My favorite author is Haruki Murakami. I have read ever one of his books. Well, at least all of those translated to English, including his non-fiction account of the Tokyo Subway attack by the Aum Shinrikyo. His words are art. Each one seems so carefully chosen and they not hide anything. His words are words. As he says, "If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance." (HM speaking to Anita Patil)

I think perhaps there is deeper meaning to his words though. By being upfront and honest in each sentance, the deeper meaning becomes available to those who are willing to read them as such. He often talk about the entropy of words. The fear of them. I identify with this. From time to time I find it extraordinarily difficult to speak, to write, to put my thoughts into coherance. Words are, sadly, not enough.

I finished his new book Kafka on the Shore. Upon finishing this book I had to take a few days of silence for myself- a time to refocus and rethink. In this time of silence, I reread my favorite of his novels Norwegian Wood. Over the past few days I am sure the three of you who read this blog have noticed the degeneration of my posting. My words seem to slip away from me... they suffer from entropy.

Now, for those of you who don't know what entropy is, here is a distilled definition:

entropy: n. 1. the degree of disorder and uncertainty in a system 2. a process of degeneration and trend into chaos

I hate when I do this, but I do it often. When reading Murakami's works, I realize that I am not alone in this. It is a common topic in his work. The degeneration of sound, or words, of thought. Chaos manifesting itself in silence. The careful choice of words (even in translation) makes me wonder if Murakami himself suffers from the noise within the mind that is so hard to organize and place into thought. The white light of ideas: dischordant, incoherant, polychromatic. This sort of thought is near impossible to put into words. By placing words on any idea we force it to become like a laser: monochromatic, coherent, collimated, intense.

Murakami's words are the laser.

Posted by Utopia at August 18, 2005 09:57 AM

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Posted by: Stephen at September 2, 2005 02:54 AM

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