Sorglose Nacht

Hirokazu Koreeda’s Dare mo shiranai, released in the US as Nobody Knows is, as many of its critics have noted, long, and slow. Ella Taylor at LA Weekly writes that it, “unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children’s long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.” True true. And it is quite a powerful film.
As I watched, however, what I felt most often was a sort of displaced nostalgia for a certain patience, a certain forbearance. The film takes place in modern Japan, set amongst the video arcades etc. that form the caricature of Japan so familiar from Lost in Translation, et. al. but lost is the frantic pacing that is so often devicive in visualizing the westernization of Japan. What we are left with, instead, is a slow picture of life set against the obvious technologization/occidentalization of Japan in a small city. The story on which the film is based took place in Tokyo; the choice for suburbanization was clearly Koreeda’s. The apartment itself is a western-style stucco job. Why? And what is the occidental?

… “The West” is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium. By the turn of a singular paradox, the West appears as what has as its planetary, galactic, universal vocation limitlessly to extend its own delimitation. It opens the world to the closure that it is. [my italics]

This closure is named in many ways (appropriation, fulfillment, signification, destination, etc.); in particular, it is named “representation.” Representation is what determines itself by its own limit. It is the delimitation for a subject, and by this subject, of what “in itself” would be neither represented or representable.

But the irrepresentable, pure presence or pure absence, is also an effect of representation (just as “The East,” or “The Other World,” are effects of “The West”).

That was written by Jean-Luc Nancy, and this was written by Elvis Costello: “We were waiting for the end of the world / waiting for the end of the world. Dear Lord I sincerely hope you’re coming / ’cause you really started something.”

The alternative here, in the East-West representation schema, is the incessant deferral of closure: Khanti.

Khanti is the sixth of the Ten Pre-requisite for Buddha-hood. “Khanti” literally means “patience”. This patience is not the patience of the weak or that prompted by weakness. It is the perfect control of temper by proper cultivation of mind based on great kind compassion on all living beings … All Buddhas, Pacceka Buddhas and Arahats practiced this Khanti as a pre-requisite for the attainment of their end - the freedom of Nibbana. They have all spoken in a very high praise of it as an essential acquirement for the attainment of each man’s freedom … So the Lord has said “Avera naca sammanti” or patience will overcome all difficulties, and bring eternal happiness.

So, perhaps, when Andy Klein of Los Angeles Citybeat (and others) suggest that “…it’s arguable whether the experience is worth it,” we are at the threshold of a repeating representation. The children in the film, the audience, the West - it takes a decidedly Eastern patience; a patience in the name of pure presentation, a patience in the absence of conceptualization, of “thought” as we know it in the West.

This is a very old link. I realize it is not particularly common to put up a link that is almost four years old. I don’t care. I really like it, and I think you will too. Please read: Basball is just baseball: An excerpt from a new book by David Shields. It is about the Seattle Mariners’ right-fielder Ichiro Suzuki, and if it doesn’t make you think that there’s hope for baseball, then you are not like I am in that respect.

A quote:

In a game against the Baltimore Orioles, Ichiro made two spectacular diving catches. Orioles manager Mike Hargrove said, “The catch he made on Anderson’s ball down the line and the catch he made on Hairston’s ball - no other right fielder in the American League makes those plays. Maybe he makes one of them but doesn’t make both of them.” Asked, afterward, which of the catches was the most difficult, Ichiro said, “It’s tough to say which one was the toughest, because each fly ball had a different characteristic.”

And another:

Asked his reaction to Alex Rodriguez getting booed so vociferously upon his return to Seattle, Ichiro said, “It’s very tough for a ballplayer to get proud and keep his dignity. There’s not much difference between love and hate.”