I have a tattoo on the underside of my left forearm. It is the image of a tree whose roots form the nonsense phrase “Asa nisi masa.” It’s upside down, according to the artist who committed the indelible ink to my skin, which I definitely understand. The treetop extends toward my left wrist and the roots reach toward the elbow, which, if my hands are resting at my sides, is unequivocally upside down.
But that’s if I care how others view my tattoo. I don’t. This tattoo is for me and I want to be able to see it right side up when I hold my hand out in front of me. So I insisted that it be upside down.
This tattoo has a great deal of personal significance for me. It was not something I did spur of the moment or on a whim, though I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that sort of impetus for a tattoo, either. I’m simply saying mine was premeditated. It’s also abstract. I intend to break it down for you here. Hopefully I manage to make some semblance of sense.
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I’m going to call it right now (and if you think this is too early, let me tell you, I’ve effectively said the same thing since January, and it still holds true for me), Typhoon’s Offerings is the best album of the year. It even rivals The Wall by Pink Floyd in terms of narrative structure and cohesive storytelling. This is my definitive opinion on the subject. You will be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.
The album itself centers on a protagonist with a deeply flawed memory. This character is at the end of his life and is rapidly losing the context of who he is and who those are around him. In addition, the world he inhabits is falling into chaos and willfully forgetting its past, while our protagonist struggles to recall his.
The purview of the album’s central exploration is this idea of memory. It poses a few simple questions: who are we without our memories, our experience? Who are we without the context of where we came from or where we’re going? Basically, if all we have at the disposal of our conscious thought is this present moment, and nothing else, what does anything mean at all?
If you’ve read Flowers for Algernon, you will already have a good sense of the album, even if you’ve not heard it. The parallels are stark, even down to explicit references, and the book heavily informs my understanding of Offerings.
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A phrase recurs throughout the entirety of Offerings: Asa nisi masa. This phrase is a driving force within the intricately woven narrative of the album, but it did not originate within the album. The phrase comes from elsewhere. It’s a small part of the 1963 Italian film, 8 ½, by director Federico Fellini.
(As an aside, I’ve watched the film, but only once, and it was conceptually far above my head due to the language barrier and the speed at which the subtitles passed by. My knowledge of the context of the phrase within the confines of the film should be taken with a grain of salt. I have, however, listened to Offerings at least one hundred times, and likely more, since it came out in early January this year. Thus, I tend to trust my interpretation of the album’s use of the phrase more than I trust my interpretation of the film’s use.)
In 8 ½, Guido (the protagonist) meets a couple street performers, a man and a woman. Their shtick is mind reading. The man makes as though he’s reading the thoughts of a member of the audience and the woman puts the words up for all to see. Then they ask if these words are what that audience member was thinking, to which he replies that yes, yes it is what he was thinking.
So Guido has them read his mind. He gathers his thoughts, the man reads his mind, and the woman reveals the words “asa nisi masa.”
“Is this what you were thinking?” they ask Guido. And Guido confirms that it is.
Cut to: Guido as a child in a boarding school, or something similar. He’s in bed and his roommate sits in the bed opposite him. He tells Guido to “remember the formula,” and then chants, “Asa nisi masa. Asa nisi masa. Asa nisi masa!”
And then we’re back to the present and the film does not directly address this phrase again.
So in the film, the phrase is used as a mnemonic device to motivate a flashback for the main character’s recollection and it takes up hardly any time. In the album, though, the phrase repeats over and over, really reinforcing this idea of remembering, which is something the protagonist of the album cannot adequately do.
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So now we know from whence the phrase spelled out by the roots of the tree comes, but what about the tree itself? Glad you asked. Let’s get into it.
If you’ve ever spoken with me, and the subject of trees comes up, you’ll likely know I’ve got more than a slight fascination with them. There’s an almost spiritual connection and respect I have with and for trees. If, prior to my existence, I were given a choice of the sort of organism I was to be, I would have picked a tree. A deciduous tree, more specifically.
A tree exists outside virtue or intention. There is no moral imperative for its continued existence, but it continues to exist regardless. Not only that, but the tree continues to exist for its own sake, without thought, without purpose.
A tree propagates passively, shedding its nuts or seeds, but at the end of the day, whether those seeds survive and become future trees is of little or no concern to the parent tree. It is the most Zen of all living beings, by my metric. And while the tree does affect the world in positive and vital ways, it does not do so out of obligation. Its effects on us are completely passive and just the result of its natural state.
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The tree’s roots dig deep. They extend into soil, grounding the tree, providing valuable nutrients. The tree directly derives sustenance from Earth itself. The tree is wholly its own, an entity unto itself. And yet, the tree is also a part of a greater whole. It reaches down into the earth and extends up toward the sky, gleans nourishment from both. It is a perfect picture of harmonious existence.
The tree is individual and separate, but remove it from the soil, uproot it from the earth, and it will die. Allow the tree to remain, and it can adapt and survive through great adversity. There are incredibly robust trees that manage thrive in tumultuous and hostile environments. The oldest known living organisms on Earth are trees, some at around 6,000 years old and counting. The origins of these ancient trees extend beyond memory, for all practical purposes, as though they exist untouched by time itself.
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Now, to tie these concepts together…
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I used to hold an incredibly linear worldview. My thinking was pretty black and white. “Everything happens for a reason,” I would have told you. I used to think that there was some sort of divine plan, some cosmic purpose or intention, to life on Earth. This was born of my experience in the evangelical subculture of conservative small town America. I further used to believe that my role in that plan was of critical importance. Every individual, I believed, mattered in a fundamentally imperative sense.
This belief put an enormous amount of strain upon my psyche, which still weighs on me to this day, but to a far lesser degree. An oversimplification of this mindset could be boiled down to a sense that I had to save the world. I wouldn’t have couched it in that language, but that’s effectively what I believed.
This sense of moral purpose put me through the ringer mentally and emotionally. But one evening, after watching an episode of Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, I had a profound revelation: nothing matters. Not in a cosmic sense, anyway. The entire planet could literally explode tomorrow and it would not affect the rest of the universe at large. We are an infinitesimal spec in the cosmos, and that’s being laughably, hyperbolically generous.
This sudden and unexpected wave of nihilism was some of the most palpable relief I think I’ve ever felt. I didn’t matter. I could disappear, and the world would carry on. Sure, my immediate social circles and family unit would be sad, but after some time, they would move on. And once everyone I knew, or who knew me, passed on, I would be lost to history, forgotten, consumed by the past, like all the billions who came before and whose names no living person now knows.
In that moment, I no longer felt the weight of the damn world upon my shoulders. I didn’t have to save anybody. All humans, all life, shares the same fate when all is said and done. We are a flash in the cosmic pan. Humans are neither good nor evil by nature. Nothing is good or evil by nature. We simply are. And then we are not. There is no moral imperative for anything to exist, and yet we exist. It is up to us to make of that existence what we will.
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“Asa nisi masa,” to me, is an attempt to remember something, something forgotten. It is an extension into the past, groping for meaning, context, sustenance, the roots of an ancient tree digging into the soil of time.
For all our knowledge of the past, of history, of the origin of life itself, we still have more questions than answers. Our roots only take us so far. They only tell us so much. At the end of those roots, all we’re left with is oblivion.
And as these roots reach deeper and deeper into the substance of things we will never know, never remember, I am left with this lasting impression: from nothing we come, into nothing we go. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Oblivion is our history and our future.
The past and the present are codependent. Like the questions posed in Offerings, I am simultaneously the sum total of my past experiences (both those I remember and those I don’t) and my present existence. My past defines my present just as my present will dictate my future. And if I extrapolate that outward into humanity as a whole, I’m left with the same conclusion. Our collective past defines our present reality.
Billions of years of evolution have led us here. Our entire species is born of obscurity. Unknown, ancient, primitive people gave birth to people we don’t remember who gave birth to people we don’t remember who gave birth to still more of the same. And for every person from antiquity about whom there are a few words written in the history books, how many billions of others are there about whom nothing is known at all? And yet, these nameless, phantasmal people existed. We know they did, because we exist now, and wouldn’t if they hadn’t.
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Like the tree, like the memories of Offerings’ protagonist, I exist, though the past may be fuzzy to the point of unknowability. My roots go deep, deeper than I know, down into things I’ve long forgotten, and things I’ve never known to remember. And these roots exist in complimentary fashion to the rest of this conceptual tree. What we see is only a small part of what is. And what is will ultimately end the same for all of us.
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Asa nisi masa. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. From nothing, to something, to nothing return.