Spider-brain, go!

The sky SPAT on me today as I walked up the hill to school after buying lunch. And the wind was one big raspberry in my face. All that was missing was that PBTHBSBTHPBP!!! noise.

...I find it no small tragedy to the English language that we have no way of codifying that wet-sloppy noise within our writing system such that our brains can actually interpret it as onomotapoeitic. There has to be some language out there that can. And I bet the people who speak it find it easier to laugh when the strung-out monkey of life flings some poo in their direction.

Do you ever have days when your head is just bursting with thoughts and you can barely track one partway as they fly out and spin away in all directions? Today's one of those days.

It started this morning. Well, it started long ago, but this particular day started this morning around 8, walking up the hillside road behind my apartment building. Some trees are flowering already, and though I could swear they were orange trees back in the fall, they bear a striking resemblance to sakura (cherry blossoms). I've been advised by many people in Isobe and elsewhere to go see the sakura blossoming in the spring. In fact I can remember being sorely disappointed about not staying in Nagoya for spring semester two years ago, partially because I would miss out on cherry-blossom-viewing. I didn't follow the thought any farther then, because that was then and I was a different person.

One thing I DID get to do in the fall, though, was go autumn-leaf-viewing in Kyoto and Nara. The leaves turn brilliant reds and golds and firery oranges and make the gloomiest, sunless day look like high noon in midsummer, such is the warmth of their colors. And in spring the cherry blossoms (among other trees which apparently feel compelled to imitation) appear and even after they've fallen, they're still magic because they blanket everything like pink snow or pixie dust.

This happens every year. And that was not only me talking just now; it was the collective wonder of the crowds. Every year, autumn and spring, they go to the same sites to witness the same transformations. Autumn and spring and leaves and flowers happen in many countries, but it's an institution here at a level that in some ways surpasses the religious significance of the shrines where most of the viewings take place.

I won't go into Shinto or cultural genealogies - I'd be sitting here all day - but all this made my brain jump to change and fluctuation and our fearful fascination with it. The nightly news mentions that some trees are blossoming earlier this year, and I sometimes get the distinct impression that this is an affront to decorum on the trees' part, or at least pointedly inconsiderate. If they change their flowering pattern, people may have to change their travel plans, change their traditional calendars, change their expectactions, and we won't have any of it.

I think it largely true that anticipated changes bring more satisfaction than unexpected ones. At the very least, for the large part we seem to have equipped ourselves to deal better with a totally predictable world. It says a lot about us as a species, that we have this need to be able to anticipate, to constrain, if only in our minds, the fluctuations that patterns of change are allowed to display to us.

Oftentimes it means we deliberately blind ourselves to larger-scale developments or refuse to place ourselves within a wider frame, a less centralized system. This occurs at all levels, from macro-economics to interpersonal relationships. I catch myself doing it a lot.

Of course the other side of the coin is that we still strive to understand, to know how all this great mess of STUFF works, even and especially when we realize just how futile a venture that really is. It means that all the silly nihilists can go terrorizing bowling enthusiasts with their ferrets, screaming that life has no meaning and you can't believe in anything, and the rest of us can still sit back and say "Yeah, alright, cheers. We'll figure something out then, shall we?"

...I like to imagine The Human Spirit as having a posh accent...given how pathologically dreary the upper-middle-class English population can be, I really have no idea why.

Um, anyway. Time for lunch. And then one more class and then I've gotta get some detail work done on the painting I started a couple weeks ago.