Expression

I had dinner at an izakaya tonight with two of my lovely colleauges from the Tokyo University of Science. An izakaya is as close as you'll get to a Japanese version of a pub, unless you want to go to a pub which feels like it was made in an 'English Traditional Pub' making factory somewhere on the outskirts of Birmingham, then flown via helicopter and dumped in central Tokyo. In an Izakaya you can order beer without actually ordering food, but its unorthodox, and even if you dont officially order something from the menu you'll get little side dishy things of unusual bits and bobs. I love how Japanese and Koreans seldom consider driking without food.

Anyway, Phil, Alex and I tried out an izakaya that we've not tried before in our tiny little township of Sakasai. As Alex pointed out, when you tell the students at our uni that we live in Sakasai, they laugh, as thats how small, uncool and inconsequential it is. Cute though, and pretty. Gardens. Miniature old people. Vertical death stairs. Houses hand painted with Disney kingdoms.

Over dinner we chatted about this and that. Good travel experiences, terrible ones, which weirdly always end up, in retrospect, being the best travel experiences. Alex had accidentally, while drunk on absynth, sat on a fat woman who he mistook for a chair, while Phil had been ordered to finish his Stolichnaya vodka by Kashmiri malitia with a mounted machine gun. We then got onto the topic of language, which isn't very surprising for a bunch of language teachers, and that lead into chatting about langauge as a form of self-expression.

Phil was saying that while language is satisfying and allows us to put our ideas out there to be recieved and considered by others, that it's an ultimately limiting experience as we can never really express the true essence of what we feel and would like to be able to say to the people around us. That language doesn't come near being complex enough to match with the things that we feel, understand and question.

My point of view, at the time, maybe overstepped the boundary of what we were actually talking about. I said that if we were able to express exactly what we felt to every person around us, wouldn't we have reached some kind of end point? Wouldn't we have nothing left to do? Without the limitations of languages we would be able to explain ourselves with such perfect clarity that most misunderstandings would cease to occur, and that humans would essentially have nothing left to discover, not only about others, but about ourselves.

There are times when I wake at night and I feel things that obviously I can't explain. I feel things about the world, about space and time, I feel like there are small moments when I grasp really large ideas of what is happening here, in this mysterious place. if I could explain exactly what I felt to someone, and they to me, as I am sure many people feel these profound things at times, wouldn't we have solved the riddle? Wouldn't we have reached the end? What would I have left to wonder about? Einstein would have said `so, e=mc squared, and this means EXACTLY this about life, therefor, i have solved the equation of life, space, time and existence, the end, and goodbye`. And then there was silence. I am sure he probably felt a lot of things that he never found the language for. What a relief.

My inability to express myself perfectly has shaped who I am. Misunderstandings in my life, with myself and with others, has shed light on the way that I view this world and has changed the course of my life. These experiences have made me different from others.

At the end of my mothers life she and I had a really sad misunderstanding. It's something that haunts me still and possibly always will. It was completely to do with language, with a mind shaped by sickness and drugs. If only she and I had been able to share, eloquently, our exact thoughts with one another, she would have died with our relationship at peace, completed, finalized. But that is not how it went. What I have realised slowly, and painfully, is that in someways the most terrible things in life turn into the most amazing. It is from that experience with my mother that I can truely feel what it is to love someone fiercly while they are still alive. I can see my dad with clarity, his fragile beauty and his massive heart and I can love him like I wish I had been able to love my mother at that time.

I wonder if I would be able to do that otherwise. It's impossible to know.

Every man is an island, it's lonely, but it feels right.