#elekashi

Maybe it was about a week ago. I saw a news story saying that cave paintings from 67,000 years ago had been found in Southeast Asia. I searched for the paper, thinking I’d read it later, printed it out, brought it home, and left it on the table next to my desk.

A few nights ago, I went into the office determined to finally finish the manuscript I’ve been writing since last August, and there was my son playing a game on his phone. It’s not that playing games is some kind of crime, but when I think about how I was at his age, back when I was in high school, I read a wider range of books, I get that helpless, recurring thought: maybe he could stand to take interest in a few more things.

In fact, when you read books and absorb different patterns of lives and societies, the way you see the world really does change—apparently. Whether my own way of seeing and feeling about the world is “correct” is another question. Until a while ago I had this strange confidence—“Well, of course I’m right”—but lately, since it seems like the people who rise in status are mostly the ones who think differently from me, I can’t keep that feeling up. Still, if I think “saying nothing isn’t great either,” I wanted to say something to my son. I of course picture the attitude of him, who would behave as if, even just saying yes/no reply is annoying, how it won’t become a real conversation, and I would just endup repeating myself patiently over and over. So I hesitate.

But this time, the cave-painting paper was sitting right in front of him. So I tried baiting him:

“Hey, there’s a paper like this. What do you think?”

“…”

“It says these cave paintings are from 67,000 years ago. Isn’t it amazing?”

“…”

“Isn’t it interesting?”

“…Why? I’m not interested…”

“But do you know since when Homo sapiens have existed?”

“…”

“You know there are these art-like drawings in caves, right?”

“…”

“Isn’t there that story that things like that are from around ten thousand years ago? What do you think when you see drawings like this? Do you think you could draw them? Do you think there was some technique behind it?”

“…But I’m not interested…”

“But isn’t it amazing that it was 67,000 years ago? Neanderthals might still have been around then.”

“…Not interested…”

“Look, I get it—you want to act all detached, like saying ‘I’m not interested’ no matter what anyone says is what makes you cool. But honestly, everyone’s been doing that forever in your age.”

“…”

“Because, you know, the way people’s minds worked tens of thousands of years ago, like turning the excitement of going on a hunt into a picture…people today are probably the same. Back then they didn’t have writing, so even if they felt something they couldn’t write it down and leave it for us to see. But human mind may just work in a same way, since the beginning of our human, then we can’t even be sure free will really exists, right?”

“…”

“But the Egyptians, and before them, the Mesopotamians, had writing already, right? Do you know how long ago that was?”

“…I’m not interested…”

“Or China is said to be of 4,000 years of history, right?”

“…”

That was the kind of conversation we had (as usual), and I honestly doubted that anything touched his mind. But actually, at dinner the next day, when I told my wife, “They found cave art from 63,000 years ago,” he corrected me:

“You said 67,800 years.”

So apparently I managed to plant some kind of impression after all. Feeling emboldened, I added:

“Even if you act all detached, it’s not original or anything. It’s also in a song by Elekashi. You know it don’t you?”

And I played “Ore-tachi no Asu (Our tomorrow)” on my phone, the part that goes:

“… In my teens, with eyes mixed with hatred and love, I cursed the world. In my twenties, knowing sadness, wanting to look away, I wandered the streets. In my thirties, I realized—ah—that this life is for the one I love. …”

But the only one listening was my youngest daughter sitting next to me. Well, if something got through to him at all, so it’s OK. 

The first time I heard this song was about ten years ago. This song, starting with “Come on, let’s do our best,” is about an old friend. When I first heard the song, I thought, “Yeah, that’s true.” And especially when it reaches the “thirties…” part, I remember how I felt like that in my thirties, when my eldest daughter was born, and it always hits me.

That “twenties, thirties…” kind of phrase also appears in Mariya Takeuchi’s “Jinsei no Tobira (A Door Of The Life)” like this:

I say it's fun to be 20 You say it's great to be 30 And they say it's lovely to be 40 But I feel it's nice to be 50

I say It's fine to be 60 You say it's alright to be 70 And they say still good to be 80 But I'll maybe live over 90

It’s very, very light. She and her husband are well known to write easy pop songs…her husband is even famous for being the singer of a song that people say “promoted adultery” during the era, when the Japanese economical situation was “bubbly”, like late 1980’s.

Still, I keep running into phrases like this lately. One other famous one is an old statement, which Confucius supposedly said:

“吾十有五而志于學、三十而立、四十而不惑、五十而知天命、六十而耳順、七十而從心所欲、不踰矩”

At fifteen, I set my will on learning (I fixed scholarship as the axis of my life). At thirty, I stood firm (I became independent; my foundation, way of life, work, and character took shape). At forty, I had no doubts (less wavering in judgment; I could see the logic of things). At fifty, I understood the Mandate of Heaven (I could accept my assigned role, my limits, and the conditions given by the flow of time). At sixty, my ear became obedient (I could hear others’ words honestly, without twisting them through resistance or self-defense). At seventy, I followed what my heart desired without overstepping the bounds (even doing as I pleased, I wouldn’t stray beyond morality or propriety; desire and norms naturally aligned).

When I compare this to myself, someone who only started doing research that truly feels like my own research after getting into my fifties, I find that, whereas I would have snorted at Confucius when I was young, I can simply accept it now. Maybe that’s because I’m about to be sixty. And I end up thinking, “Ah, Confucius really was something.”

When I was younger, I read all sorts of books and forced my way through them, even if I didn’t understand them, I marched on by convincing myself I did. But one book I absolutely couldn’t finish was Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Even so, words like “a priori” and “a posteriori” stuck in my memory. And if someone makes a statement like “the human brain keeps learning from external stimuli and eventually comes to understand many things,” a know-it-all reflex pops into my head: “But without an a priori framework to receive external stimuli in the first place, that would be difficult, wouldn’t it?” If there is any truth in it, it is thanks to my suffering back then.

While thinking about that, I came across a comment (like synchronicity) saying that Carl Gustav Jung supposedly said something like: when someone dislikes you, it isn’t necessarily your fault; often the person who dislikes you has some self-loathing inside them, and they project it onto you and end up disliking you. What stuck with me oddly was that Jung is the guy who talked about a so-called “collective unconscious,” so I wondered: does that mean we all share a common frame, and experiences of liking and disliking each other also happen within that shared frame? Somehow that felt like a kind of self-negation. But maybe that’s how it is, since the unconscious isn’t necessarily consistent to begin with.

Still, the idea that everyone’s consciousness functions under a similar a priori framework and is controlled by a similar unconscious—Confucius, Mariya Takeuchi, and Miyamoto of Elekashi all say “life is like that” in their own different ways. And that makes me think: maybe I should have opened my eyes a bit more when I was young, instead of constantly pushing back against everything. But that, too, is probably just the process of a young person becoming an adult and then an old person.

And I wonder, Homo sapiens from tens of thousands of years ago, who hadn’t yet acquired a culture of putting things into words, did they live lives that were similar in terms of how their brains worked (even if their lifespans must have been a lot shorter)? Well, “ten thousand years” is, in fact, only about 300–400 generations, so I guess, it’s not a too big surprise.