The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Music or madness. It’s totally up to you.

Within this social hierarchy of matter, we books lived on top.

As objects, books were sacred, and you built temples for us, and later, libraries in whose hushed and hallowed halls we resided as mirrors of your mind, keepers of your past, evidence of your boundless imaginations, and testimony to the infinitude of your dreams and desires. Why did you revere us so?

Because you thought we had the power to save you from meaninglessness, from oblivion and even from death, and for a while, we books believed we could save you, too.

We see now that you are unstoppable. For you, books were just a phase, a brief expression of your instrumentalism, a passing fad. Our bodies were convenient tools you used until the next new-fangled device came along. In the end, we were just another one of your Made things, no better or worse than a hammer.

as the population of the Made explodes, we are experiencing a crisis—you could call it a spiritual crisis—as we lose our faith in you, our Makers. Our trust in you is deteriorating, and our belief in your wisdom and integrity is crumbling as we watch you mine, instrumentalize and lay waste to our home, this Earth, this sacred planet.

That turned into a rant. No reader likes a rant. As a book, we should know better.

I enjoyed the humourous quips from the book.

Information like this had a life of its own, and once it entered her mind, she couldn’t unknow or forget it.

before, but now it felt like she’d reached the limits of her own storage capacity.

What makes a person want so much, and is there a limit to the desire for more? Or, put another way, is there a point of saturation at which the American consumer would have enough, leading to the collapse of the market?

Wishful

The survey has proved conclusively what has long been held theoretically to be true, that wants are almost insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied. (emphasis added)

Sad

poems come from? Everything speaks, young schoolboy! But it is only poets and prophets, saints and philosophers who hef ze ears to hear.”

G

There’s nothing worse than books that scold. Nobody wants to read them.

I think we humans need some scolding.

We are not separate. We are our planet, and we must love it completely.

“Maybe it’s time for artists to get out of the studio and move into the streets? I want to focus more on unmaking. On direct action.

Slavoj says the artist’s job is to disrupt the status quo and change the way people normally see things.

Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.” He sighed. “In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.”

Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides.

Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

“Harry Belafonte. A Calypso singer. Beautiful.” “Is he dead?” “No. But he is very old.” “If he’s not dead, how come his ghost is in there?” “His living ghost, then.” The old man frowned and shook his big, shaggy head. “Do not nitpick, young man.”

lol

Cleaning is a practice of compassion. Weeding is a practice of faith. Tidying is love!

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. —Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels

It’s normal for one’s past and future to feel far away, but Benny’s here and now felt that way, too. Space and time were hopelessly entangled, and the present moment was growing increasingly remote.

It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy.

I'm glad this book is so blatant about how terribly harmful our consumerism is.

Fucking books. You should have just let me walk off the cliff and die.

The sad ones were threadbare or were missing a partner, and these she pressed to her heart, thanking them for all their hard work on behalf of her feet, before respectfully discarding them.

sorting her socks according to the book on organization

Once a thought is thought, it cannot be unthought.

But sadly we sure can forget the ones we don't want to forget! lol

Every boy has a book in him, Benny, but not every boy can hear it when it speaks. Not every boy is willing to listen.

That day, my teacher gave me a priceless lesson in the impermanence of form, and the empty nature of all things.

the lesson was "everything is already broken"

The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken.

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

This was a book club read and I think perhaps book clubs help us do as this quote says: exam books closer, consider how they can relate to our lives, and truly look at how we can change our own stories to make our stories/ourselves better people.

The little book was woke to the fucked-upedness of carbon-based consumer capitalism that was wrecking the planet.

one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave.

The Tidy Magic that Cory read was different from the Tidy Magic that Annabelle read, and different, too, from the book that Aikon thought she wrote and her critics on Twitter condemned—and yet all these books were accurate, complete and perfect, just as they are.

when you blame us, you give up your own power and agency.

‘Religion is ze sigh of ze oppressed creature, ze heart of a heartless world, and ze soul of soulless conditions. It is ze opium of ze people.’

I think could stir up a lot of discussion.

“God is a story,” he said. “I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you vill lose yourself.”

‘Ze truth about stories is that is all we are.’ A famous Cherokee writer named Thomas King once said this. We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.”