Fish Tale

I was asleep on the couch when my son woke me. “Mommy’s choking on a fishbone.” In the background I hear loud hacking sounds. I go to the kitchen half-conscious and see my wife eating mouthfuls of bread, then spoons of olive oil, gagging desperately to dislodge the bone. 

I pressed her tongue down with a spoon and tried to play hero doctor hoping to see bone to extract it. I couldn’t find the bone. Now she started coughing up blood but said she would wait for urgent care the next morning to avoid the emergency room wait. 

There’s a weird vow echoing in the back of my head. That classic: Do you promise to love, honor, and cherish… in sickness and in health and fish bones too? 

Yes.

I do.

Then I went back to sleep.

⸻

She woke me again around 3-ish. Maybe later. Poked me in the ribs—not lovingly—and said she thought she needed to go to the ER. This was after she’d fallen down a internet search rabbit hole and diagnosed herself with something called an esophageal perforation, which apparently has like a 20% fatality rate unless promptly treated by people wearing white coats and gloves and not an architect with no medical training  in fruit of the loom underwear. I asked if she wanted me to come, not because I didn’t want to (I did) but because our marriage has its own strange rhythm of wounded independence and deferred togetherness and I wasn’t sure if she wanted help or just wanted to be the martyr who braves triage alone. But she said yes.

On the way she reminded me—not without heat, of my shoddy medical companion track record… that I once ate a tuna fish sandwich during the birth of our first son and that I almost missed our second son’s actual crowning moment because I’d gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a missing flan that I had ordered. She did not find this amusing and warned me to behave. 

We cabbed it to Roosevelt Hospital, which I told her is a hospital with the weird claim to fame of being the place John Lennon was taken after being shot. I know this because I know things like this and absolutely no one ever needs to hear them. I did not tell her that the doctor supposedly pumped Lennon’s heart manually for 20 minutes while Yoko Ono screamed down the hallway and “All My Loving” played somewhere over the loudspeakers.

Admissions: metal detector, NYPD cops milling around, the usual ER panorama of disarray—stretchers, track-marked arms, incoherent yelling, that one guy whose bloody face looks like it lost a bet with gravity.

Miracle of miracles: we got in to the treatment area in 10 minutes. 

Now the real waiting began. Vitals, triage, fluorescent lighting that somehow makes everyone’s soul look gray. She sat stiffly on a hospital bed with a Rorschach-shaped stain on the sheet that could’ve been rust or blood or god knows what. I lay down beside her fully clothed and in my winter coat, hood up, looking either homeless or deeply disturbed… my body was contorted and my legs half dangled off the inclined hospital bed so as to avoid the stain on the sheets. I promptly fell asleep again like the world’s worst emotional support animal.

⸻

Woken by a med student. Very young. Possibly not old enough to rent a car. He asked what the pain felt like on a scale of 1 to 10. She said 7. For reference, I’m assuming childbirth is a 10. My own pain threshold, it must be said, is somewhere around 2. I can tolerate stubbing a toe on coffee table and whimpering for an hour. 

This med student peered into her mouth and saw nothing, but mentioned the possibility of a CAT scan to rule out the nightmare scenario of an esophageal rupture, which is the kind of thing that can lead to death via mediastinitis.

They wheeled her off, and I stayed behind in the bed again, now fully resigned to the idea that I might be lying in someone else’s dried trauma. And yet I slept.

They returned. They saw the bone. No perforation. A resident noted her tongue was, quote, “large,” which vindicated my failed attempt to fish out the bone.

Then at 7:30 a.m., in comes the ENT. This guy’s got a portable monitor with a long fiber optic cable, and the kind of bedside confidence that makes you trust him even though he looks 32. He tells her to gargle this anesthetic and not to swallow it, and the way she gargled—loud, comic, primal—made me laugh for the first time all night. She almost choked again just from that. The gargle broke  the whole sterile hush of the place.

Camera goes up the nose. Down the throat. Monitor shows the epiglottis, then blood, then the Bone: long, pointed, impaled vertically in the soft pink folds like a miniature medieval Excalibur sword waiting for the right knight to release it. The ENT  knight retrieves it with tweezers and drops it dramatically into a dish like a magician producing the card you picked.

“What kind of fish?” he asks.

“Dorado,” she says.

⸻

Forty-five more minutes waiting for discharge. Now I became useful. I started flagging down nurses with my trademark polite-desperate energy. I tracked down the elusive discharge RN. Got the papers. Freedom at last. If it weren’t for me we would’ve been sequestered there another 5 hours. 

We walked home in the morning light, which was golden and beautiful. She was exhausted but okay. I was still in my winter coat. The fishbone sat god knows where, possibly now a teaching specimen, or in the trash. A week ago it was swimming in the ocean minding its own business.

The Art of Fugue in Tibet (or, What Happens When the Lights Go Out in the Middle of Bach’s Last Breath)

Contrapunctus 14, the last movement  of Bach’s Art of Fugue ends abruptly. Bach literally died while writing it. In his original manuscript, the notes stop and are followed by a message in Bach’s son’s, Carl Phillip’s, handwriting  who was in charge of transcribing his father’s musical ideas onto paper as Bach battled blindness in old age:

“Über dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme B A C H im Contra-subject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben.”

Translated into English, it means:

“At this point in the fugue, where the name B-A-C-H appears in the countersubject, the composer died.”

The rest of the score is blank. Empty hand drawn staves extend to the bottom of the page. 

Theoretically, a score is just symbols. Ink scratches on paper. Without a performer, it lies inert. But when a musician conjures Bach they’re not just reading - they’re channeling. They’re breathing life into a set of instructions written by someone who is no longer here. They align their body, their breath with someone else’s mind, often across a gulf of centuries and culture. The composer is dead; the music is not. And the performer’s job is to bring that ghost back into the room.

And when the musical seance is done well—you can feel it. The room changes. Time and space warp a little. It’s not just you hearing something—it’s you being in the presence of someone.

J.S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge—The Art of Fugue—a kind of farewell note… the musical equivalent of a man drawing a mandala on his deathbed and then leaving the last corner blank, mid-stroke, hand arrested in air. The final movement, Contrapunctus XIV, trails off mid-line. No final cadence, no ritardando, no D minor chord to finish. Just gone.

And here’s the part that will sound like a parable even though it isn’t one.

We were in Tibet. My sister was slated to play Art of Fugue in concert and I had the role of page turner. We were told the electricity might go out. This was presented with the same matter-of-factness as “the restrooms are down the hall to the left.” Something about rotating power grids, something about rationing, something something elevation and batteries. So I brought a flashlight. 

Now imagine this: my sister onstage playing the 90-minute sequence of fugues and canons, each one built like a crystalline scaffold of pure intellect, themes folded into themselves like those snakes that swallow their own tails. There’s no tempo markings. No instrumentation instructions. Bach left it like a musical koan: interpret this how you will. Solve this labyrinth if you dare.

About halfway in, right during the triple fugue—this is the one that eventually spells out B-A-C-H (in German notation: B♭–A–C–B♮), a kind of contrapuntal signature, an audio fingerprint folded inside the fugue—the lights go out.

And not like a flicker. Total. Gone. The hall is in sudden full blackout. You could hear people, shuffle. My sister, maybe not seeing but somehow sensing, doesn’t skip a beat. She keeps playing. Unfazed. The music continues—disembodied, a sonic ghost in total darkness. And I, from her side , flick the flashlight on. Only the sheet music glows now. A small cone of light in the sea of darkness. 

I turned the pages.

And for the next 30 minutes, we are in this dimension  of negative space—black on black, notes bouncing  around  in near darkness—and the audience, who cannot see her, only hear her leading the musical odyssey. Everyone’s sense of hearing  is heightened with nearly all visual distractions removed. 

And then we reach the end.

Except—there is no end. The music stops. No resolution. No closure. It breaks off in the middle of the third subject, right as the B-A-C-H motif returns. And the story goes that Bach died while writing it. Like literally expired with the quill still raised. 

And I click off the flashlight. The hall went from dimly haunted to utter black.

No one claps. Not right away.

Because we all know something had happened. Like we’d glimpsed the ghost inside the notation. The unfinished fugue—the final fugue that loops on itself, that encodes the composer’s name inside itself and then vanishes—had been played in the dark. And the only thing illuminating it had been this tiny cone of light, aimed not at the player but at the pages. The score. The artifact. The trace.

I think that’s when I understood what a musical performance could be. Or at least, what this piece is. It’s a mirror Bach left for us with his dying breath. And because he couldn’t finish it, we have to finish it. Not musically—I mean spiritually. Interpret that however you want. Just bring a flashlight.

Cultural Iceberg, Japanese Houses, and the Grammar of the Unseen

I. The Iceberg Cometh

So there’s this diagram that shows up in freshman sociology classes that represents “culture” as an iceberg. You know the one. The tip above water, visible, shiny, obvious: language, food, architecture, fashion, and maybe pop music. And then this enormous, dark mysterious icy base of values, belief systems, social norms, etc.—all of which, while unseen, form the basis of the visible stuff.

If this seems a little too simplistic —i.e. the seen vs. the unseen, the iceberg model gets at something interesting: that what we build (materially, aesthetically, spatially) is conditioned by what we believe but don’t talk about. Architecture—despite being entirely physical, public, and experiential—is one of the most invisibly ideological expressions of a culture.

Enter: the Japanese house.

II. A Room Made of Air

The classic Japanese house—the kind Western architects copied and idolized in the 19th and 20th centuries, all sparse lines and wood joinery and the philosophical seduction of absence—is not “minimalist”. That’s the iceberg talking. The surface reads as “minimal,” especially from the perspective of an observer stuck in an overstuffed, over-ornamented Victorian house, but underneath the waterline is a whole system of aesthetics, ethics, that make the visual minimalism of the Japanese house not so much a style as a consequence.

There’s ma, for instance. Often translated as “negative space” or “interval,” but it’s more than that—it’s about the charged nothingness between things, the idea that absence is as meaningful as presence. The idea that what isn’t there is at least as important as what is. That the gap between tatami mats or the pause in a musical phrase or the shadow under a shoji screen is not just empty but filled with a kind of silent, participatory significance.

Western aesthetics focuses on  things. Matter. Presence. Function. Even our spiritual architecture, cathedrals and temples and so on, are often designed to awe via accumulation: more light, more stone, higher ceilings, more iconography per square inch. The Japanese house, by contrast, awes by subtraction. By revealing how little is necessary to suggest infinity.

What’s fascinating—iceberg-wise—is that this aesthetic of subtraction is not simply a matter of taste. It’s rooted in centuries of cultural assumptions: about impermanence (wabi-sabi), about humility, about the body’s relationship to space, about the seasonal nature of existence, about death.

A room without furniture, in other words, is not “empty.” It is full of cultural code. 

III. On Floors That Speak

Let’s talk about the floor, which is not just a surface you walk on. In Japanese homes, you remove your shoes at the entrance (genkan), transitioning from the contaminated outside to the purified interior. Your bare feet are now in physical contact with the home itself—specifically, with tatami: soft, fibrous mats made of rice straw, precisely measured and arranged in accordance with a grid that regulates the entire architecture of the house.

Pause here. This is already iceberg-rich. To have a floor that you touch—intimately, bodily, barefootedly—implies a whole worldview. The Western house (particularly in colder climates) historically keeps the feet insulated through shoes, socks, or carpet. It is made for the standing. The Japanese house presumes that you will be on the floor—sitting, reclining, sleeping, eating. The body’s relationship to architecture is horizontal, grounded, low.

And this architectural posture in turn conditions behavior: you move differently. You don’t barge into rooms; you slide. You don’t plop down on a couch; you kneel or sit cross-legged. The architecture enforces a kind of spatial humility, an awareness of gravity and balance  that you don’t get in spaces designed for standers.

Also: the tatami is standardized—one mat is roughly 0.9m x 1.8m. The modularity of tatami defines the size of rooms, which affects the social choreography of those rooms: how many people can sit, how they face one another, what kind of ceremony (tea, mourning, negotiation, gossip) can unfold.

This is part of the iceberg, too: the unseen relational codes that determine spatial logic. 2 tatami rooms are for storage, 3 tatami for 2nd bedrooms, 4.5 tatami rooms are for tea, 6 tatami for living room. The number of tatami in a room defines activities  with unspoken rules.

IV. Screens, Walls, and Ontological Modesty

If you come from a Western tradition, you probably think of a wall as something solid. Protective. Load-bearing. Permanent. The wall is the thing that divides space, creates privacy, sets up boundaries between self and other, me and you, inside and outside.

But in the Japanese house, walls are often paper. Or wood lattice with translucent paper—shoji. Or sliding doors—fusuma. In any case, they’re movable. Impermanent. Suggestive rather than declarative. They do not announce “this is a room” so much as hint 「とりあえず、ここは部屋にできる。」   or “this could be a room, for now.”

This mobility of boundaries signals a radically different approach to space which is ephemeral and in flux. The shoji can be slid open to make one big room, then closed to make two smaller rooms. The house adapts to context: season, guest, occasion. The architecture is not a fixed structure but a dynamic participant in human life.

Which suspiciously sounds almost like a Buddhist insight about impermanence dressed up as carpentry.

Again: what’s visible—the delicate sliding screen—is merely the detail  of an entire submerged belief system. That belief system doesn’t show up on a blueprint. But it determines everything.

V. On Silence, Shadows, and the Aesthetic of Restraint

If you read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows—you get a 20th-century lament for the vanishing beauty of the traditional Japanese interior: dim, smoky, oblique, composed of shadows rather than light. The Western mind, says Tanizaki, wants brightness and clarity. The Japanese mind wants depth and diffusion.

And this aesthetic isn’t arbitrary. It’s moral. For Tanizaki, the soft glow of lacquer in candlelight or the quiet patina of a tarnished metal bowl is not just pretty—it’s ethically right. Because it aligns with a worldview that values restraint, imperfection, modesty, quiet. A worldview in which light can be vulgar, excessive, a kind of visual violence.

Again: iceberg. The visible aesthetics of shadow and restraint emerge from invisible values—about humility, about aging, about the sacredness of the ordinary. The Western obsession with clarity, transparency, and light is not universal. It is the tip of our iceberg.

VI. The House as Hypothesis

So what happens when you try to live in a Japanese house as a non-Japanese person? What iceberg are you standing on, and can it support you?

Many modern architects—especially Western ones—have tried to import the Japanese house wholesale. They go nuts for the clean lines, the absence of clutter, the seamless indoor-outdoor transitions. But often they miss the substructure. They replicate the form without the function, the look without the ontology.

A glass box with a tatami mat is not a Japanese house. 

The Japanese house is not a product. It is a hypothesis: about how life should be lived. What kind of time you’re in. How your body should move. What silence means. Where your gaze should fall. What materials you trust. How much of yourself you should assert.

And unless you inhabit the entire cultural logic beneath it, the form can’t fully function.

Which is why the iceberg is such a useful metaphor. You can borrow the tip—build your house with shoji screens and a rock garden and some bamboo—but unless you also import the waterline assumptions, you’re just performing a style. The house won’t behave the way it’s supposed to. It won’t produce the self it was designed to produce.

Because architecture, like language, is generative. It doesn’t just reflect culture. It makes it.