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A traditional Japanese house isn’t sealed and centrally heated in winter. The heat is localized in particular rooms. Or even a part of a room, which part might be a table with a quilt covering and an electric heating bulb underneath. This heated table is a kotatsu.
A kotatsu squats on the tatami floor. Seated under it, the lower half of the body becomes deliciously warm, and the warmth moves up through your clothes while your head stays cool and alert. You eat, read, write, watch TV from its womblike environment. And because you are sitting on the floor, at any time you can lie back to relax or nap and still be cocooned in warmth.
During the winter, the kotatsu becomes an intimate focal point for friends and family who spend a lot of time sitting across from each other under it. Not every house has one these days, for there are those who prefer to heat a room to move about in. But I couldn’t imagine the colder months without the simple, intimate pleasure of the kotatsu.
kotatsu
mikan tangerines
a flask of hot sake:
the joys of winter
--Julian
Note: This is one of an occasional series on the simple pleasures of Japan. To find the others, click 2008 in the Archives (right column of this page), type “pleasure” in the “Filter posts by tag” box at the top of the page that appears, and hit the “Go” button. In the series so far: tatami; ofuro (bath); jinja (shrine); sakura (cherry blossom); ocha (green tea), and uchimizu (scattering water in summer).
In the late afternoon after the storm, I looked up from my desk and noticed the house across the road was bathed in pink. Rushing to an upstairs window, I saw the western sky was rivers of crimson. Minutes later--by the time I grabbed a camera--it had faded, and the last of the light disappeared behind distant, cloud-shrouded Fuji.
. . . by a man on a psychedelic journey.
From Coyote Crossing:
During the 28-year history of the 87-mile-long Berlin Wall, 136 people are known to have died attempting to cross it. That’s an average of just under five people a year.
Since 1994, an average of 373 people have died attempting to cross the US border with Mexico every year — 75 times as many as in Germany. The proximate cause of these deaths may be dehydration, hyperthermia, exposure and drowning rather than East German bullets, but they are deaths caused by government policy just the same. They are still deaths deliberately used by the state to deter people from crossing.
Read the whole thing here.
—David
A gusty wind roars up the valley, twisting the trees and bending the bamboo. The spiders webs under the eaves and in the garden hang in tatters. A fine, dense rain falls, then is whipped and carried by the storm. Clouds barely visible, gray upon gray, scud low and fast. The house sweats and creaks, wind rattling the windows and moaning through the cracks. Every now and then a chorus of frogs croaks in the orchard. Crows, flying at the mercy of the wind, complain.
This is either terrible weather, not fit to be gone out in. Or it’s wrap up and head out to join the excitement.
--Julian
--Julian
Slavoj Zizek
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism [in the former Eastern Bloc] draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
Read the whole thing here.
—David
Rick Fields believes that the current trouble with authority in American Buddhism arises in part from the attempt to transplant an oriental monastery/temple tradition into an occidental setting of laymen and women, neither monks nor priests. By analogy, the troubles in American Hinduism might be seen to emerge from the transportation of a rigid system of caste and social role (in which 'householders' cannot be sadhus) into a society based on the rejection of the validity of such roles. But what of Islam, which has neither priests nor monks, and in which the ideal Sufi remains 'in the world'—family, job, etc.—'but not of it?' In Fields's theory such institutions would be relatively easy to adapt to Western 'democratic' social structures. Perhaps, however, the problem is not at root one of incomparable social structures or inappropriate institutions, but precisely a problem of authority. The oriental religions have looked for ways to implement a theory of virtually absolute authority in a social setting based on a culture that has passed through and been deeply changed by the Protestant Reformation, bourgeois and proletarian revolution, and so-called sexual revolution. As Foucault points out, these 'revolutions' only become articulated within the discourse of history at the very moment in which they 'disappear'—so that, in his paradoxical reading, our society is in fact post-Protestant, post-revolutionary, and post-sexual. The new 'authorities' created by revolution and reformation are themselves now seen to be empty. Even the 'experts' of the sexual revolution have proven themselves false prophets: we are not dancing toward an era of liberated desire, but lurching backwards toward some dark age of plague-fear and sexual hysteria in which all desire will eventually be experienced as 'abuse' or 'sin.' Thus within the American Roman Catholic Church we have cardinals who fulminate against every form of human pleasure in language as deeply imbued with hysteria (if not literary style) as Cotton Mather's—while at the same time vast numbers of priests are in trouble for 'abusing' various orphans or parishoners. Televangelism has lost much of its political i.e., financial, power since the 1980s in a series of sexual and fiscal scandals. In the 'Orient' adulterous women and homosexuals are stoned to death. There's a great deal less sexual freedom in the world now than in medieval times, perhaps even Victorian times. All the talk talk talk about sexuality (as Foucault says) has led only to new modalities of repression/oppression. . . .
Let me be clear: personally I do not disapprove of sexual intercourse nor of 'deviant' desire and pleasure. I do, however, disapprove of hypocrisy, power-tripping, and the self-aggrandizement of self-proclaimed avatars. I can even imagine erotic love as an integral aspect of spiritual/pedagogic companionship, but only on condition of its open consensuality. I reject (for myself) the moral/sexual codes of outdated and reactionary religious ideologies, but I accept (for myself) the best ethics I can imagine, based on a perception of the other as an aspect of self, so that my desire to some extent depends on the other's desire and not on the other's loss. If I can do this for myself, then I can demand of anyone who claims to be able to teach self-realization that he too follow this minimal ethics of mutuality. . . .
I suggest that many of the Oriental traditions have fallen prey to a guru-prinzip which makes the nearness of realization a kind of commodity, promised but never delivered, since deliverance would threaten the power-monopoly of the guru. . . .
Traditional power relations are tragically out of synch with our needs for connection and conviviality. . . . Spirituality is not a master/slave relation—it is not an "Oriental despotism." Not any more. Not now. Maybe it never was. Who cares? Here and now:—we need something different.
—Peter Lamborn Wilson in Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam
—David
