September 2006
Monthly Archive
Kafka on the Shore
Posted by squirrley on 29 Sep 2006 | Tagged as: home
Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just like Yeats said: in dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann.
I read that quote at night, by headlamp, in a tent several days’ journey from the nearest road. It’s from Kafka on the Shore, a surrealist novel by Haruki Murakami. This fiction formed a sort of dark undertow to my trip, a shadow-world of disquiet. The book was disturbing, post-modern, at times completely inexplicable. I read a paragraph by the fire one night, as I am on occasion quite an animated reader, and this particular scene had me squealing and squirming and making freaked-out gutteral sounds that drew attention. Other people took exception to the gore, which was presented in cinematic and clinical detail, precise and pointed as a scalpel breaking skin.
I thought it was a fabulous book, a book that troubled and permeated my dreams, that showed that the membrane we put between ourselves and the world–the conscious mind–is porous. The subconscious, that big heaving ocean underneath the nets we cast, pushes back.
The quote on responsibility and imagination helped me understand my own metanarrative (!) My day-to-day work has often been on a practical level to hold government, industry, and others accountable for their practises, and to shift towards ‘ecofriendly’ behaviours. But what underpins the skein of my thoughts, what I keep trying to disentangled and weave together into some pattern that makes sense or could play out differently, is the world on the level of story. Because when people act in ways that are unfathomable to me, it is because the stories that would cause them to act differently are dead to them, or denied.
Like my previous entry, this feels like a 1/3 entry, the beginning of a thought. I am inching towards ideas that are way bigger–in this case the richness and power of imagination. How oikos (a greek word that is the root for both ecology and economy) floats within a matrix of space-times and gravities, shaped by the warp and weft of our perceptions.
I need a few more days/weeks/years to figure that out!!!!!!!