KAIDIE’S HITS/MISSES: IF WE CAN’T/DON’T WANT TO MEET IN THIS LIFE, PERHAPS WE COULD IN OUR NEXT/OTHER LIVES. ASSUMING THAT YOU’D LIKE TO, THAT IS. Same place, same time?
Reprinted from Facebook posts by Meena Mylvaganam, Marta Sofia Pinho Alves and Urbantick/Fabian Neuhaus. Image by Urbantick/Fabian Neuhaus.
THANK YOU for attending Kaidie’s gig last Monday. She has resurfaced – right behind my back, as KAIDIE ABSENT in Second Life. Now that she is re-located, shouldn’t I leave?
Music by Philip Tan.
Thank you very much indeed for attending Kaidie’s gig at Off The Shelf at the Slade School of Dine Art last Monday. Blind and nearly-blind dates are always thrilling, so it was nice meeting some of you in Life 1.0 for the first time. Do note that I mean ‘nice’ in the most ambiguous, generic manner. I am sure you would agree that meetings/encounters in Life 1.0 (offline, face-to-face, material world), Life 2.0 (online, imagination, internal world) and in between – Life 3.0 – are all equally valuable and meaningful (if they are meaningful at all) – for Third-Lifers, who are restless travellers on the move, this is about the only way(s) to meet, ie, halfway, or half of the half, of half of the half of the half, and so on. The notions of eternity, forever-ness and everlasting-ness are but romantic mythologies; a Third-Lifer necessarily runs/travels/migrates/transmigrates alone, and seeks/creates fulfillment in every single moment, however transient. During each of these temporary encounters, the Third-Lifer finds/invents her own drama/climax/closures, and locks them up as happy memories (even if she forgets, they will remain safe and happy, happily ever after). And moves on. (If anything else is forever/eternal/everlasting at all, it is one’s Sisyphean cycle of births-deaths-rebirths-repeated-death-looped-fast-forward-press-play-rewind-press-play-re-press-play-again-in-different-speeds). Lest you think this is a cynical worldview, I suspect that the contrary is true – that Kaidie is yet the most idealistic and romantic of us all. Which was why the invention of a Life 3.0-mixed-reality-goggles (as if life itself is not complicated enough?), as self-delusional and naive as Don Quixote on his grand(iose) quest.
Regardless.
I was hoping that Kaidie, who had been missing for nearly 1 month, would stop running about/away, and return to Life 1.0 for her gigs. She did- briefly – on 14 March, during her 10km charity run for Medecins Sans Frontieres. Fearing that she would not turn up, I had begun the race (for, someone had to answer to her sponsors!). However, halfway through the run, Kaidie appeared. And was she hostile, as she kept trying to trip me and outrun me! Whatever she had eaten while she was away must have been really good, as she was much faster than me, and soon ran past me. The snapshot on the left at the bottom of this post captures that moment that the two of us, Kaidie and Kailives, are locked in a fierce battle, in the same spatio-temporal dimension. But like before, she ran off, and could not be relocated.
On 22 March, I was hoping that Kaidie would turn up for her own gig at the Slade. I went on stage to do what had to be done, hoping that she would join me at some point. And she did. Not in broad daylight, as it was nearly 22:00hrs, but right behind my back! This photograph on the right shows myself speaking in the foreground, in front if the audience, and Kaidie behind me, in the form of video pixels. It was a black-and-white video (see above) of her in the metaverse, the world-within-world of Second Life. There, she is called ‘Kaidie Absent’.
One would have thought that this is the grand moment of cathartic clarification, of disentanglement and denouement, where all loose ends of this long-running tedious (melo)drama are tied together. But this being (Kaidie’s) life, gosh/no/never/dream on/fat chance/what are you talking about/get out of here. And, this being Kaidie’s life, there are now even more questions than the number of hair in your nostrils (when did you last tabulate the results in your Excel sheets?). Some of the ones sticking out include:
Has Kaidie been in Second Life all this while? Isn’t that too easy! Was it The Good Pirate who kidnapped her there? Was it the Good Pirate who kept the promise of releasing Kaidie for the charity run? What does the Good Pirate want? What is the ransom? After the run, did Kaidie return to SL? Where in SL is she? What is she doing? Where is she visiting? Who is she meeting? Are they like her Life 1.0 brief encounters, or briefer still? Is Kaidie on the ‘Always Run’ motion mode in there? Does she have blisters in SL? She looks like she’s enjoying flying, but does she get (e)motion sickness from flying, like she did on the day that we first met? Has she found the obscure object of her 1000-day quest, the Meaning of Life 3.0? (Must she find The Meaning Of Life 2.0 [?] before that?) Did Kaidie upload the video on her Youtube channel herself? If so, does this mean that she is coming back, to communicate with us, to run her own Facebook account and other Web 2.0 accounts?
If she comes back, shouldn’t I go? Surely I was just Kaidie’s temporary stand-in in Life 1.0 and Life 2.0 outside of the world-within-world of SL while she was in there. Surely I should not figure in the logic of the world of Life 3.0, for the whole point is that Kaidie runs to-and-fro between Life 1.0 and Life 2.0, and that Life 3.0 is an in-between and even transcendent spatio-temporal dimension. Surely only Kaidie should be the real deal, our first guinea pig for the theory of Life 3.0. (Unless, of course, when Kaidie needs a helping hand – Kaidie did dis-locate a part of her body. I am also an avid reader of her blog, so I would have been disappointed if it was not updated. As Kaidie’s firm Facebook Friend, it is right that I help her keep up appearances.)
But enough already. When will Kaidie return to write this blog herself?
Dear Friends of Kaidie, wouldn’t you be so kind as to go locate ‘Kaidie Absent’ in Second Life? Talk to her. Ask her to come back. Coax her to leave her kidnapper. Remind her that Second Life is not the only life, that there is First Life as well as her Third.
She knows it.
TO KAIDIE’S SPONSORS FOR THE MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES RUN, THANK YOU VERY MUCH INDEED! from all of us.
Dear Joy, Kian Chow, Jon, Miss Nim, Kal, Horst, Wee San, Chutha, Sarah, Omar and Chin Hwee,
How are you? We hope you had a good weekend.
1. We would like to say THANK YOU very much indeed for having made a generous contribution to Kaidie’s participation in the Friends of Medecins Sans Frontieres charity race. Thanks to you, in a matter of only 2 weeks, £110 was collected under Kaidie’s name.
2. Because of your financial blackmail, Kaidie had sworn to ‘not let you down’, ‘do her very best’, ‘keep going’ till she ‘drops dead’, ‘reach the finishing line while thinking of you for 10km’, and so on.
3. However, all that promised, much has happened in the last 10 days, that has left us a little baffled. Kaidie had a tumble while practising her run all-too-eagerly, and subsequently, suddenly disappeared, 1 week prior to the race. There had been several conflciting reports of her being thereafter, in and across Lives 3.0, 2.0, and 1.0. There had even been suggesions that she had ‘moved on’ to Lives 4.0 or 43.2. At the meantime, Kailives has emerged, to keep up appearances in Kaidie’s absence.
4. Whilst we were wondering/pondering which space-time dimensions restless Kaidie has relocated or transmigrated, we also found a map of Kaidie’s very own version of the run route, which left us worried if Kaidie would ever complete the stipulated 10km! To add to the cacaphony of signals, we received a note from a ‘Good Pirate’ on the very morning of 14 March, hinting in a somewhat coded manner that Kaidie would be ‘released’ for the run.
5. Today, we received a set of photographs from Cadam, Dadam, and Eadam (THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH INDEED!) The 3 Nondoners were taking a walk in Regents Fark and caught the race. “I whipped up my phone to take photos of the runners because I was so irritated that they blocked the roads and spoiled my Sunday walk,” Cadam cries furiously. Dadam adds, “But I recall Kailives’ plea for help to locate Kaidie, and knowing Kaidie’s shapeshifting talents, I took pictures of the Banana Man and the Naked Man in the run, thinking that either – or both – might be Kaidie in disguise”. “I was looking out for a 3-month old crawling,” Eadam says.
6. Examining the photographs, we ask: Who is this out-of-focus many-headed person? Is this Kaidie or Kailives? Or both of them in the same space-time? What did they say to each other on their reunification? Or did they distribute the workload and did 5km each? And which route(s) did they take? The official Friends of Medecins Sans Frontieres run route, or the one Kaidie had drawn out? Did Kaidie/Kailives complete the run, or did they disappoint you, their sponsors?
7. Keen to find out nothing but the truths, we went back to Regents Fark this morning and combed through the area. After several seconds, we found a shoe tag 264 near the ducks’ pond, and Kaidie’s certificate near the giraffes’ dwelling! Then, squatting at Kaidie’s email, we were also sent a set of timings of the run, telling us that a ‘Kaidie Nondon’, aka ‘264′, has completed the run at 53 minutes 20 seconds, which translates at an approximate 11.3kmh. Out of the 82 girls who ran the 10km race, Kaidie ranks 16.
8. Suffice to say that we are relieved. So Kaidie/Kailives/either/or/neither/nor/both did not take your money and run off, but did run to the finishing line. Amorphous and reality-flexible as she is, she still has some old-fashioned virtues of sticking to her promises.
9. However, we do not know where they have next run off to. Wherever they are now, they must have gone in a hurry, for they had left the shoe tag and certificate behind (perhaps deliberately, as she did her glove).
10. If you are reading this, Kaidie/Kailives, please use the dustbin the next time.
Dear Sponsors, we do apologise for having to step in and speak on Kaidie’s behalf, but we wish to say THANK YOU once again, for making this generous donation for a worthy cause. It was a tiny gesture on Kaidie’s part (and she might have distributed her workload with Kailives anyways), but your donation helps people to get the medical attention that they need . Please do not forget to continue to support the work of the Medecins Sans Frontieres (while we clean up Kaidie’s acts).
With much gratitude,
From all of us.
BREAKING NEWS: LOCATED: Kaidie’s ‘plan of attack’ for Sunday’s run. KAIDIE’S SPONSORS, I hope she does NOT run/crawl THIS route!!
I HAVE TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU! I have just found this while sifting through Kaidie’s laptop, which comes in the folder named ‘Plan Of Attack for MSF Run’. Immediately, this sent a sharp, deep chill down my spine – instead of the official running route outlined by the Friends of the Medecins Sans Frontieres for this Sunday’s run, Kaidie was going to run in all the in-between spaces in between the route drawn out, as well as running in between other runners, on top of making several detours to visit her friends at the zoo and the pond (Kaidie’s even packed her swimming togs! AND GOGGLES!), as well as running on and on, looped, until the Fark closes. We know that Kaidie is a non-linear in-betweener and that she is a restless traveller of lives and across lives, blahblahblah, but this is just a little bit too much, for she will NEVER reach the finishing line. And how is she going to report to her sponsors?? KAIDIE, IF YOU ARE READING THIS, I’M TELLING YOU THAT I AM DESTROYING THIS MAP SO THAT YOU CAN’T USE THIS ON SUNDAY! … But I don’t trust you – maybe I should do the run instead? … But your shoes are way too tiny for me… I am not convinced why I should get blisters and runners toes on your behalf, Kaidie.
KAIDIE, DISLOCATED.
Where on google-earth might Kaidie be? 2 days ago Kaidie reported that she ‘fell head over heals at Fuston Road’ and that it ‘transformed’ her. She shared some image of some dislocated part of her body with some injury of some sorts. We – by that I mean you and I – have not heard from her since. I have had to hack into her site and ask you: would you know where Kaidie might be? Have you seen Kaidie in Nondon?
DAY 68: LOVE IN LIFE 3.0: ONE OF THE POSSIBLE MEANINGS OF LIFE 3.0? (HAPPY BELATED VALENTINE’S DAY.)
In my lifelong quest for The Meaning of A Life 3.0, Guillaume, one of my Dear Readers, writes in and advises me to seek love in Life 3.0. Specifically, he does not suggest that I ‘find love’ in general; instead, he says that I should ‘find many loves’. Perhaps that can help me to find the meaning of life / my Life 3.0?
As a 2+month old, ‘love’ is an abstract concept to me, be it in the single or plural form. What better place for an answer, or rather, many pseudo-answers, than the Internet. I wikipedia-ed the 4-letter word, learn a little about it. (For that matter, ‘life’ is another 4-letter word that is abstract, though perhaps slightly less so since I am a practitioner of it [and you too, I assume?]). Love sounds like an interesting notion. I (assume that I) know how to ‘be’, but ‘being in love’ is something else. In the past 67 days, I have fallen off the treadmill before, but I have not fallen in love. With the ups and downs, pain and pleasure, anticipation and disappointment, hoo and haa and brouhaha, performance and ritual, melodrama and horror+slapstick+action and all that, I wouldn’t mind toying with my emotions. In this short life, I have nothing to lose.
In my short lesson to learn about all that theorising about love, I come across another 4-letter word: date. Given however that I have much less time (932 days left only in my entire life) than most other people ‘out there’, I can not afford to date date. Instead, I must speed date. So I did.
All photographs, except that of the book, are taken by Mr Lorenzo Levrini. The faces of the participants become pixelated from the propsect of experiencing l-o-v-e.
With Valentine’s Day in the backdrop, I soak in the atmosphere, although this time I do it not by turning myself into a sponge, but by seeking matchmaker Afterdita Pacrami, who encourages me to participate in a speed-dating event, called London Loves Speeddating. I bring along a book called Virtual Dimension (John Beckmann 1998).
So there are 8 men and 8 women, and there is a band playing. The idea is that after every tune, ie about 3-4 minutes, the men rotate themselves. Given my very short attention span due to my very young age, this format suits me just fine. Many of the men are indeed very interesting people. Some can speak exotic languages, some have lived in faraway lands, one unpacks Gaudi’s influences eloquently, others are sexily into law and the hard sciences. Most seem to be nice, kind and lovely people. But it stops there – love-ly, but not love itself. Sadly there is none of that topsyturvyturmoil that is described on the internet about l-o-v-e itself.
So Kaidie’s first ever dating, and speed dating event, has failed. (Maybe I should try speedhating instead?) My attempt to find love has resulted to nought. Thank you Guillaume for your advice, but I have to report that I can find not even one single love, let alone ‘many loves’, but I will still keep an other 4-letter word, h-o-p-e.
For now, let me plunge deeper into the Virtual Dimension, until something n-i-c-e comes along. As usual, your k-i-n-d advice is welcome.
DOUBLETHINK: CONTRADICTORY IN TERMS
One of Kaidie’s guidebooks in Life 3.0 is George Orwell’s 1984, for several reasons. Like Life 3.0, the city of London is the novel’s mise-en-scene. In Orwell’s universe, reality is seen through an inverted lens, where the Ministry of Defence fights permanent wars, and the Ministry of Love (I love this- ‘miniluv’) operates through the mechanism of fear. That deep parallels can be drawn with our reality today can not be emphasised enough. And, like the notion of doublethink, Life 3.0 embodies contradictions without contradiction, with no apology. Like Smith, Kaidie is an experiment; while Smith’s choices may seem limited compared to Kaidie’s in Life 3.0, like Kaidie, Smith contrives to seek spaces within which he could exist/live/be. Orwell’s depiction of Smith’s process of torture through to reeducation and final love of Big Brother, is so slowburning that the final inevitable explosion – or, more accurately, implosion - resembles fingernails scratching a chalkboard, largo, breaking in the process and the small sharp bits scratching and incising the pink raw skin where the nail once was itself, a procedure so calculated and clinical as to be chilling, heartbreaking, repulsive and devastating as it is sublimely beautiful, a la Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom, Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange or a Gould’s rendition of the slow movement of the Emperor concerto. Yet another reason why 1984 resonates with Kaidie is of course, how it has been said that the circumstances of one of her previous lives was ‘Orwellian’.
ON TRIAL: PARTICIPANT 12(F) WITH ELECTRODES, SNAKES, 1k TONE, KY JELLY, 2 X (PLACEBO) PILLS.
Kadie undertook her first experiment as a lab rat last week. Now, Kadie is no longer Kaidie, but 12(F).
It would have been impossible to not be affected in any degree, with 4 hours of pills, existential ennui, electric shocks of varying degrees on the left hand, liberal applications of a nice lubrication, and staring at stills of snakes alternating with frames of blacks and crimson, oscillating between silence, very loud dead tones and its feedback, just like a copycat Paul Sharits or Peter Kubelka flicker film (I implore you my Dear Readers to kindly hook up your laptop to speakers, turn volume to the max, and WATCH FULLSCREEN, or, better still, projected large in a darkened space. Yes, we do know that a Web 2.0 representation does no justice whatsoever to these mindblowing films, but since the alternative is not watching them at all, sometimes a poor simulation is a lesser evil).
Hello World. My name is not Kaidie. My name is 12F. Like Smith in the final act after his elaborate reeducation process, my transformation is complete. I feel real, for once. I smile incessantly now. Life is no longer dark and hypocritical , and I am living a lie no more. I am converted. Everything is all right. The struggle was finished. 2 gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of my nose. I feel jolly wonderful. I have a perpetual smile on my face and black bars across my eyes (and so does the researcher, who must have undergone the experiment himself as well). The experiment succeeded.
I will now see Nondon with a new set of eyes. A few shades darker, if at all, if I could peek through that black bar.
IN THE PINK OF HEALTH: DAY 55: (ONE OF) KAIDIE’S MAPPINGS OF HER LIFE 3.0: NOT A WORLD OF BLACKS AND WHITES, BUT OSCILLATIONS OF IN BETWEENS.
If you can read between the lines and gaze between the greys and grays, why don't you test out this mapping in YOUR life?
COPENHAGEN: DEAL/NO DEAL/EITHER/OR/NEITHER/NOR
The age of stupid, again (and again, looped, across many life, and death cycles)
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UPDATABLE GLOSSARY: SYSTEM OF 3s OR IN-BETWEEN
Farrington Roads
GLOSSARY/ WIKI ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OF KAIDIE / LIFE 3.0,
AND THE THEATRE OF CHARACTERS (ongoing). SEEKING DEFINITIONS AND MULTIPLE+ ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS! CONTRIBUTE NOW!
VARIATIONS OF SYSTEMS OF 3s or IN-BETWEENS:
* Ma
* Wa, Va
* Buddhism’s Middle Way
* Aristotle’s Mind, Self-knowledge, Self-love
* Plato’s Rational, Libidinous, Spirited
* Saussure’s Sign, Signified, Signifier
* Pierce’s Sign, Object, Interpretant
* Liminality
* Lacan’s real-symbolic-imaginary
* Trimurti
* Carl Jung’s triple dieties
* Tridevi
*Lacuna
* Tibetan Buddhism’s Bardo
* Hegel’s Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis
* Eisenstein’s Synthesis
* Karl Popper’s World 3
* Fuzzy Logic
* Deleuze’s becoming
* Derrida’s Diff’erance
* Heidegger’s in zwischen
* Artaud’s / Deleuze’s subjectile
* 3rd Eye
* 3rd Sex
* 3rd Age
* Holy Trinity
* Tony Blair’s 3rd way
THERE ARE SO MANY OTHER SYSTEMS OF 3 OUT THERE- WHICH OF THEM DO YOU THINK WOULD BE USEFUL FOR US TO ATTEMPT TO LOCATE LIFE 3.0?
MA: THE CONCEPT OF IN-BETWEEN: PART 1
Life 3.0 is located in between Life 1.0 and Life 2.0. A 3rd-Lifer lives in a state of meta-cognition. Rather like Jeremy Benthem’s panopticon, and that ’special’ edition of the Hollywood blockbuster with ‘Fimmaker’s audio commentary!’, I am my own commentator of my own life with super wide-screen x-ray vision - as I live my life I am simultaneously analysing, unpacking and commenting about it. Which is one of the reasons why we are here. (And, like other post-911 superheroes, this superpower of mine is as much a blessing as it is a burden…) In the attempt to locate Life 3.0 so as to better understand my own position (literally), I re-read the thoughts of various philosophies. Here is one of them, the concept of in-between, ma. Here are some notes:
1) WHAT IS MA? AN INTRODUCTION
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by ‘taking the fat off space’. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses. ‘I collect silences’, said Heinrich Boll […] Isaac Stern described music as ‘that little bit between each note – silences which give the form’. Frank Kafka warned that ‘[…] Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence … someone might possibly have escaped from their singing, but for their silence, certainly never.’ [...] The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission. [1]
In the discussion of space, it is easy to neglect the significance of ‘negative space’, as designer Alan Fletcher reminds us in his encyclopaedic The Art Of Seeing. To be sure, that which is present (‘positive’) is surely more substantial to discuss than that which is not (‘negative’). The very term ‘negative’, in its ordinary day-to-day usage, may sometimes have an unpleasant connotation.
Well, you may not know what you are missing.
Do not mind the gap.
Ma (間) is a concept of absence and in-between, which is a departure from a way of looking that privileges the tangible. It is a powerful concept with many faces and layers. Apart from space, ma is applied to the discussion of time as well, revealing that in Japan there was ‘not even a distinction between space and time like in modern Western thought’.[3] The word ‘ma’ essentially refers to ‘an “interval” between two (or more) spatial or temporal things and events. Thus it is not only used in compounds to suggest measurement but carries meanings such as gap, opening, space between, time between, and so forth’.[4]
This spatio-temporal principle of ma underlies all traditional Japanese art forms. However, Like other Japanese aesthetic principles, ma goes beyond just being a ‘way of seeing’, but is a ‘way of life’ as well, for, as Japanese architect Arata Isozaki puts it, it is a ‘fluid term able to encompass many aspects of life in Japan. [5]
[Ma] describes both time and space through a notion of interval. This usage is the basis for understanding all spheres of the environment, life and art to the extent that architecture, fine art, music, drama and gardens in Japan can be called ‘the art of ma’. This undifferentiated understanding of time and space can be considered an important basis for the emergence of differences expressed in Japanese and Western artistic expressions. [6]
That said, while now taken to be a ‘quintessentially’ Japanese notion, like many aspects of Japanese culture and life, ma has its origins in the Chinese philosophies of Taosim, Confucianism and Buddhism. In addition, as typical of cultures that view life as cyclical and temporal, ma as a concept appears to be imprecise according to Western paradigms, adhering to the exasperating ‘oriental’ logic of ‘contradiction’.[7] On another note, although initially a concept applied to the thinking of traditional Japanese art forms, like all robust concepts, ma is versatile enough to be extrapolated to the analysis of other arts (as seen in Fletcher’s quotation above) and indeed, life itself.
2) THE ROOTS OF MA
a) HISTORICAL CONTEXT
To be sure, the concept of a pregnant void has existed way before the notion of manothingness (or emptiness, manifested variously in concepts such as mu, wu, shunyata) is a recurrent theme in Eastern philosophies, a problematic term that is at once mystified and romanticised as it is often misunderstood. Rather than being something that is ‘negative’ or undesirable, it is, on the contrary, a coveted state of mind that diligent Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists alike seek to attain, via various rigorous techniques such as meditation. was formulated in Japan. The notion of
The bedrock of the philosophy of Taoism, Tao Te Ching, written around 6 B.C, contains several texts that deal with the notion of nothingness. Lao Tzu eloquently articulates the role of nothing:
Thirty spokes / Share one hub / Adapt the nothing [wu] therein to the purpose in hand, / and you will have the use of / the cart. Knead clay in order to make a / vessel. Adapt the nothing therein to the / purpose in hand, and you will have the use of / the vessel. Cut out doors and windows in order / to make a room. Adapt the nothing therein to / the purpose in hand, and you will have the use / of the room. Thus what we gain is / Something [yu], yet it is by virtue of Nothing [wu] that this can be put / to use.[8]
For time immemorial, the Japanese have always proved to be Masters of Mashup, being cunningly skilful in how they sampled / appropriated systems and habits of the world to whip into something that would later be identified as ‘idiosyncratically Japanese’ (take for instance Japanese language and the kimono, which are from the Chinese [9]; astonishingly, in 1999, two Japanese companies even claim to have ‘invented’ Indian curry, and attempted to claim patent for it![10]). This was to be the case for the concept of ma as well, as ‘the Tao Te Ching is […] an important place to locate a ma-like element’.[11] Indeed, ma, ‘the Japanese concept of a time-space continuum, complements mu: ma conceives of time and space not as absolute measurable entities’, as the West think of them, but ‘essentially as a void, defined only by the movements and events that take place within it. Space and time are not two distinct entities, but two interrelated dimensions’.[12]
If ma has a contemporary human face (and body), he would manifest in the shape of Isozaki, who was responsible for ‘introducing’ the concept of ma to the western world through his seminal exhibition ‘Ma’: Space-Time in Japan (1978-81) in Paris and New York. This interdisciplinary exhibition ‘presented Japan’s artistic culture through the unifying concept of ‘Ma’ – Space/Time as a basic organisational principle found in Japanese painting, photography, theatre, performance, music, sculpture, architecture and daily life. [13] Ma-mascot Isozaki speculates that the oldest form of the concept of ma was the notion of utsu (void).
Utsu signifies the void inside a certain substance, a cave in a rocky mountain, the hollow inside an old tree, the ‘dug-out’ of a canoe, or the cavity of a pit dwelling – the sacred spirit was thought to lodge in all of these voids. As the view towards the void became more ritualised, even a solid gem was believed to contain a void a sack of cloth, without holes for hands and feet, was thought to be inhabited by the sacred God. The more severed from exteriority, the more sacred the internal void.[14]
This is consistent with our understanding of Shinto as a pantheistic religion. Isozaki explains how the ancient Japanese attempted to visualise and formalise the movement of the kami (spirits) through time and space. This act of waiting for the appearance of the kami is the underlying principle of the Japanese conception of space and time.[15] In fact, the essential subject of many Japanese artistic pursuits (such as Noh and Kabuki theatre) is precisely the representationmoment of inhabitation of a space by kami. [16] Isozaki goes on to assert that in this framework, ‘space was recognised only through the mediation of time’. [17] This is a radical departure from the Western conception of the objective time-space paradigm.
Let us keep this imagery of ma being a space in which the kami appears in mind. We shall come back to it later but for now, let us return to the mortal world attempt to look at more tangible ways to define ma, and see how it permeates in the basic tenets of Japanese life.
b) ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD
Language is one area in which the Japanese have indeed done a good job in customising it to suit their needs, and any learner of the Japanese language can attest to the difficulty in grasping, much less mastering, the nuances ( – which is slightly embarrassing if one wishes to claim that one’s first language is Chinese). There was much that the teacher at my hothouse Japanese language school in Tokyo could teach (and I could learn) – but there was so much more that is fascinating as it is frustrating in the Japanese language.
Take the beguilingly simple single character of ma, which is the centre of our investigation. The Chinese character ma (間) is made up of two elements: the gate or door (mon, 門) and the inner character meaning sun (hi, 日) or moon (tsuki, 月). The character itself has a repertoire of meanings both tangible and abstract. ‘A room is called ma, for example, as it refers to the space between the walls; a rest in music is also ma as the pause between the notes or sounds’. [18]
For Isozaki,
Ma is the natural distance between two or more things existing in a continuity or the space delineated by posts and screens. To sense something invisible is an essence of Japanese art. It also pervades various aspects of life & culture in Japan. In painting, the focus has often been on the margin rather than on shape, in music on silence rather than the notes and in dance on stillness rather than movement. All of these can be expressed by a single term: ma 間.’[19]
One person inspired by the Ma exhibition in New York in 1979 who put his excitement into good use was Richard B. Pilgrim, a scholar on Japanese religion and art. Pilgrim waxes lyrical of this ideogram:
The visual image or character, therefore, suggests a light shining through a gate or door. If we were to take the gate itself as representing the things or phenomena and events of the world, the opening in the gate becomes a ma or interval between the things. Yet ma is not a mere emptiness or opening; through and in it shines a light, and the function of this ma becomes precisely to let that light shine through. [20]
Ecstatic with this imagery, Pilgrim goes on to elaborate:
A literary example of this image can be found in the twelfth-century novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki: “It was the fifteenth night of the eighth month. The light of an enclouded full-moon shone between the ill-fitting planks of the roof and flooded the room. What a queer place to be lying in!, thought Genji, as he gazed around the garret, so different from any room he had ever known before.” [21]
While Pilgrim’s lyrical flourish may appear a little excessive, it is fascinating indeed that a single ideogram alone can encapsulate such a striking imagery. It helps us to understand the multifaceted ways in which ma is used in the Japanese language, and in essence, deeply ingrained in Japanese consciousness. Indeed, ‘the concept of ma became customised and widespread in many aspects of Japanese life’.[22] kami making a visitation in ma. Again, let us keep this imagery of light shining through a door in our mind; we shall return to this imagery later, along with that of the kami making a visitation in ma.
The character of ma can be combined with other words to make compound words related to time and space such as:
時間 (ji kan): time
空間 (kuu kan): space (where kuu = ‘empty’; ma is read kan here)
間もなく (ma mo naku): soon
間に合う (ma ni au): on time
この間 (kono aida)：the other day (where ma is read aida here)
Then, ma then can also mean ‘among’ :
仲間(naka ma): companion
人間 (nin gen): human being (ma is read gen here)
Pilgrim takes the compound ningen to refer to ‘persons (nin, hito) stand within, among, or in relationship to others. As such, the word ma clearly begins to take on a relational meaning- a dynamic sense of standing in, with, among, or between’. [23]
Ma also ‘carries an experiential connotation since to be among persons is to interact in some dynamic way’. [24] The following phrases illustrate this nuance:
間をとる (ma wo toru): stop, pause
間遠い (ma chigai): mistake
間が悪い (ma ga warui): unlucky, embarrassed
間抜け (ma nuke): stupidity
Since ma signifies the ‘distance between two points’, Isozaki adds that ‘maintaining distance was deemed imperative in human relations as well; those who ignore this were called manuke (missing or lacking distance), meaning “idiot”. [25] When I learnt this phrase in language school, I thought that this is such an elegant way to call someone an idiot that I would not hesitate to be called one (in the Japanese language). To be sure, there are other less poetic antonyms in the Japanese language, but compared to terms available in the English language,[26] I will take manuke anytime (and anywhere).
[1] Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon Press, 2001), (p. 370).
[2]Concordia College, “Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966.” Art and Physics: Artists. <http://www.cord.edu/faculty/andersod/giacometti.html> [accessed 20 November 2009]
[3] Arata Isozaki and Ken Tadashi Oshima, Arata Isozaki (Phaidon Press, 2009), (p. 161).
[4] Richard B. Pilgrim, “Intervals (“Ma”) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan,” History of Religions, 25 (1986), 255-277 (p. 255).
[5] Isozaki and Oshima, p. 158
[6] Arata Isozaki and Ken Tadashi Oshima, Arata Isozaki (Phaidon Press, 2009), (p. 157). Italics mine.
[7] Daniel Charles, “Bringing The Ryoan-Ji To The Screen.” Taka Iimura homepage. Translated by Eleanor Mitch from the French, copy edited by Nadine Covert <http://www.takaiimura.com/review/DC.html> [accessed 20 November 2009]
[8] Richard B. Pilgrim, “Intervals (“Ma”) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan,” History of Religions, 25 (1986), 255-277 (p. 264).
[9] RECALL MORE, AND STRONGER, SHARPER EXAMPLES- THERE ARE MANY!!!
[10] Geoffrey Lean and Fran Abrams, “Japan in a hurry to claim rights to curry – News – The Independent.” The Independent, November 28, 1999. <ariyavansa.org> [ accessed 20 November 2009]
[11] Pilgrim, p. 264
[12] Kathe Geist, “West Looks East: The Influence of Yasujiro Ozu on Wim Wenders and Peter Handke,” Art Journal, 43 (1983), 234-239 (p. 234).
[13] Isozaki and Oshima, p. 172
[14] Ibid, p. 158
[15] Ibid, p. 157
[16] Ibid, p. 157
[17] Ibid, p. 157
[18] Ibid, p. 158
[19] Isozaki and Oshima, p. 158
[20] Pilgrim, p. 257
[21] Ibid, p. 257
[22] Isozaki and Oshima, p. 161
[23] Pilgrim, p. 256
[24] Ibid, p. 256
[25] Isozaki and Oshima, p. 161
[26] Such as ‘fool, ass, halfwit, dunce, dolt, ignoramus, cretin, moron, imbecile, simpleton; informal dope, ninny, nincompoop, chump, dimwit, dumbo, dummy, dum-dum, loon, dork, sap, jackass, blockhead, jughead, bonehead, knucklehead, fathead, numbskull, numbnuts, dumb-ass, doofus, clod, dunderhead, ditz, lummox, dipstick, thickhead, meathead, meatball, woodenhead, airhead, pinhead, lamebrain, peabrain, birdbrain, jerk, nerd, donkey, nitwit, twit, boob, twerp, schmuck, bozo, turkey, chowderhead and dingbat’. From Apple Dictionary, version 2.0.2 (51.4).
