family matters!

[from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet — it’s as difficult to pronounce as Louis Oosthuizen!]

The Buddhist deity Fudô Myôô glares from his candlelit shrine: his fury, Uzaemn was taught, frightens the impious; his sword slices their ignorance; his rope binds demons; his third eye scrutinizes human hearts; and the rock on which he stands signfifies immovability.  Seated before him are six officials from the Inspectorate of Spiritual Purity, dressed in ceremonial attire.

The first official asks Uzaemon’s fatgher, ‘Please state your name and position.’

‘Ogawa Minasaku, Ingterpreter of the First Rank of Dejima Interpreters, head of the Ogawa household of the Higashizaka Ward.’

The first inspector tells a second, ‘Ogawa Mimasaku is present.’

The second finds the name on a register.  ‘Ogawa Mimasaku’s name is listed.’

The third writes the name.  ‘Ogawa Mimasaku, hereby registered as present.’

The fourth declaims, ‘Ogawa Mimasaku will now perform the act of fumi-e.’

Ogawa Mimasaku steps on to the well-worn bronze plaque of Jesus Christ, and grinds his heel on the image for good measure.

A fifth official calls out, ‘Ogawa Mimasaku has performed fumi-e.’

The Interpreter of the First Rank steps off the idolatrous plaque, and is helped by Kiyoshichi to a low bench.  Uzaemon suspects he is suffering more pain thanhe is willing to show.

A sixth oficial marks his register.  ‘Ogawa Mimasaku is registered as having performed the act of fumi-e.’

Uzaemon thinks about the foreigner of Zoet’s Psalms of David and the narrowness of his own escape when Kobayasi had the Dutchman’s apartement burgles.  He wishes he had asked de Zoet about his mysterious religion last summer.

Festive noise washes in from the commoners’ ritual in a neighbouring hall.

The first official is now addressing him: ‘Please state your name and profession …’

Once the formalities are completed, Uzaemon steps up to the fumi-e.  He glances down and meets the pained eyes of the foreign god.  Uzaemon presses his foot down on the bronze, and thinks of the long line of Ogawas of Nagasaki who have stood on this same fumi-e.  On previous New Year’s Days, Uzaemon felt proud to be gthe latest in this likne: some ancestors would,like him, have been adoptive sons.  But today he feels like an impostor, and he knows why.

My loyalty to Orito, he phrases it, is stronger than my loyalty to the Ogawas.  He feels the face of Jesus Christ against the sole of his foot.  Whatever the cost, Uzaemon vows, I shall free her.  But I need help.

European Catholicism got off to a roaring start in Japan with the Portuguese at the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th.  The shogun Ieyasu put an end to this dangerous foreign creed by outlawing it, and in no uncertain terms.  The ceremony of fumi-e is less well known than the tea ceremony, but it too has to be ingested slowly if one is to understand the country and the faith.  (I’m sure Ieyasu must have been ill at ease with the proximity of his name to that of Jesus.  This must have fanned the flames of his entirely understandable rage against this religion.)

I’ve learned much from this novel.  I hold it in high esteem.  David Mitchell has returned much of what he received at the hands of the Japanese people.  So has my friend Brian.  I have to get into this act now.  As you can see, it’s a family affair.

The most splendid part of this section is the paragraph devoted to Fudô.  It’s easy to forget, awash as we are in Manga, video games, anime and movies, that the sword is first and foremost a weapon for slicing through ignorance and error.  In my humble opinion (henceforth abbreviated IMHO), this is one of the things that accounts for the superiority of the samurai figure, compared to the figure of the cowboy or the caballero.  The samurai was constantly reminded of this original, originary sense of what othewise would become a status symbol, and a weapon of individual destruction.  There is evidence that it made little difference that a few samurai were reminded of this originary meaning: most of them remained deaf to this calling.  In fact I don’t know: I don’t know what it would involve to know such a thing.  That’s why I talk about the FIGURE of the samurai.  This figure is constantly accompanied by the Buddhist monk or priest who leans on him, gets up and IN HIS FACE, a little like Pai Mei does to Beatrice Kiddo in part two of Kill Bill.  “You are nothing, you think you’re something but you’re nothing.”!  One of the reasons why Chistianity was so violently expulsed was because of the radically opposed message it was spreading around: you are all God’s children! 

I’m letting myself get carried away.  That what a blog post is for. 

“Angle” is a huge book, flanked by two others to make a gargantuan trilogy.  I’m glad I’ve brought it front and center.  (You can go to “Reading Ordinary Time” for the beginning of this effort.)

Under this influence — the general idea that I keep finding everywhere I look that “the tree of life is in danger” (Angle: it’s the last thing the coffee shop angel says before leaving. The same  theme undergirds “Hidden Buddhas” and other somber works of fiction) — I’d like to take up something that generally gets pushed under the carpet.  (We’re good at that in the family.) 

We live in a wonderful housing project that was conceived in the 1950s following a generous approach to architecture and urbanism.  We have a series of appartement buildings, five stories high, with 10 door bells each.  Facing this row of buildings is a courtyard/garden the size of two football fields, and about 50 yards deep.  Trees, shrubs, various bird populations, a lawn, and of course the famous cherry tree just outside our second floor window.

We’ve discovered that on our neighbor’s balcony there are two pigeons nesting a couple of eggs.  Helen has lived here for 45 years at least, and has never seen something like this.  It’s an ominous sign.  The Algerian woman next door, an MD, talked with us about her new dwellers, and said that of course she would wait for them to decide when to leave.  But despite the beauty of the courtyard/garden, pigeons can’t find a suitable place for nesting.  “The tree of life is in danger.”

Now comes the hard part.  On the ground floor, I have been watching a group of 5 “brothers” starting to buddy up with two young boys, one 13 and the other 8.  The brothers have all spent time in jail, and make their living selling to drugs in the neighborhood.  No, the police is not an option.  Everyone is scared to death of them, because they look like bullies and ruffians and can live up to their reputation. 

So what shall we do?  The only option for the youngsters is to spend time with them, and to alert their parents of the imminent danger involved in this budding neighborly friendship.  The only thing I’ve managed to do so far is to yell at the top of my voice out the second-floor window, telling them that they can’t play soccer on our green!  Since then, I have become the mean old man on the second-floor.  I say to myself that I don’t have the time to devote to these kids sensation of summer boredom.  And I haven’t been to talk with their parents.

As a general rule, one that suffers no exceptions, when you say you don’t have time for something, it’s because there is something else involved.  You can always set time aside, you can always make time for the things that count.  The only things you don’t have time for are things you don’t care enough about to allow to impinge on your regimen.  I’m saying these things to whip myself into an awakened attitude.  It’s tough having to measure up to someone like Jacob de Zoet. 

I’ll have news of this unsavory situation right smack in the middle of our white heron green in a few days.  If there is no news by then, that will be a very bad sign.  This is one use for which a blog can be used. 

Brian called this second novel in his trilogy ”Angle.”  The noun and its spelling are meant for manipulation and experiment.  I’ve chosen the most central passage of this novel to remind myself how it shook me to the core of my being.  Faith is not something you can call yours because you’ve inherited, although you’re lucky if that’s the way things start off for you.  Faith is something you have to desire, and I’ve never desired anything more than what jumps off these pages.

She was sitting at a table eating a salad with one hand — at first it looked like some kind of trick, until he realized that what looked odd about it was that she had her other hand on her lap (odd in that the majority of women he associated with nowadays ate in the same belly-up-to-the bar style that men did); it was so strange to see someone eating with such perfect posture: it looked almost foreign.  Her legs were crossed and the plain white dress pulled over her knees — but there was so much leg still showing (from her knees to the white open-toed sandals that buckled high over her ankles in a leather loop) that she appeared (to his eyes anyway) in a state of undress.  Her head was down.  Jonathan was fiercely envious of the attention she paid her salad.

How was it possible that such a creature was eating all alone?  He expected to see fist fights breaking out around her, flourishes of foolishness in the hope of attracting her attention … That no one was with her, then, was simply — if inexplicably — his good fortune.  He had gone so far as to raise himself up from th stool to go join her when a strange thought occured to him, causing him to sit back down.  And reflect.  …. ….

But why think of that now?  He was simply going to join a very pretty girl for lunch … and, maybe, later, buy her a drink.  Shunting aside reflection, he summoned resolve, stood up once again, backed away from the stool, and walked toward her.  She didn’t look up.

“Excuse me, Miss …?” he asked politely.

Then she did.

Instantly, he knew he was in trouble.  It was almost more than he could handle.  Her look.  Being hit between the eyes with a baseball bat surely would have less effect!  It wasn’t so much the way she looked (he didn’t even want to think about that: as soon as an adjective — paltry things that they were — came to mind, he dismissed it out of hand) … as the way she looked!  At him.  He felt like he was running for his life!  As if he had been caught in a house afire!  He hadn’t been this excieted — scared — since he had watch a prospect sign on the dooted line for a premium of 26,800 dollars the he made MDRT.

… It felt like he was making love while free-falling from 26,800 feet! (That was the way he described it to himself …The point at the moment was simply to survive the fall!)

He thought of insurance policies lapsing.  (Nothing)  Of Black Jack’s prospects for victory.  Or Hal’s absence of pupils.  (Excited to the point of a coronary, aroused to the point of orgasm — and all the while her just staring at him with the cutest expression on her face he had ever seen (it too was completely indescribable: she seemed to be looking at him with great affection, but absolutely no interest: like you might regard a kitten if you didn’t particularly like cats.)

“Uhh!  May I join you!” he exclaimed interrogatively.  Even to do that took a valiant effort.  She smiled.

Never had a woman smiled at him like that.  He would swear to it.  But — this was the terrifying part — it wasn’t even much of a smile.  It was a small smile.  Non-commital.  Perfunctory.   And it shook him to his very soul.

… He tried to think of something funny to say, to relieve the tension.  He hadn’t been this nervous since his first high school dance.  …

“What’s a nice girl like you doing …”

“I am an angel of the Lord God.”

A simple statement.  Her hands didn’t move from her lap.  She didn’t raise her eyebrows or her voice.

So there she blows!  No doubt my defining moment.  It makes little difference what Brian thinks of this huge book now.  He may be embarrassed at some of the things in it (a lot of hard-ons and unstoppable sex-drive) or he may feel that even today not a word is to be changed.  What matters here is the sheer ambition, the pure folly, of writing about an encounter like that and having to bring it to some kind of conclusion!  Later on in the novel, in a parking lot, you can meet God himself who is busying himself, as clean and tidy as Mary Ellen would ever dream of being, eating eggrolls with a sauce he adores!  But that’s not the point.  The point is that for once in my life I was able to meet up with MY heart’s desire, which was, is, and always will be, the confluence of desire and being.  The unimaginable touch of time in our lives, as the touch of creator and created.  Something gelled for me that day, and the surprising, sad thing is how you can store this sort of thing in a secret but convenient place, like a keepsake, instead of living up to the enormous demand it ought to make of you.  I remember well saying to myself: this is truth incarnate.  In a coffee-shop.  What others found an embarrassing moment was for me an epiphany. 

Looking back on this track this morning, the only thing I can add is that it’s never too late to begin anew.  That’s the bridge I see clearly between “Angle” and “New.”  Of course much water has flowed under those bridges, and there is much more sadness today than back in the days of Angle, when the dominant tonality was fear, danger, challenge, stupefaction and mobilization.  But even back then there was wonder, joy, ecstasy.  That’s the way of all flesh.  The glorious thing about it is that it’s all there on the page, just like it was that first day when she said: “I am an angel of the Lord God.”  Lordy lordy, mercy mercy!  Someone’s going to have to take care of this novel!

Only 191 pages long, but a veritable epic of three generations!  George lies dying, surrounded by family and friends, and the author moves in and out of his consciousness to tell the story of George’s father Howard, and Howard’s father in turn.  The author, until this Pulitzer Prize, was better known as a drummer than as a writer.  (That ought to interest PJ)  He studied writing with Marilynne Robinson in that famous Iowa workshop for writers (no grades given, but stringent standards of admittance).  Here’s what she has to say about Harding’s novel: it offers “the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.” 

Watching (reading along with the author) Harding do this, shuttling back and forth over three generations, is awesome!  Nobody in this family was in very good shape: plenty of ailments, handicaps, and major mental problems to go around.  Yet, on that deathbed, it seems as though heaven is offered to everyone, despite, or on account of all these failings and foibles.

Howard never considered, not even for a moment, the possibility of telling his son about his father.  All three generations have a strange sense of physical self: they’re disconnected and don’t seem to mind.  Had there been another relation to pysicality, there might have been another relationship to narrative. George is the turning point here, although many would say by then it doesn’t make much difference.

 Here’s Howard on his father, a protestant minister whose failing mental faculties resulted in a statement to his congregation that the devil at the end of the day wasn’t all that bad!  All a part of the broader picture!:

Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all those particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to be stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes.  Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father’s fading was because he realized this.

It’s a tad difficult for me to talk about this book.  The easy way out would be to make comparisons.  I won’t do that.  I’m happy though that someone has taken on the task of concentrating on such “ghostly proximity.”  Perhaps I should say that there are spokes all around this central narrative, spokes that this blog has installed and inspected over the last few years: George is the hub of everything here.

He tries something truly ridiculous, but it’s ridiculous only seen from outside, from the other side of a wall that seems to keep popping up between us and the person in the forefront of this adventure.  As ridiculous as it may seem, he tries to make a recording of his own voice, telling the story we are reading.  He is embarrassed and angry by the stupidity and vapidity of what he’s been seeing.  He doesn’t have a clue how valuable this would be to sensitive members of his family, and to the people inhabiting the concentric circles around the hub of the nuclear family — its extensions.   George becomes belligerent, vis-à-vis himself and when he sees all the lovely loving people surrounding him on his deathbed, without being sure if or how his memories will go down to those who survive him.  He wonders if anyone cares at all.  The tape is no help.  It puts him on their side: there are more important things than these memories, now aren’t there!  What’s important is how much we love you, and how good we’ve been in these trying times!  Here he is again, as he comes down to us:

I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else’s frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their own time, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what an army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made of this world …

I was already neurotic and obsessed with these issues before reading this violent but subdued meditation on the real nature of the solitude that assails one at the moment of death, inversely proportional to the number of people taking care of you and loving you in the moments of the final countdown!  Everyone would agree that the time alloted us is condensed and erratic and seldom conducive to revelation, until it’s too late.  George manages to overcome his sense that he doesn’t have anything to say (but that all the Georges in this life be as stubborn as this one!), and what comes of this decision to pursue a vague idea is a series of wise and diamond-like reflections (sentences, only sentences, but not just any sentences!).  Every one of them comes with a watermark that says: I’m teetering on the edge of life and death, and not only am I not afraid, not panicked, but I’m having a god-damn good time!  There’s so much to say!

The reason why I’m spending so much time on these books is because it’s one of the best ways to spend one’s time, especially when you realize there’s not that much time left.  Of course we never know, and it’s not for us to decide, but there are intimations of mortality that act like goads.

‘I know what you don’t believe in, Doctor, what do you believe?’  If I don’t keep talking, Jacob realises, I shall crack like a dropped dish.

‘Oh, Descartes’ methodology, Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas, the efficacy of Jesuits’ bark … So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief.  Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove …’

Jacob knows he is spouting nonsense but cannot stop: ‘Northern Europe is a place of cold light and clear lines and so is Protestantism.  The Mediterranean world is indomitable sunshine and impenetrable shade. So is Catholicism.  Then this … ‘ Jacob sweeps his hand inland ‘ … this …. numinous Orient … its bells, its dragons, its millions …. Here, notions of transmigrations, of karma, which are heresies at home, possess a — a –’ The Dutchman sneezes.

‘Bless you,’ Marinus splashes rainwater on his face.  ‘A plausibility?’

Jacob sneezes again.  ‘I am making little sense.’ 

‘One may make most sense of all when one makes no sense at all.’

‘Do believers in karma, Doctor, believe that one’s … one unintentional sins come back to haunt one not in the next life but within this one, withing a single lifetime?’

‘Whatever your putative crime, Domburger [Jacob],’ Martinus produces an apple for them each, ‘I doubt it can be so bad that our current situation is a measured and justified punishment.’  He puts the apple to his mouth –

Martinus has been promised another role in Mitchell’s next novel.  Goody-goody gumdrops.  ‘Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove.’  This would put the philosopher’s out on the dole.  Cold light and clear lines, not only in Northern Europe, but in the Middle West, that part of the woods Marilynne Robinson talks about in her Protestant preacher novels.  (Gilead and Home).  Her Catholic novel would be “Housekeeping,” more for its impenetrable shade than its indomitable sunshine. 

And then those few lines about the numinous Orient.  Remember this is talk to avoid losing it, breaking up, total panic.  But still memorable for the contraction and pressure the circircumstances put on the words, making them, for some at least, diamond-like.  (in French you can say diamantine)  Marinus has the precise word for what happens to you when you’ve spent time in foreign countries: things become more plausible.  And the search for truth more a question working away at the self (until it finally wafts away) than weighing the competing claims against each other. 

Jacob from Domburg is feeling his boudaries and limits being transgressed.  Shattering like the wood on Dejima and in Nagasaki.  Many readers have and will gripe that it all takes place in such short sentences, and laconic dialogues.  The result is the same: one of the very first true renditions of the encounter between East and West, in the wake of the novels of Shusaku Endo, Mitchell’s precursor and guardian angel.  When you step up to this plate, (the encounter between East and West) you are not going to hit a home run.  But you can be sure you’ll be hit by the ball.  And once you are, you will be immediately transfered to the major leagues.  With Melville, Joseph Conrad, Endo, and David Mitchell, to short-list a few of the players with wounds and blessings to show for their sojourn on this sweet earth. 

Small cogs of time meet and mesh.  The flintmen cry, ‘Clear!’

Explosions hurl the shots in beautiful, terrible, screaming arcs …

… into a warehouse roof; a wall; and one ball passes within a yard of de Zoet and Martinus.  They drop to the platform, but all the other balls fly over Dejima … De Zoet helps Marinus stand; his stick is gone; they look landwards.

Courage in a vilified enemy, Penhaglion thinks, is a distasteful discovery. … Power is a man’s means, thinks the Captain, of composing the future … but the composition, he removes his hat, has a way of composing itself.

Unearthly screaming boils up through the hatches from the gun deck.  Penhaglion guesses, Someone caught by the recoil, with nauseous certainty.

…

The Captain fills his lungs to pass the death sentence on the two Dutchmen.  They know.  Marinus grips the rail, looking away, flinching, but staying put.  De Zoet removes his hat; his hair is as copper, untameable, bedgraggled … and Penhaglion sees Tristram, his beautiful, one-and-only redhaired son, waiting for death …

The shrapnel will tear through his clothes, skin and viscera and out again … Don’t let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.  He tries to map, backwards, the tortuous paths that led to this present …

‘You have no objection if I say the Twenty-third Psalm, Doctor?’

‘Provided you have no objection if I join you, Jacob.’  Side by side, they grip the platform’s rail in the slippery rain.  The pastor’s son removes Grote’s hat to address his Creator. 

‘”The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”‘

Marinus’s voice is a seasoned cello’s; Jacob’s is shaking.

‘”He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me …”‘ Jacob closes his eyes and imagines his uncle’s church.  ‘” .. in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”‘ Geertje is at his side.  Jacob wishes she had met Orito … ‘”Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”‘ … and Jacob still has the scroll, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry … ‘”I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff …”‘ Jacob waits for the explosion and the swarm and the tearing.

‘” … they comfort me.  Thou preparest a table before me …”‘  Jacob waits for the explosion and the swarm and the tearing.  ‘” … in the presence of mine enemies, thous anointest my head with oil … “‘

Marinus’s voice has fallen away: his memory must have failed him.  ‘” … my cup runneth over.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me …”‘

Jacob hears Marinus shake with laughter.  He opens his eyes to see the Phoebus tacking away.  Her mainsails are falling, catching the wet wind and billowing …

Perhaps no one will read this.  The survival of Jacob and Marinus, and the sudden superposition of Jacob’s red hair with the Phoebus’s captain’s son’s.  These sections have already taken their share of criticism and even mockery.  Perhaps you’d have to read the entire novel to stand in judgment.  These sections, splayed across two chapters, are memorable for me.  And I think for many readers.  It may be close to cheap novels people read on beaches in the summertime.  Standard fare in commercial historical novels.  Etc.  Etc.  Whatever.  There they are.  There she blows!  One unmistakeable signature of belief and talent and the mystery there still is in arts and letters!

Mitchell’s novel is Shandean in its garrulity and busy traffic of accident and incident. … Mitchell tells the tale of a clash of superstitions (eastern mysticism and a European religious doctrine) …

“Garrulity” may be in need of a dictionary definition.  A garrulous person is someone given to prosy or rambling gab, someone who pointlessly or annoyingly talkative.  Shandean refers to the French novel Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne.  The class of superstitions refers to “eastern mysticism” as a whole (and not just what transpires at the Shrine) and the European religious doctrine is Calvinism.  Superstititions one and all. 

You have to toe the line to gain the good graces of Leo Robson!  It’s been a long time since I’ve read Calvinism characterized as a superstition.  As for Eastern mysticism, I’ll have to go back and read the novel again.  Are the Ogawas mystical?  Is magistrate Shiroyama mystical?  And what about Orito?  Or the team of Japanese translators? 

There are no doubt excellent papers by Leo Robson elsewhere in the pages of The New Statesman.  This review article, with a misleading title and so many uncomprehensible slurs to nations and religious beliefs, is not among them.  With respect to Mitchell as for Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, and probably for any author you have read, once you eliminate the category of indifference, there are three kinds of readers: the besotted devotees, the critical admirers, and people who come out in a nasty rash.  (Mitchell’s classification)  Leo Robson came out with a nasty rash when he found himself on the watchtower with Jacob and his Psalter.  Robson would have been more comfortable, and less scathing in his rapid dissing of the novel, had Jacob been cut to pieces by a new salvo of shrapnel from the English canons, instead of surviving and carrying the day on the narrow basis of an accident and incident of family resemblance across generations and countries.  It was that shock of red hair that made Robson see red and lose all sense of decorum and critical restraint, before covering his tracks by writing about how it all palled in the end!

(to pall: to lose strength or effectiveness; to cause to become insipid)

My friend Brian Wall, now known to the readers of this blog, has Alzheimer’s disease.  This came in a note slipped into the post-office package.  It’s a no-nonse note that just begs, from my point of view, not to be taken seriously.

I’ve been receiving copies of what now can be called Brian’s authorship over the past year.  And, as you know, he has contributed posts and installments on “The Baird Farm” on a regular basis.  I’ve only yesterday speculated on the strong impression I have that Brian is always there when you need him, that his presence to those he knows and loves belongs to what also makes him a monster of a man: everything in him which is named “unbelievable.”

I hope he’s mistaking Alzheimer’s with the daily bouts with all those memory slips that are so damaging to one’s sense of pride.  But if the man says it’s Alzheimer’s, then the man is to be believed.

So perhaps I haven’t read the message right.  The continuous flow of books didn’t mean what I thought; it wasn’t: read this, because now, at long last, you’re in a place where they will mean something to you.  It was rather: here is my literary estate.  Deal with it.  And don’t botch it up like you did this blog.  OK, Brian.  I’ll do my best.

It’ll take awhile for me to come to terms with everything I owe to this guy.  I’m typical: you give me a little education and the first thing I’ll do is throw out the baby with the bath.  Become an athiest, alienate my parents, fuck up my marriage, and lose my friends.  All the while finding parallels and role models in literary figures.  Brian is the guy who said stop.  Enough of that for now.  It’s now an opened thread, though.

I kept talking in comments to his “Baird” pieces that to write like that meant he had to be in a special place.  I found metaphors for this that were satisfying to me, but now, in this light, strangely off the wall.  The special place in question is rather the paradox of short term memory going out the window, and leaving in its wake, as a kind of psysiological compensation, a long-term memory that suddenly awakens in vivid detail.  This is what we were served up over these ten installments. 

The only thing I can think to do right now is to draw up a list of the man’s work.  It’s all available on-line at Lulu publishers. 

1) First of all there was “Trilogy.”  Brian began work on this project as a way of responding to his belated calling to the vocation of writer.  It is composed of three books, a) The butterfly races, b) Angle and c) Ordinary Time.  We tried and failed to find a publisher for this huge work here in Paris.  Few people have read it.  I’ve devoted a web site to reading “Ordinary Time” but this does not help out in convincing anyone to start reading it.  At least I don’t think so.

2) Next there are 6 books in the wake of “Trilogy” whose chronology is uncertain, because I think Brian chose to self-publish them together, so the copyright on each volume does not help at all.  The first of these is “The Empress’s New Underclothes, et al.” 

3) Telling Them About Us: Crossing Cultures with Fingers Crossed.

4) WTC/BTW: my 9-11.

5) The “Little Prince” Lecture

6) O-Yatsu, stories

7) New, a novel.

The Baird Farm

__________________________

Brian thought that theologians, in general and those that had crossed his path in particular, would read his efforts to forge, on the basis of fiction and autobiography, a response to the state of contemporary theology.  This has not taken place yet.

The Japanese and French languages occur in the body of this work so as to, apparently, discourage the readership.  Yet it’s never too high a mountain: the task involved in taking in these languages, in the lovingly exploded way they exist here, is not beyond anyone.  Here I join up with Helen DeWitt in bemoaning the state of language learning in our respective countries.  We let our children get away with murder, just as we let our parents slip gently into that good night.  The expressive powers of language are the first thing we are willing to negotiate on the way to consumerist comfort.

Brian is a lover.  He loves things.  He loves the world.  This sounds so corny that it’s all I can do to leave it on the “page.”  But it’s true.  Brian’s backyard is rather vast, for it includes planets.  And he decided to write as a way of picking up on all the messages coming our way from these wide vistas.  And his message is a recap of those messages, whether in the field of numerology, or astrology, or new-age system building, or ancient ages of serious thought: you are loved despite the obstacles you manage to maintain in the path of that light.

[from the preface to the new edition of “The Broken Estate” by James Wood]:  in a discussion of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.”

We instantly register the reality of Nell’s silence, and Nagg’s sudden loneliness,and it touches our own lives.  But how?  What is the point of impact?  My own aging parents are not buried in bins, did not lose their legs in the Ardennes, would not laugh about losing their legs in the Ardennes, are not neglected by an ungrateful son and a bitter servant.  Their routines have perhaps shrunk into the slight tedium of old age, but my parents are not quite imprisoned by them.  Not quite: and as soon as those words are voiced, a shuttle begins to operate.  This “not quite” is a big enough connection between my real world and Beckett’s imagined world.  Our usual language about how we relate to fictional characters — we speak of sympathy, identification, empathy — implies a large exchange, a sizable impact, a sharing of identities, but perhaps what this scene reveals is that representation needs only a small point of connection; and the smaller the point of impact the more accute its effect, and the more crucial its importance.

It’s good when one’s own work and stubborn insistance finds confirmation in such an unlikely place, a collection of literary criticism!  Not quite!  This is not yet another occasion to see the question fall about whether the glass of water is half full or already half empty.  It’s an opportunity to register awareness and appreciation of the small details and slight differences in intensity that make up what’s best in life.  “Their routines have perhaps shrunk into the slight tedium of old age” and perhaps this offers ample opportunity to feel aggravated, frustrated, and unrecompensed for having to bear the brunt of this tedium.  The fact remains that our education consisted in fostering the movements of a delicate scale of appreciation and admiration, one that should now be constantly at our disposal for these “not quites” that fit no other bill than their own.  Our education consisted in an attempt to show us how to set aside a space or niche in which the “not quite” can be marveled at like we marvel at the complexity of a snow flake, or the color and veining of an autumn leaf.  No amount of hard work, or busy schedule, can calm the pain of missing out on all these indications of past and future glory.  How easy it was, and how fast our decision to allow them to flitter away!  What if, standing in the middle of this guilty field of neglect and knee-jerk rationalization, we could bring some of them back to life after all?  I still believe that to be possible.  I think it could change the face of our world.  It’s my contribution to the world cup of beliefs.

The second section of “The Thousand Autumns” is the gothic novel part of this historical fiction.  That is to say, a huge interruption in the supposedly straight-forward presentation of historical narrative.  Nothing like this shrine or castle, à la Sade, ever existed.  No historical basis in “fact.” 

It’ entitled “A Mountain Fastness.”  Dictionary definitions: the quality or state of being fast: a) speedy,  b)fixed, c) colorfast, and d) resistant to toxic influence or action.  Can also refer to a fortified, remote, or secluded place.

I’ve found nothing satisfying anywhere as regards the nature and function of this mountain fastness.  One’s attention can remain on the Japanese mainland maintaining diplomatic and commercial relations with the tiny outpost-island of Dejima.  That part belongs to the tradition of historical fiction.  But what belongs to speculative fiction (Atwood’s term)  is to see the Mount Shiranui Shrine as a hyperbolic excrescence or malignant growth of the tendency to remain shut off, remote and secluded.  Cancer.  Auto-immunity.  This allows for the samurai function to come into play once again, although it fails through betrayal of its most elementary values.  But the question of taking care of this sore-spot on the Japanese mainland remains crucial until another samurai pact can carry the day. 

The Shiranui Shrine is a hyperbolic and excessive recap of the dangers of seclusion and protectionism.  It’s also a hyperbolic and excessive take on feudal society.  But in its inner workings, it is not Japanese!  Lord Abbott Enomoto is a despot and an megalomaniac, beyond good and evil, having fallen through a gaping hole in the Japanese fabric, of his own doing.  Absolute power corrups absolutely.  All of these relates more to the West than to Japan.  Enomoto is the end-game of the dream of seclusion and autonomous survival. 

His strongest, most memorable sentence touches on the question of belief.  As a parting shot before killing Uzaemon who has been betrayed by his friend and teacher Suzaku, Enomoto proclaims: “Why do you mortal gnats suppose that your incredulity matters?”  He doesn’t say much more, but I imagine him saying: how can you possibly compare your academy of academics with my Shrine and its secret of eternal life?  Can you not see how lowly and modest your perspectives are?  Gnats!  (see the July 9th post on the question of belief at the academy.)

Conclusion.  “The Mountain Fastness” is a miniature Japan within Japan with no basis in history, other than as a virtual possibility of contamination by a Western will to power.  Its necessity and efficacity in the novel can be explained by the movement it impels toward liberation.  This sounds so clunky, but I’m ad-libbing.  Enomoto has a strong and dominant belief, structured on a quite literal faith in the virtues of blood lines.  This is a wake-up call to everyone who, heretofore, was fast (asleep).  Things start clicking in this section.  With that clicking the statutes of historical fiction are bracketed.  And a discreet but accurate account of voluntary servitude comes to replace them.  And the samurai fail in their mission and will have to mutate into magistrates and translators in order to succeed.