Stillness and Transition
On seasonal shifts and other crossroads (written for a reading).
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I feel lucky to have a birthday that comes at a seasonal pivot. Autumn always felt like the most reinventive of the seasons — there’s a certain resurgence that comes with the onset of spring, a grateful release and an investment in hope, but fall is the girl in black holding the remote with hands wrapped in suede, finger hovering over the large red reset button. The languor of summer peters out across August and September, muscles and tendons stretched and expanded in the heat, draped across towels and lawns and beaches and beds across Brooklyn, but it’s that first cool breeze that snaps you back to yourself.
I’m writing — here, now — on that brink of seasons, the brink of 25, the brink of a new job, the full-time kind, the kind that exists in an office. It’s a moment very conducive to the kind of indulgent reflection and self-narrativizing we’re all prone to in a world where almost everyone is raised on a hearty media diet, but that behavior which I found borderline pathological in more cynical days is gradually revealing itself as a simple and very human inclination. I’d reference that Joan Didion quote, the one about telling stories, but I’ve already done that this summer and if I do it again it’ll look like I opened The White Album and only read the first page. So I’ll allude without referencing. Point being: searching for narrative is part of life, a tried-and-true method for finding order in chaos. Colloquial references to “the plot” are fairly nauseating in their sickly pop-postmodernism, but in the end, it’s very difficult to have morals without acknowledging the fables they’re extracted from.
There’s a fable I revisited recently. A young girl is moving to a new town with her parents. On the way to their new home, her father takes a shortcut that leads them to what seems like an abandoned amusement park, a relic of a time before economic recession. But when the sun goes down, she finds her parents have turned to squealing pigs. The park is a bathhouse for the spirit world, large and industrial, and in order to stop herself from disappearing the girl must be put to work, making herself useful and signing her name into someone else’s possession. The bathhouse is filled with ambiguous figures whose nature and motives remain unclear, and the girl slowly learns to navigate this world, all the while keeping her clothes and identity hidden, because without them she’ll be stuck there forever.
There is much that’s already been said about Spirited Away, one of Miyazaki’s most potent odes to childhood, and its mourning cry for the effects of Western Capitalism on Japan. Much has even been said specifically about the pointed melancholy of the train sequence in the latter half of the film. As Chihiro rides along through the spirit world, the figures that surround her aren’t gifted with the imaginative designs of those in the bathhouse. They’re shrouded frames in trench coats and hats, carrying briefcases and moving with the Kafkaesque drudge of worn-down commuters.
After attending liberal arts school the word “liminal” is like an empty tube of toothpaste, used up and meaningless, but it’s striking that one of the most arresting scenes in the film is one where not much happens. Miyazaki has spoken before about a concept called “ma,” an intentional emptiness. If someone is clapping, “ma” is the time in between. The quieter moments in the film create breathing room, enriching the world of the story — a reaction to the nonstop excitement and momentum that makes up so much of entertainment. The train sequence acts both as a transition and a point of stillness.
Watching this film again, I felt a bout of unsteadiness. The sun is rising higher on that very long day I’ve been allotted, and as the light gets brighter I see myself in continuous motion, surrounded by concrete and glass and ambition and dinners and cocktails and billboards and fumes and phone alerts and sewage and cocktails and cockroaches and ketamine. I’ve always aimed for the biggest possible bite out of life; I made a point of leaning into that mentality more directly this summer, the very un-depressed and motivated kind where the world is a big cunty fuchsia oyster. But as I enter an industry where the word “storytelling” feels more like a euphemism than a philosophy, I fear the loss of stillness. Wisdom is known to come with age, but perspective isn’t just something we gain in life; we can lose it just as easily.
So as I ride along on the train across the sea, how do I hold on to stillness, to my name and my clothes? Passion might be one antidote, but passion alone is a destructive path. Spirited Away uses Japanese folklore to call back to a time before the influence of Western industry — does this point toward antiquity as the answer? Or does that drop us into the trap of the nostalgia market?
There’s a song I’ve enjoyed lately where the writer speaks of being held in someone’s “humble grace.” It’s a turn of phrase that surprised me given the context; I had thought the song was concerned with romantic entanglement but later learned it was about a late relative. There’s something beautiful about that phrasing, its allusion to virtue without pedestals. Immediately, it found a home in my chest. Among the noise of the city, and as I continue to move through life at 25 and beyond, that might be what I search for most intently.
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