Vaseline Buddha
Page 3
And the excitement continued until after I had a dream that night about a bird suddenly appearing out of a bowl of soup, lightly beating my face with its wing, and soaring into the air and flying out the open window, leaving a little fish, with only the bones remaining, floating in the soup bowl (I’ll probably be talking about the somewhat strange dreams I’ve had as well).
It’s difficult to trace the details of how I came to write this story, its origin, or source. The source of everything can be either nowhere or everywhere. Saying this, however, doesn’t help at all in finding the source of something. And at times, revealing the source of something does not lead to an understanding of it. But what lies at the source of something? This question doesn’t help, either, so let’s narrow down the question and ask, what lies at the source of thought? What do you finally reach when you cast a thought back to another, like a fish that swims upstream, or like the act of going upstream to find the source of the river itself? But you can see, without thinking deeply about it, that empty thoughts lie at the source, just as nothing lies at the source of everything. And perhaps thought in itself is something whose source cannot be reached and the source of a thought that can be conceived is something that can’t be reached even in thought. (Here I have no choice but to give up on thinking. I may also be making an attempt to circumvent the source as I write this, or I may be growing distant from the source but, at the same time, going toward it.) Perhaps you could say that there’s no source to this story, or that there’s a myriad of sources.
Thus I feel tempted once again to think, perhaps to my own convenience, that contrary to what I’ve said so far, this story began when I was sitting on a rock in a forest a while ago picturing a manuscript, like an unfinished posthumous work, that’s on or near a hand of someone sleeping or lying as if dead, or lying dead, in the faint moonlight shining down on a forest of perpetual night in which eagle-owls are flying from tree to tree.
But this story may have begun in another moment, when I found myself walking, quietly listening to the sound of my own footsteps, on the stairs leading downward to a dark basement and upward to the roof where bright light was shining through, and through corridors with open or closed doors, while carrying something that looked like a birdcage—but no sound of birds came out from within—whose contents couldn’t be discerned, or which didn’t contain anything, or a lamp—but no light leaked out from within—in a building I somehow ended up entering in a strange city. Or it may have begun in the moment when I, in mist-shrouded Venice, thought of something as I pictured a child jumping on a trampoline somewhere in the city (I’ll probably talk about that moment in this story). But it’s probably useless to look for the source in this way.
With that, I’m not prepared to begin, but I will. But how, and with what, do I begin? It doesn’t matter what I begin with, but I’d have to choose among countless stories, since I’ll have to begin with one. (I have already begun, and have come a little ways from where I began, and what I’m writing is headed in an unknown direction, but it feels as if I haven’t even begun, as if I’m hovering outside this story without even having entered it, and I could go on feeling, even as I go on writing this story, that I am just beginning, that I haven’t even begun when the story is over, that I’m back to square one in the end, and in order to make that happen, I may have to wrap up with a story that makes you feel that it’s going back to square one. Nevertheless, I feel that this story has begun to manifest some kind of an essence in some kind of a form.)
I should limit what I talk about to certain subjects, since I can’t think about everything, and talk about everything I think about. I could begin with certain thoughts that have a strong or loose hold over me, and certain subjects made up of a series of these thoughts, things I’ve thought about for a long time and thought about linking together, death and travel and everyday life, for instance, and an overlapping mixture of these things, and see, with a bit of curiosity, how the subjects that I think could link together do link together in the story. In the process, I’ll add thoughts to certain memories, bring memories into certain ideas, and link separate images into successive images (this story is also a story about the process of writing a story).
What if I began by talking about travel, which contains countless scenes from everyday life and is a metaphor for death? I could do that. But traveling isn’t something I like all that much. I do think about traveling a lot, but I haven’t actually done a lot of traveling, and although I don’t dislike traveling I don’t like it very much either. Perhaps I could rephrase this statement by saying that although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I detest traveling, I could venture to say that I don’t like traveling that much (this story, in a way, is about rephrasing a sentence in different ways.)
What it is that I’ll be writing seems to grow clearer as I recall, along with my memories about swallows, the travels I’ve done, and think about travel, which is considered an escape from mundane things and everyday life. This story could be a record of mundane things as well as a kind of a travelogue, a travelogue that contains casual yet cold ridicule on the many travelogues that praise and encourage traveling, and thus is for people who don’t like to travel, and it could be a story that could give some kind of a hint, although it wouldn’t serve as a good guide, on what to do when you don’t know what to do when you’re traveling, just as you didn’t know what to do when you weren’t traveling—if I were to write a real travel book, that’s the kind of book I’d write.
And this could be a mixture of a journal and an autobiographical novel, something that’s difficult to put a name to, or it could be something that isn’t anything at all, or something that’s not something that isn’t anything at all.
But I think I should hold off talking about travel until later. Right now there are other thoughts invading my mind. Other thoughts are invading me, holding me captive.
What are the thoughts that are closest to me now, or, in other words, thoughts that are holding me captive, clinging to me and not letting go, by which I’m held captive? But couldn’t I say that I’m not letting go of the thoughts by which I’m held captive, that I’m clinging to the thoughts, instead of saying that I’m held captive by the thoughts? Anyway, the thoughts are such that the more you try to break free from them, the more you become captive, but at the same time, they are such that the more you let go, the longer they linger (this story is also something that digs up and pulls out something dreadful that exists in thought itself, as an intrinsic part of thought).
Something is doing that to me this very moment, a sentence. My mind, again, is occupied with thoughts on the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” The sentence, presented by a language philosopher, is holding me captive like a charm, and I float around on it as if it’s a raft floating on an open sea. The sentence, cited by the language philosopher as an example of a grammatically correct sentence, or in other words, a sentence that has a logical form but makes no semantic sense and thus has no intelligible meaning, and can be discussed at different levels, feels to me, at least, like something that navigates the sea of language with infinite freedom. What I thought of as I watched a dolphin-shaped tube floating down a river in a little town in France, too, was a play of ideas using words.
For the past several days I’ve been spending time reading mostly works by linguistically experimental poets, thus allowing passages from the American poet John Hollander’s poem, “Coiled Alizarina” such as the following, dominate my everyday life.
A red pigment extracted from the root of madder, or produced by synthesizing anthracene —Author’s note
Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,b
Turquoise pigment, or the color thereof —Author’s note
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
But wasn’t it possible that the large dolphin-shaped tube I saw by a riverside one winter day, floating down the river, wasn’t something that
someone had thrown out? That perhaps the person sent something floating down the river every winter around that time, at that place, as if performing a sort of private ritual, and happened to set a dolphin tube afloat on the water that year? Wasn’t it possible that he didn’t wish for anything as he let go of something that floated down the river—I hope he didn’t wish for anything—and merely wanted to see something float down before his eyes and fade away and disappear? And that no one knew he did such a thing every year, that it was his secret, his greatest secret? Yet as a result of his secret act, someone ends up thinking about plays of ideas as he walks side by side with a big dolphin-shaped tube that’s floating down a winter river, wondering how it’s come to float down like that.
Amusing ideas and games of ideas. Games using ideas, and languages, which are carriers of ideas. A story that’s a puzzling game, a game that becomes puzzling. Games using words, just for fun, not just for fun, not necessarily for fun, for fun only, not just for fun only, simply for fun, in the spirit of fun, as if for fun, not possibly for fun, and in the end, for fun only. (Games using words are really the only games you can enjoy until you get tired of them, or enjoy forever without getting tired of them.)
Again, I feel that my craving for amusement is relentless, which isn’t because my heart is heavy, both when I’m alone and when I’m with someone, or when I’m doing something or doing nothing, and seek to lighten my heavy heart. It would be more correct to say that it springs from the idea that life itself is a chaotic wandering state in which you roam around the edge of blindness, or make your way to the center of blindness, without any aim or will, and end up playing the writing game, having no other choice, and by so doing turn your life into fiction, fiction that resembles a riddle.
Perhaps the fact that the ideas that play around in my head often turn into something preposterous and bear and breed extravagant daydreams, or delusions almost, delusions that take up a great portion of my thoughts, when I think about it, could work to my advantage as I write about amusing ideas. For example, for someone who raises a lot of rabbits in his mind, rabbits could be something that gives him the hardest time. If he scoops out something sticky and slimy and transparent from the pond every morning, and imagines that it turns into several rabbits and gives them all the same name, Alice, and imagines that they take care of him and live only for a day like mayflies and hop around the pond, rabbits named Alice will be important creatures in his reality, and dominate him with real power, and he could say what a hard time he has because of the rabbit Alices that never leave his mind, and could be sad one day to find that all his Alices are dead. Although this is a metaphor—the rabbits are a metaphor for ideas or imaginations—the many ideas that come to my mind as I write this actually dominate me like the rabbits that belong to someone who raises the rabbits he scoops out of a pond.
Anecdotes in my memories and images in my imagination dance on a stage from which time, which flows in one direction, has made its exit. I wave at them, and further, I dance with them. The past is revived in the present, and I pass again through past moments. As I write this, I’ll come face to face with returning scenes from the past and become a part of those scenes, and the scenes will overlap with my present, and I’ll confuse the past, present, and future tenses.
Anyway, what I thought was a dolphin-shaped tube may have been a little plastic bag someone had thrown away, or perhaps I never saw such a thing as a plastic bag, or went out to the riverside and watched the river one winter day when I lived in a little town in France long ago. But I’ve already said something about a dolphin-shaped tube, and although it’s an unreliable or nearly fabricated story, it becomes a part of this story, as words that are written down and printed out take on certain power and become a part of a certain story.
But it doesn’t matter if what I think I saw by the river was a dolphin tube or a plastic bag, or if I didn’t see anything at all. What matters more is the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which I think came to my mind at the riverside. And recalling the sentence, I think again about writing something about the difficulty of existence, the difficulty of talking about the difficulty of existence, the double difficulty of it, which I think I thought about at the riverside as well.
But did I, at the riverside, begin, out of nothing, a vague groping in the dark that wasn’t a new, careful search but a groping for a new failure that sought to end up as a failure, and think of a loosely structured story, that turns from a vague groping in the dark into a haze, and in the end comes to nothing, and think that such a story could be effective in writing about the double difficulty mentioned above?
And did I think that I could have something of an expectation in the fact that in the act of indulging yourself in a game of ideas, not knowing to the end what it is that you’re talking about, and rendering it null, there’s an innocent or a naive pleasure, like that of a game indulged in by a child at play, and think that there’s something about a child playing alone that makes you think that in a way, a solitary game, with everything around you, and further, the world vanishing and leaving you alone, was the only real kind of game?
And did I think that I could obsess over what it was that I sought to do because it was something I couldn’t figure out, and something useless, and that I wanted to trust the feeling that things upon which such things could exert greater power were awaiting me, and that when you didn’t know what it was that you wanted to write, you could do certain things you couldn’t do when you wrote, fully aware of what it was?
My mind is all confused again. My thoughts, which raise their heads at once like Medusa raising her many heads at the same time, cannot be cut off or paralyzed, so I have no choice but to leave them as they are.
So I consider a story dealing with an attempt related to the combination of a word with another, and the joining of a sentence with another, as well as a story about the use of language, and a certain misuse of language, which, in a sense, is an undeniable use of language, and the confusion and limitations of language and thought. (I believe that among the dreams dreamt by language, there are sentences that are impossible in themselves, or ones that seek to become something of a chaos. And a writer must be someone who also dreams the somewhat strange but captivating dreams that language dreams.) I also think about the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” as well as the sentence, “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” cited by a language philosopher along with the previous sentence as an example of a sentence that isn’t even grammatically correct, and the sentence, “Colorless ideas sleep furiously green,” which I created by changing the words around in that sentence.
And I feel tempted to devote myself to making unfamiliar or erroneous sentences, like someone who has suffered damage on the part of the brain in charge speech and who, in a sense, is able to express himself more freely due to a loss of normal faculty of speech. (In fact, I feel extremely tempted to make sentences with grammatical errors that are utterly incomprehensible, and think that one day, I could perhaps write a short story, one at least, made up of such sentences only.) It would be a sort of warming up of thoughts, as well as practice in making sentences, and such practice could be helpful in thinking more freely, and writing the kind of confusing story I seek to write. And such practice could consist of making phrases or sentences such as follows.
The softly hardened hand of something that threatens wet sense by holding it up against the smiling, bent fire of a red rose; or, The sleeping snail enveloped in the wind passing through the forest, a playground for cats, that looks like a bunch of umbrellas turned inside out, ravaged by cats in passing; or, The wet appearance of a raincoat that comes to mind when you tilt an arm horizontally puts a stop to the dance by twisting an arm somewhere within a sentence that’s startled by something that’s being watched by commas holding their breaths; or, No matter what you say to the stinkbug that lives in a pillow with me, the words, Be careful, eagle, won’t get through, it’s because martens that hav
e lost their stickiness in the net I cast in the sea are pulling the strap that’s retreating forward, or because it’s been long since the ship that sailed off, with parrots on board, and doesn’t return, sailed off, no, it’s not because of that, it’s not because of anything; or, the path taken by certain goldfish that do high jumps all day long should meet an animal that lives underground, that waves its hand playfully, instead of being found in the mind of someone who marches in place,; or, what you can do for the sick bicycle lying in bed is to hit a mushroom, instead of a volleyball, with the palm of your hand, throwing it up into the sky, and going to the future in this sentence.
I actually suffered from a sort of aphasia, and thought in a way that was closer to writing than speaking, and as a result had difficulty speaking and had an easier time putting my thoughts into written words, so I wrote down in a notebook a countless number of such sentences that made no sense, whose list could go on and on, and the making of which brought me a kind of pure joy (I feel, in a sense, that this story is a list of sorts, which could go on endlessly, deleted, added to, and corrected).
In the notebook were pages packed with names and numbers of people I’d crossed out, wondering how these people could have such narrow views, and recalling their faces the last time I saw them, and hoping that I’d never see them again, and then, in a moment of weakness, restored even while scolding myself for being weak, and on the page on which I had most recently written something down was the sentence, The thousands of question marks that have sunk to the bottom of the pond cannot rise above the surface through their own desperate efforts, and must wait for a lying monkey to smile while looking into a mirror, and although I didn’t know how I’d come to write such a sentence, I was sure that I wrote it one night while drunk.