Posted on Tuesday, 09/13/22.

Sitting in a Starbucks again, this time back in 厚木. It is a true work from home day, and nowhere else sells cold brew. The Starbucks is not very scenic, but has a calm atmosphere; it is on the main market street of the town, which in the late night is usually filled with mischievous high-schoolers and variously intoxicated adults. A woman sits outside, I see her through the window, and she working on a chunky powerbook, then taking a phone call. She is taking advantage of the deep shade provided by the neighboring buildings, and has filled the table and a nearby chair with her various work accoutrements. A purse, another smaller bag for inside the purse. In this part of town the buildings are at least ten stories tall, some closer to fifteen, all recent construction, mostly a uniform gray or dusty white. Behind the woman, on the street curb, a man on a vespa idles and inspects his phone. He is wearing thin red fingerless gloves, despite that it is in the mid-eighties today. The town feels young because its streets are relatively wide and flat. This town is for people to return home to at night, and the tall towers near the station at night are looming checkerboards of the lights of domiciles and night activities.

Some of the people I am working with, the interns, are here for a year. I try to imagine stretching forward my experience here for a year. How it would feel to arrive with the trees blooming and get to see this blooming one more time. Some of them seem unhappy. Some of them seem content but only in the resigned way, like of a pensioner who decides to simplify their life to the ground floor of their house. Others seem full of passionate intensity; they vent this by drinking on the river-shore. Still others spend all night in their labs, or near all night, as far as their visa allows, variously adjusting vacuum pumps, heating elements, feedback loops, laser power supplies, nervous tubes filled with Rubidium.

I am always aware that my detachment from most things, a mode of safety, foremost, can easily lead to a feeling that I do not fall into the same traps as others. That I am above them. In truth what my attitude allows me to do is live only on the surface of things. It is very holographic. It is apparently bad how much only the image of things suffices as currency to convince others and convince oneself that they are dealing with the source of these images. That there is a source, and that we are all holding it. This is similar to the reason that people love Murakami novels so unreasonably much. It is the reason many people watch YouTube, I think, or like posts on Instagram of people they don’t know. It’s why people read DFW and tell their friends about it. It is the reason many people listen to noise music in converted warehouses in Bushwick. I don’t think I am concerned with the irreality of things. I am too much convinced by what I study to care much about anything beyond the bare mechanism of the state of affairs of things. But I think I am concerned that the things I refer to are not tethered to the right antecedent when taken in by others. Linear text is so extremely weak in its ability to couple two people, and is instead very good at evoking only approximately parallel responses among otherwise isolated readers who share a mild cultural background. You are reading this and so I am there, you think, wrongly, but powerfully and almost involuntarily. And the things I am thinking while writing this (which I remind you are not here) are things you cannot only feel you can feel also, but have (with high probability, considering who I know) been annealed or trained to extract by a by-now almost reflexive literary mechanism.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Murakami novels, too. Everybody does. I was reading one on the bus and I began to feel sad, and I let myself feel sad about all the little glyphs on the page having been in the proper order to make me feel sad. Now that I am reading them in Japanese I have successfully allowed a set of weakly isomorphic glyphs make me feel sad, sometimes. Other times I have to consult the dictionary before suddenly understanding that I should be feeling sad. The sadness is, in that case, de-localized among me, the book, and the electronic dictionary (whose information is again encoded in a separate set of much more austere, digital glyphs).

Going forward instead of trying to read, watch, experience more obscure things, I will instead try to allow myself to trust in the possibility of things I haven’t heard about before to be convincing and honestly affecting. This in turn means believing that I am with the person making the thing, even though I am not, and that we are somehow similar. The obscurity will serve not just as cultural cachet later when I bring up the name of the obscure thing in polite company, but more as a mild assurance that the holographic mechanisms employed by the maker of the thing to project its emotional affect will have been applied less knowingly or slyly. I wonder if I am making an excuse to describe something like sincerity. But it seems like I am not, because I have loved the produce of very insincere people, and again it seems like those who ask for sincerity are really asking for the reality of things, which is something I really, at the end of the day, do not care about. This is tempered by the feeling that I am jealous of the perpetually insincere, because their mode of temperamental detachment disguised as attachment and attachment disguised as detachment is itself more powerful and above my mode of simple austere detachment. The geometry of this sort of thinking is very non-orientable, filled with cusps, and liable to self-involution. It is similar to but more flavorful than the usual linear rising tower of irony and descending pit of self-reference.

Two weeks ago I saw a two volume vintage copy of Gödel Escher Bach in Japanese at a bookstore in 下北沢, and thought about buying it, reading it, and having only ever read it in another language, and how amusing and dumb of a flex this would be, and how it could sit on a small shelf on a bedside table I would buy, and how the only people to ever see it might quietly keep their thoughts about it to themselves, and only years later tell these thoughts to someone else whose bedside table was a different mess entirely.

Somewhere a long time ago I read perhaps the jacket flap or a book, or a lit mag article gloss, or a blog post, about how the wide availability of glass (and thus high-quality reflection, and reflections of reflections, etc.) has modified our psyche and relationship with treating images as adhered tightly to things. I like this idea, and I can imagine many young people liking it as well. When I ride my bus in the morning I see the other half of the interior of my bus in the window while looking out of the window into the interior of another adjacent bus, which in turn reflects from its windows the outside of the side of the bus I am sitting in. I am yet unconvinced that this means something specific has happened to us, but it does assure me how easily we treat this redoubling of space as substantive and interesting: I just spent a couple sentences describing it, and enjoyed doing so.

I have completed my coffee and the danish I bought to justify sitting here for so long, and so I am getting increasingly ready to leave. Many of the people who were here when I arrived have left, though not all, meaning I can exit with some dignity still.