family matters!

On the novel’s website, there is a FAQ section, containing just one question.  How much of all of this is true; how much of it fiction?  …. Out of the mouths of babes ….  I feel no critical distance whatsoever from this FAQ.

Here is the author’s answer.  “The only fiction in this book is the secret tradition Priest Tokuda inherits — that the hibutsu were created to protect the world.” 

I suppose we are to conclude that all the rest is based on experience, fact, and actually existing people who have served as models for the characters. 

We are right smack dab in the middle of the LD affair.  If only for something perfectly patent: there is much more fiction involved than in the putative angelic function of the hidden buddhas.  It is totally fictional, not only to imagine the protective sheltering function of these statues, but above all the process by which they lose this function altogether.  To the best of my knowledge, I see no link between the plight of the world in the stage of mappô and the progressive extinction of the power of these statues to counteract the eroding influence of decadence.  This is indeed fictional, but fictional in a sense that you cannot intuit naturally, but one that takes (word)work and discipline to explicitate.

This is in fact one of the aspects of the novel I most enjoy.  It’s one of its most speculative elements.  As in speculative fiction.  It’s strange that this connection has not been made so far.  I’m sure there are people hard at work in the wings putting finishing touches on their essays developing this thesis.  A few words here will suffice.

I see a connection between the way the statues “die” and the way Philip lives on after his accident.  The short chapter called “Perception” is filled with challenging prose, prose that I can’t handle except by posing the hypothesis that this is what in fact is going on.  This is “fiction” in the sense of “making” (fictionner) the framework work, enabling us to continue our willful suspension of disbelief.  Here is an example of that challenging prose:

… Philip had not been thinking of Harvey Chernish at all as he loped across the street up to the I-House entrance.  He had been thinking about Tokuda. … the question of the hidden buddhas had taken over his thoughts.  Tokuda was the key;the hidden buddhas were the lock.  Maigny had discerned the pattern, and Philip was the one to put them all together.  This realization came uponhim with an almost physical force,like a wave he felt rise from deep inside his head.  And that was the last thing he remembered.

He had been dragged down by that wave.  He had a vague sensation of being underwater for a long time, pulled about, as if by hundreds of tiny hands, tumbled over sand and pebbles.  He sensed a woman’s arm reaching out.  He felt it must be Nagiko’s — but when he grasped it an older woman’s face swam into view and he dropped his hand in terror, falling back into the watery dark.  Finally, someone hauled him out of the water, up onto the beach.  Why was he so thirsty?  He could barely move.  He opened his mouth, and heard a strange voice rasping a croak for water.

“He recognized me” Nagiko said.  “Yes,” said the doctor, “it’s as if his perceptions touch his deep memories — but they are not anchored to anything.  They vanish in minutes, and he doesn’t remember having had them.”  … “There may have been something that happened just before the accident,” continued the doctor.  He asked Nagiko directly, “Did you ever know him to faint, or partly black out, when you were together?”

Nagiko … remembered their visit to Saidaiji.  Yes, he had passed out then … “Anything else?,” he asked.  She said that Philip had described a similar experience while he was hiking a pilgrimage …”our current hypothesis is that he may be suffering from a variety of Korsakoff’s syndrome.  But I don’t recommend you go airing that diagnosis to all your friends.  Usually Korsakoff’s is precipitated by fairly extreme alcoholism coupled with a thiamine deficiency. Obviously, this is not the situation here.  There is no polyneuritis that we can detect.  It may have been brought on by a concusion, or there is a chance that there was a tumor — although tests so far have not revealed one.”

For the rest of his life, Philip will function on past memories, but will forget them as soon as he or a visitor leaves the room.  He has become a living caractacture of David Hume’s philosophy of consciousness.  Just as the hibutsu can carry on with their ceremonial roles without anyone realising what has happened to them.  Only those privy to the secret are able to mourn without success the passing of the protection, a protection predicated on a living link back to the origin of Shingon which has now been severed.

This is what I love most about the novel, this fictional weave that takes one hell of a lot of imagination to sustain.  Notice back in the section quoted how little is brought into the light of day: what actually happened remains overshadowed, only hypothetical: a series of “what ifs.”  “It” was perhaps not a concussion, nor a tumor, but something going much further back.  Perhaps Philip had moved so close to the secret truth of the hibutsu that he could only share in their fate.

Day two is a day for the defense!

There are books for children, books for young adults, and books for adults.  Books for adults has always been an ambiguous term for me, meaning “for adults only” rather than “books for adults.”  You know …

Tinkers is for adults.  Tinkers is for people who look at people in the twilight of their lives and wonder: what are they thinking?  You get more than you bargained for in this one, believe me! 

It had never occured to Howard to tell George [his son] about his own father, Howard thought to himself, That’s right, my own father was always in the room upstairs at the walnut desk tucked under the eaves, composing [sermons].  He was even there when we ate dinner and when I did my lessons.  He would comment on this sometimes; he would say, What an odd thing,how I am here eating peas and there, too, scratching at my sermon.   We said nothing, but a shiver would run through me at the thought of rising from the table at my father’s right-hand side and passing into the narrrow unadorned hallway and up the narrow stairs, which were the only way to the second floor, to the study, where I would see my father bent over his work.  Sometimes I spent entire dinners imagining myself in a sort of loop where I continually went between my father at his desk and my father at the dinner table,always baffled in my intentions, by his ability to be in two places at once and my limitation to only one.  My father was a strange, gentle man.

I’d like to draw attention to the way the author does away with the standard rules of punctuation.  No quotation marks!  It’s so clear, the person speaking, but in actuality no one is speaking at all.  Everyone has passed.  That’s why the author can take such liberties with what we learned in school on direct and indirect speech. 

How can you be in two places at the same time?  No one in my family finds the question at all interesting.  They all answer in a chorus of disbelief and cynicism: you can’t.  We’re in our place, you’re in your place; these are our choices and now we must stick by them.  “A shiver would run through me”  like right now: what a shame that the boundaries not be a tad more porous, and the adventursome spirit of childhood, when you would strike out into unknown places, is now a thing of the past.  What if it returned?

A wind would come up through the trees, sounding like a chorus, so like a breath then, so sounding like a breath, the breath of thousands of souls gathering itself up somewhere in the timber lining the bowls and depressions behind the worn mountains the way thunderstorms did and crawling up their backs the the thunderstorms did, too, which you couldn’t hear, quite, but felt barometrically — a contraction or flattening of tone as everything compressed in front of it, again, which you couldn’t see, quite, but instead could almost see the result of — water flattening, so the light coming off of it shifted angles, the grass stiffening, so it went from green to silver, the’ swallows flitting over the pond all being pushed forward and then falling back to their original positions as they corrected for the change, as if the wind were sending something in front of it.  The hair on my neck prickled from nape to crown, as if a current were passing through it, and as the current leapt off of the top of my head and if I had my back to the trees, I would feel the actual wind start up the back of my neck and ruffle my hair and the water and the grass and spin the swallows in its choral voice stirring all of the  old unnamabl sorrows in our throats, where our voices caught and failed on the scales of the old forgotten songs.  My father would say, The forgotten songs we never really knew, only think we remember knowing, what what we really do is understand at the same time how we have never really known them at all and how glorious they must really be.

Had I not botched this family matter, I might have been able to be a part of the Collins choral voice singing forgotten songs.  This had to be a golden moment, when all of a sudden, from out of a background of forgetfulness, oblivion, aches, pains, and a stomach demanding regular meals, would come songs we hadn’t heard for thirty, forty, fifty years!  That would have been grand to have the names of those songs, in order to put the grand internet to work in getting them out of the wind and into our hearts, if only for a moment.  What if we had done that?  Would it have changed anything?  I think it would have placed us at a slightly different angle with respect to ultimate ends, but that’s a matter of belief and faith.  I’m not sure there’s anyone around anymore who shares my interest in these matters.  I’m counting on the boys feeling that wind from the nape to the crown of their necks, and starting off in turn on the WAY.

The following excerpt from a book by Pascal Quignard, roughly contemporaneous with “My 9/11,” contains the following passage, which, like so many passages and pages and whole novels penned by Brian Wall, is in need of translation.  So here it is, first in French, then in a provisory English translation from your friendly neighborhood translator.  This is yet another installment in what I shall call “Exercises in Love and Admiration.” which will alternate with others under the general heading “Resentments and Spite.”

                    Monsieur de Pontchâteau avait fait son ermitage des Granges de Port-Royal des Champs.

Autrefois Monsier de Pontchâteau avait fait collection de miniatures — avant qu’il s’entêtât des livres.  Dès l’instant où il se plut à leur lecture, il ne vécut plus que pour eux.  Il avait toujours à la bouche ce mot qu’il avait lu dans l’Imitation:

—- In omnibus requiem quaesivi et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.  (J’ai cherché dans tout l’univers le repos et je ne l’ai trouvé nulle part ailleurs que dans un coin avec un livre.)

*

Vivre dans l’angle — in angulo — du monde.

*

Dans l’angle mort — par lequel le visible cesse d’être visible à la vue.  Dans l’intervalle mort où les deux rhythmes humains (cardiaque puis pulmonaire) s’agrippent et autour duquel ils engendrent l’extase sonore et peut-etre la musique et, à partir de la musique, le temps.

*

Il faut pense ce point: La victoire de l’invisible ne brille pas.

 

There are several categories of people who do not read this blog, but who might, on occasion, be  persuaded, forced, or simply led to read one or another of its posts.  We’d have to make a list here, like Sei Shônagon does.  A list of people who don’t read Family Affairs.  (I’m preparing a blog entitled “why I blog” as a companion piece to Andrew Sullivan’s post on the same subject.  Such lists figure in this blog in progress.)  Sylvie Etient is someone who, I’m sure, would smile with affection and admiration at these lines by Pascal Quignard in his book Les Ombres Errantes.  It’s pleasing for me to imagine that, anyway.  So here we go with a first draft of a translation:

Monsieur de Pontchâteau had finally settled in at the Granges of Port-Royal des Champs.  A long way back he spent his time collecting miniature paintings, but this was before he got bogged down in books.  From the moment he found pleasure in reading them, he no longer lived for anything else but for them.  He was constantly quoting out loud something he had read in Saint Ignatius’s Imitation of Christ:

—-I have looked high and low for peace and tranquility and it was nowhere to be found outside of sitting in a corner with a good book.

To live in an angle of the world

In the blind spot [the dead angle] – where the visible ceases to be visible to the eye.  In the blind interval where the two major human rhythms, the heart beat and the work of breathing, hug each other until they engender an audible ecstasy and perhaps even a little music, and, from there, time itself.

This is the point that must be considered: The victory of the invisible does not shine forth!

 

First drafts are as embarrassing as farts during a good film or a great meal at Thanksgiving!  But’s it’s a sign of all the good things ingested and metabolized in view of future feasts!

That’s the best title I could think of.  Liza Dalby has thrown out so many lines, she has become such a consumate angler, for the attention and sensibility of people all over the world, that she is now a “cas.”  At least that is what she has become in the narrow confines of my life on this blog.  I keep looking over my shoulder, wondering what so and so will think, as I keep returning to “Hidden Buddhas” with a guilty conscience.  I say to myself: “is this book worthy of so much attention?”  Because I am devoting quite of bit of attention to it!  It has captured my fancy, but that’s not enough!  There is fancy and there is imagination, after all, and I would that it also feed my imagination!  The question is the same question as always: what’s fiction worth?

Liza Dalby has put a preliminary e-book guide to “Hidden Buddhas” on the site devoted to the novel.  With people, places, and things.  As always, this is slick and smooth; well-done and helpful.  I’m sure I’m not the only person around who is now fascinated by Shingon Buddhism in Japan, with its locus of people (especially the founder Kûkai), places (temples) and things (mandalas and mutra).  But why isn’t this all presented in the form of a guide book or essay?  That’s what I meant, way back on June 30th, when I must have sounded snarky talking about Dalby’s “rapidly improving prose.”  I meant the decision to enclose all of this information, and the incredible amount of experience, in the pages of a novel.  Of course you don’t have to consider the question important or obsessive (as I do): it’s easy to read it like you would any other novel with no further ado.  The geisha book is expository; the kimono book is an essay.  The 72 seasons is like an almanach.  But Lady Murasaki and the Hidden Buddhas are NOVELS.  That creates a bridge between the two novels, while also maintaining, at least superficially, the question of why this woman might resort to the novel to achieve her aims! 

Here is another thread to keep this question open as long as possible.  Where else than in a novel are you going to be able to measure up to the dimensions and practices of Japanese aesthetics and spirituality contained, compacted, in the novel’s  novel’s epigraph from Zeami: “If hidden — a flower; unless hidden, no flower at all.” ?  Of course this can become the object of an essay or treatise, as it does with Tanizaki.  But how much more praise of shadows can be found in The Makioko Sisters than in the essay?  Is it all that obvious that the novelist is the person who wishes the flower to remain hidden?  Isn’t the novelist the person who runs the greatest risk of defloration by lifting the veil before that hidden flower?  And this is where we come to Liza Dalby as an affair, a case.  What does she mean when she talks about fiction?  Why is it that she reads the world’s first novel by writing a novel in turn?  Is there such a thing as the fiction of a presence in one or the other of her two novels?  Has she tried to achieve such a presence?  With the risk involved?

Like Sei Shônagon used to do, and before her Apronenia Avitia, we can make lists of things we love about Hidden Buddhas.  1) We love the way fashion is promoted to the major art form it has always been!  We love to feel the shadow of Baudelaire tickling the nape of our neck as Nagiko maintains a perilous balance over the abyss of her own massive neurosis (let’s call it that for the moment).  We love the way she sculpts the body of her Philip in an unforgettable suit that captures everyone’s eye while remaining in the background of everyone’s attention.  They all think it’s Philip, his good looks, his height, but it’s the suit!  This is obviously one of Dalby’s strong suits.  The attention to fashion in all its Buddhist characteristics, the constant scandal for certain purists in seeing the world as impermanent and without essence, and the world of fashion as well, both requiring and manifesting the tender loving care at their core       2) we love the attention given to gastronomy in the novel, and to the cross-hatching between French and Japanese cuisine.  There are moments in “Hidden Buddhas” when our mouths water, and our consciousness of our rather vapid habits, most of the time, causes us shame.  Suddenly, the reader suspects that gastronomy is another locus in the story, that it is a supreme example of the good life while being a ready-made solution to the problem of doing away with a dangerous rival.  (The assassination by Fugu poisoning)  And just as suddenly, the reader says to himself: but doesn’t that also work with fashion?  Isn’t fashion the most sublime and the most stupid of pursuits.  Isn’t that the question that jumps out at us when we are drenched in i-mode?

Like Shikibu again, we can also make lists of things we detest about Hidden Buddhas.  That will be for tomorrow.  There is a very good case to be made in defense of Liza Dalby.  There is also a good case to be made for her failure as a novelist.  We shall have to sit in judgment.  Just as we do with any novel.  Too bad that this is almost never done anymore.  (It’s another example of statues losing their judgment-power)

The first chapter is entitled Waiting for Miroku.  The best parts of it take place in a classroom, with a Frenchman from Brittany named Maigny.  He tells quite an ancient story, and his students want to know how it turns out:

‘Of course, in times of great social upheaval, it is easier to see the signs of mappô,’ he continued.  ‘Yet most Buddhists would agree we are living through this stage right now.’

The volume of whispers rose again.  Maigny turned toward the blackboard.  THE THREE AGES OF THE BUDDHIST LAW

He wrote.  1)THE AGE OF CORRECT LAW, beginning with the era of Siddhartha, the historical Buddha.  2)THE AGE OF IMITATION OF THE LAW, the precepts begin to be distorted, leading to …   3) THE AGE OF DECLINE OF THE LAW.  The age of mappô.  The world is full of injustice, wars, famine, greed, and corruption.  The center no longer holds.

….’Is this like the apocalypse?” another question from across the hall.

‘Apokalypsis.  Greek.  It means ‘lifting of the veil’ — revelation, literally.  But you no doubt refer to the end of the world, yes?  Armageddon in the Christian tradition?  The Buddhist end of the world does not  have such a well-planned program.  The the … four chavaliers d’Apocalypse?  The return of the Messiah?  And the judgments, the sorting of souls — to heaven with you.  To hell with you.’  He pointed up with a beatific smile, and down with a scowl.  The students laughed.  ‘No, in the Buddhist view, the world simply degenerates to a point where it can no longer sustain itself.  That is mappô.  No unholy  monsters needed.  No Gog or Magog, Evil — yes.  There will be plenty of that — we humans are specialists in evil.’  … ‘According to some calculations, we are coming close to the end of mappô.  But doomsayers have a way of tripping up when they mention specific dates, no?’

‘So, Kûkai continues to wait — you know, like Monsieur Beckett’s play?  En attendant Godot?  We are all en attendant Miroku.’  Philip smiled.  Maigny caught his grin in the corner of his eye.

‘Is Miroku the Buddhist Messiah?’

‘Miroku is supposed to be waiting in a Buddhist paradise called the Tushita heaven.  When the time is ready,he will incarnate on earth.’

‘Is Miroku a man?’  The question was from a girl.

‘Not necessarily,’ …. he begain.  He was thinking of some of the earliest statues of Miroko found in Japan — they had a decidedly feminine aspect.

It was time to rope his talk back to the subject of Shingon.  ‘But, do not think Shingon is just worship of a mummy … Shingon has been dismissed as full of mumbo-jumbo and secret ritual.  Remember, though, its core belief is that a person can experience true reality in this life.  In Shingon, Buddha is neither a god nor a creator, but a symbolic pointer to the ultimate nature of things — which are themselves impermanent and without essence.  Remember too, these words of the Buddha:

‘If there is joy in the world   It comes from desiring others to be happy.  If there is suffering in the world  It comes from desiring myself to be happy.’

It’s irresistible to feel the overlapping presence of doctrines here.  But I’m especially alert to where Christianity and Shingon doctrines separate.   True reality can be experienced in this life.  Not in another one.  (what about Tushita?)  Loving this life implies, and here Shingon and Nietzsche are blood brothers, loving it with all your heart and all your soul, but without insurance.  Impermanent and without essence, it calls out for love and care.  With no shelf under the waves, like off the beaches in Hawaii!

This is not mumbo-jumbo.  It’s metaphysics.  It’s what will lead people to undertake the Shikoku pilgrimage to the 88 temples.  It’s one way to maintain an opening onto the world, despite its catastrophic turn.  People find here a doctrine that can see them through the pain and suffering of upcoming events.  It’s not an opium for the people.  It’s one of the best ways around to forge a practice of otium (leisure) in and from full cognizance of the state of the world. 

Things go careening at incredible speed in “Angle”: there is for example, a bequest by another angel of something that starts its life as a sword before mutating into different “things” faster than its custodian can blink an eye!  It’s funny, at these beginning stages of adoption, to see Johnathan lugging the thing around with him, less and less sure of what he’s supposed to do with it, and even less what recent events are “supposed” to mean to him and to his world.

And then there is Willingsby, a lawyer friend who invites Johnathan Seems to lunch at a swanky place — the Plaza Club – and soon takes over the conversation, but not before the reader is allowed to salivate before the astounding array of food available there.  To have a friend like Willingsby is a godsend.  It’s one, perhaps the central conversation in the novel. 

Brian and I are fortunate to count another lawyer amongst the people we can count on in hours of need.  Sylvie Etient is someone who, like Seems, would have thrown the ball to Willingsby and let him run with it.  She’s had practice doing that.  And now, more than ever, does not hesitate to interrupt.

Here’s Willingsby at his beastly best:

… What does matter is that every religion in the history of the world worth its salt has said over and over again that the self is the enemy; or, at the very least, that the self which would stay in control — the ego if you will — has to die.  Die.  Dead.  An unmistakeable message. Clear as a bell.  So, how do all these exponential IQ’s read the unmistakeable message, the poor dumb bastards?  They figure that all these holy men are primitives of some kind walking around in their bare feat telling fairy stories.  Bedtime asssurances for the muddles massses.  While they — little less than gods, and endowed by the National Science Foundation — have the courage to face a godless universe.  One expects to hear the voice of Rod Sterling or Carl Sagan in the background — come to think of it, there’s not a whole lot of difference between the two, is there? — saying,

‘Trust us; we’re smarter than you.’

This took place during a Sunday meal in 1979, in the novel.  It was completed around 1984.  Already, the names Rod Sterling and Carl Sagan have faded from memory, but it’s been a general free-for-all in the race to occupy their respective positions.  Meanwhile, “Angle” was self-published at Lulu.   

1) First and foremost, what a great letter.  And what a long letter it was!  Mary Ellen goes out the door, and Georgie bursts the thermometer!  Five pages!

2) My favorite sentence, and there are sentences like this one all over the place: “My hands just won’t do what I want them to.”  And your comment: how’s that for a sentence!  This is the dancer talking, and the guy who looses a lot of short-term memory, which he reinvests in songs from various epochs of his life.  It’s sweet, George, to see you writing that.  Everyone has heard you say things of the sort, but we are the only ones around who have seen it in writing.

3) Dean.  Of course he wants to hit the ball as far as possible!  I find your reaction and advice spot on, but my friend Brian says that boys will be boys.  And that there is no way to stop the kid from wanting to be number one.  Even if it turns his golf game into something unpleasant like the last two years of Tiger’s game.  Dean is at any rate beyond the space where comment matters.  We’ll all have to wait for him to enter the next stage, to get lost in the shuffle of so many others whose goal have been to be number one.  We’ll see what happens then.  Perhaps he’ll retain his rank.  Perhaps he’s Miroku.  Or perhaps he’ll invent a new aim in life.

4) There’s little chance Ellen will take up golf, at least not soon.  You take up golf when communcation with other living beings and artifacts is average, handicap 10.  Whereas Ellen has been for at least 3 or 4 years now well under par, meaning that she has found venus for communcation, in books and with her pets.  This will take precedence for some time, I think.  (I hope!)  She’ll have to see how solid her wish to write turns out.  The next couple of years are crucial.  I don’t see much golf during that time.  Except if she renounces her aim. 

5) You can’t imagine how important a letter like this is.  I see how much I’ve scolded my siblings, and I see how easy it is for them to punish me with their silence.  What they would never, and will never do with their own kin, they do with the distant version of me with all the moral justification they need.  Amazing how the six-shooter or pill dispenser still reigns in the American psyche. 

6) As you will see, I have no trouble reading your writing.  You keep saying it must be indechifferable.  It never is.  The problem is not with its being indechifferable, it’s the pain involved in doing it.  That’s what makes the letters so few and far between.  I maintain that you ought to get someone over your way who could simply listen to what you have to say, then make it into a letter.  It’s not that your letter doesn’t say enough.  It’s that we are so in need of more of where that all came from, all five pages: result: more, more, more, please!  This can’t take place except in the presence of someone who understands how good and how precious your moments are for us, and for everyone, here and all over the world.

It’s lunch time and here I am writing or trying to write to you.  Mary Ellen just went out the door to go to Mona’s.  So sorry.

I hope the weather is as nice for you folks as it is here.  I’m in my shirt-sleeves and it feels good.  Writing is sure a hastle now!  The hands just won’t do what I want them to.  Oh well, I’m 84 and still able to walk, at least I think I am!

I hope this letter finds you and your wife and kids well.

Mary Ellen just went out the door to start her daily grind.  Poor George.  No lunch, so I will have to fix it.  That’ done now and so back to the letter.  I hope you can read this: my hands just won’t do what I want them to.  MY HANDS JUST WON’T DO WHAT I WANT THEM TO.  How’s that for a sentence,  (turn the page please)

(page two): I’m going to take a break and fiw lunch.  Well, lunch is over and here we go on another ride.  Your Mom is worried because you quit writing.  Please write often because she looks forward go that. 

Dean and I went golfing Friday.  I’m sore and stiff all over.  I guess I’m getting old.  Dean is hitting the ball very well.  I’m stiff and sore all over so I don’t hit them well.  Ellen hasn’t started golfing yet.  I’m waiting for that.  She is getting tall and very pretty.  Her and Tom  Dean get along very well.  Two grandkids that get along, that doesn’t seem possible!  This will be Dean’s senior year in high school.  Ellen will be in 7th grade. Time rolls on.

(page three): Tom, this has to be a record performance.  On page three already!  Getting talkative in my old age.  Maybe it’s my son rubbing off on the old man!  I am feeling pretty good: so old, yet no ackes and pains, just sore hands and stiff legs.  I’m pleased to be able to gold on Fridays — once a week seems enough.  I don’t get many pars, but plenty double bogeys!  Dean plays pretty good but still tries to hit the ball too far.  If you ever come home you will enjoy both kids.

Obama is getting along pretty good:

(page four): I don’t hear a lot of complaints so maybe he’s doing all right.  Of course Mary Ellen doesn’t like him but I do.  Hey, I’m doing all right: four pages and no blunders!  Maybe I’ll write a book!  I’ll call it “George’s dreams.”

Your mother just said she was a neatness freak.  I’ll drink to that.  Tom, it’s been good but my hands …

(page 5) gave out and so have I .  It’s good writing to you.  We miss you and wish you well.  Your Dad

[comments:  I’ll save them for later.  In the meantime, I’ll be sending this write-up back home, so that Dad can see what a great letter-writer he is.  Mom has started doing this with me: sending me back my letters, since she doesn’t need to keep anything by her side anymore, chuck full of comments and expressions of love and admiration.  We’ve finally come to a point where we are communicating!)  Thank you Dad, for pitching in, and thank you Mom, for this modification of your writing habits, which is quite astounding.  I’d put it up on the blog, but for that I feel I need your permission.] 

This is a blog, like the Vacketta one and the Gerulski one, where you share your experience without expecting it to be universally applicable.  Without having to specify what it is “you want to read.”  Reading without knowing too much about what you need or want to read.

So, I share my experience.  I’m reading “Angle” by Brian Wall.  I’m reading at the same time all of the novels in print by David Mitchell, plus a huge novel by Eiji Yoshikawa called “Musashi.”  And I’m still trying to come to terms with “Hidden Buddhas” whose major spinoff happens to be a furious desire to make that pilgrimage through the Japanese temples, which is the warp and woof of the novel: its most interesting aspect in the end.

You’ve been able to read two excerpts from “Angle” on this blog.  And I say to myself that you may find them, at times, in certains narrow angles, rather vulgar.   I’m sure you’ve had similar reactions to my prose.  So what’s up Doc?

Dictionary!  (O Uncle Tom Jenkins, you who offer the incredible gift of a dictionary to loved ones,  how do you manage to remain silent?  Perhaps the blog itself is a hurdle.  In that case, he again is my email, for your eyes only!  georges.collins@wanadoo.fr)

Dictionary then, in praise of Uncle Tom Jenkins who is the only person in our family who has expressed his need and interest in dictionaries.  (Here too I may be mistaken.  Perhaps for him dictionaries are only for foreign people who are learning the language, as if he had already learned his!)  Here then is what it means to be vulgar:

1a: generally used, applied, or accepted.  1b: understood in or having the ordinary sense (example: “they reject the vulgar conception of miracle”) 

2: VERNACULAR

3a: of or relating to the common people.  3b: generally current  3c: of the usual, typical, or ordinary kind

4a: lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste; 4b: morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate: GROSS

5a: offensive in language; 5b: lewdly or profanely indecent.  (Webster’s 10th Collegiate Dictionary)

So Brian and I are surely as vulgar as they come!  I think I’ll write a paper on this!  Because there’s something precious in this vulgarity, the one that leads to the epiphany of the angel and to the encounter with the manager of the universe!  There is no doubt in my mind that from 4a to 5b, everyone finds a nook or cranny from which to express objections to these written epiphanies, whereas I have declared that they are of the stuff that saved me from eternal damnation!  (Yes! Yes! this is not a figure of speech!) 

I’ve only scratched the surface of this topic.  3a is marvelous, don’t you think?  And Brian is marvelous in that sense of the term.  He has given to be read, contemplated, digested and spit out a “generally current” conception that was planted in all of us during catechism!  We all learned about angels.  And spit it out as quick as you can say cunt.  (”spit” in the past tense”; “cunt” in the universal sense of obvious fact and object of desire)  Why is it that, apparently, at least in those places I’ve been to, Brian is the only one in town to have given credence to this thing about angels?  I would like an answer to this question, please.  Up to now, I have received answers, quite a few (I started asking the question as an excuse for not being able to get into the novel the first time around: that is called, in our neck of the woods, pussy-footing), and they all consist in saying: it’s a free country!  He says he saw angels, more power to him.  He has a right to his opinion!  Asinine democracy!  An angel is not an opinion, but minions holding up the world and protecting us from evil!  How dare you drape yourself in liberal rainment to say the man has a right to his opinion?  You’ve obviously stopped reading, because, buddy, he is in your face, and you have turned your backside to him and stated that this is the epitome of understanding and communcation!

The truly amazing thing for me, now that at long last I’m finally able to read this incredible piece of work, is the tender loving care with which its author carries the reader along with him, the way he inhabits just about everyone’s point of view and reaction to what he has been “painting”: neither Picasso nor Matisse ever cared a fuck about what the spectator was feeling.  This is another meaning of “vulgar.”  “Or or relating to the common people.”

I’ll sign off for the moment.  I’m having a high ole time reading “Angle” and yet it’s scares the shit out of me.  As my father said, when he heard between leaves to be raked, a BLT to be wolfed down in record time, and a nap not to miss, that I had had a second embolism, “he must have been scared shitless.”  I am scared shitless reading Brian’s greatest novel.  Because if I can let it fall to the wayside, then what does that say about the state of the world?  I can only thank my lucky stars that I am still around, in a strange but strong new disposition, in which I hope to weigh in on the Brian Wall affair.  It’s now become a family affair.  It would be great if you could get your hands on a copy or two of the books. 

He was almost past the car when he happened to look back.  As sort of a second thought: he was in the habit of checking to see what the derelect was up to when he passed by, that was all.  But when he glanced back at the car, the derelict looked up at him.  Caught his eye.  Not in a challenging way, more the result of, a reaction to, his having looked first.  As their eyes met, though, Johnathan’s anger suddenly seemed to increase tenfold — spurting instantly, indiscrimitately, inexplicable.  the old goose!  Give me a look will he!  These games were starting to piss him off!  He stopped and turned toward the car.  The derelict was still looking at him.  Neither challenging nor curious.  more like he was awaiting some routine …

Jonathan walked quickly up to the car, his anger mounting even higher, bent down, peered in the passenger window at the derelict siting behind the wheel, and shouted,

“I suppose you’re some kind of fucking angel, too?!”

“No …” came the reply in a voice as calm and melodious as the Dial-the-Weather operator’s reporting the temperature.  Immediately Johnathan felt like a proper fool.  But before he could make some equally asinine apology … he was opening the car door.  … slipping inside, and before he even knew he wanted to, he was sitting in the car and slamming the door shut behind him.  That is to say, it all happened in an instant.

Then, … the little man suddenly began talking about the weather, and asking about Johnathan’s children, and the like — for all the world like a favorite uncle, or an elderly aunt who insists on entertaining unexpected visitors with biscuits and tea ..

He could feel his eyes dilating in the dim light of the car, parked as it was under a concrete sky; having come in from the bright sunlight, they now relaxed and opened wide … The first thing he noticed about the little man was that he was truly little.  Or the car was big.  One or the other.

….

Thelittle man matter-of-factly offered him an egg roll, and suddenly he remembered how long it had been since he had had anything to eat.  Was it Wednesday night?  He was famished.  He accepted the egg roll politely, but was just about to stuff the whole long, almost cylindrical thing into his mouth when the little man pulled out two small plastic cups of red sauce from the white paper bag from which the egg rolls had come.  He explained that he liked this particular sauce inordinately.  Then the little man bit off one end of his egg roll and poured the sauce inside.  Johnathan quickly followed suit.  Then they sat there leisurely eating egg rolls and co mmenting on the pork and shrimp and water chestnuts and bean sprouts inside as if they were dining at the Third Floor amid fine crystal and the whispers of waiters.   …

When they finished, the little man collected Johnathan’s crumpled and besmeared paper napkin and place it with his own … in a MacDonald’s litter bag, the face of a clown on its front, which hung from the knob of the ashtray on the dashboard.

… He knew the answer to his question before he asked it …:

“How should I uh … address you?”

“Oh, ‘your Infinite Majesty’ would be all right!  Ha ha!”  .. The little man’s face appeared to ignite when he laughed — almost as if it were in a state of combustion!

Johnathan wondered later where he got the courage for the next two questions ….:

“Are you paying attention?” he asked.

“Hug?” came the reply, quick as a shot.  Then more laughter.

“Uh, do you ever play dice?”

“Whenever I get the chance!”  Again laughter.  The little man glowed with that same warmth and feeling of belonging you get from a fireplace in the mountains.  He started to ask another question …

“That’s enough, child … you have sufficient answers.  Men have alrady made my paths too straight.”

He said it as if it were a promise of some kind, rather than a reprimand.  As if withholding any further answers might be a blessing.  Johnathan was still wondering about this when something in the rear window caught his eye.  It was completely white … Then the same motion — and color, repeated itself in his other eye.  He jerked around to the front, and then even further around to see out his own window.  On either side of the car was a huge angel in milk-white rainment!  They were each easily nine feet tall — with wingspans to match! — and were raising and lowering their robed arms in a unison of praise and obeisance.  As they did so, their magnificent wings kept opening and closing, like Japanese fans.  The angel on Jonathan’s side was at least ten feet awy, and yet its wings encompassed more than half the car (their overlapping wings swaddled it completely!)  It was the most awesome spectacle Johnathan had ever even imagined.  Each angel seemed strangely childlike — as if it were straining joyfully to see a parade — and yet the greatest athletes in the world would have seems paraplegic alongside the strength, the grace, the … majesty that literally shone from their being.  … suddenly, he was afraid.  He turned once again to the little man; but before he could ask, he heard,

“Oh yes, they’re here all the time. It’s just difficult to see them on the outside.”

It’s high time I parted company with all those who don’t know if they appreciate this “fiction” or not: whether they ought to, or not, whether it’s permissible or not, whether the fiction is off the wall, or not, demented, demeaning, or worse.  Whatever anyone says (but the greatest majority say nothing; they remain mute and keep looking over their shoulders to see how others are reacting, and see nothing, so nothing happens, and nothing gets said), I will say here that this is on the high end of literary achievement.  This is historical fiction at its hottest, most incendiary level.  I must be quite a particular singular fellow, and for the strange string of characteristics that make me up, they all concur that what I’ve always been looking for I’ve had hear, for at least 25 years, and have been sitting on it like a mother pigeon on her egg.  As if it was going to hatch all by itself.  The time has come to ask and answer all the quite pertinent questions that such an event as this one should have been asked and answers years ago.  Everybody has used their fat asses to flatten this into something manageable.  That’s OK, though, because it’s funny.  But since I hardely have any ass left to speak of, I feel in a very good position to take up the gauntlet and start treating this with all the admiration and curiosity it deserves.