Academic exhilaration, the body, piano, self-absorption
I want to talk about several things in this post. Firstly, how much I’m enjoying the start of my first semester of graduate school. I’m taking classes in postwar Japanese literature, Japanese film from the 60’s on, literary Japanese, and comparative literature (a introductory “proseminar”). A good portion of these several weeks has been spent scrambling to get reading done while other aspects of life interfere, and I just spent a night only sleeping intermittently for about 3 or 4 hours total. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to make this work, and right now I’m just breathing in this environment that lets me read and think for hours about literature and all the countless things tied in with it. I’m not brilliant-I’m not. But maybe if I search hard, I can find a tiny spark of brilliance inside of me, enough to let me grasp the most crucial points of what I’m learning and develop a vocabulary that will let me talk about what interests me, and what makes me feel alive.
I’ve been reading about the body in Japanese literature and therefore thinking about it in terms of liberation, subjugation, desire, memory and scars. And reliving my sense of how, in the end, the body is really central to everything-this curious, strange thing that houses all our thoughts and emotions while storing countless secrets about our everyday existence, our history. I cannot help being interested in the body. I’m intrigued and moved by both beauty and ugliness, while still left in wonder sometimes when I find myself in my own body. It gets sick on its own; it swells and shrinks; it wrinkles; it hurts and thrills. It will respond without fail to food or emotions-everything is recorded, but the body itself only has a transitory existence.
And from the body and its physical aging and scars, I start to think in terms of its connection to the mind and emotional scars as well. More specifically, I want to know about human resilience and how people can grow stronger and move forward, or learn to do so. This is something I seem to need to study, because it isn’t always that obvious. Emotional healing seems to be complex, layered, sometimes backwards and even involving more pain.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been using the piano in the living room of my dormitory-I’m grateful because it’s quite good. I love playing the piano. I like shaping and singing a phrase over and over through the months and years, saying something a bit different each time, as well as feeling like I am saying what I cannot express in language, with at least an eloquent framework granted to me. For the past several years, I have been playing the same three pieces over and over, because they mean the most to me. Especially one piece, which describes for me the greatest questions I hold in my heart, and especially the difficulties of the past two years for me. It’s already become part of my language; it’s etched into me permanently. But I’ve felt a growing dissatisfaction as I wonder whether or not playing this piece has somehow become a sign of my own vanity and stubborn need to wallow in the past. Yet I can’t drop it; at the same time, I refuse to deny my own grief or memory. I decided that it’s not possible for me to stop playing it entirely, but I’ve been looking for new pieces to learn (after two years of replaying old music)-adding new narratives to say that I don’t only need to have one story, that I have the strength and creativity to create more.
Beginning here hasn’t been completely easy for me. For one, I feel more strongly than ever that I am obsessed with myself-I am drawn towards my own interests and passions as I find myself more capable than ever of pursuing them. I am meeting new people and interacting in new social situations; I am more self-conscious than ever. Is it okay for me to be writing this entry? Actually, I’m not sure-maybe it shows that I’m a horrible person obsessed with just myself. Well, if I do anything less than altruistic, or if I’m hurting for some reason, it’s because I’m inherently a selfish person; being concerned about my potential selfishness means that I am vain; and indeed, any inclination to care about another person points to more vanity and a secret desire for returns. I can never win like this. But I think back, and I have always tried to curb my worse instincts. I want to have the confidence to believe in my decisions and personality and to trust other people’s feelings for me-in general, to make things easier for myself. Sometimes it won’t be possible to avoid some form of hurt, which I also need to accept instead of insisting that this situation simply should not exist. You have to ride it out, and eventually things move on. Change is a natural part of life. I am saying this here because I need to be reminded, too.
Signing off…
Originally published at enyi.org. You can comment here or there.