If only I could be asynchronous too
July 20, 2025
The weekend is already over, and I still haven’t done anything about all the emails and messages that have been haunting me and my inbox — words that seem written for someone who no longer exists, the dead man whom I’m acting as literary executor for, continuing forth his various correspondences as he commanded me to do in his will, doing my utmost to keep up the illusion that he’s still alive. One of these emails I keep turning over in my brain, trying to form a response to that will satisfy me (and hopefully my correspondent as well), was itself about the nature of email. It was from a fellow who’d read one of my pieces where I talk about my unfinished email-reading game, and he wanted to share with me his own semi-philosophical essay about email, which I am now sharing with you. In his essay, he’d focused on the asynchronous nature of email, so I wanted to try continuing that line of thought. Unfortunately, all of my hopes and dreams for this response of mine didn't seem to coalesce into anything even approaching coherence.
My email to him would have, as an analogy, described the experience I had reading the collected letters of T.S. Eliot a few months ago, wherein a dozen interlocking conversations take place over the course of months and years. He’d write to his mom in America about all the stress he’s going through, working at the bank during the day, writing dozens of essays at night, all while his wife would go through various health problems. Then he wouldn’t get a response back for weeks or months. In that interlude new events would transpire, first brought up or alluded to in a sudden or mysterious way in one letter, than finally narrated in detail in one of his letters to, say, John Quinn or Ezra Pound. Finally he’d be writing to his mom again, months after her response had arrived, apologizing for the dreadfully long time it’s been, and asking her to send him the collected works of Shakespeare he had back in America if it’s not too much trouble. The delay between each response in these many international correspondences created a kind of natural suspense for me, the reader. In the years of 1916 - 1922, he was rapidly transforming, taking on a very different life. He gave up philosophy, got married, made it through the war, started working 12+ hours a day, went from being a nobody to being the preeminent critic and essayist of his day, had a nervous breakdown, wrote The Wasteland, then went through a year of trying to get it published. His collected letters had reduced his life to a literary object with a plot and side-stories.
I would have then related this to one aspect of living in a major metropolis that I find quite strange: people (mostly friends of my girlfriend) who don’t live here and who have never lived here keep visiting once or twice a year for one reason or another. Every time one of them arrives, I go with her to meet them and have a little conversation, as though picking up from last time. There is one friend in particular that I’m a bit terrified of, a Canadian who plays bass in a moderately well known rock band which I’ve written about on here before. He stopped in Shanghai last week before preceding to Beijing where he’ll be staying for the rest of the month. He used to work with my girlfriend at Vice China, back when that existed, but he’s been living in Canada for more than half a decade. Around the time he left, his younger brother moved from Taiwan to Beijing, as though to replace him at their pizza dinners and late night drinks. Then somehow that whole friend group ended up in Shanghai, everyone living a five minute bike ride from each other, all on pleasantly shady roads — and yet the only time I see them all together is when the older brother returns from Canada and gathers us for dinner. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen this time around, since I wanted to actually be able to have a real conversation with this older Canadian brother, but as always I was disappointed. What I thought would be a party of three became a party of five — and I don’t know how to participate in five way conversations, so I fell into my normal silence, listening to them talk amongst themselves and instinctually responding in a way so as to shut down any further questioning whenever they graciously tried to include me. I’ll have to wait another 6 months until the next time he’s in Shanghai for another chance at conversation.
Finally, I wanted to contemplate my inbox has being a kind of intersection point between dozens of people who don’t know each other and have nothing in common except they were kind enough to send an email to me, The Man Who Replies So Slowly. I did begin typing this part, but only as loosely connected paragraphs that I no longer have the energy to make sense of. For your reference, here they are:
I often wonder about the people I’m brought in contact with in other people’s minds — all of the other worlds I can never experience, and yet I belong to, whether I like it or not. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of Norwegian Wood throughout this year. I reread the book as December turned into January, and quite similarly to how The Three Cornered World colored the entirety of 2024 for me, Norwegian Wood seems to have been the book that gave something resembling a theme to my thinking in 2025. I read the Critique of Pure Reason earlier this year to help me better understand Murakami, since he references it a lot in Pinball 1973. I’m not sure how many other people there are out there who read Kant because of Murakami, but I assume I can’t be the only one. One of Kant’s critical insights is that there is an essential unity inside my mind: everything I know about the universe is mediated by how it is represented in the structure of my mind, and one feature of my mind is any two “mental objects” may be put into relation with each other. He uses this idea to make all sorts of astounding claims, e.g. that the conservation laws of physics or universal gravitation are conditioned by the essential unity of thought represented in time and space — but none of that concerns me here. Instead, whenever I encounter some deep philosophical idea, I can’t help myself but use it as fuel for metaphors, using the philosophy for purposes it was clearly never intended for.
In Norwegian Wood, the protagonist has two “girlfriends” and a number of one-time encounters with peculiar strangers, none of whom have anything to do with each other. You see him talking completely differently with different people (another “literary descendent” of Norwegian Wood where this quality is even stronger is The Part of Me That Isn’t Broken Inside). There is a surface level fragmentation, but yet all these people seem intimately connected to each other in the protagonists consciousness. He places Midori and Naoko side by side in his mind, and yet these two women have never met each other, only being aware of the other’s existence by a few scattered references in conversation with the protagonist Watanabe.
There are also other characters we never see that only exist as vague references by the characters we do — e.g. Midori mentions her boyfriend from time to time. You can imagine a book written from her perspective, where Watanabe is only on portion of her narrative. If this were a Victorian novel, perhaps all these characters would have some secret connection each other that is revealed two thirds of the way through, and a professor lecturing on the book could bring a board that had done up at staples with a diagram plotting all the connections between characters. Yet in Norwegian Wood they are only connected through the protagonist — because these are the people the protagonist happened to find himself in contact with — and this single connection becomes the most critical world defining connection of all.
There were other topics I wanted to bring up in this email too, e.g. the periodization forced on every work day by my obligation to spend 9 hours of it in an office, or an agricultural analogy comparing email to planting seeds (or setting up time-bombs, to use a terroristic analogy instead), where present day me’s email may or may not, at some indeterminate point in the future, be converted into a response from the other person. At this point though I realize all of this was far too ambitious for an email to a stranger, and I should have just thanked him for his interest. My hope is that writing all this here on SADDLEBLASTERS.COM, I can get it out of my system, and then return to my email inbox and write some sane, normal responses.
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Yesterday, I discovered The Exciting Breeding Journal. It felt like a bolt of lightening in the midnight sky, briefly illuminating for me the path to how one might write a diary consisting of daily entries in a way that could become true literature. I read it, determined to do something with this inspiration immediately — but first I felt a pressing need go out for a 15km run at 5 p.m. in the sun and humidity. When I got back, I collapsed on the floor and, after somehow managing to crawl into the shower, I was unable to do anything meaningful for the rest of the day. “Tomorrow!” I thought. Yet tomorrow became today, and already at 10:30 this morning I gave up all hope of accomplishing anything. Instead I have just been passing time, waiting for yet another tomorrow to come, so I can bike back to the office and feel the warmth of its heated toilet seats against my air-conditioned-chilled flesh. At this point, I no longer have any idea what it was about the Breeding Journal that had so entranced me. I suppose I’ll have to continue in my ever expanding confusion, unsure what to do with this website of mine. Once again, I was deluding myself. You can’t consciously write literature. Literature only occurs when you don’t realize it — when you think you’re doing something else.