Farewell Tokyo

On the weekend I found myself again in the mysteriously and endlessly urbanized sublime of Tokyo. One may gather from my diction of absolutes that I am merely reiterating a static perception of a static world. That is possible to say, but there is another way of looking at my experiences in Japan's capital that one must always consider anew with the turn of each page. This image is, as Wallace Stevens taught us with his "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", simultaneously an ending and a possibility: "the edge / Of one of many circles." Where I stop is where I keep on going. As Wittgenstein says, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" — whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

In this silence, the ineffable expresses itself. What I speak of is not an expression that we are used to, being accustomed to the book of human language. Rather, what is brought into being by itself, rather than words, which are an 'elegy to what they signify,' cannot be approached, wrapped up, and synthesized. However much we seek for, thrive on, and perish for the sake of a synthetic unity, a self made whole, it is only by sacrifice, by dying a symbolic death, that true communion happens.

What am I talking about? Whom may it concern?

One way of looking at Tokyo...