Klara’s Universe

Nowadays, Christmas has become such a universal holiday that it is celebrated even by Buddhist Thais, Hindu Indians, Shinto Japanese and unbelievers across the Earth. It is no longer the deeply spiritual Christian holiday, celebrating a long-awaited miracle: the Birth of God’s only son, descended on earth to wash the sins of humankind. From this perspective, it has become highly necessary to reevaluate the meaning and the entire concept of Christmas, as it exists today in our highly-modern and globalised society. Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, the carols or the ‘’traditional’’ Christmas steak and cake, all these symbols have undertook a deep change in time, transforming Christmas in the highly commercial, materialistic celebration of the modern age and its achievements.

Christmas is a word derived from the combination of ‘’Christ’’, the name of Jesus Christ and ‘’mas’’ or ‘’mass’’, the holy ceremony held in church, therefore a profoundly Christian ritual. The very name of this holiday in English suggests its deep Christian meaning, as in the night between the 24^th and 25^th of December, the long awaited Messiah, or the Son of God, was born to Virgin Mary in Bethlehem. In the Christian calendar, Christmas is, together with Easter, one of the two greatest celebrations across the year. A time for reconciliation - with one-self, with the world, with God - and a time for prayer and reflection, this holiday has been celebrated only in church and in people’s own hearts for centuries.

However, this patriarchal dimension drastically changed in the 19^th century and further on, in the 20^th century, with the rapid expansion of industry, technology and trade. It is for example, Charles Dickens who introduced, through his well-known story, A Christmas Carol, the ‘’traditional’’ Christmas carols, presents and turkey steak, as well as a sense of generosity and belonging, transforming Christmas into a family, rather than a personal holiday. Today, the custom of going back home for Christmas dinner or exchanging presents with the loved ones on Christmas day has long surpassed the religious and ethnic boundaries. Moreover, even these not-so-ancient traditions are recently being replaced by even more frivolous phenomena like the Christmas shopping spree, the annual pop stars’ Christmas concerts, the boring office Christmas parties, the hurry of commercially displaying Christmas decorations even as early as two months in advance or the countless Santas that flood the department stores on Christmas’ eve.

Today, it is neither the birth of Jesus Christ, nor a time for giving and forgiving that people celebrate on Christmas day, but a series of highly commercial symbols: the fire-place-hung socks, the Christmas tree, the reindeer-dragged-sleigh, the red and white Santa Claus. Santa Claus, who can track back his origins to the Byzantine Saint Nicholas has nothing of a saint nowadays: his round, bulging belly, his famous, over-commercialised laughter, his residence at the North Pole, his helping leprechauns, his pagan-named reindeers or his Coca-Cola colored outfit. All this iconic elements of the modern Christmas have nothing to do with God, whose birth it was supposed to celebrate. But they have a lot to do with our own infatuation of modern men, great achievers and spenders, more interested in putting on the Christmas decorations and eating the turkey steak than in analyzing one selves and becoming better persons, or, even more, in reflecting upon the meaning of the Bethlehem born miracle.

In its crazy run for an easier and more comfortable life, the modern man often forgets and loses touch with the spirituality. Ancient cultural traditions and beliefs are endangered more than ever nowadays, with the sudden rise of globalisation. Perhaps one can say Christmas is just one of them, a particular Christian holiday transformed into the universal celebration of the metropolitan world we live in. But the highly commercialised Christmas means more than the mere loss of some religious values, but the degree of spiritual and cultural void humankind has reached, celebrating the shape, and not the content. And no matter how cosmopolitan and tolerant we want our world to be, we can and should neither tolerate snobbishness, nor celebrate the superficiality in it.

 L’existence humaine se déroulant dès toujours dans l’inévitabilité de deux moments, de la naissance et de la mort, entre lesquels on peut tracer une ligne étroite, un ‘chemin’, la perception de la vie comme voyage n’est pas une invention proustienne. On la rencontre déjà dans L’Odyssée, œuvre fondamentale de la littérature occidentale, dans Gargantua et Pantagruel, le grand roman du français médiéval, ensuite dans Candide et dans toute la série des romans picaresques dont Don Quichotte représente la parodie, aussi bien que dans les pèlerinages romantiques de Childe Harold et de René, les héros de Byron et Chateaubriand et les tribulations de Fabrice del Dongo, le fameux anti-héros stendhalien. On y voit en effet toute une tradition littéraire occidentale envisageant l’existence humaine se déroulant sous le signe d’Hermès, l’ancien dieu grec des chemins et des voyages, pour n’en compter pas que le voyage est au fond le sujet de toute épopée originaire, de Gilgamesh à Ramayana.

 

Cependant c’est Proust qui englobant toute cette longue tradition parvient à en trouver une nouvelle tournure, bâtant son œuvre à travers un minutieux réseau de voyages en chemin de fer entre les pôles centraux de son long roman : Combray, Paris, Balbec. Nouvelle dimension du voyage en général, le voyage en chemin de fer prend une connotation spéciale chez Proust, à travers l’antithèse y incarnée entre le progrès de la science et l’aliénation de l’individu. Représentation de la vie par la grande diversité de tableaux de la vie quotidienne qu’on y surprend et par les différentes expériences auxquelles elle donne occasion, le voyage en train semble symboliser la vie dans toute sa totalité. Empruntant un peu de l’imaginaire de Zola, le chemin de fer est à la même fois le symbole de la mort, un départ suggérant toujours une petite tragédie, une absence et qu’est-ce que la mort sinon une absence éternelle ?

Le chemin de fer se trouve converti ainsi dans l’incarnation du destin, parce qu’il ne suffit qu’une petite tournure de la voie ferrée pour que le narrateur se trouve soit face au lever de soleil, soit au paysage nocturne, de la même manière soudaine et incontrôlable dont l’être humain se trouve parfois plein d’optimisme et de joie de vivre, parfois noyé dans la tristesse et le plus noir désespoir. 

              A travers ces tableaux tridimensionnels, Marcel Proust réinvente l’ancien concept de la vie-voyage en lui donnant des nouvelles et inédites interprétations, démontrant au même temps le loisir avec lequel un grand génie littéraire peut trouver des moyens toujours frais de discuter des thèmes antiques comme le destin humain. On a souvent remarqué que l’originalité de Proust réside dans son style, dans sa manière révolutionnaire d’écrire, dans son inépuisable capacité de trouver les formules les plus inattendues et éclatantes pour exprimer des faits tout à fait banals. Mais sa grande œuvre, A la recherche du temps perdu trahit aussi sa préoccupation ininterrompue de trouver non pas seulement la forme, mais aussi le sens, le sens de l’existence. C’est sans doute cette préoccupation qui l’a conduit vers les conclusions finales de son long roman, celles de la mémoire comme lien entre passé, présent et futur et de l’existence humaine comme voyage oscillatoire et incertain entre les certitudes de la vie et de la mort.

 

As a long term expatriate to Tokyo (though so might argue 5 years is not so much and I might even agree) I had the chance to experience various ways of passing your spare time a la japonaise. Now, I should wanr from the very beginning that by that I do not mean performing tea ceremony or going to kendo training, though I do acknowledge the beauty and meaning of having such elevated hobbies (I also once had). I’m talking about having fun and relaxing, that activity which you look forward to in the evenings or in the weekends after a long week at work or studying.

Japan has its own particular practices such as going karaoke, playing the slot machines (pachinko), going to get drunk with your coworkers almost every weekday nite (nomikai) or school festivals. Although these practices recently extended to many other countries, they still have a deep socially and nationally defining meaning lingering to them.

Naturally, Tokyo being the huge metropolitan area it is, the confused and lost foreigner is offered a large variety of entertainment, cinluding those which he might have been used to back home: clubbing, shooting pool, bowling etc. or even more exotic ones, like the lively night bars n Kabukicho, boasting hostesses from all around the world (a not so neglectable share of them being East Europeans, as a matter of fact). We should also not forget the main pass time of all, shopping, which is naturally done on a large scale here (Japan being probably the biggest consumer of brand goods in the world) and shops of all levels and taste plentiful at every step.

Here are some samples of my recent whereabouts:

Bowling in Shinjuku

Clubbing in Roppongi

Singing a Joe Dassin song at the Franco-Japanese party

Franco-Japanese eating and drinking party (nomikai) in Tokyo University

University Festival in Tokyo Institute of Technology (Indian food stall)

Trip to Ueno Zoo with my cutest students: Kenji and Miyuki

It seems that the people in Waseda decided to take a chance on me, despite my lack of international relations knowledge and the quite mediocre essay I managed to write last Sunday morning (yes, I had to wake up at 7am to go and give the exam on SUNDAY!!) on the problems that the creation of anEast Asian Community faces. I like to believe they were impressed by my enthusiasm in my future research and rhetorical skills that helped me a lot during the interview (which was luckily held in English, otherwise…), but I’m afraid that things like the number of languages I speak or the fact that I am a Tokyo University student studying Ancient Japanese Literature were very heavy too…

Well, one on top of the other, here I am, one step closer to sealing (once again) my fate to Japan for the next 2 years… Of course, there are still many problems to be solved, first of which is the scholarship… But I will only know if I will get the extension in late February, outrageaously late if you ask me. (Let’s not be masochists and imagine the situation where I give up Renault (apparently I need to decide if I join or not in early January!!) only to find out they refuse me the extension…) Then, the place where I will live from next year… I pray I may get a nice cheap close by dormitory…

But once again I find myself thinking how lucky I am, gaining confidence in my star and the possibility that I might, after all, get to do something important in this life!

One of the oldest and widely exploited myths of the Western world, the myth of Pygmalion belongs to the thesaurus of myths and legends passed down on us from the rich civilisation of Ancient Greece. Due to its obvious artistic implications it is considered to be one of many myths dealing with creation and its aftermath. It can be viewed as belonging to the same narrative framework as other fundamental myths: that of Prometheus, the creator of the first man or that concerning the creation of Pandora, the first woman, for instance.

Since Pygmalion is mainly a story about an artist and its masterpiece, it was but natural to become a recurrent artistic theme, widely present in all the domains of artistic creation, from painting to literature and transcending centuries, trends and religion. The popularity of this myth lies not only in its connection to the artistic world, but also in its universality. Pygmalion is equally a love story, depicting the deep and indestructible bond that ties creator and creation. Just as one creation exists thanks to its creator, so does the creator live on through its creation, like an intricately metaphorical symbiosis. In this light, the myth of Pygmalion represents the exacerbation of a but very natural phenomenon, where this bond between subject and object becomes physical as well as spiritual love.

The story of Pygmalion and Galatea as we know it today is based on the version Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses. The main narrative thread of this story is, like those of all fundamental myths, linear and simple. Pygmalion is a very talented artist, namely a sculptor who decides to create the sculpture of the perfect woman. After long exhausting labor, he creates the sculpture of a woman so true to reality and so perfect in every respect, that he irremediably falls in love with his own creation. He locks himself out from the outer world and he dedicates his life to attending and admiring the beautiful statue, whom he names Galatea. Like in all ancient Greek myths, divine intervention arrives and goddess Aphrodite, patron of love and beauty finally takes pity on the poor sculptor and bestows the gift of life on the cold marble, which turns into a real flesh and blood woman. Needless to say the couple live happily ever after a totally normal life.

As previously stated, Pygmalion and Galatea have been a largely exploited theme throughout the centuries, mostly in painting and sculpture, a phenomenon proved by such famous masterpieces as the statue of Etienne-Marie Falconet(1716-1791) currently displayed at the Louvre Museum in Paris or the painting of 19^th century artist, Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904). In literature, among the hundreds of poems and songs dedicated to it, some outstanding literary adaptations of the myth are Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and its Broadway adaptation My Fair Lady (and perhaps the most famous and celebrated of all), Gogol’s Wife by Italian novelist and critic Tommaso Landolfi and The Great Portrait by the famous writer Dino Buzzati The most recent one is the movie S1m0ne (2002), starring Al Pacino.

Narcissus and Pygmalion are the two requisite incarnations of any creator. The creator’s incentive to create comes from self-love. Love of the thoughts and visions that populate its inner world, a world so full that it menaces to burst out and will not have rest until unleashed to the outer world. The artist must love and believe in the power of these thoughts and visions in order to take up the toil of materializing them. It is the very motor of all creation. The works are just like Narcissus’ reflection in the water, shaped on the very likeness of their creator and every masterpiece contains a part of the artist behind it.

Pygmalionism is therefore but the natural consequence of Narcissism and its mirror like image. One creates out of self love and then end up falling in love with its creation completing a cyclical phenomenon. If Narcissism is the source of all conception then Pygmalionism is its inevitable result, because according to the Holy Bible even God, the first creator of all, first creates man after his own likeness in the Old Testament, then sacrifices himself out of love for men in the New Testament.

Deep enamaled in my throat
The taste of your body
Elapses far beyond the dawn.
And evening come, across my veins,
One same perfume of grounded spices
Arises to foretell the moment
You knock again to my room’s door.

(non directly consecutive follow up from the post on October 2nd and September 6th, excerpts from my first novel written between ages 12-15, Fortuna, Infortuna, Forti: Una)

En tournant ses regards vers la petite voie qui menait à Châteauneuf, Athénaïs de Châteauroux ne put pas s’empêcher un tressaillement de surprise. Son cœur commença de battre de plus en plus vite et la jeune comtesse cessa de respirer pour un moment. ‘’Non, ce n’est pas possible. L’imagination me trompe encore une fois…’’ s’écria-t-elle au fond de son cœur qui, malgré tout les sages conseils de sa raison, ne pouvait pas renoncer à espérer.

Cependant, le petit point noir continua s’approcher de la haute colline au sommet de laquelle elle était assise. Il prit de plus en plus la forme d’un homme à cheval qui galopait avec une véhémence surprenante. Athénaïs se leva et continua à fixer ce point avec inquiétude, tandis que le livre qu’elle avait tenu jusqu’alors dans ses mains, glissa par terre. ‘’Mais est-ce possible ? Est-ce vrai ? Lui…enfin…ici ?’’ laissa-t-elle expier de ses lèvres. Comment a-t-elle attendu et rêvé ce moment ! Combien de nuits a-t-elle perdu pensant à l’instant où ils se rencontreront de nouveau ! Et maintenant, le grand jour arrivé elle sembla immobilisée par une joie immense qui commençait lui inonder le cœur. La comtesse se trouvait dans un tel état de surexcitation qu’elle ne pouvait même pas se décider entre les différents sentiments qui l’assaillirent tout d’un coup : rage, orgueil lésé, tristesse, surprise, espérance, joie, amour.

Mais quand le chevalier fût arrivé à une distance d’où on pouvait déjà distinguer sa stature et ses vêtements, les doutes de madame de Châteauroux furent dissipées et elle se trouva, non pas avec étonnement, crier de toutes ses forces le nom de celui qu’elle attendait depuis si longtemps. Mais comme le chevalier était encore assez loin de la colline et le vent soufflait en direction contraire du cris, le jeune homme ne l’entendit point. Il continua son galop, poussant son cheval de tous ses pouvoirs, pour arriver à Châteauneuf avant le crépuscule.

Se rendant compte que ses efforts était en vain et que le chevalier était sur le point de surpasser la colline au sommet de laquelle elle demeura comme foudroyée de trop de bonheur, la comtesse décida de renoncer à toute convention et tenter sa chance. Le vent dans ses longs cheveux bruns et le feu dans ses joues, elle commença à descendre en courrant le versant de la colline, le cœur lui battant comme une immense et lourde cloche de bronze sur le point de lui casser la poitrine.

‘’Roland ! Roland !’’ Elle ne savait pas d’où elle avait pu recueillir des forces pour l’appeler de nouveau. Elle se sentait heureuse, replie d’une joie qui risquait de la rendre folle, ridicule et stupide, et surtout de la faire tomber dans la manière la plus gênante. Mais elle n’avait plus d’espace dans sa tête pour penser aux détails. Roland était là ! Il l’avait enfin retrouvée ! L’amour lui donnait des forces dont elle ne s’était jamais soupçonnée la maîtresse et le bonheur d’être si près de celui qu’elle aimait lui donnait des ailes. ‘’Enfin ensemble ! Ensemble pour toujours !’’ murmura-t-elle du point de ses lèvres enfin de s’écrouler dans les bras de son mari.

Last week on Monday I started working part time 2 times a week at ZARA in Shibuya (apparently the oldest ZARA shop in Asia).  I thought Ill be called for an interview. Insteadthey wanted me to start immediately. It sounds cool, I know, but still starting working without too many explanations is kinda weird too.

   Things I like about working part time at ZARA:

1. I work at ZARA
2. I learn many new things
3. I get to help people
4. The colleagues are really nice
5. The managers are awesome, helpful and understanding (they agreed to all my conditions of work and even agreed to me taking a leave during December to concentrate on my graduation thesis)
6. I gain many new experiences
7. I get to bump into amazed and half envious acquaintances and many kinds of foreginers (including two Romanian hostesses who were extremely surprised to learn I never worked in a bar and I don’t have a Japanese husband!)

  Things I don’t really like about working part time at ZARA:

1. I don’t get any discount
2. I only get 1000yen per hour (a huge fall from the 3000yen I used to get for an hour of teaching english)
3. One of the supervisors in my section who keeps yelling at me in a futile attempt to impose himself
4. I don’t have a uniform yet and I have to use my own clothes (not so adequated or good looking)
5. I have to stand and smile hours on end
6. I may need to buy a watch (such horror, to spend money on a more than futile thing in the usefulness of which I stopped believing since age 15)
7. I get home at around 23.30 more than exhausted

    Well, all in all, it is a new and itneresting experience. I hope it’ll get better and better in the future.  Like one of the girls told me yesterday, FIGHT!