Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (right) and Israel's President Shimon Peres attend a ceremony awarding Murakami with a prize at the 24th International book fair in Jerusalem Feb. 15, 2009.
Feb. 20, 2009 | I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.
Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?
My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies -- which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true -- the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important
qualification for making up good lies
Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.
So let me tell you the truth. In Japan a fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The U.N. reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens -- children and old people.
Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.
Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me -- and especially if they are warning me -- "Don't go there," "Don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.
Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.
This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is "the System." The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others -- coldly, efficiently, systematically.
I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death,
stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.
My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the battlefield. He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.
My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.
I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong -- and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.
Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.
couldn't be more explicit and beautifully metaphoric at the same time. a difficult task well done, telling it without being a write-off. .
apparently israeli views were split. some likening the eggs to terrorist bombs etc... and the others, urging the demolish the security wall, system built.
both literal and more so contextualized than murakami's speech.
i think it is great for average israeli to know, criticism of israeli policies and actions are no longer limited to flag burning angry muslim demonstrators on fox news, but quite a literary group of world renown figures.
Interesting that the writer chose to ignore the obvious available metaphor, and stick with his parable in its given form. I'm glad he chose to "say something, rather than saying nothing."
This story gives me the words, or perhaps the thoughts, with which to explain, to a Conservative cousin, my own Liberality: I will always side with the weak. The mighty need no help from me.
well, its all so much easier to be pretty and stradle-the-egg (and not the wall) than to actually come to terms with who is specifically the perpetrator of violence, the builder of walls, and condemn them for it. how strange that humanism must follow this parallel track that says nothing, and says it beautifully.
and is it your job to accept whatever a "brilliant novelist", or anyone, says at face value?
he is not a novelist as he accepts the award, knowing fully the political climate, and gives the speech...he is only a novelist when he writes a novel. if you prick us, do we not bleed?
now, it is becoming more obvious to me, that when things are named, and people are singled out, then ..is there a possiblity of accountability. sidestepping a chance at citing accountability and drawing attention to the actual visceral reality basically says nothing to the people who died and, more importantly, to those who will die.
call us eggs and walls, but call us also by our names. would we be content with the innumerable jewish holocaust memorials and musuems being called Egg Crates..and ignore, through name-veiling, the fact that they were specifically targeted because they were specifically a case of jews rather generally a crate of eggs? would we be content by calling the Nazi regime merely "The System"? the System can be soul-crunching but it isnt necessarily synonymous with murder. the metaphor was pretty in an expectedly delicate murakami way, yes, but the speech said nothing at all.
You're right, Noctilucent. Accountability is key. Think of the recent show on PBS about how Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau pleas in the early 1940s about the Murder Camps were ignored. Murakami tells his tale beautifully but misses the point.
but there's also an issue of proximity. it all depends on how close you are to the issue,, the closer you are, the less important the vagueness or the multiple possible readings of the metaphor become, because you will be able to read through it,,, this applies to both, the egg and the wall,, the wall needs to realize it is a wall that is viewed as a wall by others,, the egg needs to know that weakness does not mean the loss of its cause
perhaps he's being universal about it,, perhaps what hes saying is that he will always, always stand by the weaker side,,, and, for the specificity of the issue at hand, there is absolutely no argument which side is weaker (in terms of capital, military power and backing),, I'd like to know which side you think is the egg, and which is the wall
"..and ignore, through name-veiling, the fact that they were specifically targeted because they were specifically a case of jews rather generally a crate of eggs?"
And does the king, losing his clothes, become just a tad. . .paranoid. . .or is that his permanent condition. . .?
i thought the speech was pretty explicit and directed towards actions by the israeli military, but it should be noted that the speech was met with standing applause by many in the room, many of whom were israeli, which goes to show the disparity between the policy of the government and the sentiment of the people (the same for many countries). the reaction is an example of "individuals transcending nationality and race and religion".
nam, i don't have the original link, it was emailed to me by a friend.
We should remember that it is extremists on both sides who get most of the attention -- and who have a disproportionate influence on policy, as well, I believe. The shrieking wheel gets the grease ?
blah why does every hipster eat up anything murakami says.
his defense of the individual's irreplaceable uniqueness is nothing new and is actually just diluted 60s rhetoric that is a product of the 20th century urban, capitalist condition, aka the system. So sometimes the system, in turn, creates us. It's nice to think that reflecting on how we created the system empowers us, but in reality, it's a 2 way street, like anything else (except for 1 way streets)
but really, why does every hipster eat up anything this guys says/writes? don't you realize how painfully obvious and un-unique you are by doing that? And shouldn't that make you ashamed since your 'uniqueness' is such a precious commodity?
dot - meaning is in the eye of the beholder. The reason he received a standing applause might also very well have been because Israel does not see itself as the wall - its self image is more in line with that oif the egg. An egg trying to survive a meeting with the Iranian and Arab wall.
It's not Murakami's job to call things out explicitly. He's a novelist, for god's sake. He thinks and works in metaphors. Leave the explicit sanctioning to the politicians and human rights groups.
By noctilucent's metric, Kafka's parables would be made into fact-laden journalism: Gregor Samsa would become a real man living in Prague and going to bars and "feeling" like an insect. The cats and mice in Art Speigelman's Maus would be drawn as human Nazis and their victims. The power of metaphor and parable would be reduced to the hard realities of journalism.
The meaning of Murakami's statement is that it is metaphor. I think it has a special provocative power that a simple piece of journalism could never have.
oy, noctilucent. it's painful to read your screeds sometimes. you demand that everyone see the world in exactly the same way as you, and with the same lack of nuance. and then you disagree with everyone, on every occasion.
can't murakami's statement just be what it is? a metaphor? metaphors do actually sometimes have greater power than explicit realism. our greatest artists are masters of metaphor, as murakami is—you could learn something from them.
Metaphor, and poetry, reflect the ambiguities, the paradoxes found everywhere in our existence, it seems to me -- leaving the mind free of "settled fact" and better prepared to deal with the world as it is, contemplating the ideals but accepting the messy inconsistencies that are all too real.
farwest1 oy, noctilucent. it's painful to read your screeds sometimes. then fucking don't and fuck off. and don't oy me
farwest1: you demand that everyone see the world in exactly the same way as you where did i demand such a thing?
farwest1: and with the same lack of nuance me thinks that you yourself are unnunaced in your reading, judging from the fact that you still can't see that my criticism is of the lack in murakami's statement rather than in the statement, or metaphor, itself or in, very irrelevantly, murakami's novels. he is not writing a novel, he's giving a speech to a bunch of people, many of whom supported the murder of people in lebanon and palestine. the yellow and white metaphor pales in comparison to the red in real.
more interestingly can't murakami's statement just be what it is? a metaphor? a metaphor is never only a metaphor, by itself. there was a deliberate act of being silent...thats the only near-explicit intention in the speech, other than the statement of an ethos itself. this tidal movement allow murakami to criticize something..and at the same time accuse no one of it. as such, accountability is withheld and he goes away with his award squeaky clean and with the fragilest trace, the buddhist principle of worldly detachment (which is basically almost nonchalance) intact.
what is needed (and i didn't demand people to share this observation, you unintelligent reader) is for the perpetrator to be defined and singled out ... they do no thave the luxury of waiting for an allegory or metaphor to be (mis)interpreted. and i emphasize, its a question of need, actual survival, of people...not an ovular metaphor.
i thought murakami's message went directly to the targeted audience. i remember reading the reactions on right wing jerusalem post, condemning the novelist and condemning the selection committee which included the editor in chief of rival liberal paper haaretz. murakami used the lingo of a diplomatic core. sometimes seemingly harmless word in diplomatic language means thousand f.u's..
in his one reference to 'white phosphorous shells' had one possible target and it was very strong shot at it.
i wouldn't think he'd be invited back to israel anytime soon after reading some reactions. that means he was effective and listened carefully.
on the other hand, turkish prime minister in davos totally abandoned that kind of diplomacy to get his message across... and, boy, did he? .;.) some call him hero, some call him liability, in turkey alone...
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.
Yea, I wonder who the real idiot is here. Those statements above say what he wished to say a million times more clearly than any direct "assigning of blame". "Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall": as Orhan said, it is abundantly, eminently clear who he's blaming here: who else had the bombers, rockets and white phosphorus?
what is needed (and i didn't demand people to share this observation, you unintelligent reader) is for the perpetrator to be defined and singled out ...
No, that's what you need, cause you're an idiot and understood nothing of what Murakami said. So how about a little of that, which you fling about so easily, how about some of that?
Mar 8, 09 5:35 pm ·
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Murakami - "I will always stand on the side of the egg"
By Haruki Murakami
Reuters/Baz Ratner
Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (right) and Israel's President Shimon Peres attend a ceremony awarding Murakami with a prize at the 24th International book fair in Jerusalem Feb. 15, 2009.
Feb. 20, 2009 | I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.
Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?
My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies -- which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true -- the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important
qualification for making up good lies
Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.
So let me tell you the truth. In Japan a fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The U.N. reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens -- children and old people.
Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.
Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me -- and especially if they are warning me -- "Don't go there," "Don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.
Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.
This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is "the System." The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others -- coldly, efficiently, systematically.
I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories -- stories of life and death,
stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.
My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the battlefield. He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.
My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.
I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong -- and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.
Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.
couldn't be more explicit and beautifully metaphoric at the same time. a difficult task well done, telling it without being a write-off. .
apparently israeli views were split. some likening the eggs to terrorist bombs etc... and the others, urging the demolish the security wall, system built.
both literal and more so contextualized than murakami's speech.
i think it is great for average israeli to know, criticism of israeli policies and actions are no longer limited to flag burning angry muslim demonstrators on fox news, but quite a literary group of world renown figures.
Interesting that the writer chose to ignore the obvious available metaphor, and stick with his parable in its given form. I'm glad he chose to "say something, rather than saying nothing."
This story gives me the words, or perhaps the thoughts, with which to explain, to a Conservative cousin, my own Liberality: I will always side with the weak. The mighty need no help from me.
Thank you, Haruki Murakami -- and dot.
thanks for posting- what a beautiful speech.
Wow.
Amazing speech and metaphor from an amazing writer...
Do you have the original link?
one of my favorite writers, anyone knows the story of the fish falling from the sky? its always on my mind
Unbelievably beautiful statement. The metaphor is stark and perfect. And Murakami is wonderful.
well, its all so much easier to be pretty and stradle-the-egg (and not the wall) than to actually come to terms with who is specifically the perpetrator of violence, the builder of walls, and condemn them for it. how strange that humanism must follow this parallel track that says nothing, and says it beautifully.
noc, have you ever, ever, ever agreed with anyone?
not to start a hostile arguement, but, as a novelist, and a brilliant one, stating things point blank is not his job
fays.panda,
and is it your job to accept whatever a "brilliant novelist", or anyone, says at face value?
he is not a novelist as he accepts the award, knowing fully the political climate, and gives the speech...he is only a novelist when he writes a novel. if you prick us, do we not bleed?
now, it is becoming more obvious to me, that when things are named, and people are singled out, then ..is there a possiblity of accountability. sidestepping a chance at citing accountability and drawing attention to the actual visceral reality basically says nothing to the people who died and, more importantly, to those who will die.
call us eggs and walls, but call us also by our names. would we be content with the innumerable jewish holocaust memorials and musuems being called Egg Crates..and ignore, through name-veiling, the fact that they were specifically targeted because they were specifically a case of jews rather generally a crate of eggs? would we be content by calling the Nazi regime merely "The System"? the System can be soul-crunching but it isnt necessarily synonymous with murder. the metaphor was pretty in an expectedly delicate murakami way, yes, but the speech said nothing at all.
You're right, Noctilucent. Accountability is key. Think of the recent show on PBS about how Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau pleas in the early 1940s about the Murder Camps were ignored. Murakami tells his tale beautifully but misses the point.
noc, you raise a point,
but there's also an issue of proximity. it all depends on how close you are to the issue,, the closer you are, the less important the vagueness or the multiple possible readings of the metaphor become, because you will be able to read through it,,, this applies to both, the egg and the wall,, the wall needs to realize it is a wall that is viewed as a wall by others,, the egg needs to know that weakness does not mean the loss of its cause
perhaps he's being universal about it,, perhaps what hes saying is that he will always, always stand by the weaker side,,, and, for the specificity of the issue at hand, there is absolutely no argument which side is weaker (in terms of capital, military power and backing),, I'd like to know which side you think is the egg, and which is the wall
"..and ignore, through name-veiling, the fact that they were specifically targeted because they were specifically a case of jews rather generally a crate of eggs?"
And does the king, losing his clothes, become just a tad. . .paranoid. . .or is that his permanent condition. . .?
i thought the speech was pretty explicit and directed towards actions by the israeli military, but it should be noted that the speech was met with standing applause by many in the room, many of whom were israeli, which goes to show the disparity between the policy of the government and the sentiment of the people (the same for many countries). the reaction is an example of "individuals transcending nationality and race and religion".
nam, i don't have the original link, it was emailed to me by a friend.
We should remember that it is extremists on both sides who get most of the attention -- and who have a disproportionate influence on policy, as well, I believe. The shrieking wheel gets the grease ?
blah why does every hipster eat up anything murakami says.
his defense of the individual's irreplaceable uniqueness is nothing new and is actually just diluted 60s rhetoric that is a product of the 20th century urban, capitalist condition, aka the system. So sometimes the system, in turn, creates us. It's nice to think that reflecting on how we created the system empowers us, but in reality, it's a 2 way street, like anything else (except for 1 way streets)
but really, why does every hipster eat up anything this guys says/writes? don't you realize how painfully obvious and un-unique you are by doing that? And shouldn't that make you ashamed since your 'uniqueness' is such a precious commodity?
guess this is more a diatribe shaming fuzzy navel gazing hipsters more than murakami.
cheers haruki.
dot - meaning is in the eye of the beholder. The reason he received a standing applause might also very well have been because Israel does not see itself as the wall - its self image is more in line with that oif the egg. An egg trying to survive a meeting with the Iranian and Arab wall.
rotten eggs and hipster bashing, really?
man, you guys really sucked the soul out of this one.
sucked the yolk out of it, you mean
It's not Murakami's job to call things out explicitly. He's a novelist, for god's sake. He thinks and works in metaphors. Leave the explicit sanctioning to the politicians and human rights groups.
By noctilucent's metric, Kafka's parables would be made into fact-laden journalism: Gregor Samsa would become a real man living in Prague and going to bars and "feeling" like an insect. The cats and mice in Art Speigelman's Maus would be drawn as human Nazis and their victims. The power of metaphor and parable would be reduced to the hard realities of journalism.
The meaning of Murakami's statement is that it is metaphor. I think it has a special provocative power that a simple piece of journalism could never have.
touche noc
haha, good one noc, but, come on, you are discrediting an ancient form and genre of story telling > the fable.
Funny thing is, you seem to have enjoyed the metaphor, because you're actually building on it
correction :the wall is the ideology that works against the individual, on any side
Dratted humanists, always putting their own interests before those of some deity or other. . .!
oy, noctilucent. it's painful to read your screeds sometimes. you demand that everyone see the world in exactly the same way as you, and with the same lack of nuance. and then you disagree with everyone, on every occasion.
can't murakami's statement just be what it is? a metaphor? metaphors do actually sometimes have greater power than explicit realism. our greatest artists are masters of metaphor, as murakami is—you could learn something from them.
Metaphor, and poetry, reflect the ambiguities, the paradoxes found everywhere in our existence, it seems to me -- leaving the mind free of "settled fact" and better prepared to deal with the world as it is, contemplating the ideals but accepting the messy inconsistencies that are all too real.
farwest1 oy, noctilucent. it's painful to read your screeds sometimes. then fucking don't and fuck off. and don't oy me
farwest1: you demand that everyone see the world in exactly the same way as you where did i demand such a thing?
farwest1: and with the same lack of nuance me thinks that you yourself are unnunaced in your reading, judging from the fact that you still can't see that my criticism is of the lack in murakami's statement rather than in the statement, or metaphor, itself or in, very irrelevantly, murakami's novels. he is not writing a novel, he's giving a speech to a bunch of people, many of whom supported the murder of people in lebanon and palestine. the yellow and white metaphor pales in comparison to the red in real.
more interestingly can't murakami's statement just be what it is? a metaphor? a metaphor is never only a metaphor, by itself. there was a deliberate act of being silent...thats the only near-explicit intention in the speech, other than the statement of an ethos itself. this tidal movement allow murakami to criticize something..and at the same time accuse no one of it. as such, accountability is withheld and he goes away with his award squeaky clean and with the fragilest trace, the buddhist principle of worldly detachment (which is basically almost nonchalance) intact.
what is needed (and i didn't demand people to share this observation, you unintelligent reader) is for the perpetrator to be defined and singled out ... they do no thave the luxury of waiting for an allegory or metaphor to be (mis)interpreted. and i emphasize, its a question of need, actual survival, of people...not an ovular metaphor.
idiots
noc, i would have loved it if he had blamed israel (im saying things clearly, im saying what i believe clearly, proud of me?) for their actions.
it just doesn't happen that way, just try to enjoy the nice metaphor and lets get moving
and honestly, i dont believe it would have made a difference, it doesnt seem to work that way either.
i thought murakami's message went directly to the targeted audience. i remember reading the reactions on right wing jerusalem post, condemning the novelist and condemning the selection committee which included the editor in chief of rival liberal paper haaretz. murakami used the lingo of a diplomatic core. sometimes seemingly harmless word in diplomatic language means thousand f.u's..
in his one reference to 'white phosphorous shells' had one possible target and it was very strong shot at it.
i wouldn't think he'd be invited back to israel anytime soon after reading some reactions. that means he was effective and listened carefully.
on the other hand, turkish prime minister in davos totally abandoned that kind of diplomacy to get his message across... and, boy, did he? .;.) some call him hero, some call him liability, in turkey alone...
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.
Yea, I wonder who the real idiot is here. Those statements above say what he wished to say a million times more clearly than any direct "assigning of blame". "Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall": as Orhan said, it is abundantly, eminently clear who he's blaming here: who else had the bombers, rockets and white phosphorus?
what is needed (and i didn't demand people to share this observation, you unintelligent reader) is for the perpetrator to be defined and singled out ...
No, that's what you need, cause you're an idiot and understood nothing of what Murakami said. So how about a little of that, which you fling about so easily, how about some of that?
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