Meher Baba
--Jack
Saturday, December 06, 2014
After Rereading Herbert Marcuse
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Messiah President (Re-posted from August)
If only the rest of Congress consisted of representatives like mine, what a wonderful country this would be.
John Lewis
Jack Miller
Posted by Jack Miller at Friday, August 29, 2014
Friday, November 07, 2014
American DNA
A new study reveals that Americans have the DNA of Neanderthals.
"It is as if the the DNA has become a virus," senior scientist Skinner Jung said when the results of the study were presented at Georgetown University. "Why the brains of white men are most affected is still a mystery."
Sadly, no cure or way to prevent the Neanderthal Strain is possible at this time.
One particular white male who participated in the study brought some levity to the presentation by asking how Obama was still President when he and so many others like him voted Republican in the 2014 election.
Copyright: Jack Off-center News Service. All content is unprotected.
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Tsunami of Sludge
As Democrats who distanced themselves from Obama all lost, while a few who embraced Obama won, as in Hawaii, billionaires, banks, bigots, fat cats, Big Oil, corporations, and the Pentagon took firm control of the nation. It would be easy to dismiss the election as unimportant and make jokes-- as Jon Stewart and others will, about the dreadful statements of Republicans. But the devastating result will soon be felt globally and will be undeniable. Man-made climate change will continue unabated. There will be more oil spills and pipe lines through pristine wilderness. There is a lesson here for progressives. Stop thinking there is a revolution at hand-- it's far more likely that the country will become even more radical right wing reactionary!
Americans have spoken; they want the unholy trinity above to control the government. (BTW, This is close to what I was expecting to happen, but I had the fantasy that I was being too pessimistic.)
Jack, 11-4-14
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Religion
We mortals are composed of two great schools--
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.
--Abul 'Ala al Ma'arri
It is very important to live in harmony and analyse where the opinion of the other lies. The best way to do this is to engage in dialogue, dialogue and dialogue.
--The 14th Dalai Lama
Photograph I made on our visit to
Istanbul
What is religion? The Oxford Dictionary offers us little help: "The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods." In order to begin a discussion of religion, the distinction has to be made between established and organized religion and personal religion which may or may not adhere to the tenets of a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or shrine. There must also be some discussion of the relationship of a religion to its scriptures, its acknowledged sacred writings, and the body of work created by the revered leaders of the religion. The greatest problem in discussing religion exists in the equivocation of going from personal religion, to generally practiced religion, to shared beliefs of the majority of those practicing a religion, to the pronouncements of the officials and leaders of an established religion. The Bible, for instance, forbids eating shrimp. It would be ridiculous now to say that Christians, generally, condemn the eating of shrimp and find doing so to be abominable.
There are, as I see it, two starting points for any essay on religion: first, the views of skeptics, agnostics and atheists such as Abul ʿAla Al-Maʿarri, Karl Marx, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins, etc.; and second, the exploration of the meaning of what is sacred, in the vein of Mircea Eliade, Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Joseph Campbell, Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, and one of my favorite novelists and philosophers, Iris Murdoch. (click for an essay on her views on religion). I shall take up the meaning of the sacred.
The Parthenon, Athens
If I were to ask what people hold sacred, I imagine I would receive a wealth of answers. There are sacred spaces or places many of us hold dear. For me they are many, the Parthenon in Athens, the Pantheon in Rome, Delphi, Tōdai-ji in Nara, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Kalani on the Big Island of Hawaii, homes I have inhabited, Big Sur, Mt. Rainier, to name a few. There are things I consider sacred; there are people I consider sacred. Does that mean I consider what I hold sacred to be holy or have some ultimate value beyond the value for me? When I find something to be sacred, I do not expect everyone else to appreciate it as such. The sacred is subjective, not objective, as I see it; even though thousands may share in holding a specific site holy.
Carl Jung, like Eliade, found the experience of the sacred to be universal in human kind. He wrote of and illustrated mandalas as an example. There are patterns of experience of the numinous we all share. For Jung, the experience of god as well as the sacred took form in his idea of the Collective Unconscious. Alfred North Whitehead, among others, attempted to comprehend god as a collective process. For most modern philosophers the idea of a personal god who acts like an individual is inconceivable. Jean Paul Sartre and his companion, Simone De Beauvoir, gave convincing arguments that traditional views of god as an individual who acts and influences world events are self-contradictory.
That is not to say that holiness is meaningless. Art especially has the ability to embody the sacred. From the poetry of Rumi, the biblical Psalms, and the Hindu Mahabharata, to the paintings of DaVinci and the sculpture of Michelangelo, to the poetry of Keats and Yeats, from the paintings of Schiele to the music of Bach, the arts are for many of us sacred. There is a spiritual reality in the world, quality and value not definable by science alone.
Huichol Jaguar
That being said, there is also the profane. By the profane, I do not mean the merely neutral, valueless entity or being, but rather that which negates the good and the sacred. It is impossible to discuss religion without discussing evil. Most religions have presented us with a path, a Tao, a means to a holy life, a way to enlightenment, or a code of conduct that will lead to some reward, whether in this life or in an afterlife. The path is always toward the good and away from evil, a path to avoid the temptations and pitfalls of life that might lead us astray. Evil need not be so blunt as Satan or host of devils, it can be something as seemingly innocuous as ignorance. In the Bhagavad Gita, a prince resists the call to war, not wanting to kill friends or relatives on the other side. Yet a deity, talking of immortality, convinces him to accept his caste, to become a warrior. How, we must ask, are we to know good from evil, right from wrong, correct action, noble endeavor, in the modern world.
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." --Hamlet
Church in winter, Santa Fe
One other criticism of religion is that established religions have become tools for those in power to stay in power, to lull the masses into behavior that benefits the state and its leaders, and give them false hope for an afterlife. Marx's perceptive analysis of how capitalism in particular does this is devastating. That religion is co-opted and misused for power rather than love or whatever other good motives initiated the religion, does not negate the religion; but it gives us all good reason to ask who speaks for the religion and to what end.
Tōdai-jiSearch Results
Triton
The Alhambra
Notre Dame
Stonehenge
The Pantheon
Mosaic, Hagia Sophia
Sitting Ramesses II Colossus inside Luxor Temple
Delphi
Kasuga-taisha Shrine
Daibutsu, Tōdai-ji
(click)
Rose Window, Notre Dame
Similarly, belief in a god or gods often leads those in power to assume that they know what god wants. Since many holy writings, like the Bible, the Koran, the Sutras, allow for interpretation, whether literal or allegorical, who has the authority to apply sacred texts? What if religious and cultural traditions lead to harm of others, or to destruction of the Earth and its animal inhabitants? Killing elephants and rhinoceroses come to mind. More devastating, climate change arises as a problem. Those who believe in an afterlife and in all-powerful gods may take destruction of the planet as unimportant. Religion has become in some cases adjusted to capitalism. The ethical problems go on and on.
To conclude on an uplifting note, look at a few more artistic achievements directly resulting from religion. All the photographs on this page are by Darryl or by me:
Sphinx and Pyramids
--Jack, October 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
The Definition of Marriage, continued
Yesterday, Darryl and I attended the Marriage Equality Rally at Atlanta City Hall. It was a gorgeous, Georgia, breezy, autumn afternoon. Here are my photographs form the rally as well as a link to a site that includes the presentations of a host osf speakers. Following is a post I made last week about Marriage.
Freedom to Marry Site:
http://www.freedomtomarry.org/blog/entry/photos-georgians-call-for-the-freedom-to-marry-in-the-peach-state-with-ga-e
The Definition of Marriage
Our marriage in Provincetown
August 2004
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Jules and Jim
Tonight I experienced this film as one ought, on a big screen, in a ravishing black and white print, if that is the right word. How films are remastered into such perfect moving pictures is beyond me and I must look into it. The clarity and richness of the moving image, which at rare moments Truffaut held in a still, freeze-frame, was astonishing.
What I want to do here is write of my reaction to such a remarkable work of art, my reaction as a gay man, often in my young life bisexual, who pursued the loves and friendship portrayed here. Like the characters, I was often so caught in the moment that I failed to step back, pan as a camera can, to an overview, a necessary distance to appreciate fully the richness of the life I was living.
The film moves from the idyllic and innocent world of the young friends, through their Bohemian days in Paris, to the ravages of a war (WWI) in which they fight on opposite sides, to the love affair with Catherine, embodied perfectly by Jeanne Moreau. Their friendship, with never any question of sexual attraction, becomes a strange relationship of empathy, fellow feeling, shared joys of ordinary life and good conversation, then jealousy, then a deeper sharing, as they both become lovers, then alternate husbands of Catherine, who is the archetype of a Femme Fatale.
There is no Hollywood ending, nor any of the mundane morality of monogamy and family values here. Catherine is moved by emotion, by her own logic and feeling, as the men struggle with their own conflict of emotion and reason. I shall have to read what feminists think of Catherine as a woman, whether they think her liberated or somehow a victim of her society and her relationships with the men.
The view of the limits, especially the false expectations of marriage, must have been way ahead of its time in 1962; the same time that Masters and Johnson were revealing so much about human sexuality.
The ending is sad. We are left feeling it could not have been otherwise. Do we take joy in the menage-a-trois as it was lived out, do we look for some alternate solution or ending, or should we go with the inevitability of suffering in relationships? Nonetheless, how I admire the art, the way Truffaut presents life to us. How many of us, I wonder, must identify with Jules?
Jack 9-30-14
Friday, September 05, 2014
The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life".-- Oscar Wilde
"The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature." --A.N. Whitehead
Ever since Democritus, scientists have jumped to the conclusion that reality consists of atoms in motion. The theory has been promising, leading to century after century of elaboration and refinement. Today, a number of scientists are disputing the existence of nothingness, whether there can be a void in any meaningful sense. They take issue with Vladimir who, in Waiting for Godot, proclaims, "There is no lack of void."
The mistake, both in philosophy and science, that is so ubiquitous today was called by Whitehead "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness." As the quote above makes clear, the error is to assume that the concept is more real than what it purports to explain. The primal fact is the perception. In the words of Bishop Berkeley, "To be is to be perceived." Awareness comes first. Afterwards, comes the attempt to make sense of perceptions. The pre-Socratic philosophers tried all sorts of explanations: water, air, earth, and fire, followed by all sorts of interesting theories. Ask a scientist today what is real and you get something like this:
An atom is less real than my perception of this table in front of me. The perception is first. The theory that the table consists of tiny atoms spinning and flying about comes at the end of a long line of abstraction and ideas based on the initial perception.
That there is an "I" doing the perceiving also comes after a process of gathering perceptions and unifying them into the idea of a person, an ego, a Vladimir, waiting for Godot to come.
Yes, ideas and theories are real as well as perceptions, for they are based on perceptions. As I see it, the idea of a mind that does the perceiving is existentially more real than the biological theory that all our thoughts and feelings are contained in an organ called the brain. The latter construct is far more complex than the former. You'd have to have lost your mind to believe otherwise.
Ogata Gekkō (尾形月耕, 1859-1920)
The monkey is reaching
For the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him
He’ll never give up.
If he’d let go the branch and
Disappear in the deep pool,
The whole world would shine
With dazzling pureness.
Jack
Thursday, September 04, 2014
Updike on Murakami
- SUBCONSCIOUS TUNNELS.
- John Updike
- Updike, John
- New Yorker. 1/24/2005, Vol. 80 Issue 44, p91-93. 4p. 1 Color Photograph.
- Book Review
- KAFKA on the Shore (Book)
- MURAKAMI, Haruki, 1949-
- Reviews the book "Kafka on the Shore," by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
New Yorker. 1/24/2005, Vol. 80 Issue 44, p91-93.
Haruki Murakami’s dreamlike new novel
Haruki Murakami’s new novel, “Kafka on the Shore” (translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel; Knopf; $25.95), is a real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender. Spun out to four hundred and thirty-six pages, it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be. Murakami, born in 1949, ran a Tokyo jazz club before he became a published writer, with the novel “Hear the Wind Sing,” in 1979. Though his work abounds with references to contemporary American culture, especially its popular music, and though he details the banal quotidian with an amiable flatness reminiscent of Western youth and minimalist fiction in the hungover nineteen-seventies, his narratives are dreamlike, closer to the viscid surrealism of Kobo Abe than to the superheated but generally solid realism of Mishima and Tanizaki. We often cannot imagine, while reading “Kafka on the Shore,” what will come next, and our suspicion—reinforced by Murakami’s comments in interviews, such as the one in last summer’s Paris Review—is that the author did not always know, either.
Yet “Kafka on the Shore” has a schematic rigor in its execution. Alternate chapters relate the stories of two disparate but slowly converging heroes. The odd-numbered chapters serve up the first-person narrative of a fifteen-year-old runaway from his affluent, motherless home in Tokyo; his father is a world-renowned sculptor, Koichi Tamura, and the son has given himself the peculiar first name Kafka. He totes a carefully packed backpack and, in his head, talking in boldface, a scolding, exhorting alter ego called Crow—which is what Kafka means, or close to it, in Czech. The even-numbered chapters trace, beginning with a flurry of official documents, the life of a mentally defective sexagenarian, Satoru Nakata. He was one of sixteen fourth graders who, in 1944, while on a mushroom-gathering walk with their teacher, fell into a coma after an unexplained flash of silver in the sky. Nakata was the only one who didn’t wake up, unharmed, within a few hours; when he did wake up, several weeks later in a military hospital, he had lost his entire memory and, with it, the ability to read. He doesn’t know what Japan is or even recognize his parents’ faces. He is able, however, to learn to work in a shop producing handcrafted furniture, and when, upon the owner’s death, the factory disbands he supplements his government subsidy with a modest-paying sideline in finding lost cats, since along with his disabilities he has gained the rare ability to converse with cats. (Cats frequently figure in Murakami’s fiction, as delegates from another world; his jazz club was called Peter Cat.) One cat search leads Nakata to a house—that of the sculptor Koichi Tamura, in fact—where he is compelled to stab to death a malevolent apparition in the form of Johnnie Walker, from the whiskey label. Fleeing the bloody crime scene, Nakata hitches truck rides south to Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands, where Kafka Tamura, as it happens, has recently arrived by bus.
Both the young man and the old, though independent and reclusive, have a knack of forming useful friendships. Kafka befriends Oshima, the androgynous, hemophiliac assistant at a small library where the boy can read all day and, eventually, bunk at night; Nakata in his winning simplicity finds a disciple in one of the truck drivers who give him a ride, the lower-class, hitherto unenlightened Hoshino, “with a ponytail, a pierced ear, and a Chunichi Dragons baseball team cap.” The double plot unfolds in cunningly but tenuously linked chapters. There is violence, comedy, sex—deep, transcendental, anatomically correct sex, oral and otherwise—and a bewildering overflow of possible meanings.
In a prefatory chapter, Crow promises Kafka a “violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm,” with “hot, red blood.” He assures him, and the expectant reader, “Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through. . . . But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.” At the center of this particular novelistic storm is the idea that our behavior in dreams can translate to live action; our dreams can be conduits back into waking reality. This notion, the learned Oshima tells Kafka, can be found in “The Tale of Genji,” the early-eleventh-century Japanese classic by Lady Murasaki. Oshima summarizes:
“Lady Rokujo—she’s one of Prince Genji’s lovers—becomes so consumed with jealousy over Genji’s main wife, Lady Aoi, that she turns into an evil spirit that possesses her. Night after night she attacks Lady Aoi in her bed until she finally kills her. . . . But the most interesting part of the story is that Lady Rokujo has no inkling that she’d become a living spirit. She’d have nightmares and wake up, only to discover that her long black hair smelled like smoke. Not having any idea what was going on, she was totally confused. In fact, this smoke came from the incense the priests lit as they prayed for Lady Aoi. Completely unaware of it, she’d been flying through space and passing down the tunnel of her subconscious into Aoi’s bedroom.”
Read in context, in the first section of Arthur Waley’s translation of “Genji,” the episode borders on the naturalistic. Within the tight, constrained circles of the imperial court, emotional violence bursts its bonds. Both women are gravely sickened by the trespassing spirit of one of them; Lady Rokujo, a beauty of great refinement, is horrified that her dreams about Princess Aoi are full of a “brutal fury such as in her waking life would have been utterly foreign to her.” She reflects, “How terrible! It seemed then that it was really possible for one’s spirit to leave the body and break out into emotions which the waking mind would not countenance.”
From the inarguable truth of the second observation the possibility of one’s spirit leaving one’s body could be plausibly deduced in a prescientific, preëlectric age when, Oshima points out, “the physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two.” In Murakami’s vision of our materialist, garishly illuminated age, however, the boundary between inner and outer darkness is traversed by grotesque figments borrowed from the world of commercial imagery: Johnnie Walker, with boots and top hat, manifests himself to the cat-loving simpleton Nakata as a mass murderer of stray felines, jocularly cutting open their furry abdomens and popping their still-beating hearts into his mouth, and Colonel Sanders, in his white suit and string tie, appears to Nakata’s companion, Hoshino, as a fast-talking pimp. The Colonel, questioned by the startled Hoshino about his nature, quotes another venerable text, Ueda Akinari’s “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”:
Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man.
Later, with some exasperation, the Colonel tells Hoshino, “I’m a concept, get it? Con-cept!” Concept or whatever, he is a very adroit fixer when it comes to such supernatural hustles as handling the entrance stone to the spirit world, where the dead and the drastically detached live in the heart of the forest like writers at the MacDowell Colony—meals and housekeeping provided and other residents discreetly out of sight.
This novel quotes Goethe as decreeing, “Everything’s a metaphor.” But a Western reader expects the metaphors, or symbolic realities, to be—as in “The Faerie Queene,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Goethe’s “Faust”—organized by certain polarities, in a magnetic field shaped by a central supernatural authority. No such authority controls the spooky carnival of “Kafka on the Shore.” To quote Colonel Sanders once more:
“Listen—God only exists in people’s minds. Especially in Japan, God’s always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person.”
In “Kafka on the Shore,” the skies unaccountably produce showers of sardines, mackerel, and leeches, and some unlucky people get stuck halfway in the spirit world and hence cast a faint shadow in this one. Japanese supernature, imported into contemporary America with animated cartoons, video games, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, is luxuriant, lighthearted, and, by the standards of monotheism, undisciplined. The religious history of Japan since the introduction of Chinese culture in the fifth century A.D. and the arrival of Buddhism in the sixth has been a long lesson in the stubborn resilience and adaptability of the native cult of polytheistic nature worship called, to distinguish it from Buddhism, Shinto. Shinto, to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica, “has no founder, no official sacred scriptures, in the strict sense, and no fixed dogma.” Nor does it offer, as atypically surviving kamikaze pilots have proudly pointed out, an afterlife. It is based on kami, a ubiquitous word sometimes translated as “gods” or “spirits” but meaning, finally, anything felt worthy of reverence. One of Shinto’s belated theorists, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), defined kami as “anything whatsoever which was out of the ordinary.”
A tenacious adherence to Shinto in the Japanese countryside and among the masses has enabled it to coexist for a millennium and a half with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, and to be subject to repeated revivals, most recently, from 1871 to 1945, as the official national religion and a powerful spiritual weapon in Japan’s imperialist wars. After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Shinto, under the direction of the Allied occupation force, was disestablished, its holidays were curtailed, and the emperor’s divinity—based on the first emperor’s purported descent from the sun goddess—was renounced. But Shinto shrines remain, in the imperial precincts and in the countryside; its rites are performed, its paper wish-slips tied to bushes, its amulets sold to tourists Asian and Western. Shinto’s strong aesthetic component, a reverence toward materials and processes, continues to permeate the crafts and the arts. Kami exists not only in heavenly and earthly forces but in animals, birds, plants, and stones. Nakata and Hoshino spend hours trying to learn how to converse with a stone—to divine what the stone, at times easily lifted and at others heavy to the limits of a man’s strength, wants. Kami pervades Murakami’s world, in which, therefore, many Western readers will feel, a bit queasily, at sea, however many fragments of globalized Western culture—Goethe, Beethoven, Eichmann, Hegel, Coltrane, Schubert, Napoleon—bob from paragraph to paragraph.
The novel’s two heroes interact only in the realm of kami. Of their entwined narratives, the story of Kafka Tamura is more problematic, more curiously overloaded, than that of the holy fool Nakata, with its familiar elements of science fiction, quest, and ebullient heroics. As Hoshino remarks, “This is starting to feel like an Indiana Jones movie or something.” Return and release to the underworld of his childhood coma are the old man’s intelligible goals, for which he prepares with prodigious sessions of sleep. Less intelligibly, the “cool, tall, fifteen-year-old boy lugging a backpack and a bunch of obsessions” labors under an ill-defined Oedipal curse. He hates his father enough to dream of killing him, and to feel little sorrow when he is killed, but we never see the father, unless it is in the bizarre guise of Johnnie Walker, and know only that he was a famous artist and, as such, probably pretty egocentric. Kafka’s mother left home, with his older sister, when he was four years old, and when he encounters her in Shikoku it is in the form of a fifteen-year-old spirit projection of the library director, trim, prim, reserved Miss Saeki, who is over fifty. Miss Saeki and Kafka Tamura talk like this:
“We’re not metaphors.” “I know,” I say. “But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.” A faint smile comes to her as she looks up at me. “That’s the oddest pickup line I’ve ever heard.” “There’re a lot of odd things going on—but I feel like I’m slowly getting closer to the truth.” “Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?” “Either way, I don’t think I can stand the sadness I feel right now,” I tell her. “I feel the same way.”
Small wonder, as the teen-ager admits, that “the whole confused mess swirls around in my brain, and my head feels like it’s about to burst.” The Oedipus myth, shedding its fatal Greek gravity and the universality Freud gave it, just adds vapor to the mist of fancy and strangeness through which the young hero moves toward the unexceptional goal of growing up.
In the last pages, the novel asks that it be taken as a happily ending saga of maturation, of “a brand-new world” for a purged Kafka. But beneath his feverish, symbolically fraught adventures there is a subconscious pull almost equal to the pull of sex and vital growth: that of nothingness, of emptiness, of blissful blankness. Murakami is a tender painter of negative spaces. After his coma, Nakata “returned to this world with his mind wiped clean. The proverbial blank slate.” In his adulthood, “that bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already.” Throughout this chronicle, Murakami describes his characters falling asleep as lovingly as he itemizes what they cook and eat. Refrigerated severed cat heads, like the severed human heads of Tanizaki’s tremendous novella “The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi,” have a lulling serenity, “staring out blankly at a point in space.” Making love to a woman, “you listen as the blank within her is filled.” Kafka Tamura says, “There’s a void inside me, a blank that is slowly expanding, devouring what’s left of who I am. I can hear it happening.” Heading into the forest, leaving all his backpacked defenses behind, he thinks triumphantly, “I head for the core of the labyrinth, giving myself up to the void.” Existence as something half empty—a mere skin on the essential void, a transitory shore—needs, for its celebration, a Japanese spiritual tact.
By John Updike
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