How would you translate the word 心? The most obvious is “heart”.
In Alfred Birnbaum’s translation of Haruki Murakami’s Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, he translated it as “mind”. I can understand why. In the context of the story, it refers to our consciousness, memory, thoughts…
In the more recent translation by Jay Rubin (the title was also reverted to End of the World and Hardboiled Wonderland) , Rubin reverted to “heart” as the English translation. It is more direct. Even in Chinese, the seat of thought is the heart - as in the phrase 心想事成 , which means “may whatever your heart desires or thinks be made real”. Even here, the word for “thought” is actually “desire” because what your heart/mind is thinking of is your desire. Mind and heart are not dichotomised, as in the English and the post 18th century worship of "reason" and the "rational mind".
This week I started watching a Masterclass series on the brain, particularly its relationship to anxiety and memory.
Memory is knowledge from a sensory experience. With this knowledge we can better predict our environment and we can better survive. Having touched fire, our memory allows us to predict the pain. And so when we next see fire, we flinch from a knowledge of pain. Our post-traumatic responses are one extreme manifestation of this. But in daily living, the more we sense and experience, the more we remember and learn - and hence the advice to stave off dementia by always learning new things. Think of it not just about the acquisition of skills, but a constant or daily working of the senses, emotions, reasoning and motor muscles as one integral being.
It did make me think about AI, including predictive AI. In a way, we are outsourcing our learning through experience to a machine. While we gain efficiency, we lose our ability to predict through experience - which is how living things have evolved and survived.
Murakami’s 1985 novel was somewhat prescient! In the book, the protagonist becomes a human “data shuffler and encryptor”, in a system where power resides with a centralised bureaucracy that controls data and its nemesis which steals data. Except in this case, there are no computers but individuals whose brains have been altered in order to shuffle and encrypt any data. However, the process also warrants the creation of an alternate subconscious universe, built from his memories and the sum total of his identity.
This alternate universe serves as an escape valve or balance to the brain's new capacity for shuffling data. In this alternate universe, all the inhabitants other than the protagonist have lost their “heart”, which is the sum total of memories that gives a person both identity (a person’s shadow literally) and the ability to love but also to fear. This world is deceptively peaceful and free of conflicting emotions, or much emotions at all. This world has forgotten instruments, but no music… and this world is aptly named “End of the World” -
Image 1 explains the word “heart” in ancient Chinese type - isn’t it interesting that the heart of a flower is represented by 3 hearts? And isnt it even more interesting that it’s no wonder the Chinese phrase for a flirt or philanderer is 花心，literally flower heart! And not because women are wooed with flowers or that flowers don’t last…
Image 2 is a collection of seal carvings of the word “heart”
Image 3 is fascinating! It is “new” text invented by Empress Wu ZeTian’s court. Star is changed into just a circle, and the word for human is changed into the conflation of “one” and “life”!
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