite the opposite. It has always seemed to me that a radical youth is needed everywhere to stir up societies and stop them becoming moribund or reactionary, even though it upsets those who are approaching their dotage or who have a monopoly on power.
Wanting to shape a country’s culture shows a person cares about it. In the fifties and early sixties we teenagers felt alive and sensed we were dominating attitudes and beliefs. We behaved badly but the arts flourished with our headstrong attack upon the establishment’s control of what counted as culture and what didn’t. Eventually we were marginalised as our creative forces were subsumed in the new consumerism but much changed. This condition still pertains. Ideas are merchandise like everything else. Walk the streets of Tokyo or any other city in the world and you see fashion appropriating every form of disaffection, muzzling it or neutering it. The young are disinheriting the earth.
As I said recently, student revolt in the UK over fees bears little comparison with earlier student revolt over disproportionate power and control where the haves dominate the have-nots, keeping them firmly embedded in ignorance and powerlessness. Similarly, marching to Aldermaston or Greenham Common encampments had a different order of caring for a country, its people and humanity as a whole, than breaking windows at Tory Headquarters in London. When people march for their rights to gather, to be uncensored or not to be discriminated against. there is hope.
I visited the Hiroshima Peace Park, yesterday, for the second time in three years, with its museum attesting to the devastation of the Atomic bomb in 1945. The images and artefacts are so unsettling that the mind revolts against them, trying to deny them access. No human being could do this, surely? Harry Truman did and he was no Hitler or Stalin. The order was passed. The decision was made not to warn the civilian population. Days after Hiroshima the Americans turned on Nagasaki. The carnage was stupendously obscene. The bombs we have today are thousands of times more powerful. Many countries have them. Yet, in the main in the apathetic west we don’t protest about the world’s ills beyond our doors. We keep our heads down and let our politicians, our own Harry Trumans, do what they may. Even if we could be flattened by H Bombs or environmental suicide.
When I was forced to drink coffee in the smoking area of a restaurant in Tokyo, a young couple came in, their faces covered in those white anti-pollution masks. They took them off and lighted up cigarettes. It seemed to sum up the Wonderland we live in very well.
Labels: H bomb. Hiroshima. Protest.
Charles and Camilla
One of those symbolic moments occurred the other day on Regent’s Street, London, captured in a short take of film by a lucky photographer. And from it was extracted a single frame of film in which Camilla stares open-mouthed and Charles in bemused consternation at the parallel universe beyond the glass of their vehicle. The world, in its unpredictable proletarian reality, was washing up on the shores of their royal separateness! The prince is not used to his subjects being other than forelock tuggers on his estates, or the Uriah Heaps of the royal retinue and the landed gentry of the county set. Of course, the Prince’s Trust has its charitable offerings to needy young folk who aspire to making it in business and the prince might have assumed that it was a conduit to understanding the downtrodden masses. Until now. Nothing had actually prepared the surreal pair for this rupture of their rarefied universe.
The most significant element of their brush with unwashed studenthood was the attack upon Camilla’s royal person. Was she, as was originally claimed but not really corroborated by the Home Secretary, ‘poked with a stick’? If so, how Neanderthal. Even today, in this world of technology, virtual aggression and climatically controlled vehicles, we can be prodded by an oaken branch, from the same genus of tree that another royal Charles once hid from republican Cromwell!
For Charles, rhetoric and reality are not considered complementary. He it was who paid for a planeload of black lilies or some such plant to be brought from South Africa for a swanky do whilst well into his cant on environmental sustainability and man’s odious place in that narrative.
As you will know from a previous blog, I don’t feel that much solidarity with the student revolt this time round as there seems little ideology or altruism in it but, at least, it has given genesis to that iconic photograph of the future king coming face to face with the people he must one day rule.
You Dear Reader, may not exist...!
There is an excellent series on BBC Knowledge showing in Ghana at the moment. I suppose you may have been able to see it a year or two ago but time here does not behave like yours does. Last night I watched Morgan Freeman, who fronts it, ask what the latest scientific proof might be for God. Get to see it unless you are so smitten with your religion that you could not bear to be challenged. The latest theories were like a gourmet’s meal for famished philosophers. I’ll have to watch it again because my brain buckles with so much being thrown at it. Here’s what my depleted memory store can regurgitate for three of them.
Theory One: we are living in a simulation created by our descendents. In 50 years computer power will be so extraordinary that this world we know as our own, with you, me and everything could easily be created and because we are part of it, like in The Matrix, we cannot tell that it is not real. Think Playstation 50+ and the Sims. Evidence can be found by examining the very fabric of our world. On close inspection it is made up of pixels…
Theory Two: put a magnet over your brain’s right lobe and focus its power and even atheists have God-like experiences. Because we know death is an end to existence our anguish is converted into the means to alleviate it with spiritual experiences. Great prophets may have access to this part of the brain and thus ‘see’ God.
Theory Three: a beach bum with a PhD and a mind that has moved on since Einstein has come up with a theory for everything, mathematically speaking. It excludes God but is so elegant that it makes it appear that God or a supreme Physicist must exist. It (the metatheory) says that only by random do the constituent four theories of gravitation, electro-magnetism and weak and strong forces fuse together on this planet….
As I gurgled in a recent blog, our brains are undoubtedly capable of believing that what they conjure up, actually exists outside them and that our senses apprehend them.
Oh no! I have just realised that mine may well have done this. My brain is so capable of such creative self-deceit that it has fabricated this blog, Ghana, my life thus far, the programme called Through the Wormhole and even the illusion that I am an atheist...!
Whose God is it Anyway?
There they were in Israel trying to change the course of nature which, according to Sky News had become ‘biblical’ in its form and effect. There is a seven year drought and we all know that plagues, pestilences, floods and the like go in seven year cycles in the Old Testament. God might work in mysterious ways but His ready reckoner tends to get stuck on seven.
“They’ who had got together to seek God’s intervention, were spiritual leaders of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. Joint prayer. The paradoxical element of this is that there is widespread belief among adherents to different faiths that the God of each is not necessarily the same God. Otherwise why would Muslims and Jews be in a death conflict, or Christians and Muslims? Or are they saying that it is the same God but each road has different scenery and they are fighting over the view out of the window?
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a God? We’d all be happy and in harmony. But we don’t really believe it or we’d stop the bloodshed immediately.
If there is a God then I doubt He bothers too much about people praying and genuflecting to Him. A bit demeaning to His intelligence, don’t you think? What kind of Being finds His ego inflated by men and women on their knees? Hardly an all-seeing, all-knowing, loving God!
But there they stood on the dusty terrain, hedging their bets as they allowed each in turn to invoke the rain through God, whomever had the most scenic route to Him.
Labels: God. Israel. Drought. Religions
On level playing pitches and moving goal posts
So, as I mentioned a couple of emails ago, FIFA had little intention of supporting England’s bid, despite it being the best constructed, most viable and economically beneficial to grass roots football throughout the world. The 22, largely old men, who are steeped in forms of negotiation and power that are beyond the comprehension and experience of the Brits had little compunction in saying they were going to support the English bid and then reneging at the last possible moment.
Why?
Well, I am a much travelled man and what you discover when you travel is that cultural norms differ wherever you find yourself. For example, in Ghana it is likely that, whatever you suggest will be agreed by your opposite number. This is a norm. It has little bearing on what your opposite number may decide to do. People here regard it as showing good grace. But they dislike intensely any criticism, implied or direct, regardless of the justification for it. I found when working in Uzbekistan that people agreed with your strategy and then went off to find out whether it was politically acceptable. Similarly in Russia. In France there can be a nationalism that rejects suggestions, theories and hypotheses from ‘foreigners’. In Africa, generally, everyone suspects voting results because they know the likelihood of rigging and many indulge in it for themselves, anyway. Bribes are part of every day interactions, as they are in most countries outside those with an investigative free press and openness to public scrutiny.
England was on a loser from the beginning (as were the USA and Australia). Blatter’s word sways delegates from the developing world because he has the power to award funding and doesn’t really hide it. He is also known to dislike the British. He has an overblown sense of personal legacy which, in his terms means that he has raised his profile as god of football as a means to bring about social and political development in his empire. It is no surprise that FIFA decided to hold two ballots on one day, making it possible for collusion between delegates to advance the causes of Russia and Qatar to the detriment of the traditional football playing nations, despite the odds. It is also no surprise that FIFA laid down one set of criteria (which the English felt made them pre-eminent bidders) but, at the death, changed the goalposts.
So, thinking about it, the English did not stoop (in their terms) to the internecine tactics of their competitors who then gleefully walked off with the prizes. Over time more will come out (perhaps through Wikileaks) but the chances that anything will be done about it will be minimal. The English and Scottish may have invented the rules but they were the rules of football, not of football politics.
And this latter point holds in it the promise of biters being bitten. Russia kills its investigative journalists with impunity. Its mafia roam free and its institutions kow tow to the old KGB. Qatar imprisons homosexuals, restricts peaceful assembly and has different laws for foreign workers. The votes of two women are generally regarded as equal to one man. The World Cup brings with it the cultural norms of other nations and there is nothing more liberalising than the every day traveller and his/her expectations. Alphadogs and Emirs are about to discover the cost to their power and influence.
Maybe Blatter IS a god and this was his strategy all along... Why do I doubt it?
The End of Days
This phrase, appearing in Revelations, has a deeply mordant edge to it because of its sheer poetic finality. Watching a programme about the battle between dark matter and dark energy led me to the speculation that it is no wonder some people find life intolerable and top themselves.
You see, it appears (in our latest scientific theorising) that dark matter keeps everything together like an all-pervasive glue, from the atoms in our bodies to the great galaxies of space. We are formed in it and then it supports us in an invisible miasma of togetherness. BUT, as in action comics, if Dark Matter is our saviour, Dark Energy will have none of it and seeks to tear everything apart. They call it The Big Rip. Currently, computer models show that the universe will break down, not in shreds but in sub-atomic particles.
It got me wondering about the stability of our psyches. We live and then we die. That’s painful enough and we invent all sorts of thinking to handle it positively (God, heaven, reincarnation and the rest) and those of us who have kids take comfort in our genealogical line heading off to infinity. Not in this universe. Even the sub-particles of God will succumb to the disintegration of Existence, He being a human construct and thought itself not surviving, even if science fiction suggests it might one day disengage from its physical home.
So, what is the point of being 'alive' when we discover the bus we are on is the number 13 and humanity is on the road to nowhere?
I suppose I gravitate towards Zen Buddhism because it acknowledges this in its maxim of living within the moment. That is all there is.
Labels: Death of the universe. Dark Matter. Dark energy. Zen.
Prince Andrew: the Royal Right Wing
There is a genealogical line in the Royal Family I believe that has seen them, over the decades, breathily embraced with fascism. The Queen Mother had her somewhat tarnished reputation for all things Right and nasty, heavily glossed in the second world war, to make her appear a war heroine, one of the first campaigns over which Saatchi would have been proud. And she was just the latest in a long line of Nazi sympathisers. Oh no she wasn’t! Did not William go to a ‘natives and colonials' party in Nazi uniform? The Queen seems to have kept herself to herself in most matters political but she did marry that consort to racism, Philip and thus they produced Andrew who, for some unaccountable reason, goes under the title of Royal Ambassador or some such toff tosh. The fact that he is figuring in Wikileaks is hardly a surprise. It turns out he hates the Guardian for its nosiness in business deals, particularly those involving arms sales to countries that have no compunction in using them against their own people or their neighbours. Like his father he is incapable of moral judgment. Given their generations of wealth acquisition, tax dodging and EU handouts in all sorts of dubious circumstances it is hardly a surprise.