by Kenzaburo Oe
Instead of giving private lectures to Patron, Kizu planned just to read the poems together and discuss them, though two or three days later, when he was up far into the night, preparing, Dancer called him, and he headed off to their office despite the late hour. She explained to him that Patron’s depression was back and he was staying up late and sleeping through the mornings. Kizu was led into the bedroom study; Ikuo, who’d driven him over, stayed out in the office beside Dancer and Ogi.
Kizu had selected as their first poem one from the collection Between Here and Now that was written when the poet was about the same age as Kizu and Patron:
“You ask why I don’t write.
But what is there to say?
The salt current swings in and out
of the bay, as it has done
time out of mind. How does that help?
It leaves illegible writing
on the shore. If you were here,
we would quarrel about it.
People file past this seascape
as ignorantly as through a gallery
of great art. I keep searching for meaning.
The waves are a moving staircase
to climb, but in thought only.
The fall from the top is as sheer
as ever. Younger I deemed truth
was to come at beyond the horizon.
Older I stay still and am
as far off as before. These nail-parings
bore you? They explain my silence.
I wish there were as simple
an explanation for the silence of God.”
Patron had a lot to say about the poem. It occurred to Kizu that Patron’s insomnia was due less to depression than to the recent intellectual stimulation that had entered his life and was cutting down on his hours of sleep. Patron’s large, moist eyes reminded Kizu of a photo he’d seen of a nocturnal marsupial from Tasmania.
“‘You ask why I don’t write./ But what is there to say?’ That line makes me recall a very pressing matter,” Patron blurted out, for all the world like a bright yet rash child. “I’ve never written a thing, ever since I was young. In a way, though, I guess what I did up to the Somersault was a kind of writing. Guide helped me in this, of course. The things I experienced in my trances I couldn’t put into clear words, but I told them to Guide and he’d translate them into something intelligible.
“After the Somersault, I wasn’t able to fall into any major trances, which Guide was aware of. This last half year, though, I could tell Guide wanted to say something to me, something like the first two lines of the poem. ‘Why don’t you fall into any trances? And why don’t you tell me your visions?’ But if, for instance, I were to fall into a trance now, I know I wouldn’t come into contact with anything transcendental. Which is why I don’t make the effort. That’s all I can say, if ‘you ask why.…’
“‘But what is there to say?’” he continued. “I’m holed up in this place as in a hideout, not looking at the tides in the bay every day. But for a long time I have been letting time flow from my heart—the movement the poet compares to the tides. These past ten years I’ve been doing nothing, merely observing the flow of the tides in my own heart.
“Time. . . the flow of the tides move indeed. ‘How does that help?’ That’s exactly right. ‘It leaves illegible writing/ on the shore. If you were here,/ we would quarrel about it.’ Guide was by my side, but I never spoke to him of that writing. When it flows out of my heart, what does time inscribe? Even if it could be deciphered, I know it would be meaningless. There would be nothing to quarrel about.
“But people live their lives for all they’re worth, knowing nothing. ‘I keep searching for meaning.’ That’s the truth. I didn’t expect that everything would be thrilling in life. If someone accused me of just sitting on the beach, staring vacantly before me, I couldn’t deny it. Sometimes when I feel in good spirits, that is still ‘in thought only,’ just climbing the stairs of waves.
“That’s so painfully true! ‘The fall from the top is as sheer/ as ever.’ It’s true. Every single day and night, all I’ve thought about is what happened ten years ago. The way I fell then, I continue to fall, moment after moment, in my mind.
“The next stanza expresses exactly how I feel right now. ‘Younger I deemed truth/ was to come at beyond the horizon./ Older I stay still and am/ as far off as before.’ What does ‘these nail-parings’ really point to? At any rate, here I am, sitting here blankly staring at the horizon. It’s no wonder Guide got angry and asked why.
“This is what I should have said to him: ‘They explain my silence./ I wish there were as simple/ an explanation for the silence of God! That hits it right on the head.”
Patron’s dark glistening eyes were no longer aimed at Kizu but were fixed steadily on an invisible companion only he could see.
The mid-October sky was threatening rain, the gloomy road beginning to lighten in the approaching dawn, as they sped toward home, Ikuo at the wheel. Kizu, meanwhile, ruminated on what Patron had said regarding Thomas’s poem and his accompanying translation. ‘Younger I deemed truth/ was to come at beyond the horizon,’ he mused. I think that’s true. Isn’t that why I set out for America? And what was the result? I ended up never really investigating that truth.
Ikuo got out of the car for a moment. As Kizu opened the side door next to the main entrance with the same key he used for his apartment, he heard Ikuo’s voice, almost apologetically, from behind.
“I wish I could come up to my room now, but Ogi and Dancer have this plan we need to work on.”
Kizu turned around and nodded.
“Yesterday, after I drove you and went back to the office,” Ikuo went on, “Dancer told me that Patron would like you to donate something he needs, something of great value. Did you talk about this? Religious leaders might seem unworldly, but they have a practical side too, don’t they?”
Kizu suspected that Ikuo and Dancer were behind this pronouncement of Patron’s. But he merely nodded again, pushed open the solid American-type steel door, and went in alone.
2
This year Kizu sensed that the seasons were changing quickly. Even on days when the morning light shone into his room above the branches of the wych elm, the position of the light was changing, no longer reaching the spot where he sunbathed in the nude.
Kizu’s sunbathing, his middle-aged-man’s habit, wasn’t something he wanted others to see. Ikuo might be living with him and modeling in the nude, but even if Kizu often lounged nude on the sofa he never invited Ikuo to join him. Not that there were many chances to do so, with Ikuo now so busy at the office.
When he was alone, Kizu spent his time painting and preparing his readings of R. S. Thomas for Patron. He reread his note-filled paperback copy of Thomas’s poems, gathered books of Thomas’s prose writings, and read the theses and monographs that young Welsh scholars had written, like good conscientious sons. He faxed the assistant in his office back in the States a request to look for these books. Coincidentally, the assistant’s father happened to be an immigrant from Wales, from Thomas’s own parish, in fact. Though he wasn’t an Anglican but a member of a minor denomination, her father remembered seeing Thomas, a clergyman, walking through the fields wielding a walking stick like some kind of sports equipment. She added a note in the package of books saying how surprised she was to find that even the Japanese were reading Thomas’s poetry.
At one of their late-night readings, Kizu quoted the following Thomas poem.
“I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them.
“I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on
“this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
t
he light. To look forward? Ah,
“what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What”
Kizu and Patron always began with Kizu reading aloud from his paperback copy, Patron following along in the hardbound copy in his lap. Kizu’s translations served as reference. Then they would discuss the poem, stanza by stanza. On this particular day when Kizu had read to this point, Patron thought the poem ended there, an understandable mistake since the poems in the collected works edition he was using were almost all complete on one page.
“That’s exactly right.” He sighed in admiration. “Only someone who’s desperate, driven into a corner, could write a poem like that.”
This didn’t sit well with Kizu, the longtime teacher.
“Thomas divides his stanzas in unusual ways,” he cautioned his pupil. “The last word in this stanza, ‘What,’ is the first word in the next stanza, actually. The meaning of the line doesn’t end there.”
Patron’s response was unexpected.
“But the next stanza isn’t really necessary, is it?” he said confidently. “How did you translate the next line? What comes after ‘What’?”
“to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?”
“I see! But even though he triumphantly produced this smart stanza, if you look at the whole poem it’s an unnecessary addition, don’t you think?”
“Don’t you believe at all in this kind of ‘reciprocating touch’?” Kizu questioned him.
“These past ten years I’ve been in the dark,” Patron said, “but I haven’t relied on a reciprocating touch. ‘I emerge from the mind’s/ cave into the worse darkness/ outside, where things pass and/ the Lord is in none of them.’ I’ve experienced this more often than I can recall, but I never attempted to find God as I passed through there. Doesn’t Thomas at times try to be overly suggestive?
“Do you really need to keep your balance on the edge of the abyss? When I made my noisy reversal in front of the media, falling even farther into the abyss, it was like a Ping-Pong ball trying to sink down by itself into a tub of water. Even without the last stanza—no, even with it—I agree that this is an outstanding poem.”
Kizu felt a slight maliciousness from Patron as he smiled at him in the gloom. Trying to control his rising displeasure, Kizu took out a volume of Thomas’s prose writings and showed the following to Patron.
The ability to be in hell is a spiritual prerogative, and proclaims the true nature of such a being. Without darkness, in the world we know, the light would go unprized; without evil, goodness would have no meaning. Over every poet’s door is nailed Keats’s saying about negative capability. Poetry is born of the tensions set up by the poet’s ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
When he’d finished reading, Patron looked serious again.
“He’s entirely correct,” he said. “Thomas is a clergyman, but I think he says more telling things about poetry than about religion. In the final analysis, I should say, he’s a poet.”
Once more, Kizu felt he’d been given the slip. He said nothing. Compared to the craftiness of Patron, a man of about his own age, Kizu felt himself rather naive.
Patron continued, trying to soothe Kizu. “Of course there’s nothing of the poet about me, but I can sympathize with this particular one. This calm ability to be in hell and, as Keats puts it, the ability to be ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’—these would be wonderful mottoes for my old age!”
Under the light of the lamp stand, Patron’s head jutted forward as he read, and Kizu could see saliva glistening on both sides of his dark cocoonlike lips. His voice had risen in pitch, and Dancer, sensing in this a sign of excitement and exhaustion, quickly and stealthily stepped to his side, gave him medicine directly from her hand, and held a glass of water to his lips. Patron gave himself up to Dancer’s practiced movements. She then transferred the cup to her left hand and wiped the saliva away from Patron’s lips with the back of her other hand.
* * *
It was morning again when Kizu went home, but this time, instead of Kizu’s Mustang, Ikuo drove a minivan, a present from Kizu for Patron to use for meetings he planned to hold in sites outside Tokyo. Expecting that he would be attending these meetings, Ikuo was doing his best to get used to driving the van.
“I think reading that Welsh poet with you is having a good psychological effect on Patron,” Ikuo said. “For the first time in a while he came out to the front of the house, to the office, and chatted with the three of us, and he used an English phrase he said was from Thomas that he’d heard from you—quietly emerge. He read the poem to us. It was in the translation that you did, and I think it’s wonderful.”
Kizu reached into the briefcase on his lap, pulled out the copy he was using as a text, sandwiched in between his notes, angled it up in the pale, cloudy light, and read.
“As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea.”
Ikuo nodded. “Patron said, ‘If once again God is going to quietly emerge to me, I want to welcome him calmly, without flinching. I take this poem as a sort of sermon, and when I can accomplish this and I am able to ‘quietly emerge’ before you as mankind’s Patron in the end time, I hope you too can welcome me as just calmly, without hesitating.’ That’s the last thing Patron said.” And Ikuo clenched his mouth, in a way that reminded Kizu of a shallow-water fish he’d seen on TV ripping apart a turban shell, and stared fixedly at the lights of the oncoming cars.
Kizu wasn’t sure what Ikuo was thinking, but he went ahead and spoke. “I want to believe that Patron is a man of great charisma.”
Ikuo drove on in silence for a while, his mouth still set in that strange way. And then he spoke, quietly, of something he’d apparently been considering ever since he was getting the minivan ready to take Kizu home.
“Yes, Patron certainly does have charisma. But is he planning to lead people using that charisma? That’s the question. I used to think he used the media to appeal to the dispersed radical faction when he did his Somersault, but now I have the feeling that the Somersault was necessary for him. Once again, he said, God would quietly emerge.
“That’s why,” Ikuo continued, “though I feel his charisma, I have no real sense of what kind of person he is. I’m not sure whether I should get more deeply involved. Since you’re well grounded and have a relationship with him that maintains a certain distance, I think it might be best for me to rely on that.”
3
During the week Kizu was able to talk with Dancer, who came to his apartment just as Ikuo was setting out for the office. Ikuo hadn’t told him in advance, but he’d urged Dancer to pay Kizu a visit.
The only person who had sat on Kizu’s sofa since he’d been in Tokyo was Ikuo, so now, as Dancer sat on it—teacup and saucer resting on her shapely thighs, watching Kizu as he spoke, her eyes barely blinking, the pink inside her mouth showing as she sipped her tea—she looked incredibly delicate.
Appearance aside, Kizu already knew she never hesitated to speak her mind. Today, too, she broached a topic that took him completely by surprise.
“There still is a lot of criticism of Patron,” she said. “So much it makes me realize how much more vicious the attacks must have been ten years ago. Every time some article lambasting him was sent to
us I always asked Guide for his opinion, but now with things the way they are.…
“One famous retired journalist writes the most abusive, scathing things, but I don’t pay him any mind. I’d say the problem’s more with the person who’s writing than with anything to do with Patron. Recently we received a copy of a university bulletin that contained an interview between a Protestant theologian and an associate professor who’d just joined the same church. Overall it was typical overbearing criticism of Patron, the main point being their agreement that since Patron had abandoned his own church, the only way he’d be saved was to join a proper church.
“I told Patron about this, and he said he wants to keep apart from all established churches, Protestant, Catholic, or whatever. Every person has that right, he said. If he were to share the same certainty in an objective external God with the other members of a church, his critics included, he said, he might very well lose his faith entirely. Instead of climbing into the same bed of faith with these people, he said he much preferred a gnashing of teeth and the uncertainty of belief, lying over seventy thousand fathoms, where he could taste the reason he was living in this world.…
“What I wanted to ask you, Professor, was what did he mean by over seventy thousand fathoms? I asked him, but he just said you mentioned it in one of your talks. Is the phrase from one of Thomas’s poems?”
Dancer stopped speaking, her lips slightly parted as usual, and gazed at the artist.
“It’s originally from Kierkegaard,” Kizu replied, “though Thomas used it several times. I do remember linking the phrase with the poetry and discussing Kierkegaard with Patron. This wasn’t directly from Thomas’s poetry collections, but something from a volume published to commemorate the poet’s eightieth birthday. . . this book, in fact. The author of the text I chose discusses the metaphorical uses Thomas has in his poems for the desolate farmland and sea in Wales.… The author quotes two poems; the latter, entitled “Balance,” directly mentions Kierkegaard. Let’s take a look at it.”