JapaneseDeathPoems [she/her]

  • 9 Posts
  • 83 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: October 16th, 2020
  • JapaneseDeathPoems [she/her]toelectoralism•DemocRAT party WINS! - GENERAL MEGATHREAD November 4th 2020 Part 2
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    4 years ago

    A certain Japanese professor has defined Japanese culture as "a culture of death." In a long essay he argues that the "collective unconsciousness" of the Japanese is governed by a strong attraction toward death.

    His theory somehow explains even the peculiar five and seven-beat rhythm that characterizes Japanese poetry. "If Freud was correct," his thesis concludes, "and the death wish is a basic desire in all human culture, then it can be admitted that one culture in particular may represent that desire."

    Another professor claims, to the contrary, that the outstanding feature of Japanese culture is the love of the Japanese people for all phenomena. The Japanese, he says, are unwilling to believe in a reality separate from this world; they understand the abstract in terms of the world's concrete features - its mountains, rivers, trees, and insects.

    It is true that the millions of people living on the isles of Japan are a single nation, and a nation, so they say, has its own particular culture. Every student of that culture who explains it one way or another is probably correct from his point of view.

    Contradictory ideas may be found within a single person; how much more so, then, in an entire nation? Poems written before death no doubt reflect the attitudes of the dying, and what hundreds and thousands of Japanese say before death must certainly partake of the "Japanese spirit."

    Let us not forget, however, that when someone dies; it is not a nation but an individual that is dying. A person can bequeath his property and even his opinions to his survivors, but he buries his own name with him. And what stands behind that name, which belongs to the man alone, will never be understood by another. This is perhaps what a certain little-known poet named Tomoda Kimpei meant when he composed his death poem:

    In life I never was

    among the well-known flowers

    and yet, in withering

    I am most certainly

    Tomoda Kimpei.

  • JapaneseDeathPoems [she/her]toelectoralism•Good Morning, Wednesday Morning Main is CLOSED - GENERAL MEGATHREAD November 4th 2020
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    4 years ago

    As a Zen Master I bring you this secret from the void:

    We live today in the eye of the storm, at the end of the Imperial Core and in the twilight of Western cultural hegemony. Celebrate. We should then be patient, calm, and save ourselves for the spring.

    But nothing has fundamentally changed?

    Everything has fundamentally changed.

    Neo-Maoists now control the leading factions in global capitalism. The fascist coup attempt is imploding. The online “Thule Society” at the heart of the Western far-right has been decapitated. The QAnon cult has been cut loose.

    We have enough to hang them. Supporting a fascist coup and losing puts a person in a very weak position: that of a traitor - not just to the American state, but to all of humanity.

    The financiers of this coup — Peter Thiel — are surely trying to distance themselves, and may do so successfully, but the remaining far-right conspirators, especially those in the networks associated with 4chan and /Pol/, are soft targets - they are paralyzed.

    We can go for a full sweep.