Notes from Asia:
Some notes about Asian literature and cinema. I studied Eastern philosophy in college, and had some familiarity with it over the years. I knew that their big guys, Confucius, Taoism and Buddhism were certainly profound and the contemporaries of the West's Socrates, Plato's and Aristotle's.
But it wasn't until I started watching Asian cinema, that I was able to put that in context and boy does it make a difference. I'm starting to feel about the Asians like I feel about the women, I think the rest of us should probably step aside and just turn everything over to them and let them run the world. Those two groups simply have more sense than anybody else on earth that I've ever seen.
I digress-lol, a book I recommend over the years is called Musashi, I have heard it is the most popular book in Japan, and I can believe it, because I have read it twice and my daughter read it once and named her little dog Otsu after a main character.
That writer, more than any other writer on earth that I can think of should've won the Nobel Prize for literature. That is one of the finest books I've ever read. It is about a 16th century samurai, who actually lived and wrote the book of five rings. He had over 100 battles and never lost.
Anyway, what I learned from that book was how the East weaves reality and surrealism to write books that are multidimensional, and much more interesting and describes a much larger picture of reality. The danger of course, when combining surrealism and reality, is that it is easy to move into fantasy, and by mistake think it is reality!
But that is where the discerning eye has to come in and notice the difference. Some lacked a discerning eye in this last election-lol.
One of my favorite stories in Musashi, was when samurais from a rooming house he was staying at went to challenge an older top samurai. The elder samurai turned them down and later felt sorry, so he cut a daffodil and had messengers take it back to the other samurai as an apology.
But when they arrived at the rooming house where all the samurais were staying, they were all pretty drunk and just brushed the messengers aside. So the messenger took it to Masashi who accepted it, and then noticed by the way the samurai had cut the daffodil that he was a superior swordsman.
The next day Musashi went back to the same place and asked to be a student of that samurai. And the teacher accepted him recognizing that the person that could discern the superiority of the cut, was a worthy student.
Pretty cool, huh?-lol |
