Ima Muso (今、無想。)

For many years, I tried to write finished prose. Great words have a soul dwelling in them. They have human warmth, the words are polished to perfection, and the context is edited so that anyone can understand it. You rarely come across them, but when you read them, you know at once.

When I encounter writing and words like that, I feel a trembling sense of awe, along with a little disappointment. Because it throws into relief the rather uninteresting fact that I have neither that literary talent nor that editorial skill. I don't consider myself a perfectionist. The disappointment comes from wanting to respond better to what has influenced me.

Lately, however, while I search for words to craft writing I'm satisfied with, new ideas come to me one after another. Each idea quickly takes another form, and they assail me without pause. There is something that will eventually be lost if I leave it unwritten; and conversely, if I just hoard writing that I finished at some particular time and place, it goes bad. There are countless such things.

So I began to think it might not be so bad to express them while they're fresh, unfinished as they are. If you trace that trajectory, a vague outline comes into view. To lose what I could see at the time while waiting for completion would be a great loss. No—more than that, I would be letting down what I can see now.

Writing is a technology that transcends time and place. People, society, and nature keep changing, and the very ways of thinking that try to grasp them keep changing too. Amid all this, it is hard to say that a finished system with a soul dwelling in it truly exists.

Rather, isn't it the things that don't close off dialogue with an ever-changing world that survive the longest? For example, as I see it, great words don't have much influence in the time and place of their birth; rather, unfinished words absorb the changes of time and place, and their greatness is amplified. This is merely one person's observation, but that is how it looks to me now. To observe things as they are, to leave behind what I see now, to leave behind what cannot yet be named. That is not an answer, but it is a trace of the unfinished.

Thinking this way, I begin to see a little of what I want to do here. In this place, I want to keep experimenting, unfinished. In a few years I may turn out to be wrong. I may feel embarrassed looking back. I'll write anyway. Writing, too, is a kind of experiment. I love experiments.

I love experiments done in the physical world, and I love experiments done in thought. But the latter doesn't exist cut off from the former. It is grounded in what I've observed in the real world, what I've made with my own hands, what I've failed at, and the sense I've gained from all of that. Imagination always starts from reality.

You could say it's for the future, or for myself, and perhaps that's so. But more than that, I want to fulfill the responsibility of expressing what I couldn't help but see. Ima Muso (今、無想。), the name of this site, IMAMUSO, means the muso of now (ima). Muso here is three words that share one sound: 無想, a mind not held by fixed ideas; 無相, having no fixed form; and 夢想, dreaming. It is a place like a garden, where I observe the world from where technology, culture, humanity, society, and civilization intersect, and record the process.