Lying Pessimists

When they say there are no certainties in life,

they are being pessimistic

(or they are lying).

You can always depend on the permanence

of the fissures in the plastered wall,

or the deep-blue of the impassive ocean,

where matter slides into the irredeemable.

2009

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Approaching Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” the Jungian Way

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...

Murakami Salutes Orwell: How "1Q84" Pays Homage to "1984" (Part 2)

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...

The Thinking Man’s Bible and Messiah: A Personal Reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Part 1)

A great many clichés we usually associate with Nietzsche – “God is dead” (often quoted out of context), “Man must be overcome,” “the Übermensch ” – have their origin in the infamous 1883-5 text Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None ( Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen ). It is a “treatise” generally ignored by professional philosophers for being “too artistic”; for the common reader, if he is not religious, it is a trying reading experience due to its cryptic nature, and if he is a believer in God, a full-frontal attack. It is a text many have heard of (and think they can quote from it), but few have seriously read from cover to cover. My aim is to synopsise some its recurring (pun intended) messages and explain why it is essential reading – now more than ever – for any man who strives to rise above himself and others. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a literary/philosophical bulldozer: it attempts to raze to the ground all extant mora...

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