009_The heart death of the universe
Do you remember the story I proposed for memorizing 音?
If you only read it once, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if you can’t recall what I wrote about standing on the sun (#007).
In Canjeez terms, what happens when you forget is that your heart dies. The relevant glyph has two bits: 心 heart and 亡 die. Bind them together and you get 忘 forget.
Now that I’m in my 60s, it’s getting harder for me to remember stuff. Forgetting is a major preoccupation of mine on the occasions when I remember that forgetting is a major preoccupation of mine.
I (hazily) recall an earlier period in my life when my heart had tentacles equipped with industrial-strength suckers that would latch limpet-like onto new mental inputs.
Hold on a second while I try to remember something: Kawaguchi, Narahashi, Akita, Ihara, Soma, Yamaguchi, Nanami, Nakata, Lopes, Jo...
I should explain. I’m trying to recall the members of the men’s national football team in Japan’s first-ever appearance in the FIFA World Cup Finals, in France in 1998. Their opponent was Argentina.
But I’m missing someone. Hattori? Or the other guy who played on the left and who almost marked Suker out of the game in the second match, against Croatia? Was Gon Nakayama in the game with Argentina? Or did he only feature in the third group game against Jamaica, when he scored a typical Gon goal?
Back then I was a huge fan of the J.League and the men’s national team, to the point that, as you can see, I used to know the lineups by heart.
Now, though, I am becoming so absent-minded that the other day I came close to… doing something strange while I was making breakfast. But what was it that I did? I can’t even recall the episode that I wanted to use to illustrate my advancing absent-mindedness.
The automatic routines of my everyday life are beginning to stall and fail. I find it irritating to have to focus alertly on every task when I’m making breakfast. I’d rather be attending to the mental flotsam that drifts into my still-sleepy mind’s eye. But I can’t indulge that pleasure if the outcome is fresh fruit sitting mysteriously in the microwave. (That hasn’t happened yet, but I’m getting there.)
To resolve a breakdown in an automatic routine, I have to make a conscious effort to work out how the routine has gone wrong and how to set it right. For a brief instant it’s like being a baby again, but a big baby who is learning about a puzzling world without the benefit of parental guidance, and with a grown-up inner voice raging at big baby using words that baby didn’t learn until he was quite a lot older. I’m starting to feel a bit afraid of myself.
This is the beginning of the heart death of my universe.
(Did his name start with “Nara”? No, I’m pretty sure it didn’t. I know he played club football for JEF United in the J-League. This is ridiculous! Why can’t you remember this one name, you very silly person! Note: My inner voice did not actually say “you very silly person”.)
The pads on my heart’s tentacles have had the suction sucked out of them. Nothing seems to stick to them any longer. One thought after another slips quietly out of the suckers’ clutches. Previously treasured memories drift gently away to the darkest realms of inner space where no one can hear your inner voice scream… Nakanishi!!
An etiolated heart tentacle loops out into the void and listlessly lays a feeble sucker on a distant memory. It lazily tows the memory home to the bright universe of my conscious thought, and at long last the long-lost sound is delivered to the vocal cords of my inner voice.
So now you’ll have to excuse me while I access the external heart drive that I call the internet in order to find out how accurate my memory of that 1998 starting lineup actually was.
I’m back, and feeling slightly amazed. I got the whole team right except that Lopes was a substitute. Nakayama started and Lopes replaced him in the 65th minute. The eleventh member of the starting lineup was indeed Nakanishi.
I’d really like to slow down the advance of my heart-death, but a separate challenge may actually be contributing to its acceleration. I’m referring to a “deadened heart”.
You may be thinking that I’m making another weak joke about failing to remember what I have just written. But no. There is indeed a second Canjeez that is composed of the same two bits: 心 heart and 亡 die. It looks like this: 忙.
Do you remember (I probably keep testing your memory in a neurotic attempt to reassure myself that forgetting is entirely normal) the Canjeez for memory?
That character is 憶, and we saw that it has two hearts (#007). The one at the bottom is easily discernible. It looks like a flattened version of 心. This is the heart’s “standard” Canjeez shape. The second heart shape in 憶 is忄, which is simply a different way of writing 心.
In 忙, we see that same忄heart variant, standing on the left. Why was it used? Because the space under 亡 was already taken, in 忘. It was necessary to come up with a different design for a deadened heart.
Not a lot can be done to ward off 忘 heart-death. But, with appropriate care, 忙 heart-deadening is avoidable. It seems that people in ancient China weren’t careful enough, because eventually, about a millennium after 忘 was coined, there was sufficient evidence of heart-deadening that it became necessary to forge a new glyph: 忙 busy. When you’re busy, the heart is less sensitive to what’s going on around you. Your heart is deadened.
Still, maybe there’s “good” busy and “bad” busy. And rather than moping about whatever it was I was moping about earlier on in this post (what was it?), maybe I should just pull myself together and busy myself with a new challenge.
It’s time to get into shapes.
一切唯心造
This long glom of five Canjeez is part of a Zen chant that in English is called Ambrosia Gate. You should be able to recognise the second-to-last Canjeez: 心 heart. As we have seen, the heart plays a key role in various Canjeez that are crucial to making sense of things. 心 is often referred to in academia as heart-mind, but in the world of Canjeez, I have decided to call it simply heart, as this makes it easier for me to think about the discrete roles of heart and of mind. The essential meaning of these five Canjeez is that the heart is central to our understanding of whatever we know.
一切唯心造 issai yui shinzo: “The heart creates everything.”