The Reading Dream-state

I’m riding on the train. In Spain. Or I wish I were riding on the train in Spain. Instead it’s rainy old Japan. Which is funny because there’s that rain train Spain rhyme. Maybe you think I hate Japan, now that I’m writing doggeral about it in my posts. But in fact, I like Japan. It’s just hard to reconcile my worklife with the experience I know is possible here. Possible, but just out of reach, at least during the weekdays. On weekends such as this I find myself rediscovering the pleasure I get from exploring a land that’s fresh and new to my senses. The whole land lies in possibility before me, only restricted to the Kansai region on weekends. I could travel to the Sea of Japan or to the Pacific on any given weekend, though I haven’t done this yet. My neighbour Colin visited Kobe on the Pacific coast just last weekend, and he went up a tower and looked out over the bay. That sounds like good fun to me.

Nishi Chu (my school) is my recurring nightmare, or perhaps it’s merely a dreamless immobility that brings no rest. This is how I feel some mornings when I wake up to go to Nishi Chu. My eyes and body are still tired, but it’s not sleep that will cure me. It’s the tantalus hope of not going to work. I haven’t yet had that cruel experience of waking up and thinking it’s the weekend, only to find it’s a workday. Come to think of it, when I was a boy it always happened the other way: I’d wake up on Saturday and think it was mid-week or think it Monday on a Sunday morning. Then the realization hits and it’s even better than knowing it’s the weekend. Now my bewildering sleeps come at odd times in the afternoon, when the office has cleared out and I’m sitting at my desk with nothing to do but read. My head is over the book, and the words of McLuhan begin to cluster like an impenetrable forest. I venture in, and passing each word, a silent tree that refuses to speak its meaning, I’m too entranced to realize I’m no longer awake. By then I’m in the midst of a forest of McLuhan’s mind and my own - my unconscious, unfettered mind - and I begin to see the meanings in such a strange and wonderful way. The insight that accompanies those problems I fall asleep to is complex beyond normal conscious imagining, and only a glimpse remains when I wake to the sound of a phone, ringing.

Cursed lucidity! Why won’t you retain the cipher of my recombinant dream-mind? Instead, seive-like only the granules of ideas remain. Spending my free moments - make that free hours – at school reading re-organizes my consciousness away from the everyday stream of consciousness and into a forced awareness. My mind keeps wanting to drift, unused as it now is to extended concentration, and as I force myself to continue reading I’m also forced to explore different ways of connecting to the material. Usually it’s depth connection – the engagement that McLuhan says is fostered by a youth of television. Then as my ability to maintain that understanding slackens it becomes a race. My eyes running over the page just faster than my ability to second-guess and misunderstand. It’s a forced understanding that must be McLuhan’s lineal textual engagement. A means of engagement suggested by the medium itself, by it’s unimodal sensory demands and tersely coded meaning. Heidegger, who struggled to contain the multiplicity of meanings in the written word would have a bone to pick with McLuhan. Like any great thinker McLuhan can sweep aside these inconsistencies as unknown, irrelevent, or merely obstacles in the way of his strident exposition.

I try to imitate this to gain confidence in my writing, however weak and random my expression. I have so much work to do. Please forgive this self-indulgent entry.