I am given a folding chair under the high platform and there I sit in quiet excitement to wait and watch. The last words are given, the assistant shouts his “get—ready, get—set,” and the director says “Action!”
We begin. I watch with a mighty tightening of the heart. I can scarcely breathe. I remember when I wrote that scene and when it was finished I was exhausted. Now I am to see it in life. Will Old Gentleman be able to play it as I wrote it? Is it possible that he can do it with the power and majesty that were revealed to me?
Behind me and on the patio between the surrounding rice fields the crowd stands silent and absorbed. The crew is busy with lights and camera and suddenly the strong glare falls upon the old servant coming out to light the torches. The leaping flames flare in the darkness to reveal Old Gentleman, that proud old man, standing at the top of the stone steps to the gate. He is gazing out to sea. He is desperate, that old man, a prophet unheeded, yet yearning. He sees all too well what will happen to his people, his ignorant, stubborn and beloved people. Yes, yes—he is the character I created. I see him clear and whole, perfect in conception and detail, and am surprised to feel tears running down my face—I who never weep!
Such realization comes seldom to an artist—a few times perhaps in a lifetime of creation. To me it now comes perfectly for the first time, the happy coincidence of creation made manifest in the flesh and the mind of another human being. I am overcome with the need to share the moment with someone—someone! Hundreds of people are crowding around me, kind people but at this moment strangers. Among them there is no one. I turn and walk through the darkness to the waiting car and am driven away into the night.
In that moment I realized what before I had only known. He was dead. There was to be no further communication. Had communication been possible it would have come by some means out there in darkness when I was alone in the crowd. He would have heard me, he would have known my need. Whatever the barriers, he would have found the way to me somehow, had he been awake and aware, wherever he was. He had always found a way. That he did not could only mean that communication was now impossible or that he was neither awake nor aware.
The hotel room became intolerable again. I slipped unseen through empty corridors and walked the silent streets of the town. All decent folk were in bed, and even a drunken man was staggering his way home. The moon was full—somehow a month had passed—and by its light I left the town and went out into the country. Silence, silence everywhere and only silence, because death is silence. I do not know how long I walked or how far, or even where, except it was beside the sea, so calm that there were no waves, only the long swell of the deep tides. I remember how beautiful the landscape was, by night, the mountains rising above silver mists in the valleys. I saw everything and felt nothing. It was as though I were floating and far away, in a strange country in which I had no life. I might have been dead myself, so profound was the silence within. I would never weep again. I knew now there was no use in tears, nor any comfort to be sought or found. There was only this one—myself. Silly to cry for myself!
I turned inland from the sea then and was walking along a narrow path between rice fields. The air was windless until suddenly a wind rose from nowhere, it seemed, and I stopped to feel the freshness on my face. At that same moment I heard a child cry, a baby, I could tell by the high frantic agony. I looked about me. Yes, a farmhouse across the field was bright with lights. Was the child ill? I have heard so many babies cry that I know their language. No, this was not agony—surprise, perhaps, fear, even anger. It was the cry of a newborn child.
I sank down on the grassy bank, listening. The crying stopped, and I heard voices, and laughter. The child was a boy, then! The child was another life. I lay back on the grass as though upon a bed and for a long time gazed up into the sky. The stars were not visible, for the bright moon was swinging its arc across the heavens and I watched it until I could believe I saw it move. A desperate weariness was creeping into my bones, the weariness of acceptance, the acceptance of the inescapable, the conviction of the unchangeable. From now on I must never again expect to share the great moments of my life. There would be such moments as long as I was alive, moments of beauty, moments of excitement and exhilaration; above all, moments of achievement. In such moments he and I had turned to each other as instinctively as we breathed. That was no more to be. … It is not true that one never walks alone. There is an eternity where one walks alone and we do not know its end.
The night was over and in the east beneath the horizon the sun was shining. It was time to go back to my room, time to prepare for the day’s work.
The good weather held. We drove to Old Gentleman’s house to find our crew ready to begin, even to fresh seaweed in the walks. I had a friend with me today. Years ago I learned to be grateful for small miracles and this one was an old friend from Hiroshima. Our acquaintance began when he and his wife and children came to the United States in connection with some of the young women who, as little girls, had been sadly wounded but not killed by the atomic bomb. While he traveled to give lectures and raise money for hospital expenses during the surgery necessary to restore their marred faces to something like their natural beauty, his wife and three children had spent the summer in my great house. I found him waiting for me that morning and it was cheering to see his friendly face.
“Would you like to go with me for today’s shooting?” I asked.
There is of course something of the actor in every preacher. “What a pleasure,” he said, his good face lighting.
As we drove to Old Gentleman’s house we talked of many things. I learned that Hiroshima is rebuilt and much bigger than before, numbering now some half million souls, each with a body attached. I mention the body, because it was the body that was destroyed by the bomb, and bodies are valuable for it is through them alone, it seems, that souls can communicate.
The day passed at once too swiftly and too long. My Hiroshima friend stayed by me, absorbed in the infinite detail of making a motion picture. We talked now and again.
“Promise me that you will come to Hiroshima before you leave Japan,” he begged.
I could not promise. I knew I would not go. It was not as if I were needed. The people of Hiroshima have lived through the disaster, they have learned that peace is the most valuable goal in human life, for unless there is peace there is death. If I should go to Hiroshima it would be as a sightseer, and I am not that—not in Hiroshima. But I could not explain all that to my friend.
We parted at the end of the day, he to return to his reborn city and I to my room. I was there and I was not there. In absolute rest I spent the evening in a silence which was only a step from sleep. Sometime in the night I was wakened by laughter under my window. I rose and looked out. The moon was shining again and there in the big pool three young men were bathing, their slim nude bodies half hidden in the steaming mists of the earth-heated water, a scene so beautiful with life that I was half convinced, as I watched, that the painter has the best of us all as artist.
It was the last day at Old Gentleman’s house, and I was loath to leave. The farmhouse location had been delightful, and I had made friends with all the family there, even with the cock and his hens and the goat. Only with the barking pig did I maintain a certain distance, feeling a mutual lack of interest, a result, doubtless, of our having nothing in common.
With Old Gentleman’s household I had much in common. I enjoyed to the full their cultivated minds, their delicate courtesy, their friendliness at once frank and restrained. Yet the end must come there, too. Old Gentleman had performed his part with dignity and grace, his servant had led young Yukio, the farm boy, and Toru, the fisherman’s son, into the stately house and had led them to the gate again after Toru had made his fateful choice to leave. The servant had his great moment at that gate, for here it was that he had his momentous dialogue, his yes and his no. He spoke these two words with importance and indeed they are the most important words in any language, containing wi
thin their brief sounds the positive and negative forces of the entire universe.
We said our farewells, too, we bowed and gave thanks, and I signed hundreds I am sure, of the big autograph cards that are used for this purpose in Japan. It is almost a pleasure to write one’s name on the ample cream-white surface, so exactly right for a brush or wide soft black lead. Instinctively one writes the name large and in graceful lines. The result is gratifying, somehow, and satisfaction is increased because of the silver edges of the handsome card and the silver stars sprinkled on the back.
Regretfully we gathered ourselves together and left the beautiful place and the kind people who live there and were conveyed by truck and car to our next location, the village of Kitsu. Our vehicles dislodged us on the top of a cliff and from there the approach was on foot and by a narrow path clinging to the rocky hillside. We walked down and down, until we came to the village itself, a cluster of stone cottages separated by narrow cobbled streets. I knew as I walked those streets that already I loved Kitsu the best of all our locations. A glorious bright day it was, the sun burning down upon the sand, and alas, this time the script called for rain. Rain had been forecast over the radio from Nagasaki, but rain there could not be from that brilliant blue sky. Therefore again we must make rain.
And we made rain all day and all night, it seemed, until we pumped the village well dry. The rain making was primitive but effective. A heavy canvas hose connected the well with the tank near the fisherman’s house where the scene was to take place. The tanks were big wooden tubs, each holding fifty gallons of water but I do not know why we did not put the hose into the ocean, for fifty gallons is only a drop in what we needed. Each time that we were ready for the scene someone shouted that the water had given out and the gasoline pump went to work again. Or when we were ready for the scene, actors in position and rain pouring, the make-up man discovered a hair out of place on our star’s forehead, or a rill of sweat on his brow, and by the time that damage was mended, once more we had no more water and so no more rain.
Yet rain we continued to need for now came the scenes when Old Gentleman warned the fisherman’s family that the big wave was sure to come. Grandfather cackled that there would be no typhoon, only rain. The village elders, locally provided extras and very proud of their new career, assembled on the narrow veranda of Toru’s house and agreed with him.
Those elders! I did not imagine that one village could have provided such a collection of snaggle-toothed, cheerful, wisecracking, withered old men, but Kitsu could, evidently, for there they were. At first they were preternaturally grave and well-behaved, especially one eagle-faced old bird of a man, who blinked his hooded eyes occasionally but otherwise gave no sign of life until the director requested some laughter at an appropriate moment. The old bird then staggered us all by shouting, in a stentorian bass voice, a string of words which when translated went thus:
“Put on your hat, American! That’ll make me laugh!” Everyone roared, for this hat had already become a joke. It was a small loosely braided straw, a bright sulphur-yellow, the crown encircled by a vivid variegated band. It was useful merely in locating the whereabouts of the director.
By the time we were really in action after the laughter, and at last synchronizing water with rain, a radio began to blare and again we stopped, the sound man in despair. The blast was from the school on top of the cliff, and the village headman, all devotion, raced up the mountain to make sure the children were clean and well-behaved. We waited and the water gave out, but the children arrived clean, their noses were wiped, and they were wearing clean cotton dresses or pants as the case might be. The headman was proud but stern. Left to themselves, he said, they would surround us and stifle activity. As it was, under his firm but benevolent discipline, however administered, they went about their daily work, obviously eaten up with curiosity about us, but subdued. He with the bowed legs bustled about, a human crab albeit a smiling one.
O Kitsu, darling village! I sat last night in a small empty theater in New York and looked at the finished picture, one friend beside me to share remembrance and to decide whether the picture is what we thought it was when we made it. Others must be the judges finally, for when Kitsu came back to me on the screen, when I saw the sea rolling in on the white beach, the many-colored nets hung there to dry, the boats at rest rising and falling gently on the waves, the noble rocky cliffs of shore and mountain and, yes, perhaps most of all, the fine good faces of the villagers, I felt a surge of spiritual homesickness. There are a few places, a few haunts, so natural to one’s being that they are forever home. I do not know whether I shall ever see Kitsu again in this life, but it is with me and in me.
Let me remember!
From the top of the winding narrow path, as I first saw it, Kitsu is, as I have said, a cluster of roofs on a narrow neck of land cradled between the two arms of the sea, each roof as close to the next as the scales of a fish. From the sea it is different and from the sea I like it best. Each morning we climbed into boats harbored at Obama, we swept along the superb coastline for half an hour and then, rounding a high cliff above the massive rocks, we faced the white beach and the stone walls of Kitsu. Those houses had no windows to the sea. The people when they slept sought shelter from their powerful friend and enemy. The schism was obvious. They lived by the sea and would not live elsewhere, but the sea’s mood was their mood. If the day dawned fair and windless, if the water was as blue as the Mediterranean, then the whole village was alive with laughter and business. If the sky was gray and the wind harsh, the people, unsmiling and anxious, crept along the sea walls to lash their boats firmly to the rocks they had rolled to the beach, and then crept back again into their houses. On a fair day if we entered the wide cove early we might be lucky enough to see the fleets of fishing boats putting out to sea and that was a sight to remember. On a stormy day the open waves broke into angry surf and we went by land. Sitting there in the dark theater in the center of a great American city, I returned to Kitsu. I saw Toru and Yukio in the boat fishing and Setsu—well, I must not tell the story. I see the children’s faces, laughing and carefree, I see those same children grown, their young faces firm with will and purpose, Toru a young man declaring his love under the shelter of the great gray rocks at the end of the curving beach, twisted and hollowed by storm and wind.
Our days fell into the pattern of work. We rose early, breakfasted, and left the hotel at seven. A quarter of a mile away we took ship, and were carried swiftly to the village. Once there each person proceeded to his individual preparation for the day’s scene. For an hour there was no need for me and I walked along the beach, past the stone break-water to the foot of a steep hill. Some steps led up this hill for an eighth of a mile or so, and at the top was a little empty stone temple, once a Shinto shrine. A low wall surrounded it, and the view was sea and mountains and sky.
I found my own niche, however, behind the shrine. At the edge of the high cliff there was a hollow in the rocks which exactly fitted my body. There I went every morning and, held in this hollow as though in his arms, I lay at rest. It was not the rest of sleep. It was the rest of the mind emptied, the spirit freed. He and I had never been here together. In the years when I had lived upon Kyushu I did not know that he existed, nor did he dream of me. Nor was there communication between us now—I cannot pretend that I heard his voice or even was aware of his presence. What did take place gradually as the days passed was a profound insurge of peace. No one became part of me, but I became part of the whole. The warm rock bed in which I lay, the wind rising cool from the sea, the sky intensely blue and the drifting white clouds, the gnarled pine tree bent above my head—of these I was a part, and beyond these, of the whole world. Myself ceased to be, at least for a time, a lonely creature with an aching heart. I was aware of healing pouring into me. It is a fact that at the end of the hour when the conch shell blew, I was able to rise refreshed to join my fellow workers.
The stone steps? I saw them again last night in the dar
k theater when Old Gentleman came down to warn the villagers, his faithful servant following. Yes, those are the same steps I climbed every morning, thirsting for the peace I found in the shelter of the rock. It became a habit, I woke eager for the hour and savored it deeply and with new zest each day. Then I discovered that something of each day’s peace was left as residue for the night. I did not use it all up, there was an accumulation. I became stronger. I was able to miss a day, then two days, then more. Gradually I was established in myself and I needed no more to climb to that high lonely place and wait to receive. I was able to manufacture peace within myself merely by recalling the sweep of sea and mountain and sky and myself curled into the hollow rock. I had the peace inside me then, and the place became a shrine in my memory. I do not know how this healing came about. I did not pray, if prayer be words or pleading or searching. If the process must be explained, it was simply that I gave myself wholly to a universe which I do not understand but which I know is vast and beautiful beyond my comprehension, my place in it no more than a hollow in a rock. But there is the hollow and it is mine and there is the rock.
This chronicle, if it is to be worth anything, must be truthful. We were approximately one-fourth of the way through the making of the picture and we had arrived at the desert which lies in the middle half of every creative project. The desert begins at that point where progress is too far to consider giving up, and so far from completion that the end is invisible and can be contemplated only by faltering faith. How well I know the bleak prospect! I face it in every book I write. The first quarter of it goes like a breeze from the sea. The work is pure joy. It is sure to be the best book I have ever written. Then I enter upon the middle half of the book and joy departs. The characters refuse to move or speak or laugh or cry. They stand like pillars of salt. Why, oh, why was the book begun? Too much work has been done to cast it aside, yet the end is as far off as the end of a rainbow. There is nothing to do but plod ahead, push the characters this way and that, breathe on them hotly in the hope of restoring life, use every means of artificial respiration. Somewhere, some day, though it is unbelievable for weeks and months or even years, they do begin to breathe. What relief! The desert is past, the last quarter of the book breezes again.
A Bridge for Passing: A Meditation on Love, Loss, and Faith Page 18