Posted on Tuesday, 08/05/25.

On Friday, in a fit of restlessness, I transited to 表参道 to visit what I would later learn was the flagship branch of a Japanese brand nest Robe CONFECT: the mens’ subdivision of nest Robe. whose sister-location I had come across in 梅田. The 大阪 location had been just a slim hallway on the fourth floor of some leaf-shaped buildingette——one wing of a ludicrous mall tied together with suspended walkways. CONFECT locations are all speleoic, I learn, done out in natural wood and low light. Their clothing and most of their fabric is made in Japan, else with special collaborators in England or the Netherlands. I stuck my fingers into some patch pockets set low into linen work-shirts. I twiddled neatly stitched hems.

I went because I needed new, neutral pants——because commitment seems permissible only if paired with expenditure. 表参道 is a rich neighborhood with wide, gleaming sidewalks ichthyoid with some sort of composite whitish stone with flinty inclusions. I was angry with myself that evening also because on my way to 大阪 I had misplaced an expensive 新幹線 ticket, in part because of the great pains I had taken precisely to not forget the ticket. This meant that my systems of organization, the ways I make my life solid, sterile, flat and inhospitable to others, were themselves prone to idiotic, low-level failure.

I spent close to an hour there. I prodded linen, cotton-linen, cotton-silk, and many hemp blends. The staff assigned to me was kind enough, and eventually inferred, perhaps by my dampened forehead, that I was not an easygoing consumer. This widened his conversational tack. We spoke only tangentially about the clothing, which helped. I settled on a pair of sulphur-black cotton-hemp darted denim pants, in something like a dress style. The warp is black cotton and the weft undyed hemp, producing whitish ‘nep’ among the general ‘slub’ that denim-heads crave. The same fabric was used for a sister pair of wide-leg five-pocket jeans, which in addition to being much louder were slightly too short when sized for my waist. The staff member was wearing these jeans, a recent release, and we stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror, my hips a few inches above his. He sported a wispy goatee. I have a soft spot for bast fibers, I realize. It is near-impossible to force bast fibers to become featureless fabric. The pants are a little stiff and strangely voluminous——they bend differently along different axes, as the asymmetry of the twin fibers combats the double-skip of the twill.

I wore the pants for my presentation on Monday in Hong Kong—together with my by-now-ancient short-sleeve black ribbed Zara Men’s mock-neck, my Uniqlo Women’s cotton-linen cropped short-sleeve button-down, and my ragged all-black Clifton-9s.

On the train, during breaks, I read my filched Meant in the spiritual sense; these 60s-70s copies appear for $1-2 in boxes at the foot of my local academic bookstore, basically untouched. copy of ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction’. I’m given over now to reading only those paperbacks that wash up. It smells beautiful.

In the second story Salinger opens with the following, attributed to Kafka:

The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I’ve written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.

The story’s phlegm-clearing preamble ends with the following ‘near-polemic,’ where the purported narrator (Buddy Glass) starts winding around the topic of his brother Seymour’s misunderstood life and suicide.

By every logical definition, he [Seymour] was an unhealthy specimen, he did on his worst nights and late afternoons give out not only cries of pain but cries for help, and when nominal help arrived, he did decline to say in perfectly intelligible language where it hurt. Even so, I do openly cavil with the declared experts in these matters——the scholars, the biographers, and especially the current ruling intellectual aristocracy educated in one or another of the big public psychoanalytical schools——and I cavil with them most acrimoniously over this: they don’t listen properly to cries of pain when they come. They can’t, of course. They’re a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source? With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones——hardly even counterpoint——coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido. But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn’t the true poet or painter a seer? Isn’t he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist. (Surely the one and only great poet the psychoanalysts have had was Freud himself; he had a little ear trouble of his own, no doubt, but who in his right mind could deny that an epic poet was at work?) Forgive me; I’m nearly finished with this. In a seer, what part of the human anatomy would necessarily be required to take the most abuse? The eyes, certainly. Please, dear general reader, as a last indulgence (if you’re still here), re-read those two short passages from Kafka and Kierkegaard The latter omitted, though the passage of Kafka is the one above. I started out with. Isn’t it clear? Don’t those cries come straight from the eyes? However contradictory the coroner’s report——whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death——isn’t it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say (and everything that follows in these pages all too possibly stands or falls on my being at least nearly right)——I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own scared human conscience.

My credo is stated. I sit back. I sigh——happily, I’m afraid. I light a Murad, and go on, I hope to God, to other things.

I seem to have happened upon authors and artists recently, mainly Salinger and Herzog (whose long interviews and celluloid ephemera I watch on slow nights), who seem quite keenly to ‘cavil’ or ‘kvetch’ on psychoanalysis, or at least the general tics of its adherents. I don’t feel their ire, not really, not yet, perhaps because I am not subjected to modern academic conferences, or to film critics, or to the pale, plump and bespectacled New Yorker editors who harangued Salinger into hermiticism. Maybe if I had more money. Maybe if I lived in Manhattan.

Herzog is more humorous Reading this with his teutonic inflections seems only to increase the amusement. about it all, though his love of intentional fallacy elsewhere makes his meaning here less clear:

One has to be very very careful how we deal with each other, and that’s one of the reasons why I hate Psychology and analysts. They are a disease of our time. They should be all just put on an airplane and flown into an island in the Pacific. They should analyze each other but they should not bother us. Besides these people, they just come like, just boldly as if it was a a profession or a science already and they do not confess that their knowledge is not much more than, let’s say, brain surgery during middle Dynasty in Egypt, during the Pharaoh A good vowel is loosed here. time. So out with them, forget about them, they are disease, they are our disease and that’s exactly because they are too indiscreet.

No, no, I, for God’s sake, I would be the last one who would ever allow it. I think, I think it is one of the greatest stupidities and the greatest mistakes of the 20th century. There’s something finally and definitively wrong about psychoanalysis. I have, all my figures in my films, they are not captured with psychoanalysis. And I believe that explaining every dark little corner that we have in our soul is a very unhealthy, and a very stupid, and a very dangerous thing. We should not do that. Why? Because when when you inhabit a house and you illuminate every last corner of the house with strong lights, the house becomes uninhabitable. This word in particular, each syllable emphasized and the bending toward ä, is beautifully rendered. And human beings illuminated to the very last corner of their darkest soul become inhuman and uninhabitable.

I admit I try to understand this because of Sophie——not that their distance is some psychoanalytic reflex or exercise, I understand, though it seems to me they believe quite deeply that certain insights yield to active study, for which I have always admired them. There is nothing I can do besides to care and try to inscribe the shape of this distance in too many anecdotes. It is just the coincidence of Salinger and Herzog’s distaste for what they claim are psychoanalytical practices and practitioners that has stirred me a little now——I have loved what they have said and shown me elsewhere, or am else taken by their efforts, and so I should not immediately scorn their fears and annoyances. To despise something seriously must negatively define something loved or prized or at least comforting. Their arguments also glom onto the usual, larger ones on the differences between what is said and what is meant. What is said versus what is understood. Salinger died a seclusive mystic, while Herzog now appears in the IP of megacorporations.

Both seem incensed that the analyst is not only missing something but in fact seeing things that are not there——moreover that this misidentification is usually confident, forgetting the subject insidiously. Herzog maybe gives more credence to ultimate conclusions with some caveat lector. Salinger too cannot cleave totally from the literary beauty doled by the best acolytes. Herzog says, in that other video, now much-distributed, where he discusses the forest and its ‘harmony of overwhelming and collective murder,’ that he still loves the forest, though ‘[he] love[s] it against [his] better judgement.’ Salinger despite his antipathies still wrote lascivious letters to teens deep into his life. I am at times serenely comforted that we seem all do things we know are bad for us——not just as judged by others, but even after cleanly and honestly interpreting our own souls. To admit my comfort in this opens up the possibility for immense abuse and contradiction.

I am susceptible to meekness, I believe——some slim agnate vestige of a Christian softness on the idea of grace.

Later in his pseudo-essay Salinger says, “What I am, I think, is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him [Seymour]. I believe I essentially remain what I’ve almost always been——a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs.” I read this on the 新幹線 and sigh to myself. I read Sophie’s essays and feel quite despondent on language. Salinger turns many small phrases which I can barely remember after reading.

Occasionally recently, if I am having trouble falling asleep, I try to freely remember scenes from my youth, or things I have once read, or had said to me. I think of the first time I read ‘Kafka on the Shore’ in middle school, stealing my sisters thick paperback copy. I read it alone in my room because of its occasional, vague sexual content. I sometimes still tell myself, to break the silence of my apartment, that ‘you have to be the toughest fourteen year-old on the planet,’ though when I go back and locate the section, just in the first few pages, it actually reads:

“From now on–no matter what——you’ve got to be the world’s toughest fifteen year-old. That’s the only way you’re going to survive. And in order to do that, you’ve got to figure out what it means to be tough. You following me?”

And then just later:

“You’re going to be the world’s toughest fifteen-year-old,” Crow whispers as I try to fall asleep. Like he was carving the words in a deep blue tattoo on my heart.

I remember my heart hurting then over not having some coastal library to which I could flee as a fourteen year-old. No Oshima. No Mrs. Saeki. I must have been around that age, I suppose. I remember being nineteen reading ‘Norwegian Wood,’ also, which is the quoted age of the main characters. I have discussed these books some with my sister, some with Sophie, some with friends of friends who reveal to me, looking for an easy connection, that they also had a Murakami phase. It astounds me to no end that 村上春樹 is alive and doing something as I speak.

I fear recently that I’ve not been spending any time with people——everything, the videos I watch, the fevered reading, the jaunts outside, are too episodic, reactionary, and petulant to encourage any process of change which, like scabbing, is best aided by long intervals of damp compress and only in extreme cases debridement. Instead I, like the perverted teen during open swim lessons in middle school, inspect mainly what others do rapidly and disjointedly. One reads scryingly, hoping embarrassingly that one will be mentioned, or at least one’s penumbra will be cast from off-page. One finds that one at once wishes to be completely removed, serene, but also to be berated and influenced and involved. Touched. Contorted. Made pliant and porous. There is some crisis, some bad mechanism, in that I can be ‘perfectly intelligible’ and yet feel such things. I fail to be patient when I do this, then. And this must mean I have become forgetful, and that my apprehensions, embrittled, are ungenerous to you.