"I'd like to eat with you and gaze into your eyes while we talk of UFOs"

As anyone who reads this blog already knows, it doesn't take much for me to make obscure connections and go off on a tangent. This week it's the juxtaposition of my reading Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto while re-reading Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" after having seen Denis Villeneuve's film, Arrival (based on Chiang's short story).

Iyer and Chiang are often mentioned by the same people (mainly writers), although I've been I've only recently managed to remember to look for Iyer during my forays into Half Price Books. I came across The Lady and the Monk twice, as it happens, not remembering the second time that I already owned an unread copy. The second was, fortunately, a nice hardcover edition and thus much easier to read out of doors, in the garden, during cat-watching time.

Many of us SF fans have only recently discovered Ted Chiang, most likely because he publishes so seldom, and because he doesn't write blockbuster trilogies that run to thousands of pages. Rather, he pens carefully crafted short works. When I found out that his story was the inspiration for Arrival (with its haunting and intriguing trailer), I looked him up online and found a rather wonderful story that reminded me of something out of Arabian Nights, called "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," which I read while I awaited the copy of his collection, Stories of Your Life and Others.

I'm not sure I'd have thought of recommending "Story of Your Life" to my daughter, despite resonances with our life together that emerged after I'd seen the film with her and re-read the story, but she saw the film before I did and "got" it before I did.  I was more intrigued by the connections between linguistics and physics explored in the story, and actually missed the "twist" that everyone's making a fuss about. Now that I do "get" it, however, and because I'm also reading Iyer's book, I'm somewhat overwhelmed with notions about language and time.

Many years ago, when I was wallowing in what was then a hotbed of controversy over Whorfian linguistics at Penn, I attended a small conference, the focus of which I can't even remember. Since it was job-related, it might have had to do with computers in university administration, but I'm not really sure. At any rate, during a break, after I'd given a short presentation on something or other, a fellow came up to me and asked me, "How old were you when you learned Japanese?" Now, truth be told, I never learned anything more than "baby" Japanese, the language of children I picked up during my year at a classical Japanese dancing school next door to our little shack in Kunitachi--when I was five or six years old. But apparently the combination of having been introduced to basic Japanese language structure along with the pattern-recognition inherent in the dance moves did something to my brain that caused me to bring unlikely topics into odd juxtapositions.

This is apparently what happened at the conference that made that guy ask me that question.  I guess I did tell him a brief history of my acquisition of what little Japanese I had, and would imagine that the dance training may have enhanced what ever brain changing that went on.  My use of the language actually got a boost in Taiwan when I was about ten and could use what I had to get around because all the old guys who drove pedicabs, sold noodles on the street, or conducted buses spoke leftover wartime Japanese. I could well have been a walking advertisement for linguistic relativity and the idea that language (at least in part) structures our cognitive engines.

In "Story of Your Life," the linguist learns the aliens' language, which in turn restructures her experience of time.  And while I'm not sure my baby Japanese has influenced my concept of temporal movement, it most certainly has provided me some insight into how Japanese translate English, especially as Pico Iyer has recorded it in his book--as well as some understanding of why that guy made the connection between quirky associations or metaphors and early experience with Japanese language.

So when I announce (as I often do after watching a Miyazaki film) that the Japanese are quite simply nuts, I mean it lovingly.  They well and truly are--but only if one sees the particular brand of "sanity" that comes out of America as the norm. The title of this post comes from a passage in the "Spring" section of Iyer's book; it's a sign in the window of a coffee shop where he goes to enjoy some melon sorbet. The book, which is an account of four seasons spent in Kyoto where he went to learn about Zen Buddhism (among other things), is stuffed to the covers with the peculiar admixture of East and West he experienced.

As a student of intellectual history and the role language plays in telling the human story, I often find the unexpected in books.  And because my own rather peculiar understanding of time seems to require that I layer my reading so that anywhere from two to ten books overlap at any given moment, I shouldn't be too awfully surprised that the connections between books frequently burrow through those layers.

Although I do think that Denis Villeneuve made a bit of a hash of Chiang's story--especially with all the military bullshit that seems to be part of the Language Of Science Fiction according to movie makers--it's still moving and beautiful and innovative and may do a lot to stir interest in linguistics and (to a much lesser extent) physics. In a nation where citizens seem to be getting less and less knowledgeable about maths, science, and even language, it really is a pleasure to see a smart movie about smart people who solve problems without blowing stuff up.

Perhaps the fact that WWII did so much mutual damage to both countries is both the cause and the effect of the oddity we perceive about their understanding of the world. Anybody who wonders at the mania for anime and manga and Hello Kitty over here should read Pico Iyer's book for a thoughtful account of the Japanese fascination for Western--and particularly American--culture. Ambitious Japanese children learn English almost as a matter of course. If American kids who are learning Japanese today manage to reshape their brains as a result of their engagement with a radically different world view, I can only see the result as positive.

Image credit: A 1930s-era travel poster, "Come to Tokyo," from the Library of Congress's Online Prints and Photographs collection, via Wikimedia Commons.

Taking Care of the Roots

I just read Pico Iyer's short essay in Orion, "The Inner Climate," about global warming, and the necessity to gauge our internal temperature as well as that of the local climate. This was an especially timely happenstance, because the weather's started warming up again and my snarkiness level is going up with the temperature.

Iyer's thesis revolves around the notion that in order for us to effect change in the physical environment, we have to make some changes in the philosophical climate:

Action without reflection is what got us into this mess in the first place, and the only answer is not action, but, first, clearer reflection.

As I look around, at the superficial evidence of change (I can, for example, see my blue recycling trash bin from where I type), there seems to be a great deal of it going on. I could--and may still do--post on what my town is touting in the way of "green living," what with its McKinney Green Building, its model elementary schools, its "green" Walmart, and its snappy new logo ("McKinney--Unique By Nature").

But it's clearly external. I can't imagine for a minute that most of the neighbors who use their blue bins are doing it out of any deep philosophical understanding of what human beings have wrought. Many are using them because their kids are urging them to, or because it's kind of trendy (like buying organic produce--at least until the price makes a dent in the fashion budget). A couple of houses have been ticketed for using their blue bins as extra trash bins (the bigger green ones). Some houses--smaller than ours, with only two or three people living in them--have two green bins they fill up weekly (we used to put ours out twice a month; now it's down to maybe once because we can now recycle most of our waste). The only way they'll really begin to stop buying over-packaged merchandise and throwing all that stuff away is if it starts hurting them in the pocketbook. Capitalism has done this to us: consume more and more to help the economy. But put the packaging in the recycle bin whenever possible.

If the oil companies weren't rolling in their profits, and bitching about new drilling sites (when they're not drilling the places they've already got access to), I'd be happy that gas prices are hovering around $4 per gallon. It's got me to increase my mileage by about 4 mpg (simply by slowing down to 60 and using cruise control whenever possible) and combine necessary shopping with trips to and from work. High gas prices may actually encourage the city of Allen to rethink its participation in the local rapid transit consortium, which would mean that we'd hop on that bandwagon, too (Allen is the next town south, and without its participation, McKinney can't get train service this far north).

But that's just it. As a nation we are reluctant to do anything simply because it's the right thing to do; we've clogged our ears with iPod buds, turned on the TV, the computer, the video game, and tuned out reflection. Thinking makes us uncomfortable, so we don't do it. Until this aspect of our collective experience changes, efforts to do anything substantial to save the planet or to prevent political catastrophe will continue to be cosmetic and, in the end, they won't work.

We need what Tom Kuhn would call a paradigm shift. And maybe, if things get bad enough, the evidence in favor of a philosophical shift--from rampant consumerism to responsible stewardship; from rabid partisanship to true community--might tip us over the edge. We might reconsider our position as Lords of the Earth and begin to see ourselves as just one species, one political entity, among many, but with power that requires vigilant reflection to wield properly.

Take care of the roots, says Iyer, and the flowers will take care of themselves.

Photo credit: "Bluebonnets and Fence" by Observer12 on Wikimedia Commons. I loved the juxtaposition of the state flower with the barbed wire--it says a great deal about Texas.