Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! Page 3

  On the day we traversed the Indian continent in a plane, Mr. H and I had spent a good ten hours waiting for our flight, the only Japanese among the Indians. In that entire time, other than the word “river” that may have been just the fluttering of his lips, and an invitation to read an article in the International Herald Tribune—"You might be interested in this"—and, before that, in the taxi on the way to the airport, an episode about dirty eyeglasses, he had not spoken a word to me. And until just before our flight to Calcutta finally departed, I had been feeling that his silence was due to anger at me for my compulsive-ness about time and my ignorance of how things were done in India. The truth was, if it hadn't been for my jumpiness, Mr. H might have spent the ten hours relaxing in our hotel instead of waiting around on an autumn day with nothing to do in an airport as drab and deserted as a warehouse.

  In what I took to be his indignation, Mr. H was unapproachable as a fortress. Born into a merchant family that had been shipping agents on the Sea of Japan for generations (the only one of his brothers who had turned his back on the world of commerce, he had been the one to inherit what might be called the essence of his family's accumulated humanity), he had set out just after the war for the chaos that was China, as though in search of hardship, and had found what he was looking for. On his return, he had become an author and an intellectual with a style of his own, though very much in the postwar school. But there was something about him that had nothing to do with his family background or his lifetime experiences, an inherent personality that included stubbornness about his feelings that made it impossible for anyone to divert him once he had set his course. Particularly not the person responsible for his anger.

  Before it had become plain that he was fuming, Mr. H had removed his International Herald Tribune from its paper cover and shown me an article whose contents I can convey vividly: it was about the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich's attack on the suppression of free speech in the Soviet Union. Still in Russia at the time, Rostropovich was dedicating himself to defending his comrade Solzhenitsyn, and I had copied his remarks in the flyleaf of the book I was reading that day: “Every human being must have the right to express without fear his own thoughts and his opinions about what he knows and has experienced. I am not talking about simply regurgitating with minor modifications opinions that have been fed to us …”

  As Mr. H's anger gradually revealed itself, I sensed that it was not only directed at my blunder and at the airline but also related to censorship and civil rights violations in Russia. I was led to this by the anecdote he told me about eyeglasses. We were in New Delhi at the time to attend a conference of Asian and African authors, but there were also a large number of Soviet writers present, including a woman poet who was an old friend of Mr. H's. The previous night, he and the poet, whom I shall call Madame Nefedovna, a smallish woman his age, in her mid-fifties, whose utter lack of intellectual restraint and cosmopolitan, Jewish-looking features made her appear ten years younger, had sat up arguing until late. As Mr. H was a veteran of too many international battles to be careless or indiscreet in a conversation with political overtones, I refrained from asking questions, but I judged that the argument had reference to the declaration by Rostropovich in the paper and was about the current civil rights issue in Russia. While Mr. H was on familiar terms with the cultural bureaucracy, he had always been clear about identifying emotionally with the artists and scientists whom Rostropovich was defending. The criticism he continued to voice at the African-Asian writers’ conference, tenaciously but with great tact and strategy, addressing the Russian representatives in the calmly delivered English that suited him, was on their behalf. If, however, it was the case that Madame Nefedovna was overdoing her actual involvement in the civil rights movement in Moscow, she would have been well advised to reconsider, for if this was noticed, she would find herself as a Jew not only unable to make trips abroad like this one but also prevented from pursuing her activities at home—apparently Mr. H had tried hard to persuade his friend that he was correct. But “that unrepentently stubborn Russian female intellectual,” as he called Madame Nefedovna, had rejected his admonition out of hand, with the familiar ease that came from having met him at writers’ conferences for fifteen years. Mr. H had been wearing glasses since his youth, but Madame Nefedovna had only recently begun using reading glasses, which she carried in her handbag. She needed them for the fine print in the volumes she pored over in her research—a distinguished poet, she was also a recognized Sanskrit scholar—and, like many people who do not wear their glasses all the time, she rarely cleaned them. Mr. H was in some respects a fastidious man, and it was accordingly his custom to clean them for her, but that night he had instead pinched some lint from his pocket and dusted it on her lenses.

  Such was the story Mr. H had told me in the taxi on the way to the airport. When we arrived, he installed himself at the counter of a newly opened bar and began drinking beer or something stronger, ignoring me entirely. Our flight had been scheduled to leave at 7 A.M., and in my uneasiness about separating from the Japanese writers’ group and setting out alone on a journey with Mr. H, there was no question that I had overdone my insistence on the accuracy of the timetable. Moving back and forth down the hotel's roofless corridor that faced a courtyard garden like a small forest, I had gone to awaken him repeatedly—I recall an unbearably desolate tree, the giant black trunk and fallen leaves of golden brown more like minerals than plants, a tree impossible to imagine outside India, which remains on my mind because I do not know its name—and later, when it appeared that he had no intention of getting up, I had tipped a bellboy to drag him from his room. What I had neglected to do was phone the airport to inquire whether the flight was on time. We had finally raced to the airport in a taxi, arriving just before scheduled departure time, and found that the flight had been delayed, and the delay had been extended hour after hour with no explanation, and then it was the afternoon and still there had been no announcement that the flight would be departing. It occurred to me that Mr. H, who understood how India worked and had even written a book based on his experiences in the country, might have known all along that an on-time departure was out of the question, and that his anger at me was therefore more than justified. While he sat at the bar drinking by himself, I waited near the electronic board on which departures were posted, listening for an announcement about our flight, and read a book about wild animals in India that I had purchased at the gift shop in our hotel. A memoir in dead earnest by a plantation owner named E. P. Guy, the book was written in a prose style that mirrored the rectitude of its author's character and life, yet was filled with details that were bizarrely amusing and made for perfect reading on the road. I have this book with me even now as I write, with Rostropovich's remarks copied on the inside cover. Based on eyewitness accounts from friends in the region of Kashmir, Guy described the following bizarre phenomenon at the time of the partition of Pakistan in 1947. As Hindus, who viewed cows as sacred animals, crossed the new border into India from Pakistan, and Muslims, who eat no pork, moved in the opposite direction, the wild animals in the region instinctively sought their own route to survival. Whole herds of wild oxen in Pakistan migrated to India, and wild pigs in similar numbers crossed into Pakistan in search of a safe environment.

  It was now late in the afternoon. We had been waiting that long and, even so, thinking I might make Mr. H laugh with the animal episode, I sat down on the bar stool next to his and ordered a beer. The bartender's attitude seemed, for want of a better word, Indian: with a dusky disagreeableness that might have been directed more at life in general than at his customers, and an expression on his face that seemed to say “So now we have a second Japanese alcoholic,” he passed me a lukewarm bottle of beer. When I told my animal story after drinking the beer, Mr. H listened without the slightest show of interest, his gaze never moving from the sorry shelf of bottles and the large map of India on the wall across from him. This left me helpless, with nothing to do but order anoth
er beer and stare at the same shelf of bottles and map on the wall. As I sat there, drinking one beer after the other, I felt the onset of an impulse that was by no means unfamiliar to me.

  When I first became aware of this impulse at age seventeen or eighteen—as I think of it, my son's current age—I named it “leap,” using the English word, a name that I continue to use though clearly it was a youthful invention; and when I feel a leap approaching I do what I can to distance myself so as to avoid being taken over. But there are times when I have behaved in odd ways that have carried me forward as though to welcome the leap. If I include drunken behavior, leaps of one degree or another possess me about once a year, and it may be that their accumulated impact has twisted and bent the course of my life. Or, possibly, leaps have made me the man I am today.

  In this particular instance at the New Delhi airport, the leap I took, not so much rude or nasty or anything I can think of other than dangerous, was to ridicule an author I had admired for years by writing a poem that portrayed him in a ridiculous way as a man past middle age who was suffering the pain of an unhappy love, and to show it to him as he sat drinking at my side with his anger on display.

  I began by copying the map of India on the wall onto the back of a coaster. When I had marked various points on the map with asterisks, I then composed a poem in English, incorporating the place names I had starred. The title was “An Indian Gazetteer.” The only thing I remember clearly about my pseudo-English poem was a man getting on in years brooding over his sake cup about his similarly aging lover going off to the provincial city of Mysore. This part has stayed with me because the point of my scheme was to use a pun on Mysore as the basis for an insinuation. That very day, Madame Nefedovna had in fact departed, in her case by train, for a conference on linguistics being held in Mysore.

  My sore: in the small dictionary on my desk as I write, I find the following definitions for “sore”: 1) a place that is tender or raw, a wound, an inflammation; 2) inflictions or hardships of a mental or emotional nature (including sorrow or anger), unpleasant memories. To be honest, it had never occurred to me that the friendship Mr. H and Madame N had sustained across years of meeting at international conferences had anything to do with love. Those of us who had been influenced by Mr. H and his generation of postwar writers during our college years sometimes indulged in carrying on like naughty children in his presence; O, for example, another young member of our Japan writers’ group, had frequently teased him by treating Madame Nefedovna as though she were his lover. But O shared my respect for Mr. H and Madame N as veteran intellectuals who had always insisted on their own individuality, and had no more intention of pigeonholing them as lovers than did I. Nevertheless, I slid the coaster inscribed with my doggerel innuendo into Mr. H's field of vision as he stared down at the bar (he had removed his glasses and hung his head, the shape of which put me in mind of a distinguished warrior from a powerful clan in the Middle Ages). If you think you're angry now, I thought to myself in the grip of a leap I could not control, have a look at this! If you can indulge your feelings for hours on end, why should I pussyfoot around you!

  Without changing his position, Mr. H appeared to read the coaster, his eyes narrowing with the effort. Then he put his glasses back on and I could tell from the tightening between his temples and his eyes that he was slowly rereading my brief verse a second time, and then a third. I had begun to feel regret at once, as though the world were going dark, and then he slowly turned his face in my direction and the look in his eyes struck a blow that took my breath away.

  I described my son's eyes the first time I looked directly into them on returning from Europe as the eyes of a rutting beast still rocked by aftershocks of desire following sexual frenzy, as unbearable eyes that looked as though he were being devoured from within by a ravening beast. What I failed to note and wish to add here was the bottomless grief that was revealed above all else in the yellowish resin luster of those eyes. Reports of my son's unmanageable behavior while I was away and his response to the harmonica I had brought him, not to mention my own travel fatigue, had frayed my nerves and deprived me of the emotional leeway I needed to read and register his grief.

  Writing this now it is hard to imagine how as a father I could have failed to see that massive grief in the desolation of my son's eyes. And I can't help feeling that, healing the rift with my son, I became aware of his grief through the agency of a Blake poem, “On Another's Sorrow,” which includes this stanza:

  Can I see a falling tear,

  And not feel my sorrows share,

  Can a father see his child,

  Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.

  One of the “Songs of Innocence,” the poem concludes with the following verse:

  O! he gives to us his joy,

  That our grief he may destroy

  Till our grief is fled & gone

  He doth sit by us and moan.

  I was able to read the grief in my son's eyes even more directly, as though it were in my own experience, because I was equipped with a definition of grief that had appeared for just an instant in Mr. H's eyes that day at the bar in the New Delhi airport.

  2: A Cold Babe Stands in the Furious Air

  “Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance,” Blake wrote. This aphoristic note is appended to one of his epic poems, together with the following, to me not entirely clear but nonetheless appealing, phrase: “Unorganized Innocence, an Impossibility.” I have returned to the poem in question repeatedly at various times but have always skimmed my way through it. Given the nature of Blake's epic poetry, it might be said that anything less attentive than poring over the details is not reading it at all; nevertheless, in my own way I have discovered verses that have inscribed themselves on me. Consider, for example, in the heroic poem usually called The Four Zoas, properly speaking, with “Zoa” signifying “living thing” as in the Greek version of Revelations, “The Four Zoas, or, The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man,” the unforgettable prospect of the dead, at the time of the final judgment, revealing themselves as they were in life, wounds and all, as they stand to accuse:

  They shew their wounds they accuse they seize the oppressor howlings began

  On the golden palace Songs & joy on the desart the Cold babe

  Stands in the furious air he cries the children of six thousand years

  Who died in infancy rage furious a mighty multitude rage furious

  Naked & pale standing on the expecting air to be delivered.

  When I wrote just now that I “skimmed” these lines, I didn't mean to imply that I could read Blake fluently. On the contrary, it remains difficult for me no matter how often I read and reread the original year after year. In particular, the voluminous poems known as the “Prophecies,” from Blake's middle period, are knotty with passages that impede the foreigner's understanding. Even so, I always imagined that even I could have made my way close to the full meaning of a poem had I taken the time to move carefully through it with the help of a commentary. And I did make it a point to acquire whatever Blake studies and commentaries I found in Western bookstores. I still do. At the same time, since my student days I have had a kind of fear that once I began reading Blake line by line I would come to feel that no amount of time was adequate, no matter how much time I spent. Besides, I wanted to taste whatever I felt moved to read, for example the entire Four Zoas, which is 855 lines long, and so, with a sense of urgency as my guide, I have made a practice of finding my way along the stepping stones of what I am able to understand unaided.

  If I were to quote another passage from The Four Zoas that has stayed with me vividly, without reference to the complex narrative of the work or, for that matter, to the premise of God or the godlike person at the center of Blake's unique view of the universe, it would be the following:

  That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return

  To the dark valley whence he came to begin his lab
ours anew.

  The first time I read these lines, quite out of context, I was a student in the department of general education in my first year at college. I recall the circumstances clearly, and even my posture as I read, my head thrust forward. I can't have been at college for more than a few weeks. I was sitting in the library that had been there since the days of the Imperial Upper School, on the campus that was apparently of botanical interest for its variety of azaleas (on the way to the library, the azaleas were in full bloom, and I remember having remarked about each and every flower that it couldn't compare to the real azaleas that blossomed on the mountain slopes that rose out of the valley where I was born, not to mention the fact that my azaleas protected the loam on the cliffs with their roots).