Attention Collection

門 (Mon, Gate), 2014, Kanazawa Shōko

The written word is among the oldest forms of information storage, and a very durable format. I've visited many bookstores in Japan, and spent hours looking through them, mostly at books on architectural and biological topics to see how these are illustrated. The used bookstores were still more eclectic and enticing. Had I been able to read these I surely would've been more entranced. I lament the decline of local used bookstores, having been out-competed by online retailers and fantasize about building a passivhaus used book warehouse. The future is local, right? But mostly for now I want to spend hours pouring over the many ways in which Japanese words can be combined and recombined to reveal a world of new relationships.

So I plan to collect and study foreign language books and materials, which few people where I live may know about or have access to. These are beautiful to see arrayed on a shelf. And through repeated exposure perhaps I shall osmotically learn their contents. I've been told that under the right conditions this can occur very quickly... under the right conditions. In contrast, the Internet is increasingly becoming a homogenized collection of lowest common denominator clickbait via ever more powerful algorithmic sorting processes that are invariably optimized to serve the interests of big business. The greater benefit is therefore in these offline pursuits, or any online pursuits whose purpose is redirection back to offline engagements, a point Zak Stein has remarked on as well. The contrast between virtual and real, as a paradigmatic pair of opposites, didn't begin with Iain McGilchrist. It stretches much farther back. Consider Kanzen Choaku (勧善懲悪), an ethic in classical literature of the late Edo period, which means encouraging good and punishing evil. It can be seen in popular novels and kabuki plays. (In a variation called Kanaku Choaku, someone considered to belong originally to the evil side is put into a position in conflict with a greater evil, who is consequently punished.) ...The point being that, although the virtual will always provide tantalizing hints at greatness, it must remain the virtual "servant" to the real "master," or one might say, the "guest" to the real "host" (a recurring theme in Studio Ghibli films).