L. Navid Osbert (東京)
22 June, 2009
Today marks day one of the website phase of the Project. Thus it also marks the official start of my work on it.
I’ve been trying to write a concise, formal introduction for the project in order to contextualize what will follow for the reader. But I can’t do that. The project doesn’t even have a name, and if it has a goal, it’s not clear even to me what it is.
I’ll just try to the best of my ability to explain what I do know about the project, about my role, and who I am.
In 2002 I was living in Indonesia. I was, as far as I can tell, a relatively successful professor of history with additional background in literature and linguistics, who for some reason or another was taking a leave of absence to live abroad. I was in the nightclub area of Kuta the night of the bombings that took place there that year, in the vicinity of where the car bomb was detonated. I experienced brain trauma, as the doctors called it, from being struck by blast debris. As a result, I now suffer severe retrograde amnesia. I have a very limited understanding of who I am and what I did before that day, and if I was traveling with anyone who might have been able to tell me, they didn’t survive the attack.
For an assortment of personal reasons I declined the Consul’s offer to fly me back to the States for further medical examination after I had physically recovered. Up to that point I had spent most of my time in the hospital in Bali using the consulate-provided assistant to clear the host of legal and financial hurdles that had been created by my sudden inability to verify my identity the old-fashioned way — by remembering addresses and account numbers and passcodes. Fortunately for me I had enough identification on my person that the important issues were all eventually worked out; and of course if anything serious has been lost I don’t remember it.
When I had recovered I set about wasting my savings on wandering. I stayed mostly in Asia, with a few exceptions that aren’t worth mentioning here. It was an aimless few years spent in childlike wonderment at the world and halfhearted attempts to re-familiarize myself with it. Half-hearted because I never have gotten around to going back to America. I guess I should say I never got around to going to America, and that I haven’t been re-familiarizing myself with the world; I’ve just been familiarizing myself with it.
Two months ago I was contacted by my current employers to join this project. It wasn’t very clear what I was being asked to do from the start. I was told that my background was perfectly suited to what they needed, that I would be working in the academic fields of history, literature, and linguistics. They said it would be lucrative for me. What thread they followed to find me I don’t know, but it was the first time in the short memory I have that anyone had wanted me specifically or sought me out, and I couldn’t see any reason not to get on board.
The project. I’m going to get even less formal here and just be honest, because it’s too much of a pain to pretend. Even calling it a “project” feels like a little bit of a stretch. Or really maybe it’s only strange to my abstracted understanding of how the world is supposed to work.
I’m in Tokyo now. I don’t know how much would be proper to say publicly about my employers or the terms of my contract at this stage, and I’d at least like to figure out what it is I’ve been assigned to do before I get myself fired and/or sued for punitive damages. So I’m going to abridge things a little.
Long story short, after settling into my new apartment and working space, I received a massive volume of printed and handwritten pages, stored in several cardboard boxes that looked like they’d passed from hand to hand, from place to place, no small number of times. They have “War’s End,” written on them in both Japanese and English, from which I have derived a title of sorts.
This is the work of another researcher who retired without finishing it. I’m to pick up where that person left off. The nature of the work is translation, as well as close content analysis of historical primary and secondary source documents – “but the vast majority of the hard translation work has been completed, as you will see.” I asked what it is I’m looking for, what the geographical, chronological, and political context is. The answer I was given is that it’s my job to answer those questions.
This is fair enough. It’s not a problem to me personally, I just can’t understand why or even how someone could afford to fund research like this when they can’t even say in general terms what they’re looking for. They are paying well, and I would like to do whatever it is they want me to do correctly. So if they don’t want to, or can’t, say how or where the documents were discovered, I just have to treat the information as unknown for now and move forward, put together what pieces I can.
I made what I think is the fairly obvious protest that if one of the objectives of the research is to determine geo-chronological context, it might be better to entrust it to someone who can even remember where they were born, and who has more than seven years of contextual memory about the world they live in, and its times and places. An amnesiac historian isn’t worth a whole lot here, whatever his paper qualifications may say.
“We don’t believe your medical condition will interfere with your ability to approach this material effectively.”
That’s how it is.
I was asked to start a website for the project and keep a publicly-available log of my work, my thoughts and my impressions as I go through the material. I was asked to work in English. I was asked to think and speak freely throughout.
I said earlier that they’re paying me well, and that as a result I’d like to do a good job. That is true. But I haven’t been able to even really sit down with the material yet. I don’t know what it is. I guess it takes a while to shift into a new routine. I met with a liaison for my employers for lunch this afternoon and managed to be honest. I admitted that I hadn’t even started yet. Not only was I not in any trouble, she didn’t even seem surprised. “Take your time and get settled in.”
That’s how it is.
She also recommended that I try to set deadlines for myself and set a work schedule, in order to get into the swing of the work. So as of today I have set up the public website and posted this introduction of the project. I think tomorrow I’ll try to crack the first box open and get started.
Let’s see. Deadlines and a schedule. Let’s go for Monday. Every Monday I’ll summarize the previous week’s work. If my pace picks up or I hit any breakthroughs maybe I’ll keep you posted more frequently than that, and I’ll acknowledge the possibility now that you may get some “nothing new to report,” Mondays from me too. I did some research on brain damage after my accident. Have you heard of Phinneas Gage? I can’t guarantee that the parts of my brain corresponding to responsibility haven’t been damaged too, because I haven’t been put to the test since then. Actually, that would make some sense.
But we’ll say at least once a week. Mondays.
Phew. So that’s that.
