Points of Light

July 9th, 2009

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go.
Wind-Up Bird, 223

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
Wind-Up Bird, 24

Watching the dewy, unfamiliar sequined ribbon of night at Izhcayluma, I’m thinking about points of light traveling together, the slightest gravity winning over the intervening spaces an inch for an eon. Above, they dance together, are coupled or strung into a necklace of bells. But for all I know, the very ones on the cusp of embrace are in fact billions of light-years apart – a lifetime even for stars. From the right place in the universe, any two points of light seem ready to kiss.

How do you know whether you are really close, or whether the closeness is just an illusion? Whether one step in any direction might reveal a reality of utter solitude? And whether you intuit that step is right there, yet go on avoiding it despite knowing so?

Don’t stand in place. Take one step, then another. Circle around, observe the lights move in relation to each other. Whether they are close or far, know from a vast range of experience. Or perhaps not whether – but where – which axes and dimensions are closer. Whatever is real, close or far, is good.

Whether it is possible to achieve perfect understanding of another – seems an eternal question. But what if I answer quite simply? No. Because the entire phrasing of the question makes it an impossibility. As long as it is experienced as “another” – as separate, a detached entity – how can you – also separate and detached – understand it perfectly?

The existence of “context” arises from the existence of “other”. You – separate and detached – will always only be viewing from one angle. Or have the memory of a limited path of angles. In each angle, there is a pinpoint of truth. But if man is a river, then this modicum of truth is wading in, feeling the coolness and force on your ankles. At each moment in time, you experience an aspect of the flow, but it is just that – your experience of that part of it. As long as there is the “other”, it is helpful to move through the contexts – the angles, the shallows and depths, the fast and strong, the slow and gentle, the trickle and torrent. This process gives a sense, much more so than standing in place. The distance is experienced and measured. Perhaps recorded. The river illustrates constant change – yet even in that change the river has a nature, which can be felt and tasted, to a degree.

But to cover all angles, all at once, simultaneously … there can be only one way. And that is for angles themselves to disappear – and in a way that is not itself just another angle. Context itself must disappear. “Other” must disappear. “You” must disappear.

In boundless wholeness, there is no possibility of non-understanding …

Sounds Like …

April 22nd, 2009

Dr. Koh: “You sound like a starving chicken. You need to sound like you are cutting someone’s head off with a knife. [slash!] You’re DEAD! [slash!] You’re DEAD!”

Entanglement

February 21st, 2009

Just wasted a good chunk of time on an issue I had using Grails – “deleted object would be re-saved by cascade”. Turns out that among the associations you need to remove to clear this error are the bi-directional associations created using belongsTo . I removed belongsTo from the domain object being removed from another object’s list and deleted, problem solved! Incidentally the reverse link wasn’t necessary anyway.

Emptiness

January 25th, 2009

I can describe the emptiness of you

She appears in a saffron summer dress
eats grapes and green things
But I don’t see her
only the absence that is created
the white space serves to give the faintest impression of an outline
Fullness shrinks, and dissipates

I bring hope and possibility
with circles in the sand
She brings the anonymous tide
washing away all meaning there might be

Completely.
Uncomprimising.

Desire itself is left no scraps for sustenance.

I wrote you were different then
I could touch the sneakers
adore the furrowed brow and adolescent books
She wrote it was a selfish vision.

I am a moonlit cloud
my passage is silent
the tulips are closed
Inviting amber glow of the corner boutique
a sign hanging on the door:
“Will be back”
A trace of frost recedes as I watch it.

In my dreams I am tender
and she is accepting
Her hair is loose.
Her hands are warm.
Her eyes are soft.
Her words are simple.
Struggle to delay the collapse of harmony
a goodbye kiss on bare shoulder

I realize as much as you are emptiness in me
as well I am absent in your world.
Though I am there as you pass
it is just the glimmer of an idea
quickly abandoned.

Copy a Japanese-encoded FAT32 Volume

December 13th, 2008

I recently was asked by a friend to help transfer files from a defunct computer to his new laptop. It appeared at the outset this would be a trivial affair; however I soon ran into difficulties. The key issue was that the defunct computer was set up with the Japanese language edition of Windows XP, with the filesystem formatted using FAT32, while the new system was an English language version of Windows Vista.

I soon entered a world of character code hurt – unbeknownst to me at the time, the filesystems of international editions of Windows are essentially incompatible with each other! Apparently, the set of supported filesystem character codes is fixed in each localized Windows kernel – short of installing Windows in that language, you will be unable to read any filesystems created using its character code!

Fortunately, Ubuntu comes to the rescue! Albeit not without some confusion and a healthy dose of wasted time. Here I outline the steps I took to copy the Japanese-encoded FAT32 filesystem content to an English Vista NTFS drive. You might be able to skip some of the steps, but I include them all for completeness.

  1. Connect the FAT32 drive to an Ubuntu box.
  2. In a terminal, change to the superuser (we’ll need to be root for most steps): sudo su
  3. Mount the drive using the Japanese character code: mount -o codepage=932,iocharset=utf8 -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/temp
  4. Copy the drive contents to the local drive. (You might be able to skip this step by copying directly to the USB drive.) cp -r /mnt/temp ~/backup
  5. Did I say you needed a USB drive handy? Well, how else were you planning to transfer the files? We need to have an NTFS partition on the drive. I did this using GParted, so that I could have a FAT32 partition alongside an NTFS partition. GParted should be pretty straightforward to use – the only thing to note is that creating the initial partition tables will delete any existing data on the drive. We’ll also need NTFS write support. Install the following packages: apt-get install gparted ntfs-3g ntfs-config ntfsprogs
  6. Run ntfs-config . You can cancel out of the first dialog, but make sure “Enable write support for external device” is checked in the second dialog.
  7. Install the Ubuntu Japanese language pack, if you haven’t already. In Interpid: System > Administration > Language Support, tick “Japanese” and hit “OK”.
  8. Verify the locale was added: locale -a | grep ja_JP
  9. Set the LANG and LANGUAGE environment variables: export LANG=\"ja_JP.utf8", then export LANGUAGE=\"ja_JP.utf8" .
  10. Make sure the USB drive is not mounted. If it was automounted, for example on /media, unmount it: umount /media/disk . If the FAT32 drive is still mounted, you can unmount that too.
  11. Mount the USB drive specifying a Japanese locale: mount -o locale=ja_JP.utf8 /dev/sdf2 /mnt/temp
  12. Copy the files from the local drive to the USB drive: cp -r ~/backup /mnt/temp/
  13. Unmount the USB drive and disconnect it from the Ubuntu box, reconnecting it to the Vista box.
  14. In Vista, perform a simple file copy from the USB drive to the desired location.

I hope this helps any poor souls out there put in the same situation as I was, for Japanese or any other multibyte language!


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