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様
A stack of envelopes, forty or so.
Notices to our clients, for the start of the second half of the fiscal year.
The addresses were to be written by hand, I was told.
Company. Department. Name.
And last, 様, sama, the honorific.
Somewhere past the thirtieth, my pen stopped.
様 looks like a character I have never seen.
A tree on the left, a sheep to its right, and beneath the sheep, something like water, flowing.
Every part is familiar. Only the shape they make together, I cannot recall.
I held the pen tip just above the paper and looked, for a while.
The longer I looked, the more the character became a gathering of small lines.
I almost asked the person at the next desk, this is right, isn’t it, and then didn’t.
Gestalt collapse, it is sometimes called.
Stare at the same character long enough, write it enough times, and the shape comes undone, and the meaning slips from your hand.
On the train home, I looked into it a little.
There was a study that measured brain waves while showing people a Chinese character over and over.
It compares the shape of the brain’s activity early in the repetitions with its shape later on.
The more someone said the character had seemed to fall apart, the further that shape had drifted from the shape of seeing a character whole.
It had moved closer, they say, to the shape of seeing it part by part.
There was also an experiment that showed rarely used characters again and again.
At first, the responses grow faster.
Then, it seems, a delay began to appear, only for the characters that had been repeated.
A pull toward the familiar, and a pull toward coming undone, straining against each other, I suppose.
Up to the thirtieth, my hand really had been getting faster with each one.
Perhaps I had been able to read it not because I was looking hard.
Just a glance at the whole of it, all at once.
The Line
That night, on the way home, I played alone.
A ball is left, almost straight in.
Cue ball, object ball, pocket, lined up very nearly on a single line.
I get down on it.
I didn’t want to miss.
So I looked for a long time.
On the cue ball, the point to strike.
On the object ball, the point to hit.
The mouth of the pocket.
As I look, the three points begin to drift loose, each on its own.
Which to join to which, I grow less and less sure.
The tip of the cue wavers, just slightly.
I shoot.
The object ball caught the point of the pocket and came back out.
At the next table, an older player was down on a shot, not moving.
After a while, the stance loosens, just like that.
Stands, and takes a step back from the table.
From behind the cue ball, looks out over the whole table.
Then sank down, took two practice strokes or so, and shot without a pause.
The object ball sounds once, deep in the pocket.
Playing alone, I can put the balls back.
I set up the same position once more.
Before getting down, I look, still standing.
Cue ball, object ball, pocket, there they are, still a single line.
I sank down and shot before I had stared too long.
The object ball goes straight in and is gone.
The Address
The next morning, I set the remaining envelopes on my desk.
Before writing, I look out the window, just for a moment.
On the roof of the building across the street, a water tower is catching the morning light.
Then I look at a single envelope, whole.
The company, the department, the name, and the blank space where nothing is written yet.
I write 様.
The familiar character is there.
I had been seeing it all, at once.
I draw the next envelope toward me.
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References
– Liang, Y., Mo, L. & Li, Y. (2026). From holistic to decompositional: Tracking the neural representational shift of Chinese character satiation with representational similarity analysis. *Brain and Language*, 281, 105832. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2026.105832
– Cao, K., Li, J., Wu, B., Zhang, H. & He, H. (2019). A Lexical Representational Mechanism Underlying Verbal Satiation: An Empirical Study With Rarely Used Chinese Characters. *Frontiers in Psychology*, 10, 2236. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02236
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