1. “If you drop your piece in the pot, you will receive a punishment.”

2. “When you dip your piece in the cheese, you should always stir it up (by drawing an ’8′) so that the bottom doesn’t burn.”

—Two rules for fondue I learned last night.

There has always been the metaphor of America being a melting pot, and most certainly my cultural identity has been altered and transformed in the years I have spent living there, or anywhere away from my hometown. But as the evening of laughter and melting cheese unfolded, I reflected upon my yet another experience of living in a foreign place – This time Zürich, Switzerland.

As one takes a cube of bread with his fork, dipping it into the pot of melting cheese, coating it with this strong unique flavor, I wondered if I too, have gotten my coat of the flavor of each melting pot I have jumped into through out my life. America, certainly; Tanzania, no doubt. Japan, obviously; Switzerland, well, time will tell.

Now the rules seems to make sense, too. If you drop yourself in and became unable to get out, you soak up too much of the flavor, and lose the integrity of your own texture. Of course, you also compromises the purity of the stew for others’ pleasure. And on the other hand, it is only meaningful if in the process of coating, one also stirs up some waves. I am proud of having caused some changes of behaviors (in a good direction, I believe) among my closer friends in various places, just as they too inspired me to become who I am today.

This past weekend, I flew through nothingness.

It was all white, every direction I looked. Yet I felt the speed I had; I felt the changing pressure that the terrain was acting on me; I felt, for the first time in such context, the strange excitement of proceeding without seeing.

It was a Sunday on the slopes. My new friend Yi, at the last minute, invited me to go to Titlis with him. I was told the weather would be poor for the weekend, but I had been wanting to go riding in the Alps and the urge won out.

Indeed the forecast was correct. As we climbed the mountain in the gondola, the thick mist submerged us into near blindness. We could hardly see the cart in front of our own. We dared not going to the top of the mountain, where slopes are steeper and falling off cliffs is not unlikely. In fact, that was one thing I was told by Suguru, a Japanese friend I met here, about skiing in Switzerland: the cliffs are just there, it’s your fault if you fall down one of them.

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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.

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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