just in teractive : A Few of My Favorite Things

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6 January, 2009

  A Few of My Favorite Things

Justin Hall CTWR548 - Weil/Naimark Week 3 Assignment January 19, 2005

A Few of My Favorite Things

Item 1: A Favorite Thing: Blue foil wine bottle wrapper.

At least six years ago, I tore off the top of a bottle of “Stone Creek” wine; a blue piece of foil covering up the cork. I smoothed that foil out, and studied it; it was a royal blue, on the cobalt side but still light. The metallic material gave it a shine, almost a luminescence.

It was about as close to my favorite color of blue as I’d ever seen, and so I kept it. Looking around for an object that pleased me to show the class, I found that, close to where I work, as it has been for years. Looking at it still makes me happy, though there’s some wrinkles, though there’s a smudge or two on it, when I tilt it into the light the foil can catch it right and evoke a rich color from inside my mind.

Item 2: An Inspiring Thing: Ikkyu and the Crazy Cloud Anthology, Translation by Sonja Arntzen

This book offers an extensive translation of my favorite poet and religious thinker, Ikkyu Sojun. Arntzen is a leading Ikkyu scholar, having published a number of volumes. They’re not easy to find; I first came in contact with this book in the library of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo in the summer of 2002. I checked the book out for weeks, reading each of his poems and her footnotes in turn, as I visited the monastery in Kyoto where Ikkyu served as abbot towards the end of his life. I marked my favorite versus; I knew I felt affinity towards Ikkyu, and a desire to study under him. This book was the deepest chance I’d had yet to explore his weltanschauung.

I think of Ikkyu as a timeless thinker; he eschews ceremony and rules for direct, personal religious experience. He seeks the truth, moment to moment, in windswept nature and in slums as well as ancient texts and polished houses of worship. The results of this varied seeking are detailed in hundreds of short poems.

This anthology gave me a much better insight into his craft. While he seems to me timeless, his references and metaphors are hewn from the Chinese Buddhist figures and stories that he studied as a monk. Arntzen has taken the time to trace these references, accordingly this book is a dense hypertext compendium of Ikkyu’s musings.

I finally returned the book to the FCCJ library, and eventually moved back to the States. Looking online, I found that the book was deeply out of print. But antiquarian booksellers had the book available – for well over $100 in some cases. I bargained with one seller and purchased a copy for one hundred dollars – the most I ever spent on a single volume. As a book I’d shared a connection with, it was worth the price. I purchased The Crazy Cloud Anthology in 2004, the book has been within reach of my computer since. I have a current favorite poem I’m fond of reciting from the text:

The Correct Skill for Great Peace

Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday’s clarity is today’s stupidity.
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change.
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

That seems about as close as I’ve ever gotten to universal truth, though I suspect in years to come I will reapproach the collection and find another poem that’s even more appropriate for all sentient life. I’ve thought about taking the Ikkyu poems from the book and turning them into some kind of interactive media project. In Spring 2005, I built a crude “Chat with Ikkyu” bot; while fun this was not the right way to exhume his teachings for the internet. I look forward to the right project – I will call up Ms. Arntzen and ask for her consultation!

Item 3: A Thing I Crafted: Honduras Journal

In an effort to get offline and learn some Spanish, I spent the summer of 1997 in Honduras, Central America. At first I lived and studied in the third largest city, La Cieba. But the diesel fumes were too much for me and seeing all the glue-sniffing kids got me down. So I traveled to La Mosquitia, the rainforest to the east, between Honduras and Nicaragua. There I volunteered as a journalist and analyst for a non-governmental organization Mopawi. In exchange for free lodging and travel costs, I wrote a series of reports on their efforts to promote sustainable development for the Miskito and Garifuna people in remote rainforest villages.

It was an exhilarating ten weeks, spent away from the computer and my internet community. And it was the last intense handwritten journaling period of my life. In small print I spelled out events, conversations, songs, crazed malaria-medication dreams. I sketched Miskito tools, I squeezed a blood-filled tick I found on my testicles in between the pages. Flipping through the journal astonishes me today – the power of accretive work; daily writing in mostly even letters across the pages created a tome of my experience. The closest I have yet come to a book as a writer! And something softened by time and travel that I enjoy holding.

Analysis

To call these objects personal might seem a waste of bytes. Except that I think each of these objects enshrines a way of seeing, personal perception: evoking a color, exploring footnotes of a time-distant religious thinker, collecting and recollecting my thoughts away from my media cocoon.

Looked at properly, these old objects can reflect failure. Attachment to past events. A failure to create objects more in the moment. Certainly each of these objects represents some kind of failure to me:

The blue foil reminds me of the myriad personal trigger objects I have in my workspace, and filling boxes around my house. Over winter break, I moved a number of boxes into a paid storage space: my failure to consolidate my belongings for the space I’m in now. It’s attachment to papers and pieces of foil and foam sumo wrestlers and notebooks from old jobs and unopened mail from 1996. In class on Tuesday, Mark Bolas pointed out that monitors have a more limited color palette than nature. So would I rather have all these objects in storage to help me remember life, or couldn’t I find those things around me if I lifted my eyes from the screen and cleared my plate for new objects?

The Ikkyu book reminds me of my failure to learn Japanese, particularly my failure to learn to read and write. I have read a number of spiritual texts and I’ve never enjoyed any so much as I enjoyed Ikkyu. I went to Japan, I studied the language, I tried writing poems, I had teachers, I tried reading. But I never had the patience to suffering through incomplete communication in a second language. I never was able to let my passion for Ikkyu and that history drive me to learn classic Japanese either. That could have been my portal to the contemporary language, and a geography of relative peace – compared to the mobile phone and video game landscape I studied professionally instead. I craved my deep vocabulary in English. So now I have this book of Sonja Arntzen translations; including the original Kanbun characters he wrote in. With more patience I might have been able to translate for myself, and read the greater number of books about him and his teachers in Japanese. Maybe some day I will.

The Honduras journal is a failure, because it is the last deep sustained journal I have. I have started other journals, I carry them around constantly, but I get pulled into a computer writing experience instead. So the pages are inconsistent, entries are just phone numbers or momentary inspirations, not essays of isolation in distant lands. Months go by without an update. My journal was my closest companion in Honduras, and it shows. I think I like having other, closer companions now. But my journal from Honduras reminds me of that time I spent there with myself, which mostly fed my sense of the scope of the world – the diverse ways that people live. For that it’s valuable. But I look at my life today, and my technology-enhanced surroundings and I see almost nothing that I have integrated from my time in Central America. Maybe I put everything I was thinking into my journal and left it there.

Having these objects makes me think about losing these objects, and that makes me sad. It makes me want to digitize these objects, to put them into my computer somehow, share them over the internet. That makes me feel compulsive and time-limited.

Still I think of myself as young. A few key objects like this really do anchor what has been a relatively high-velocity trek through countries and jobs and lifestyles. They tell me that I can be reflective. That I can be deep. That I have places within myself that are timeless perhaps, or in the moment. That I am not alone, or when I am alone, I am telling a story that I will be telling for all my life. There’s a belief, in personal objects, that I can accumulate things and they might describe a person I like, a person I like to be.

It’s accumulation, it’s accretion. It’s also editing, which is what I’m working on now. Paring down to more essential personal objects, and giving fewer objects a chance to speak more sustained stories.

Posted by justin at January 19, 2006 1:33 PM

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