Reader Beware
I recently finished listening to the novel Musashi (1924) by Eiji Yoshikawa. Paragon and progenitor of the samurai genre and a kind of War and Peace of feudal Japan, the book has a total audio duration of 53 hours (War and Peace is 60 hours). It is the epic bildungsroman of one real-life character Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645), following his journey from being a wandering ronin, after the battle of Sekigahara, to become Japan’s most famous samurai and kensei, a sword saint. Despite its length the book is expertly paced and contains a number of magical and breathtaking moments, all while depicting Edo-period Japan in exquisite detail; it is however, rather chauvinist in outlook and so I cannot in all honesty recommend it (one might say the same thing about the bible, ha ha). Anyways there is one moment that stands out to me now, when Musashi’s pupil wishes to read the Analects of Confucius, Musashi warns him that he should limit the reading of books for they may corrupt his reality. Upon hearing this I, who read many books, was appalled: how can this be! Limit books! What?
After much prayerful reflection I have come to acknowledge that Musashi may have a point. One of the effects of reading is that it reinforces or compounds what we already believe (rare is that book that destroys belief) so that should we follow this reading habit long enough our very perception will be warped and occluded; it is quite possible to read ourselves into a corner—if we were not already in one (a habit of reading shows the inverse of the path of repression). Recall how Don Quixote brought on psychosis because he read one too many knight adventure books and “his brain dried up.” (What will happen if I consume too much samurai genre?) Conversely, mid-career Susan Sontag spent a year writing in a Paris apartment without books in an attempt to maintain her own style.
And yet, who am I kidding, who even reads books anymore?
Obviously given our own political situation no one needs reminding that certain kinds of “reading”—by which I mean watching videos on the internet—can produce the worst and most intractable forms of delusion—a collective delusion that might otherwise be known as religion. From a more syncretist viewpoint, such collective delusion is just ideology. We are all of us born into language, given an iPhone, and suffer from various degrees of hallucination. “Reality” is always already obscured by the gauzy curtains of mediation—even worse: reality is mediation.
And yet, per Musashi’s Taoist position—"the Tao that can be told is not the true Tao”—a question arises: though we may be cursed with media (including our own internal and inexorable fantasy), and given that clearly some media is better than others, how then do we mediate our media? Can we avoid reading ourselves into a delusion? Is there a degree-zero of hallucination?
Don Quiote in his Library, 1883, Gustave Dore
