無為

A name is the linguistic threshold through which persons enter a shared world, a condition under which one becomes addressable. Unlike descriptive language, which tells us what something is, a proper name allows us to turn toward someone. In complete isolation, a name would lose its function, for names exist so that one person may call and another may answer; one may remember another in their absence, or speak of them after they are gone. This understanding transforms the idea of naming into one of presence. 

Many places have a "forest that shouldn't be entered." Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don't know what is there, but I think they are real . . . The world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. The world doesn't exist just for humans. So I think it is all right to have such things. This is why I think it's a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings . . . I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.

I dont think things can be treated with that kind of duality. For Japanese who don't think that way, the gods are in the darkness. They may come out into the light at times, but they are usually deep in the forest or mountains. When a holy spot is created, the gods drop down onto it. That is why, in the shrines that are closest to their original form that still exist in Okinawa . . . the image of the god is just a tree or a stone. And such a shrine isn't in a bright, shining place, it's in an overgrown dark area where the silence is deep—a butterfly may flit about, but it's a bit eerie. When I went there . . . it felt as if something were there. This sense of dark awe is the sort of veneration that Japanese have toward certain forests and natural objects.

This Ego, this living individual would itself be inhabited and invaded by its own specter. It would be constituted by specters of which it becomes the host and which it assembles in the haunted community of a single body. Ego=ghost. Therefore “I am” would mean “I am haunted”: I am haunted by myself who am (haunted by myself who am haunted by myself who am . . . and so forth). Wherever there is Ego, es spukt, “it spooks.” . . . Its translation always fails, unfortunately, to render the link between the impersonality or the quasi-anonymity of an operation [spuken] without act, without real subject or object, and the production of a figure, that of the revenant [der Spuk]: not simply “it spooks,” as we just ventured to translate, but “it returns,” “it ghosts,” “it specters.”) The essential mode of self-presence of the cogito would be the haunting obsession of this “es spukt.

All that remains: The strange condition in which possibility has withdrawn, but existence has not. The slightest movement constitutes a problem because the future no longer reaches backward into the present and draws you toward it. And so you remain unmoving. Time does the moving for you. All the while, you carry the small void of yourself, until death brings movement to an end.