The references I can no longer make

On a kind of citation that has dissolved past the point of being cited — and what we might still give back

Picture by the author (Hiroshi Sato)

I started writing in English not long ago — for the first time in my life — and found myself in a place where the culture around references is carefully kept. When you say something here, it matters to show where it came from. You place your own thought inside a wider conversation, and you name the people whose work you are standing on; by naming them, you also hand something back to that conversation.

When I first met this practice, it felt as though I had come upon something beautiful. To cite is to bring back, briefly, to the surface, the wisdom that has sunk to the bed of flowing time and become its foundation. And to make your own footing visible, so that a reader can test it, follow it back, and go further than you did, or in a slightly different direction — that is how it felt. I wanted to become someone who could give something back to this culture, and I still do.

And then, trying to do exactly that, I ran into a strange sensation.

The thing I could not cite

It happened in a small, practical way. I was writing a paragraph, and I wanted to add a reference — to be honest about where a particular way of seeing had come from. And I could not.

It was not simply that I had forgotten a name. That kind of forgetting has an edge to it; you know there is a gap, and you can feel its shape. This was different. The thought I wanted to call back had no edge left. It had stopped being something I could set down on a desk, as a single thing, and point at. It must have arrived from outside once — from a book, a conversation, a sentence read on a train. But the label that said when? from where? was no longer on it, and I could not even be sure it had come from one place rather than several. By now, this is just how things look to me.

There are, I started to notice, a quiet number of these — or rather, I started to notice that what I am made of is exactly these quiet things whose origins can no longer be traced. Not what I have lost, but readings that have soaked all the way through; what loses its label, it turns out, is not only what I have let go of, but also what has finished arriving in me. The references I can make are, in a way, the ones still drifting like bottles in shallow water — close enough that I can take a boat out, find them, and lift them up by hand. Most of what I am is what I can no longer cite. Those are the things that have already lost their labels and their glass — sometimes dissolved into the surrounding water, sometimes scattered too widely to gather. They are no longer beside me. They are inside the shape of the sea itself.

Picture by the author (Hiroshi Sato)

What has not yet completed

I know a word that might help describe this state, and I should say where I got it, while I still can.

I took it from a book by Yasushi Hirai, The World Is Made of Time. There is a grammatical term I will borrow once and then put down: the imperfective — the form a language uses for something that is still going on, not yet completed, still open at its far end. What I do with the word here is my own way of holding it, not the author’s argument. If you find the precise idea in the original, I would welcome the correction.

What I take from it is this. Information, when it enters us, does not complete on arrival. For a while it stays unfinished — until what has been received is, in some form, put back out into the world — still moving, still touching other things, still able to change shape. And, as I understand him, Hirai treats the phenomenon we call consciousness, too, as something that lives within this unfinished form: not a finished state we inspect, but a process that has not closed. That last step is mine, not a summary of his: the things I can no longer cite are the ones that have sunk below this moving surface, down out of awareness, into something I would call the unconscious. They have not vanished. They have settled. And every so often — shaken by a question, a phrase, a problem that happens to rhyme with them — one of them rises again, unbidden. But it often surfaces without its label. What comes back is only the content; many of the little cards that said this is so-and-so’s fell off somewhere on the way down. What I can still bring back with its label is what my attention can still catch on — what is, in Hirai’s sense, not yet finished in me. What has finished is no longer something I can turn my attention toward; it has settled below the surface where attention reaches.

Picture by the author (Hiroshi Sato)

A self that is a hollow absence

A second book — still with its label intact — comes to mind here. It is Shin-Ichi Fukuoka’s Between Art and Science, a collection drawn from a long newspaper column. The chapter whose force I want to borrow was itself Fukuoka reading someone else — the immunologist Tomio Tada, and his book The Semantics of the Immune Self. Tada wrote it; Fukuoka read Tada and wrote it again, in his own astonishment; I read Fukuoka and carried it off.

Their account, very roughly, is this. Our immune system does not learn its enemies one by one. It generates a vast, near-random variety of sensors, and then, in an early window before birth, it destroys the ones that react against the body’s own self. What is left is treated as not-self. The self is never written down anywhere as a positive thing — it is what the sensors were stripped of the power to react to, what, in that sense, they forgot. Go looking for it at the centre and there is no list, no core. The self, in Fukuoka’s phrase, naming what he had found in Tada, is a hollow absence — a void left exactly where the deletions were made.

I want to be careful here, on two counts. Hollow absence, void — these are not my inventions. The shape they describe — a self never written down anywhere as a positive thing — comes from Tada. The name itself I take from Fukuoka, who, reading Tada, was struck and gave it that name. And the word I keep reaching for — that the body forgot the self — is mine, not theirs. The mechanism they describe is deletion: the self-reactive sensors are destroyed, not absent-minded. I am bending deletion toward forgetting on purpose, because the bending is this essay’s subject. What I am doing is leading their phrase out somewhere it was not built for — out of immunology, into the small problem of what I can and cannot cite. That carrying is mine. I do not want to dress it up as theirs.

The two books are still open in me at once. One is about the things quietly sinking toward completion. One is about the void at the centre of the net of sensors.

Picture by the author (Hiroshi Sato)

Where the two lines cross

Set them next to each other and the question that joins them is the question of where my attention can still find something to hold on to. The things I can still quote are the things my noticing still catches on. The things I can no longer quote have slipped past my noticing — and, as Tada and Fukuoka say of the self the immune system stops reacting to, what no longer meets me as a separate thing has become part of how I see. An eye does not see itself; it is part of seeing.

So the “un-citability” of a reading is not a gap in my notes. It is the measure of how deeply some idea has been received. The references I can produce cleanly are the ones that have not yet become me. The ones that did become me cannot, most of the time, be produced cleanly — they go on, label-less and undistinguished from me, dissolved into whatever I write next.

Being unable to name a source is not the same as being unable to give anything back. What can I do for the ones whose labels I have peeled off, the ones I have folded into a new version of myself?

What I can do, for now, is to keep writing — with the eyes they have updated, the hands that now write differently, and the way of looking they have given me. I will read the labelled messages still drifting near my surface, follow their references, sit with them long enough to finish them, and let them dissolve into me. What writing here has taught me is to give back, in advance, to those who might one day become me — while I still can. Before they have become me, while their labels are still on them, while I can still write back to them by name. This strange sensation itself will keep floating in me, unfinished, for a while yet — stirring things in me as it surfaces and sinks.

References & further reading

This essay leans on three writers whose work I can still cite, and gestures at a fourth fold — the things I no longer can. Where my use of a term departs from its source, I have tried to say so in the text rather than here.

On time that has not finished:

• Yasushi Hirai, The World Is Made of Time (平井靖史『世界は時間でできている──ベルクソン時間哲学入門』, Seidosha, 2022). The word imperfective, and the idea of consciousness as something that has not closed, I took from this book; the use I make of it is my own and may not match the argument in the original.

On the immune self as a hollow absence:

• Tomio Tada, The Semantics of the Immune Self (多田富雄『免疫の意味論』, Seidosha, 1993). The account of the self as what immune sensors no longer react to belongs to this book; the name hollow absence / void was given to it later by Fukuoka.
• Shin-Ichi Fukuoka, Between Art and Science (福岡伸一『芸術と科学のあいだ』, Kirakusha, 2015) — a book made from his column in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun; the piece “In the immune system, the self is a hollow absence” is where I met Tada’s idea, already once removed.

On the practice of references itself:

• The culture of citation I describe is the everyday one of online essays and the wider conversation they sit in — a practice I am still learning, and grateful to be learning.