10000 Weeks

 These are just a few thoughts I had while reading Woman in the Dunes that wouldn't have fit it my time slot, so I apologize if it reads like a series of disparate verbal spasms. Without further ado:

 

Mind-Body Duality

    The mind-body problem in Western philosophy has always struck me as a little ridiculous, and I think Abe's mode of philosophical analysis explains why. In Western philosophy, we have a tendency to look for a third thing (r) that connects two phenomenon - an external similarity or noumenon that leaves the two objects fundamentally unchanged by the acknowledgement of this connection but establishes a relationship between the two. In Abe's philosophical analysis, and Japanese philosophical analysis by extension, the two objects overlap and similarity (r) exists in that overlapping, which is to say that all connection is intrinsic, that all things are interrelated and cannot be separated without losing a piece of each object.
    In the same way, the mind and body are discrete, true, but their interconnection is part of the definition of each, and as such they cannot be isolated. The mind would not be the mind without the body, just as the body would not be the body without the mind.

 

 Coming Unstuck from the World

    While the sand is dreadful, just as time is, and is a reminder of impermanence that gets everywhere, it too is inseparable from life. Humans are defined by not just their invention but also their limitation, and death is the limitation that births human experience. In Abe's world, sand equalizes everything, brings all injustices to a tepid end, forces one to face down life without distraction and attentively stare at death. In this world of sand, this ever present mirror that reflects the emptiness of all that appears before it, every ethic and all certainty crumbles before the 1/8mm grains - or, as Pascal would say, this sand puts reason in its place.
    In this way, Woman in the Dunes almost reads like The Stranger: just like Meursault, Jumpei seems innocent in everything he does because the sand so thoroughly eliminates rationalism. No matter the crime he commits, it's impossible to hate this creature who pays his taxes, fills out insurance forms, boards the train every Sunday, goes to the theatre every Saturday, laughs like an idiot at newspaper comics and cries at the image of an oak tree's leaves fluttering in the wind.
    Only, unlike The Stranger, Abe doesn't need to strip meaning from Jumpei's actions as Camus did. Where Camus expressed absurdity by showing man from behind a pane of glass - a comic philosophy - Jumpei simply exposes us to the world as it is, a plain world unadorned by nightly specials and concerts. The reader comes unstuck from the world by dint of this exposure alone. Even so, the sand is what ultimately drives Jumpei to embrace the woman; it is while dusting the sand from each other's bodies that they find companionship.  

 

Home and Venereal Disease

    In Zen Buddhism, the process of taking one's vows and committing to enlightenment is referred to by a single word. This term literally means "to leave one's home," and this is a useful way of understanding Abe's philosophy. In modern Japanese philosophy especially, I've noticed that one's ego, one's world of perspective, is also symbolized by "home." When Abe says that, knowing the meaningless of existence, we center our "compass on...home," he means that we necessarily take shelter in ourselves and our relationships with others to be insulated from the indifferent world. The village is, for Jumpei, also a kind of flight - his escape from the village is no different from his escape to the village after leaving his daily life. Both are characterized by a new perspective, by a hint of something more.
    On the topic of venereal disease. I didn't bring this up in class because the term is a bit impolitic, but sex is a core feature of Abe's work and worth discussing. He writes that "venereal disease is the greatest proof against the existence of soap opera," essentially meaning that this transmitted, almost banal form of disease thwarts what people might call passion. The world always presents something that precludes us from letting ourselves go. Onward from this point, Abe presents sex invariably as a clinical, almost nightmarish affair, a disorienting sandstorm characterized by leaden muscles and headaches and sweat and orange. There is never a refuge from the sand, not even in sex, where the person that engages in the act is a different person from the one who existed before the act and is left behind afterward. Before the sands, sex is no different from the moths' flight toward light - illogical, spastic, impulsive. In a word, mad.  

 

Radios, Mirrors, and Baths

    Abe writes that "radios and mirrors must touch something at the core of humanity." Regarding radios, it isn't too difficult to understand. They enable us to communicate with others, to hear all about the world, to separate ourselves from the sand for a time by listening to something other than its hiss. Mirrors are a little trickier. For Abe, they are worthless without somebody else to perceive you in them.
    I'll approach this from a few different angles. The first: there was a French psychoanalyst named Jacques Lacan who generated a great many theories during his lifetime. One of these is called the mirror stage. Without going into gratuitous detail, the gist is that we are introduced to alienation upon seeing ourselves in a mirror. We are forced to identify the specular image as "me," all the while feeling as if that "me" is not really "I." We are introduced to the separation between our ego and the actual "me" (the "me" in the world).  However, while we make the claim that the thing in the mirror is "me" all by ourselves, Lacan asserts that another must be present to say "yes, that is you," that we require another to ratify our existence. Sartre asserts the same; we discover ourselves in the presence of the other, we are just as certain of them as we are of ourselves and we gain no intimate self-knowledge without the other as a mediator. 
    I was playing an old game recently, an RPG from 1998 called "Xenogears." In this game, one character asserts to another that sacrifice is always noble on the grounds that "two is one." When one sacrifices themselves for another's true happiness, even if some sadness is left behind, the act is itself ethical because there is no such thing as a single person. Hearkening back to relation being intrinsic rather than external, interrelationship fundamentally changes both of the relatives - in fact, this game goes on to claim that the "meaning of humanity is interconnection," and I'm inclined to agree. For Abe, too, this must be the case: the mirror has no meaning without a subject and an other.
    Abe does also mention mirrors when talking about sex. He describes the "infinite consciousness of the sexual act," a person looking at another, a person looking at themselves looking at another, a person looking at another looking at themselves looking at another, an infinite sequence of mirrors, a dance of masks. 
    One of the most impactful sections of the story for me was the night Jumpei returned to the woman after his botched escape attempt. He feels everything is over, that this defeat is total, that his "dignity...shriveled up like the ash of a dragonfly's wing." Though most of Jumpei's despair in the novel was attached to rage and, through rage, hope, this despair is lucid and watery, devoid of anger and maybe even holding a little affection. Though he acknowledges that their tongues will be worn down in licking each other's wounds, it's no reason to stop the nursing, just as the inevitability of death was no reason for Rieux to quit administering medicine. And, amidst the sand, upon transience and impermanence, all the woman asks Jumpei is "shall I wash you?" He undresses without another word. It doesn't matter how profound the defeat is. Life always waits.

 

Responsibility

    A staple of the existentialist novel is a discussion of responsibility - either its supremacy or, more commonly, its irrelevance, and very few books take a middle ground. 
    Abe commits to none of these three. He refuses to offer his reader any stability, any belief, any assurances, but his refusal is just so gentle. Unlike Kafka, though Abe never allows his characters to retreat, never leads them back home, he always affords them a clumsy step forward. To Abe, it seems that answers lie in taking a single step, and that the meaning of responsibility lies in this step. And while he says nothing about a moral obligation to be kind to others, the relentless humanity of his novel can't help but imply it. If two truly is one, then to harm another would be to gnaw off your arm. If everything is sand, then one is not obliged to hurt others, and in a philosophy where movement is everything (literally everything), committing to the unobliged movement of causing injury is nothing short of a sin. For Abe, one might say that responsibility is living, without illusions, among the sands. 
    In this sense, Jumpei is us - an unwitting thing plucked from the chamber of contingency and thrust into an unintelligible world without consent. A being cursed and blessed with the ability to wish beyond our means. An escapee, a fugitive, eventually forced to fathom the world from within it. An illusory creature that clutches the arm of a loved one in the boundless empty sea and, in that random, insignificant movement, becomes human.
    And so, Jumpei's nasty hope, his extravagant hope, his hope for a world without sand for himself alone - because one wishing for the conditions of man to change must always wish all on their own - becomes a doctor. His hope is converted, through the sand, into a vessel of water from which every convict drinks.  

 

*P.S. Nietzsche keeps talking about how people look to metaphysics for security and the world as substances for certitude which further confirms my suspicion that he's the white Shankara.