Equivocality

I was in the Times Square Mall in Kuala Lumpur today, a huge ten-story edifice. While waiting for a companion to order their ice cream at Dairy Queen, I walked into a shop sellling Anime and picked up the case of the DVD playing in the store. It was an episode of a series called “Fruits Basket.” On the back of the box I read:

“Toru Honda is a cheerful 16 year old girl. She was orphaned when her mother was killed in a car accident. Not wanting to burden anyone, she buys a tent and begins to live in a forest. She is determined to finish school in order to fulfill her mother’s last wish. It turns out that the land Toru is living on belongs to the Soma family. The members of the Soma family are possessed by animals and they turn into their true selves when they are embraced by the opposite sex!”

Amused, shaking my bead, I put down the box and walked away. So much Anime revolves around trivial sexual taboos, schoolgirl crushes, walking in on someone in the shower, and so forth. Japanese culture must be very concerned with embarassment, I thought. There’s something interesting there, I thought…

And something happened. Intellectually exhaused both by the onslaught of new expierences to absorb and by my own endless muddling thoughts about all that I’d seen, endlessly writing essays in my head, I gave up. Finally, my thoughts ground to a halt. I had found another tiny little glowing gem of something curious to me, an anomaly that could flare into an interest, perhaps even explode into a full fledged passion as I explored it, staying up late on the computer reading sociololgy papers, studying Japanese history, reading Japanese literature, maybe even learning the language if it held my interest long enough. I’ve been down this road before; I tend to consume subjects wholesale. I am very driven to understand the world.

But I never will. That is why my mind stalled even as I was gearing up, in my head, to begin analysis of this idea. I could feel the ramifications of my observation assembling themselves, I had already begun searching my memory for incidents where I had read or heard or concluded similarly. In those few seconds, walking away from the shop, my mental machinery began to rev up. I am nothing if not analytical, and I was getting to work.

What stopped me cold was the notion that this intellectual approach is no way to engage the world. There is simply too much world. I realized long ago that I could never actually “see” the entire world, even in principle. Sure I can travel to anywhere on the planet within a few days, I can call (almost) anywhere almost instantly, and I will both visit and telephone a great many far away places in my life. But there is no way that I can visit the entire world firsthand. Even if I spent just one day in every city, every town, every piddleshit settlement where at least one family lives, and just one day at every beautiful waterfall, towering mountain, ancient temple; even on a whirlwind tour with a teleporter, there are not enough days in my life. This knew long ago, but today I finally realized that the world of human ideas is far larger. I not only have no hope of seeing it all, I have no hope of even catching the highlights.

This is obvious, I guess. It seems obvious to me now. I knew this on some level before. For example, I knew that my technical training was by nature very specialized. Wandering around the science libraries during my university career, it was clear to me that I would never read even one percent of all those books, I would never be an especially good practitioner of more than a small number of fields. Over the last days and weeks I have likewise pondered the vastness of human culture. Culture, any culture, is enourmous and mostly arbitrary. It is far more than just manners and taste in music. It is language — each language a complete subject in itself! — and history and architecture, and what people eat on Sundays, and what an everyday object like a local bus ticket looks like. I took a very careful photograph of my used bus ticket in Penang, fascinated by this idea.

That set the stage. What came crashing down on me today, literally stopping me in mid-thought, is the realization that there is a whole world of cultures, a endless litany of minor fascinating anthropological pathways. And not just pathways, neat alleys of reasoning as I’m so used to dealing with in the harder sciencies, but vertible labrynths of human behaviour. Dead ends and circular reasoning and historical baggge. Culture is not rational! It is usually massively self-contradictory, for one thing. Like the two signs outside a club here: one saying “Happy Hari Raya” (the festival marking the end of Ramadan) and the other advertising the club with an image of a barely clothed teenager. How the hell can an Islamic culture so casually appropriate images of Western sexuality? It doesn’t make any sense, and sure enough I spent some time in my head trying to unravel this contradiction, trying to trace historical and developmental influences, the effect of the multiple non-Muslim cultures also living here, possible generation gap effects, the rise in exposure to foreign media…

Stop.

It’s not that this isn’t a fruitful excercise. It’s not that sociology and anthropology aren’t valuable disciplines. It’s that my tendency is to experience the world through studying it in this manner, to try to devour it wholesale. And trying to be intellectually honest, I always attempt to admit a plurality viewpoints and explanations, I always accept that the truth is always more complicated and nuanced than the model I am able to construct in my head at any one point. Instinctively I know that there is always more to learn.

None of this is wrong. In fact this ambiguity and unsatisfied self doubt is the very definition of intellectual curiousity, and I love these things about myself. It is also paralyzing, if it is the only way has to approach the world. I’ve always known this instinctively. I believe in ‘love’ but I have never tried to deconstruct it; it never bothers me that I cry at books and movies, because I know that my emotions are real and important despite their irrationality, that human hopes and desires don’t fundamentally make sense. But my training as a scientist makes me inclined to try to connect with the newness of the world by analyzing it. Now, as my horizons have expanded, analysis has finally failed me. Not becauase there are things I cannot understand, but because there is simply too much to know. The universe turns out to be far larger than my intellect can encompass, after all; I concede.

Once, in high school, I had an arugment in English class. We had been asked to critique a short story which involved the protagonist watching the ocean. He was absorbed by the waves, watching the waves from two different directions converge on the beach, and the complex patterns they made as they interacted. The story was supposed to have deep implications about how we seek to understand the world. I had a different response. I wrote that if he had just studied some basic physics, he would have understood how wave interference works and that would have neatly explained it all. This view was unpopular with a classmate. She felt on some deep emotional level that I was ignoring something important. She got touchy about it. “When you look at the stars,” she finally asked me in exasperation, “do you really think about nuclear fusion?” Yes, actually. But what she didn’t understand was that the stars are no less beautiful to me for understanding how they shine.

What I didn’t understand then is that the world is too large to be encompassed entirely by reason. Over a period of years, my physics and mathematics training has enabled me to understand reality in a certain deep and very satisfying sense. I know why bridges stay up, why sunsets are red. This makes me happy, and these things are no less wondrous to me for their transparency. But there is far, far more to know about the world of people than there is to know about basic physics, and it makes far less sense on average. I know I have the intellectual power and willpower to unravel some of these mysteries, in time. And I enjoy engaging the world through rationality, but I realize now that like all those endless places on a map of the world, there are far too many destinations for my wandering thoughts to encompass them all. Yet life enfolds me nonetheless. And so, to live fully in a strange world, I need to learn (or re-learn?) to connect with complicated things in ways other than deconstructing them.

I will never stop applying my mind to the world around me. But I also need to learn to enjoy Anime on its own terms. I need to love life like I love the stars, for their own simple beauty.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2003 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Essays, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.