Tokyo: Prelude, or How I Won a Free Trip to Japan Complete with 260 Pounds Allowance

When you look under the “Awards and Prizes” section of our college website, you find the following:

Technos International Event

This rewarding and prestigious event takes place each year in Weeks 7 and 8 of Trinity Term. Four second year undergraduate students and a member of the teaching faculty spend two weeks in Japan at the invitation of the Tanaka Ikueikai Educational Trust.

You can imagine the covetous sparkle in my eyes when I read this for the first time. As I went on to read the requirements a candidate for the event was to satisfy, though, I had to accept that my hunger for a tasty chunk of Tokyo would most likely go unfed. A genuine interest in Japan, its people, culture and history. I had to admit my knowledge of Japanese culture was rather slim, and I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about Japan. But then knowledge and interest are two different things, and enthusiasm can be developed. I described what happened in the 6 months after my hearing about the event in my application; here’s a fragment.

When I found out about Technos International Event, I was motivated to look at Japanese art, of which I had previously only known throughits influence on the French Impressionists, with a fresh eye. I discovered Hokusai’s masterworks and saw in them a strong resemblance to impressionistic art, a resemblance that runs deeper than the dissimilarity in contours. I was captivated by his series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”, with its unending variation of vantage points (predating the invention of photographic cameras and Degas’s pastel works) and atmospheric conditions (so reminiscent of Monet’s haystack and poplar series!).

As I delved deeper into Japanese culture, the parallels between it and impressionist art became more and more apparent. I found the impressionistic fascination with the fleeting moment to suffuse much of Japanese poetry, from Yamabe no Akahito’s 8^th century poems to Matsuo Baisho’s haikus. But, of course, Japanese art is not impressionism, and there are important disanalogies. The former is more restrained – the haiku is, after all, a highly codified form. Rather than the French impressionists, the one Western artist that Japanese art reminds me of most is James Abbott McNeill Whistler (who was, of course, strongly influenced by Japanese culture). His art is minimalistic in a meticulously thought-out way, which does not diminish its fresh, impressionistic quality, but only enhances it. I find the same characteristics throughout Japanese art. I was especially spellbound by Hasegawa Tohaku’s Pine Trees – here was a work of art embracing sophisticated simplicity, executed by a contemporary of Caravaggio! I believe that this appreciation of minimalism is something we can all learn from the Japanese, and I would give much to see Tohaku’s original work in Tokyo’s National Museum.

When I first heard about the Technos Event, my knowledge of Japanese culture was limited to a vague idea of its connections with impressionist art and a mass of stereotypes. After half a year, I found fascinating parallels between Japanese art and the Western painters I had long admired. If I was driven to learn so much by the mere dream of a stay in Japan, how much more would such a stay teach me?

But before I had even started on my application – though after my interest in Japan had been sufficiently developed – I encountered a difficulty which threatened to shatter all my hopes for an unforgettable two weeks. Last year’s event had taken place in weeks 7 and 8 of term – and I was to have exams in week 9. That would give me two weeks fewer for revision than everyone else got, and a day between returning from Tokyo and exams. My hunger overpowering all sense, I wanted to apply nonetheless, but I knew I had to seek approval from my tutors before I could do so.

I was severely disappointed when I got two more-or-less negative replies. One tutor was decidedly against it, the other said she’d support whatever decision I made, but urged me to consider the implications doing worse on my exams could have for my future.

After a day of sulky thoughts, I decided to ask the academic office whether it would be at all possible to – if I got in, that is – return from Japan a day or two early to be able to recover from jetlag. To my intense joy, the reply I received informed me that this year the event was to take place in weeks 6 and 7, rather than 7 and 8. I could now safely apply; I’d have plenty of time to revise in the break between terms, and then still have a week after returning from Tokyo to run through my notes.

You can imagine (you all have very good imaginations, I know) how I jumped up and down when I found out my application had been accepted. You can also imagine – after all, you went through it yourself – how shocked I was when I heard about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan this March. A week or so after the cataclysm, we were informed that Technos International Event had been cancelled. I was disappointed, of course – especially since our college only allows second-year students to apply to take part in the event, so I would have no chance of going the following year. Still, I had to admit that others had been affected by the disaster in incomparably worse ways. Also, not going to Japan meant I didn’t have to do as much revision during the break between terms – after all, I’d still have those two extra weeks.

Therefore when at the end of April I got an email announcing that Technos International Event had been brought back in the form of Japan Tour – a week – rather than two – in Tokyo for two of the four Pembroke students, I didn’t jump up and down anymore. I’d done very little work over the holidays, and I was sure that at least two of the other three students would be more interested in coming than I.

To my surprise, they were not. Two backed out immediately, as they had already made other plans for the week of the Tour. To my even greater surprise, the very same tutor who urged me to consider the implications of going to Japan was this time all for my going – more so than I myself! And so, believe it or not, I applied to go this time without much enthusiasm.

Like my enthusiasm for Japanese culture, though, this enthusiasm too grew with time. When I walked out the bus that drove me to the airport on the day of my departure, I was as impossibly excited as anyone who had just won an exclusive holiday in Tokyo could possibly be.

My excitement turned to worry as the self-checkout machine refused to let me through yet another time. “Your flight was overbooked. We’ll have to move you to a different one. Stand in that line there” – the member of airport staff I asked was less apologetic than she should have been, I thought.

It turned out it wasn’t so bad – I’d be moved to a flight that arrived in Tokyo only half an hour later. That did mean going to a different terminal with little time to spare before the gate closed, but it also meant a 260 pound refund. A free stay in Tokyo plus 260 pounds – life, I love you.

Logic and Insanity

I've thought long and hard about whether to post this text (sketch? ultra-short story?) here. And I've thought long and hard about whether to write that I've thought long and hard about it. And whether- It's probably too personal. And the fact that I admit to realising that it's too personal makes it even more personal. And that in turn- The only consolation I have is that the fact that I have decided to - and am able to - post it means not everything is quite as described. Though the fact that I've admitted to realising that...

A silence. You finished talking. If I don’t say something now, the silence will go on forever. But it’s so difficult to say anything. And now I’m thinking about saying it, and the time for me to say it has passed...

– I – I’m talking now... They’re looking at me, you’re looking at me. Intensely. Like you think everything I say is worth listening to. Like I’m about to say something important. But this isn’t important! I’m just talking about myself again. I’m too shy to ask you about you. – I – Damn, now I’m stuttering. You’re looking at me, and I need all the strength I can muster to continue speaking. – sometimes have this thing – my voice sounds unnatural. You nod encouragingly. You know I’m finding this hard and you’re trying to help. But you’re making me think about the conversation again... – where I can’t start a conversation because – But this is ridiculous! Can’t start a conversation because I think about starting the conversation instead of simply starting it? Who’d be so insane as to mix up levels in such a way! And then I can’t finish what I started saying because I realise that I am now talking and start thinking about that, and then I think about all the times I thought about thinking about having a conversation in the middle of one... And I’m doing it yet again, thinking about thinking about thinking about... I can’t count it anymore – because... Never mind. I don’t know what I wanted to say. – I’m lying now, I’m lying now, I’M LYING NOW!

I have this thing sometimes where I can’t finish a text because I keep on thinking about...

Summer Reading

I don't usually write book reviews, but this one just kind of happened...

I spend most of my days at Oxford thinking “I love my course. It’s the perfect course for me.” And there’s plenty of reasons for me to think that: I enjoy writing my essays, solving my problems, I feel I get a lot out of my tutorials and lectures, mathematical and philosophical problems prevent me from falling asleep often enough for me to satisfy any definition of a nerd. But all these are, one might say, positive reasons for believing one’s course of action is the right one – but what about the negative ones? I have evidence that what I’m studying is a thing I enjoy, not that it is the thing.

It was quite different in my high school – biology, chemistry and Polish lessons were all living proof that math and physics were the two sole interesting (or at least understandable) subjects of study in the universe (we didn’t have philosophy at our school). But how much of this was bad teaching, how much my prejudice, and how much actual boringness of the non-mathematical subjects and my lack of talent in those directions? At university I don’t have to go through boring biology classes – instead, I go to a popular lecture or two every once in a while, enjoy conversations over dinner with people studying wide varieties of subjects, and my interest in everything under the sun grows all the time, threatening to reach the level of a five-year-old soon.

And so I’ve spent the book vouchers I received for proving in exams that my course was made just for me on biological/ neuropsychological literature which is threatening to provide a counterexample to my proofs... One of the books I bought was Lewis Wolpert’s “How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells”.

I almost gave up on it in the middle of the second chapter. “When tall and short plants were crossed, the offspring were tall, and when these were crossed, one third were short, the others tall,” I read in the part about Mendel’s pea experiments... Now if I understood anything in biology lessons, it was Mendelian tables. And if I understood Mendelian tables, then one fourth, not one third, of the peas would be short. TT crossed with tt gives four Tts, Tt crossed with Tt gives one TT, two Tts and one tt. One tt. One short plant, three tall ones. So one fourth of the plants were short, and the short to tall plant ratio was one to three. How difficult is it to understand this distinction? If Lewis Wolpert can’t tell the difference between p/q and p/(p+q), how can I trust him to tell the difference between DNA and RNA, say, and explain that difference to me?

One slip could happen to anyone, of course. But there were other reasons for me to give up on Lewis Wolpert at that point. First and foremost – he can’t write. Or at least he can’t write popular science. He writes like a child, maybe a student – chopped up simple sentences, hardly a relative clause in there, he tries to glue the whole with some “so”s and “therefore”s, but the connection between the parts seems superficial. He has problems with his paragraphs – he starts completely new thoughts in the middle of one, as if pressing that “enter” button was too hard a job.

Many of his sentences are, I feel, ones about which my tutor would ask – “Can you explain why you wrote that? What was the overall structure of your essay? What were you trying to get across?” – to which I would respond with shamefaced silence. One maxim I got out of last year’s tutorials is surely “When in doubt, don’t write it” (this applies to sentences in essays, not in blog posts) – but Wolpert’s text seems to me full of sentences that serve no purpose (he pours out lists of diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, genetic disorders, sometimes only explaining the nature of the disease in a single line – in short, he forms a shopping list, the entity, when discovered within an essay, frowned upon by my tutor with endless disapproval.) Sure, Wolpert isn’t writing a philosophy essay – but he’s not writing a Wikipedia article either. And his text, at the heights of its style, is only as good as one.

If it was just bad style, I’d maybe let it pass without mention. Even things like “The cells of all animals and plants have evolved from much smaller single cell organisms such as bacteria and other single-cell organisms”. (Though the way he tops up the repetition with an inconsistency in his spelling of “single-cell organism” is infuriating.) Or like his hypercorrect “it was basically downhill all the way to we humans” (even my Word tells me to change the “we” to “us”). But when Wolpert’s linguistic clumsiness turns comical, the urge to share it with the wide world becomes to strong...

“The region that will give rise to human eggs and sperm can be identified about halfway through gastrulation in the mouse and thus probably at a similar stage in humans.” “Are you man or mouse?” acquires a whole new meaning in this context...

Or this: “there are a thousand million synapses in a tiny piece of our brain the size of a grain of sand – and think how many grains of sand there are in our brains!” I should hope none...

So much for Wolpert’s inability to write. I did end up finishing his book, so it can’t have been all that bad. Indeed, sometimes I was laughing with his sentences, not at them. Like “We have ten times as many bacterial cells in our body as we have normal body cells – a fact so surprising that you may need to read that again.” I read the first part of the sentence three times before I read the second, and I almost laughed out loud when I got to that. There were some fascinating facts presented in the book, and I must say for its defence that it’s immeasurably more interesting than my high school biology textbook. I was amazed at how fascinating all those things I had hated in high school were – but then I thought that they obviously should be. It’s the way our bodies, we, are built we’re talking about. Sure it’s interesting! What I can’t understand is that I’ve never yet found a book which actually presents it as such. Wolpert manages to do it a few times, but not, in my opinion, enough.

Stephen Hawking was allegedly told by his publishers that every equation decreases book sales by half – why hasn’t the same been said about biological terms? I’d love it if Wolpert exchanged some of his technical terminology for equations... Of course, our bodies are fiendishly complicated – that’s part of the beauty of the subject matter – but do we really have to name every molecule before we can talk about it?

Another thing which made the account in “The Secret Lives of Cells” difficult to follow was the complete lack of illustrations. I remember diagrams of mitosis and meiosis in our old textbook, and though I understood very little of what I was learning back then, I would have understood even less if it hadn’t been for them. And because Wolpert didn’t include such diagrams in his treatment of the matter, I still don’t understand the process completely.

Finally, there is the question of the opinion part of “How We Live and Why We Die”. “Poor argumentation,” my tutor would surely say. Wolpert spits out assertions with all the certainty of an anti-religious, anti-philosophical “Scientist”. He argues that genes determine some of who we are, saying: “Only someone blinkered and unthinking could believe that all the differences are cultural” and proceeding to talk about the differences between men and women. Sure, men and women are different, of course they are! But once he begins to treat the fact that boys and girls play with different toys as evidence for further genetic differences and expects us to continue believing that only someone “blinkered and unthinking” could not agree with him, his only argument is a statement of his conclusion...

Wolpert is well known for his claim that “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life”. It’s a nice phrase – but one which on reflection I think he is not entitled to utter. For he believes that the embryo is not a human being until it is roughly 36 days old. Gastrulation takes place at around 10 days – can he then, if it is not yet a person who gastrulates, call the process a part of your life, let alone the most important part of your life? There is a debate going on among philosophers of mind as to whether we are essentially persons or animals – for Wolpert’s beliefs about gastrulation and the status of the embryo to be consistent he would have to opt for the latter option. That is probably the option one would expect him to choose anyway, but it is nonetheless quite a claim to make!

From finding Wolpert’s mathematical mistake in genetics to frowning upon his lack of style and argumentation, writing this text has convinced me that I need not worry whether my course is the right one. I would like to take this moment to thank Professor Wolpert for bringing certainty into my life.

Waving at Mom

Wszystkiego najlepszego, Mamo! All rhymes unintentional.

pink foam

dripping with sunlight

coalesced into pebbles of glass

with minuscule swirls

that you step on

and pass.

a fan

the color of flan

crisply cut like a chip full of stripes

lying down on the ground

in the sand.

tiny cones

full of ice cream

vanilla

into strawberry

melting into peaches and cream

or cappuchino

into chocolate

into blueberry

open your mouth and eat with your eyes

the waves never stop

in our lives

gnarled, indigo twists

abruptly

cut

at the edges.

Everything Was New Again

We were late for the birth of the new world – the bloodied head of the sun was already peeking out of the waters as we ran towards the beach. A half disk with a horizontal line of light hair floating on the sea, it entered the sky with nearly visible speed.

When we got to the edge of the beach, the world was saturated with meaning. We took off our socks in awe and respectfully dipped our toes in the edge of the vast, all-engulfing plane of pink purpled by gently thundering waves.

The other edge was occupied by a sailboat, the sky was full of dancing birds, and I believed that generations of ears sophisticated by postmodernism and sacrilegious ringtones will never make Für Elise ugly.

Ferrara that day was a disappointment – tired after our morning walk, we were falling asleep.

Bologna

And so it's happened. My blog has been degenerating into poetry for months now - possibly from the very beginning. I can't be bothered to write a proper introduction or glue my paragraphs together anymore, I've been writing "sketches" instead, but even those are starting to bore me - why put a verb in a sentence if you can just throw in a noun with an epithet?

Below –

the old university

crouched down

arms falling to the ground in columns

porticoed shoulders

chests tattooed with graffiti

pink and ochre skin peeling off in white patches

blood quick as ever:

through the arteries of streets and corridors

run feet and engines

cars, bikes, motorcycles, buses

students, mothers, businessmen, cats

meow and bark and screech

and it is alive.

Above –

I stand alone

just me and slightly dizzying

peace and quiet

orange roofs – plasters concealing old age

stuck on with cubistic fantasy

this is the way it is

and it is beautiful.