Chinese lie, Japanese lie, American lie, Tanzanian lie. As far as I am aware of, everybody lies.

We have long been told that honesty is a virtue and dishonesty a sin. These type of moral precept often has its religious backing. For those who have watched Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying, I hope that you find Ricky making up the concept of heaven to her dying mother an act of kindness, albeit an influential lie it became. Some lies are not necessarily bad, and we are all quite well adapted to the kinds of lies that makes us feel better about our lives (and afterlives).

Certainly, there are lies that are ill-intended, geared for personal gain, or to avoid responsibility. My experience in Tanzania has taught me that the real harm of lying is not so much in the immediate loss one suffers from being deceived, but in the loss of the ability to trust thereafter. That is true in lying to potential donors, as well as invested lovers. These are the kind of lies to be frowned upon.

I believe that Japanese, as a culture and a language, intrinsically accepts the communication of partial truth, abstract meaning and implied dishonesty. I have been rather exposed (besides the radiation) to Japanese culture for the past few years, and have been influenced and inspired in many ways. Japanese culture is many things, above all I see it as one which celebrates contradiction like no other. It is one of advance technology and preserved tradition, of eternal spirits and ephemeral existence, of restrained formalities and savage desires, of excessive sincerity and implied dishonesty. Japanese culture is one that tries explicitly to satisfy the contradiction between the expectation of a civilized society and the carnal need of our selfish being.

The expectation of a civilized society, which we must critically distinguish from a developed country, is one that is in a state of self-regulating harmony. The Grassmen tribe in the movie God Must be Crazy is, in my opinion, a highly civilized society, as long as there were no Coke bottle. Japanese people know well that there are things that people do not want to tell, and things that hurt when told. This is just the nature of things. Stark naked truth is not the best way to communicate a message and expect the recipient to receive it well. It is much easier to accept, for example, rejection, if it is sugar-coated in a pseudo apologetic manner. On the other hand, it is much easier for both parties to remain in harmony when an inconvenient truth could be abstractly communicated such that both could pretend to have misinterpreted the message when challenged while they really know full well what it meant. This abstractness is thorough in the Japanese language. It is a language abundant with tools to imply dishonesty.

Implied dishonesty is, in my opinion, being honestly dishonest. It is sometimes the best way to be right. To not lie right out yet avoid causing unnecessary hard feelings. I am inclining to believe that there’s something good about being honestly dishonest. It is considerably easy to employ, but relatively difficult to appreciate, and I am learning to do just that.

Buried deep in the concrete forrest, on the fifth floor of an unadorned apartment building in Causeway Bay is a little known piece of pristine land – the Su Bong Zen Monastery. I first learned about the place from Stephen back in 2009. I went on a few occasions to experience a more formal setting for meditation and to learn of zen teachings, as I have always been interested and have read books on the subject.

Of the few times (including twice more this past summer) that I have visited, the one teaching that I have found most inspiring was an analogy about the state of mind while meditating.

Consider our mind a tumbler, and one axis (either the x or the y)denotes space, the other, time. The tumbler sits dead center, right here, right now. When our mind wander to another place and time, for example, the dinner last night at that nice restaurant with an attractive date, and then the endless work we have to take care of tomorrow, our mind is a wobbling tumbler. The objective of meditation is to keep the tumbler at perfect balance. Rather than trying to stabilize it by exerting forces at various angles, it is best when we just let it be, and let it slowly come to rest.

I have found that this analogy, or the imagery it creates, is my best path to inner peace as I meditate, not as much as I would like to, but whenever I can.

-

As I am finally picking up C4D and learning to use rendering engines properly, I thought I would produce this image in my head as an exercise. I decided to make it my desktop wallpaper. Feel free to make it yours :-)

For your monitor height: 768px / 1080px / 1200px / 1440px

From p.43 of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving:

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the “loved” person. This is the same fallacy which we have already mentioned above. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object—and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, “I love you,” I must be able to say, “I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.”

Where do we go from here.
pick a path, doesn’t matter.
If we make mistakes,
we’ll find out,
sooner or later.

The dashed line was to guide you,
so were the footsteps.
but deviation
is all the more fun.
and the beaten path,
is often rather sullen.

You backtrack or you move forward,
only to have a loop,
brings you back,
From Finish to Beginning.

The footsteps we left
will be replaced.
The moments we shared,
forgotten.
It’s but a trail,
make the most out of it.

Welch/Dickey Loop Trail

From p.41, The Human Use of Human Beings – Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener written in 1954:

The education of the average American child¹ of the upper middle class is such as to guard him solicitously against the awareness of death and doom. He is brought up in an atmosphere of Santa Claus; and when he learns that Santa Claus is a myth, he cries bitterly. Indeed, he never fully accepts the removal of this deity from his Pantheon, and spends much of his later life in the search for some emotional substitute.

The fact of individual death, the imminence of calamity, are forced upon him by the experience of his later years. Nevertheless, he tries to relegate these unfortunate realities to the role of accidents, and to build up a Heaven on Earth consists for him in an eternal progress, and a continual ascent to Bigger and Better Things.

¹ I would argue that the condition described has moved far beyond the average American onto a global level.

2011年5月

1. (Hong Kong)

She who is only 29, beautiful but unmarried, works two and a half jobs to meet ends for her mother and sister, is diagnosed with stage III cancer. Struggling to pay for her treatments, she is practically taking out rice from her families’ bowls.

While that happens, I dared to feel sometimes unsatisfied about my life just because I did not get what I wanted. The truth is, I didn’t even deserve to get what I already have, and I knew it.

2. (Tanzania)

Those millions of children whom were born without access to clean water, nutritious food, education and other basic rights are crying in vain, while we are talking about modern minimal design, artistic symbolisms and architectural poetry.

Naturally, we have all learned to accept the things we cannot change, haven’t we? These are the things we can’t change, aren’t they?

3. (Yunnan)

Everyday, out of disgust, many of us cut & throw away one of the most valuable resource in the animal world – body fat. We were in Yunnan that year, my Dad, Kelvin, Ting and I, and we were offered by the villagers the best of the food – a piece of smoked pork fat straight up. The skin was chewy and inside liquidy – like a ziplock filled with pork fat. We tried our best not to throw up. We have came so far in acquiring material wealth, that we are so naturally disgusted by ‘too much’.

It has also become OK to not finish the food you ordered if you don’t want to. After three years of lonely practice, I have been invited back into the club.

4. (Tokyo)

Strumming my guitar, singing Blowin’ in the Wind in the leftover space between the old and the new facade of our guest house, a tiny thread in the back of my head led me to the time when I used to be a Boy Scout. My dad would pick me up at the end of the session, and as he drove home he’d play English folk songs (it was a privilege to have a CD changer in the car back in those days), and ask me to try understand the lyrics. We’d listen to Bob Dylon, Simon and Garfunkel, Carpenters, Brothers Four, Andrew Lloyd Webber (Phantom of the Opera), Peter, Paul & Mary……

And just now I realized where my obsession with lyrics came from.

I remember the time when dinning at home was the most boring thing you could do for a Friday evening. And that didn’t seem so long ago at all.

Last Friday, when I was able to get off work rather early (8:30pm), all I wanted to do is to go to the supermarket on the way home, buy a pack of Saba (鲭鱼) for less than ¥400, cook a lot of rice in the slowest rice cooker I have ever used (even in its express mode), and toast my fish to perfection with browned, crispy skin. A touch of Cupie mayonnaise sprinkled with pepper sealed the deal. I felt far more content with this meal than some that I have paid many times its price.

And then, talking with friends, learning languages, watching a movie, they all were just what I needed. I would’ve instinctively described this whole dinner as a 家常便饭 in Chinese, literally “Home-Common-Casual-Rice”, except that I would realize that it wasn’t so common afterall.

In one of Kengo Kuma’s essays ‘Weak Architecture’(弱い建築）he discussed his sensibility to materials. He likes materials that are weak, and when weak things come together in harmony, they form an equilibrium that is in many ways stronger than what we have come to understand as strong in today’s society. He also compared these ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ elements to audio, that ‘the intrusion of a loud voice can make whispers inaudible.’

Hasn’t the construction of our society been so loud that we have long lost the sensitivity to hear the whispers of nature? How about the loud dogma that drowns the inner voices of our hearts? Strength, so it seems, is only our escape from the knowledge of our weaknesses, not a solution.

In the quietest of evenings, I realized what I heard was the whisper of happiness.