by John Updike
“Nay,” says Canus, rising from his bench in surprise, “an angel, rather, to relieve both beasts and men by the means of an insensate and efficient”—and here, groping for the Latin “mechina,” he slurs into creation a new word—“machine. I have created”—and again he must coin the word—“horsepower.”
“You would bind up the anarchy that has set us free,” Ablatus pursues, pacing the rectangle of dirt floor in his visionary distress. “You would bring back the ponderous order of Rome, that crazed even emperors, ere the sea of slaves dried up and like a galleon of millstones the Empire sank. Oh, Canus, frater meus, reflect! With the great flail of bishops and barbarians God broke Rome into a thousand fragments so that men might breathe. In the subsequent darkness, in this our confusion, men have found their souls, have fallen into right relation with one another—the lords protecting the vassals, the vassals supporting the lord, on all sides love and enlightened self-interest. True, there is brutality and waste, but they stem from our natures; they are true to our image, which is God’s. The seal of the divine sits upon the organic. Out of Eden, Adam groaned at toil and Eve screamed in the travail of birth so that men might know their sin. Wisely the ancients took up the first poor tools and disdained to improve them. You would presume to forge a second Nature—better the hellish blackness of midnight than a blasphemous Paradise! Better impede the windpipes of beasts than strangle the souls of men! From this impudent seed of invention, what iron vines will flourish! With interconnection comes restriction; with organization, oppression. This device of yours, so beneficent in its apparent effects, is Satan’s stalking horse, wherewith to conquer again the kingdom so dearly redeemed by Christ’s blood! You call it a blessing, I call it a curse! I call it a—pollution!” And, inspired, fair Ablatus seizes one of the candles that in this dark age burn even at midday, and hurls it upon the artifact of straw, and it becomes a hoop of flame.
Canus, inspired in his swarthier fashion, takes up one of the blunt tools from his bench and strikes his brother a firm blow.
“Devil!” exclaims Ablatus, sinking.
“Fool,” replies Canus, and, with one of the sharp tools from the same set, deftly finishes his brother off.
Ablatus abolitus est. It does not arouse remorse in us when we slay a twin; it is too much like suppressing an aspect of ourselves. Serenely Canus carries off the body (Ablatus ablatus est) and digs the grave. The earth is heavy, Northern soil—more resistant and more rewarding than the earth the ancients scratched. In the distance, a scrimmage of nobility reverberates. A monastery bell—a silver thread thrown across a chasm—sounds from a muffling valley. The Dark Ages begin to fade. As Canus leans on the shovel, a breeze of evening caresses his face, and he idly reflects that here is power too, to be harnessed. He imagines sails, gears, driveshafts. Inside the hut, he composes himself for sleep. His muscles agreeably ache from useful labor performed. The prototypical horse collar lies consumed beside the bench, but the ashes preserve the design. Tomorrow he will reconstruct it. The slippery little half-dreams that augur sleep begin to visit him. And tomorrow, he thinks, he will invent the horizontal-shafted windmill … and the next day, Deus volens, the wheelbarrow.…
(illustration credit 23.6)
Jesus on Honshu
Japanese Legend Says
Jesus Escaped to Orient
—Headline, and passages in italics below, from the New York Times.
TOKYO—A Japanese legend has excited some curiosity here, that Jesus did not die on the cross outside Jerusalem, but lived in a remote village on the northern part of the Japanese island of Honshu until his death at 106 years of age.
The distances within His blue eyes used to frighten the children. Though toward the end, when His age had passed eighty, His stoop and careful movements within the kimono approximated the manner of an elderly Japanese, His face, up close, never conformed—the olive skin, the tilted nostrils sprouting hair, the lips excessive in flesh and snarling humor, the eyelids very strange, purplish and wrinkled like the armpits of a salamander. There was never much doubt in the village that He was some sort of god. Even had His eyes given on less immensity, had their celestial blue been flawed by one fleck of amber or rust, He would have been revered and abhorred by the children. His skin was abnormally porous. His voice came from too deep in His body.
Jesus, so the legend runs, first arrived in Japan at the age of 21 during the reign of the emperor Suinin in what would have been the year 27 B.C. He remained for 11 years under the tutorship of a sage of Etchu Province, the modern Toyama prefecture, from whom he learned much about the country and its customs.
Strangely, the distances had melted within Him, leaving little more trace than the ice cakes along the northern shore leave in spring. What a man does when young becomes a legend to himself when he is old. The straight roads through drifting deserts, the goat paths winding through mauve mountains, the silver rivers whose surfaces He discovered He could walk, the distant herds like wandering lakes, the clouds of birds darkening the sun, the delegations of brown people, of yellow people, the green forests where sunlight fell in tiger stripes, the purple forests (tree trunks shaggy as bears, star-blue butterflies fluttering in glades no man had entered before), emerald meadows sparkling with springs and freshets, sheets of snow a month of walking did not dismiss, and in the distance always more mountains, more deserts, the whole world then tasting of vastness as of nectar, glistening, men huddling in mud nests like wasps, the spaces innocent. He had walked because, obscurely, His Father had told Him to. His Father was an imperious restlessness within Him. At last He came to the land of Wa, beyond which extended only an enamelled sea without a nether edge. The sage of Etchu took Him in and taught Him many things. He taught the young Jesus that dual consciousness was not to be avoided but desired: only duality reflected the universe. That the eight hundred myriads of daemons (yao-yorodzu-no-kami) are false save in that they stand guard against an even more false monism. That the huntsman must bend his thought upon the prey and not upon the bow. That a faith containing fear is an imperfect faith. That the mountains wait to be moved by the touch of a child. That the motions of the mind are full of kami (holy force). That the ways of the gods (shintō) are the ways of plants. That a seed must die to live. That the weak are the strong, the supple outlast the stiff, the child speaks truer than the man. And many more such things He later preached, and forgot, as the ice cake deposits pebbles and straw in melting. After eleven years, the restlessness seized Him again, and He returned. The trip returning, strangely, was the more difficult of the two; He kept searching for familiar landmarks, and there were none.
Jesus returned to Jerusalem, passing through Monaco on the way, to tell his own people of his experiences in the Orient, it is said. It was his younger brother, known in Japanese as Isukiri, who was later crucified, according to the legend.
No one ever got it quite right, and He Himself ceased trying to understand. Judas (Isukiri) had not been His brother; he had been the troublesomely sensitive disciple, the cloying adorer. Selecting the twelve, Jesus had chosen solid men, to whom a miracle was a way of affecting matter, a species of work. Judas, with his adoration and high hopes and theoretical demands on the Absolute, had attached himself hysterically. The kiss in the garden was typical—all showmanship. Then, the priesthood proving obdurate (and why not? any Messiah at all would put them out of a job), Judas had offered to be crucified instead, as if we were dealing with some Moloch that had a simple body quota to meet. The poor Romans were out of their depth; eventually they hanged Judas, as they generally hanged informers—a straightforward policy of prudence. For Him, there had been nails in the palms, and a crying out, and then dark coolness, a scuffle in which He overheard women’s voices, and a scarlet dawn near the borders of Palestine. For the first days eastward, until the wounds in His feet healed, He was carried in a litter and had a mounted escort, He dimly remembered. Gruff men, officials of some sort.
Jesus is said to have escaped and come back
to Japan after wandering through the wastes of Siberia. The legend has it that he landed at Hachinoe in Aomori, and settled in Herai, whose name, it has been suggested, derives from the Japanese for Hebrew (Heburai). He married and became the father of three daughters, according to the legend.
Asagao was the oldest, Oigimi the youngest; both married before the age of fifteen, and in them and their children He saw no trace of Himself, only of His wife and the smooth race that had taken Him in, as a pond swallows a stone. Ukifune, the middle daughter, called Dragonfly, was tall like Him, with His wrinkled lids and big-knuckled hands and surges of restlessness and mockery. She never married; her scandals affronted the village until she was found dead in her hut, black-lipped, cold. He would have called her back to life, but her face had been monstrously slashed. Poisoned and disfigured by a lover or the wife of a lover. She left a fatherless male infant, Kaoru. Shared between the households of his aunts, the infant grew to be a man, living always in the village, as a mender of nets and thatching. Conscious of himself only as Japanese, Kaoru grew old, with white hair and warts, and Jesus, now over a hundred, would suddenly, senselessly, weep to see in this venerable grandson—hook-nosed profile bent above a chisel, his forearms as gnarled as grapevines—the very image of old Joseph of Bethlehem, seen upward through the eyes of a child. Things return, form in circles, unravel and reravel, the sage had insisted, crouching with the young traveller on a ledge in the mauve mountains of Etchu, in view of the enamelled sea. Jesus had argued, insisting that there was also a vertical principle in the world, something thrusting, which did not repeat. Now, Himself ancient, He had come to exemplify the sage’s scorned truth. He lived in the village as a healer, and the healed kept coming back to Him, their health unravelled, and again He would lay on His hands, and the devils would flee, and the healed would depart upright and rejoicing; only to unravel again, and at last to die, even as He must. A soft heaviness sweetened His veins; His naps lengthened. As death neared, His birth and travail far ago, in that clamorous desert place, among Rome’s centurions, seemed more and more miraculous: a seed He had left behind, and that had died, engendering a growth perhaps as great as a mustard tree. Or perhaps His incarnation there, those youthful events, were lost in the scuffle of history, dust amid dust. Whatever the case, He never doubted that He was unique, the only son of God. In this, at least, He resembled all men.
One family in the village says it is descended from Jesus. Many of the children have the star of David sewn on their clothes, and parents sometimes mark the sign of the cross in ink on the foreheads of children to exorcise evil spirits.… An annual “Christ festival,” held on June 10, attracts many visitors.
THE MAPLES
Marching Through Boston
THE CIVIL-RIGHTS MOVEMENT had a salubrious effect on Joan Maple. A suburban mother of four, she would return late at night from a non-violence class in Roxbury with rosy cheeks and shining eyes, eager to describe, while sipping Benedictine, her indoctrination. “This huge man in overalls—”
“A Negro?” her husband asked.
“Of course. This huge man, with a very refined vocabulary, told us if we march anywhere, especially in the South, to let the Negro men march on the outside, because it’s important for their self-esteem to be able to protect us. He told us about a New York fashion designer who went down to Selma and said she could take care of herself. Further more, she flirted with the state troopers. They finally told her to go home.”
“I thought you were supposed to love the troopers,” Richard said.
“Only abstractly. Not on your own. You mustn’t do anything within the movement as an individual. By flirting, she gave the trooper an opportunity to feel contempt.”
“She blocked his transference, as it were.”
“Don’t laugh. It’s all very psychological. The man told us, those who want to march, to face our ego-gratificational motives no matter how irrelevant they are and then put them behind us. Once you’re in a march, you have no identity. It’s elegant. It’s beautiful.”
He had never known her like this. It seemed to Richard that her posture was improving, her figure filling out, her skin growing lustrous, her very hair gaining body and sheen. Though he had resigned himself, through twelve years of marriage, to a rhythm of apathy and renewal, he distrusted this raw burst of beauty.
The night she returned from Alabama, it was three o’clock in the morning. He woke and heard the front door close behind her. He had been dreaming of a parallelogram in the sky that was also somehow a meteor, and the darkened house seemed quadrisected by the four sleeping children he had, with more than paternal tenderness, put to bed. He had caught himself speaking to them of Mommy as a distant departed spirit, gone to live, invisible, in the newspapers and the television set. The little girl, Bean, had burst into tears. Now the ghost closed the door and walked up the stairs, and came into his bedroom, and fell on the bed.
He switched on the light and saw her sunburned face, her blistered feet. Her ballet slippers were caked with orange mud. She had lived for three days on Coke and dried apricots; at one stretch she had not gone to the bathroom for sixteen hours. The Montgomery airport had been a madhouse—nuns, social workers, divinity students fighting for space on the northbound planes. They had been in the air when they heard about Mrs Liuzzo.
He accused her: “It could have been you.”
She said, “I was always in a group.” But she added guiltily, “How were the children?”
“Fine. Bean cried because she thought you were inside the television set.”
“Did you see me?”
“Your parents called long-distance to say they thought they did. I didn’t. All I saw was Abernathy and King and their henchmen saying, ‘Thass right. Say it, man. Thass sayin’ it.’ ”
“Aren’t you mean? It was very moving, except that we were all so tired. These teen-age Negro girls kept fainting; a psychiatrist explained to me that they were having psychotic breaks.”
“What psychiatrist?”
“Actually, there were three of them, and they were studying to be psychiatrists in Philadelphia. They kind of took me in tow.”
“I bet they did. Please come to bed. I’m very tired from being a mother.”
She visited the four corners of the upstairs to inspect each sleeping child and, returning, undressed in the dark. She removed underwear she had worn for seventy hours and stood there shining; to the sleepy man in the bed it seemed a visitation, and he felt as people of old must have felt when greeted by an angel—adoring yet resentful, at this flamboyant proof of a level of existence above theirs.
She spoke on the radio; she addressed local groups. In garages and supermarkets he heard himself being pointed out as her husband. She helped organize meetings at which dapper young Negroes ridiculed and abused the applauding suburban audience. Richard marvelled at Joan’s public composure. Her shyness stayed with her, but it had become a kind of weapon, as if the doctrine of non-violence had given it point. Her voice, as she phoned evasive local real-estate agents in the campaign for fair housing, grew curiously firm and rather obstinately melodious—a note her husband had not heard in her voice before. He grew jealous and irritable. He found himself insisting, at parties, on the constitutional case for states’ rights, on the misfortunes of African independence, on the history of Reconstruction from the South’s point of view. Yet she had little trouble persuading him to march with her in Boston.
He promised, though he could not quite grasp the object of the march. All mass movements, of masses or of ideas supposedly embodied in masses, felt unreal to him. Whereas his wife, a liberal theology professor’s daughter, lived by abstractions; her blood returned to her heart enriched by the passage through some capillarious good cause. He was struck, and subtly wounded, by the ardor with which she rewarded his promise; under his hands her body felt baroque and her skin smooth as night.
The march was in April. Richard awoke that morning with a fever. He had taken something foreign into
himself and his body was making resistance. Joan offered to go alone; as if something fundamental to his dignity, to their marriage, were at stake, he refused the offer. The day, dawning cloudy, had been forecast as sunny, and he wore a summer suit that enclosed his hot skin in a slipping, weightless unreality. At a highway drugstore they bought some pills designed to detonate inside him through a twelve-hour period. They parked near her aunt’s house in Louisburg Square and took a taxi toward the headwaters of the march, a playground in Roxbury. The Irish driver’s impassive back radiated disapproval. The cab was turned aside by a policeman; the Maples got out and walked down a broad brown boulevard lined with barbershops, shoe-repair nooks, pizzerias, and friendliness associations. On stoops and stairways male Negroes loitered, blinking and muttering toward one another as if a vast, decrepit conspiracy had assigned them their positions and then collapsed.
“Lovely architecture,” Joan said, pointing toward a curving side street, a neo-Georgian arc suspended in the large urban sadness.
Though she pretended to know where she was, Richard doubted that they were going the right way. But then he saw ahead of them, scattered like the anomalous objects with which Dalí punctuates his perspectives, receding black groups of white clergymen. In the distance, the hot lights of police cars wheeled within a twinkling mob. As they drew nearer, colored girls made into giantesses by bouffant hairdos materialized beside them. One wore cerise stretch pants and the golden sandals of a heavenly cupbearer, and held pressed against her ear a transistor radio tuned to WMEX. On this thin stream of music they all together poured into a playground surrounded by a link fence.
A loose crowd of thousands swarmed on the crushed grass. Bobbing placards advertised churches, brotherhoods, schools, towns. Popsicle vendors lent an unexpected touch of carnival. Suddenly at home, Richard bought a bag of peanuts and looked around—as if this were the playground of his childhood—for friends.