Japanese Netsuke

At CTY summer camp (see below post), we did an activity where we held actual artifacts: traditional Japanese netsuke. We were supposed to examine the little statuettes, taking careful note of small details, and tell a story based on the artifact.
   For those of you who don't know what a netsuke is, here's the definition based on the International Netsuke Society:


A netsuke is a small sculptural object which has gradually developed in Japan over a period of more than three hundred years. Netsuke (singular and plural) initially served both functional and aesthetic purposes. The traditional form of Japanese dress, the kimono, had no pockets.

In short, netsuke were used as a counterbalance for the belts of traditional clothing (someone correct me if I'm wrong). They were gradually customized to sort of represent a story that had significance to the wearer.

   My chosen netsuke was very interesting. It was made of dark wood, depicting a long snake-dragon creature with the face of a gruesome man with long hair, wound around a large bell. On closer inspection, it was revealed that the man-dragon held a mallet in its right hand, presumably to strike the bell with, and there was a large crack on one side of the bell revealing the face of a terrified man with his hands raised in prayer trapped inside the bell.
 
So here is my take on this netsuke*:

The Nightmare

  The time had come for the man. He was fifty years old, which was considered a ripe old age at that time. As he slept fitfully in bed one night, a bell outside chimed eleven times, signaling an hour until midnight.
  As the man slept, he dreamed. He dreamed of a cold, dark world, where everything was either a shade of black or red, where demons with bodies of long snakes but faces of ghastly men with horns soared like ribbons in the windless, ashen sky. Their skin was the color of old dried blood, and they all carried mallets in their filthy, cracked hands, the type of mallet that was used to tap bells in the olden days.
  One such demon, larger and with a crueler face than the others, came spiraling down and down, chasing the fearful man, until he fell into a gaping, black hole that appeared to materialize right under his feet.
  Down the old man spiraled, clawing at the air, watching evilly smiling faces with bulging eyes appear out of the gloom and cackling loudly, then fading away again.
  His breath, already ragged from running, age, and fear, was knocked violently out of him as he hit the stone hard bottom of the hole. Wheezing horribly, the man creakily got to his feet.
  The demon that had been chasing him in hot pursuit materialized from the darkness, close beside him, so close that the man could feel its hot breath against his face, smelling of stale tobacco and decay.
  “Your time has come, old man,” the demon taunted in its dry, raspy voice.
  The man did not answer. He was frozen in fear, unable to contain his trembling, even though he knew that this was only a bad dream.
  Mockingly slapping its mallet against its other hand, the demon circled around the man crouched over in fear.
 Suddenly, the man realized that he was trapped inside a huge bell with many broken holes in it. The demon hit the bell with its mallet, and, with a reverberating gong that pounded against the man’s ear drums like a hailstorm, one of the holes repaired itself instantly.
 Shivering violently, the man slowly raised his hands in prayer, prayer to make this nightmare end soon.
 “Prayer won’t help you here, old man,” the demon scolded teasingly. “Do you even know where you are right now? You might as well pray to Lucifer to give you a quick end.” The demon laughed nastily at its little joke, still striking the bell at regular periods with its mallet, repairing more and more holes, so that only one remained, the only one that could give the old man his freedom back. The demon had already repaired eleven of them.
 Not hesitating for a second, the demon mercilessly struck the bell for the twelfth time with all of its might, sealing the bell once and for all, trapping the old man inside.
Carefully and almost lovingly, smiling sadistically, the demon wrapped itself around the bell prison and dragged it, along with the praying man frozen inside, into the deepest pits of hell.

******************************************************************************
 The next morning, Father Sun rose out of his cloud covering, beaming benignly upon the face of Mother Earth, gently kissing each of the dewdrops on the flowering azaleas, to shine his warm light with surprised horror through the open window of a house upon the stiff, dead form of this man, still in bed, hands raised in prayer, a mask of terror plastered to his face.

*The true story to this netsuke is actually completely different to the one I wrote.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Here's the true story's summary:

   A princess was walking on the road when a monk walked by. She apparently fell in love with him right away, but the monk turned her romantic advances down because he was, well, a monk. This princess got mad so she turned into a horrible snake-dragon-person, and then she trapped the monk in a huge bell so she could keep him forever.

My first impression on the true story: "Wait, that monster thing is a GIRL?"

My Weird Fear

   Recently, I got back from CTY camp, where I took a class on Creative Nonfiction. For my final essay, we were instructed to write about any question we had that was not a yes or no question. The style was vignettes, which is a compilation of small paragraphs on various things that are only related to each other by the topic. I wrote about my fear of dead animals.

Not Necrophobia

   An Encounter

News traveled fast in our hiking group. As soon as the kids in front spotted the dead, partially eaten mouse lying on its back in the middle of the dirt trail, my legs stopped dead of their own accord, spun the rest of their body around, and sprinted as fast as possible back the way they came from, towards the slow adults at the back of our group. Their surprised and worried eyebrows crinkled in fear of what could have scared ten-year-old me all the way to the back of the group: a dead creature. A tiny one at that; it was just a little field mouse. Begging pitifully, I beseeched my father to piggyback ride me until we were ten yards clear of the body. Listening to me explain my predicament, my father chuckled at first, but eventually conceded and carried me a safe enough distance from the cold, empty spot.

Consequences

Perhaps it was my wild imagination when I was little, coupled with my love for all living creatures, big and small, but nobody could deny that I had an intense dislike or phobia of dead creatures. It’s like I feel a cold emptiness radiating from them, like life should be there, but has deserted it. I do not fear the concept of dying itself.

Because of this inconvenient phobia, I cannot will myself to go near window sills that have dead flies in them, nor the open air fish-selling places in Asian supermarkets, where dead fish are all laid out on beds of ice for buyers to poke and examine, all dignity lost. Those are just a few places that radiate that horrible deathly feeling that I associate with dead bodies.

Two Views

“What’s the big deal? They’re only bugs,” my brother said to me one stifling summer day as he routinely fried the ants in our backyard with a magnifying glass.

“They’re not just bugs! They are living things with the same size lives as us!” I said in my squeaky eight-year-old voice, beseechingly tugging the horrible weapon from my brother’s grasp.

“Don’t be stupid. Lives aren’t actual things. They don’t have size. Your heart and brain have size, and they are all bigger that that ant’s! We live to die. That’s all there is to it. I’m merely helping them through the process,” my brother said as he kept his firm grip on the glass.

“No, that ant has a family, and things that are precious to it, and it has a LIFE! Unlike YOU!” I began to cry, frustrated at my brother’s lack or refusal of understanding.

“Hey, Katelyn, Mei Mei, Sis, this ant means NOTHING. If it dies, nothing will happen. The world won’t end, the sky won’t fall, therefore its life means NOTHING.”

“Than ALL of our lives mean NOTHING too, right?” I watched helplessly through eyes blurry with tears as an ant scurried frantically in circles, attempting to evade the fatal, focused ray of sunlight.

“No, because you have PEOPLE to worry about you. Do you know how an ant colony works? If one ant dies, either the others come and take it away for the queen to EAT, or it is just left to rot. There are so many ants in this world, nobody, even an ant, will notice that it’s gone.”

I sniffled. “N-no, you’re lying. I don’t believe you. At least the ants will have me to notice and remember them.”

He snorted derisively. “Fat lot of good that’ll do them.”

Paranoia

I shake my head in fear,

uneasy in my skin.

The cold black void of nothing

hidden beneath the din.

My scalp crawls

when a crow caws,

lamenting the moment of death.

A single tiny body,

broken and unfeeling,

lay at the place

where my father was kneeling.

Mouse skin and bones

was all it was,

my father said.

But the fact was that life

had deserted this creature

that now lay dead.

Chills tremble up my spine,

Bones step out of line.

It’s not disgust.

It’s not fear of dying.

It’s sadness. But a fear of

the fact that this body,

supposedly functional and whole,

is only a half.

There is no spark to light up its eyes,

no emotion to churn its blood.

It will never move by itself again.

It will ever laugh

or communicate

or cry

or love

or have

a beating heart

or breathing lungs

or smiling face.

Yes.

That is the fear.

Biology/Thoughts on Death

The body or any living thing at all is an intensely complex thing. Why are there living creatures at all? Why do we move or talk or laugh? Where does our life come from? Does our life come simply rooted in our bodies and how they function? Is life just the abstraction or generalization of how we work and the memories we acquire when we work? If so, then our life resides purely in our brain.

But life is different from just what is stored and filed away inside our brains. Moving bodies, communicating tongues, all of those make up a life. When we die, do our lives disappear in the flutter of a single eyelash, the beat of an exquisite golden butterfly’s wings, the delicate, quick thump of a mouse’s heart?

What comes after death? Oblivion? Freedom in its final form? I like to think that your consciousness simply disappears. Maybe it is similar to that empty period after you fall asleep, but before you start dreaming. The problem is, we can never remember what that period is like. When you die, all that is left is the imprint you made, the plaster cast, the clay mold, the empty shell. Physically, your body. Abstractly, the impact you have made on other people’s lives, be it miniscule or monumental. I’m sure that if you could piece the parts where you have touched all the people you have impacted together, after you have died, you would get your missing life as the negative space.

When you die, you brain still remains. Does your life desert you brain and crumble into nonexistent star dust, or dies it burrow deep into your brain and refuse to come out? Do we get any notification of our death? When a surgery patient lies, unconscious, on the table, while her surgery is failing, do she know if she is dying? Does she feel anything? Perhaps she just slips away from her shell, and disintegrates into the air.

But the air isn’t life. The air is life. The air isn’t life. The air is death. The air is both. Is death the same as life? Death must simply be the absence of life when life could be there. So when we die, our life seeps into the air, leaving death in the body. If life and death are complete opposites, how can they switch places so suddenly and effortlessly?

On the Other Side of the Argument

Dead bodies. They are just the same as objects. Who cares if they were alive once? They’re dead now. A mass of organs and veins and bones. They pose no threat, therefore are not worth freaking out over and fearing. Dead things do nothing, they mean nothing anymore, therefore, there is absolutely no point in fearing them.

Living things? Little creepy-crawlies? I hate them. Never. They are so gross and creepy, I can’t even stand thinking about it. They could actually do some harm. What if they randomly decide to attack you all of a sudden? They could chew your house down, or bore into your eyeballs, or crawl up your leg and bite you or scratch you and give you disease. Their life force counteracts yours. They are a threat. The animal’s life will fight yours, and it could beat yours. Plus, they are all so ugly. Their little legs all over the place, their dirty fur and exoskeletons. Just squash them all and you will be fine.

View on Pets

My pets are all around the house. Guinea pig in the hallway, turtle in the garage, hamster in the kitchen, fish in the entrance hall, and parrot in the living room. When I am home alone or am just alone in a room, I can mentally reach out and feel the comforting reassurance that there is another living thing nearby. The sense of security and companionship is very much needed, as my parents are usually dealing with my older teenage brother in the next room while I do my homework. Focusing on the animals’ presence, or even just listening to them clank around in their tanks or cages helps me focus and lets me know that I’m not alone.

Now

I have not yet found anyone else who has this weird fear of dead creatures, but I hope I have succeeded in describing what it’s like and why on paper. Looking it up on Google, I couldn’t find a specific name for this, except for necrophobia, the fear of death and all things associated with it. That is not my case, though. To me, death is just a release of life, where everything in you ends suddenly. I try to imagine what that must feel like, but it must not feel either freeing or confining, since everything probably just stops suddenly just like tha