The
Brady Archive
The
Cloud Resembles a Rabbit
By
Robert Brady, (KJ 46, bookzine
on Media in Asia)
In a previous millennium, not long after I had come to Japan and seen
how different the news was over here from what it had been back home,
where Japan was still not quite above suspicion as an ally (and never
will be, in some still-living minds), I was experiencing what every
traveler senses at every international transit: that borders determine
news, and that all news is local. Every seasoned border-crosser knows
how the truth changes when that judicial interface is passed, how the
victims on one side become the murderers on the other. But this was
all rather subconsciously perceived by me at the time, amid the swarm
of new information travel stirs up.
I guess
that’s why not long after I arrived in Tokyo I had a dream in
which as a dream novice monk I asked my dream abbot the koan “What
is media?” and he responded “The cloud resembles a rabbit,”
which phrase was floating homeless in my newly alien brain as I awoke.
I thought it a rather silly answer at the time; but then, I was only
a novice alien dream monk. Since then I’ve traveled more, and
have seen and heard more news here and there and elsewhere from an increasingly
alien perspective, and have observed how difficult it can be for a local
to maintain a healthy skepticism while immersed in a sea of information
served up by ‘trained’ and ‘qualified’ professionals
who are actually ‘on the spot’. It seems most people never
travel ‘far’ enough to gain such perspective, and never
see how profoundly their own borders alter news, and so general populaces
tend to trust their media, which by definition stand between the seeker
and the truth.
Once upon a time, when there was nothing between us and reality, when
rock or tree or flower or wind or stream was as real as our imagining
– when we were inseparate from the actuality around us-- our hands
were easily water, our eyes easily sky, our hearts easily fire. Long
before there were media standing dutifully in our light, or streaming
through the air in disembodied voices or faces, or sheets of paper covered
with words from minds, times and places we can never know or be in;
before we began to indulge in the narcissistic addiction of setting
ourselves up to believe even history was true as told to us, subsequently
relying on second, third and fourth-hand accounts of events to keep
us abreast of things we didn’t really have a clue about except
this or that smidgeon afforded us by an unknown and elsewhere accredited
commitee, thus collectively aspiring to the dangerous illusion that
bides at the heart of modern society, i. e., that we actually have a
handle on what is going on around the world even now – as I say,
before all these veils came to be (pay no attention to that man behind
the curtain), we saw no separation between ourselves and the world around
us, had as yet created no distinction, no palisades of faith, no moats
of patriotism, no need for better and better weapons and the right to
bear them, no seeds of distrust, no doubting the very air.
Environed
as we are now by information and its aftereffects, with billboards on
our eyeballs and pixels in our faces, new stars in the sky and etherwaves
sectoring our very bodies, all we need is the internet. How crucial
it has become, then, that we revive and maintain our ancient skepticism,
our own intelligence, as we carom like corks down the whitewater rapids
of data directed by experts. So gain perspective: look at a tree if
you can find one, and remember the roots; or at least look up at a patch
of sky and remember that the cloud resembles a rabbit.
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held by the author
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