| | I was thinking about the book Kokoro the other day and realized that it probably is less allusive than I was moved at first to read it. When I first read it in college I figured that it was a story about how you can manipulate friends by offing yourself. Or by extension, how in Japan you can influence politics via suicide. Now I think that it was just a story about man's inability to be loved. The stuff about the end of an era was just added gravitas that could have been left out, because the only era ending was the one in which Sensei felt himself to be nonexistent. It is weird to say that his passivity in life is due simply to the fact that one guy has been reigning for decades, but this is not such an uncommon thing in all truth. For a smart but smug, passive type it is kind of important to know who is in charge of the world - so that you can finger the cause of all that hubbub to which you are superior. You say these three things: 1) the powers that be, are; 2) they disallow change; 3) I'm degage from all this. After all, the symbol of an unlikeable leader is as potent as that of a likeable one, and under any administration there will be some discontents. But how soon your ideas lose their crucial images and you are back dealing with actual life. Maybe you think that you have achieved a detachment from present history, but all you've managed to do really is conceal historicity in a personal fatalism. It is impossible to do that once the symbolic order which reminded you of it starts to crack up behind that fatalism. And it can be quite upsetting when change begins to exist in spite of this system. Even more so is to find out that you have admirers in life, as this requires you to think of yourself as being something. In a way you realize that you may well merit their admiration, or rather, their admiration is merited. But you do not merit it; you just have these certain traits you were born with. They look up to you for simple reason that they do not have it. And you would want to just give it away because it has done you no evident good. It is upsetting not to deserve what you do have, emotionally or otherwise. In this respect what is said of having to live up to your commitment to another person is perversely true too of the love which others show you. It is no good just to bask. But when you have spent the better part of your life trying to dodge all the rays what is there to do? It is hard to be seen when you have nothing to show. But what would it mean to have something in this seminal respect?
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| | Posted 6/26/2009 2:09 AM - 2 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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