Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (15 page)

Eeyore's younger brother and sister, as if they were ashamed of themselves, though they had no reason to feel that way, retreated to their rooms. Without another word to my wife, in the grips of a “leap,” I set out from the house with Eeyore and his doll as though we were knights departing for the Crusades.

We took the Odakyu line from Seijo Gakuen to the Odawara station and rode standing, jammed in among the commuters who filled the train. With all eyes staring at him, Eeyore declined to remove Tiny Chiyo or even his knapsack; he looked obstinately at the floor, his head down, behaving as if he had left on a trip by himself, and I couldn't even bring myself to hoist his pack into the luggage net above our heads. We stood back to back as if we were strangers, but Eeyore's body odor was curiously strong and I could tell even turned away from him that he had not alighted at a station along the way and was still standing at my side.

At Odawara, we transferred to the National Railroad, and, as far as Atami, the train seemed normally crowded for the hour; when we changed to the Ito line after buying box lunches for supper, there were very few passengers. The sea was already dark, and the mountainside was also in heavy shadow, but there were instants when light glinted faintly off the trees as they bent to the wind. As we crossed an iron bridge I glimpsed a swollen river; the wind-whipped trees and the tumbling water took me back to stormy nights in the valley in the forest. Eeyore was in the next seat with his back to me and had placed his troublesome pack in the aisle seat; I sat as though alone at the window curtained by the rain and the darkness of the night and recalled the wind and rain in the forest. On stormy nights I had felt anxious and somehow horrified, but the people in the village in the valley had seemed united. In a novel I had read as soon as I could read French there was a scene the day the Great War began when people experienced “
une grande communité,”
and I was certain I had understood that moment perfectly. Thoughts about the future course of the life I was to lead were included in the exaltation and uneasiness of those stormy nights in the valley, but it had never occurred to me that a life as unseemly as mine was waiting. Ashamed of my sentimentality, I took from my suitcase
The Life of William Blake
by Mona Wilson, a name I had been hearing for some time.

When we reached Ito, we learned that the track ahead was impassable. Eeyore was continuing to behave as though he were traveling by himself, but as this included listening carefully to the announcements inside the station there was no need to explain to him. When we came out of the station, Eeyore following two or three steps behind me, I made a deal with one of the taxis waiting for passengers in what was now a downpour to take us to our mountain cabin in Izu Heights.

“Checking up on your place? Shall I stop for batteries for my flashlight?” the driver asked, trying hard not to stare at Eeyore. “If it gets really bad I'm turning around, I can't be letting you off and not getting back myself! They say the typhoon'll hit Izu right between the eyes! You leave your place open?”

The storm became violent as we drove, but the driver managed to deliver us to our cabin. He even lit the way for us with his headlights from behind as we walked the thirty or so feet to our front door and got soaking wet. The path beneath us remained in darkness; what the headlights lit so brilliantly it hurt the eyes was the deep ocean of leaf on the frenzied branches of the bayberry, which seemed about to go up in flames as the wind whipped it against the trunk of the cypress tree. Opening the wooden door at the front entrance, I managed to get Eeyore inside before the wind blew the door shut, then went around to the rear of the house for an armful of dead branches to use as firewood. On the way back, the wood I was carrying caught on the branch of a tree, which snapped back and struck me a blow across the face, knocking off my glasses and bloodying my nose. What unexpected force this storm had, to stop me in my tracks to wipe my lips and search for my glasses!

But once I had closed the door behind me, I experienced a certain peacefulness very different from my painful thoughts until then. For one thing, Eeyore had grown alert as soon as he got inside and, with the electricity off, seemed to be using the flashlight to move around upstairs from the dining room to the living room. I got towels from the bathroom and brought them upstairs along with a mattress from my bedroom, which was plenty large enough for both of us if we lay down side by side. I had Eeyore get undressed and dry himself while I went back downstairs for bedding and blankets; guessing my intention to build a fire and sleep in front of the fireplace, he positioned and straightened the mattress, propping Tiny Chiyo on the floor alongside it.

I placed a bundle of the wet branches in the fireplace and lit some torn magazine pages on top of the wood. As I hadn't opened the valve in the propane gas shed at the edge of the property, we couldn't boil water. I gave Eeyore the box lunch from the train station and a cup of water, poured the sake remaining in a two-liter bottle in the kitchen into my own cup, and began drinking as I tended the fire. Eeyore, his large body hunched over in the darkness, squinted into the lunch box to inspect the contents as he ate them. He ate in silence, taking a long time to finish, then lay down in the very center of the quilt on top of the mattress, placing Tiny Chiyo at his side, and fell asleep, snoring loudly, as he did immediately after a seizure. I was left alone in front of the struggling fire.

The wind and solid sheets of rain rattled the wooden shutters. A large wind dragon whirled through the leaves of the shrubbery surrounding the house. High in the sky and in the space that rose steeply from the road along the kitchen side of the house—beyond, on the land across the road, the space was wide enough to accommodate a pine tree in which large crows were always perched—I could hear the screeching of the unimpeded wind as it chafed against itself, layer upon layer. At some point I also heard a cracking as though a large tree had been sheared off at the trunk (the following morning, because pines were scarce in this area, the only damaged tree, except for saplings, was the giant pine in front of the kitchen, yet the smell of resin was so strong it would give me a headache).

Eeyore's snores had changed as he slept to a sound like moaning. Lying flat on his back on the quilt atop the mattress on the floor where I was sitting, his legs straight out, he was like a mummy in its tomb. Next to him, his spring-loaded eyes also closed, Tiny Chiyo was a smaller mummy who had been interred with his master.

I banked the fire a little, so the wood would last, and read Mona Wilson by the light of the fire without the help of glasses, tilting the book toward the fireplace. I had reached the chapter where she interprets
The Four Zoas,
and I recalled my first encounter with this epic poem in my youth as I felt myself drawn into it again. Blake's pantheon of demigods explain that the world we know has fallen from primal bliss, and the two women among them, Ahania and Enion—they can be considered emanations of the principal demigods or brides to them, and also symbolize the various essences of this world—join each other in lament. They relate what happens in the “cosmic caverns of the grave.” They speak
of Man, the eternal Man
who must remain asleep so long as we mortals dwell in confusion.

The time comes when
Man
surveys, as though in a dream, the tree, the herb, the fish, the bird, and the beast. Collecting the scattered parts of his immortal body, he thinks to restore the
elemental form
from which all things grow. This
eternal Man,
with a capital M, as in
That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return / To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew,
was of course Albion, the ultimate human existence; there was a period in my youth when I saw my destiny in his, and in his grief my own. In the following passage, Albion laments the fate that requires him to suffer anew in this real world in order to redeem humankind through Christ, “the lamb of God”:

In pain he sighs in pain he labours in his universe / Screaming in birds over the deep & howling in the wolf / Over the slain and moaning in the cattle & in the winds / And weeping over Orc and Urizen in clouds and flaming fires / And in the cries of birth & in
the groan of death his voice / Is heard throughout the Universe wherever a grass grows / or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt / And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss.

Taking a lesson from Blake, I could hear The Eternal Man's existence and sadness in the sound of wind and rain enveloping the house. Though I knew the living room would fill with smoke, I had left the damper in the fireplace closed to prevent rain from blowing down the chimney, but the moaning on the other side of the damper was like a howl of pain from the giant throat of Man.

As I went over the passage quoted by Mona Wilson, I became aware of a fact that seemed so unmistakable I was surprised I had missed it until now. In my novella
The Day He Deigns to Wipe My Tears Away,
I had represented the “father” as
ano hito
(that man). The significance I intended the Gothic boldface to convey, if it were expressed in English, would be
Man
with a capital
M.
I assume I had been influenced by my reading of Blake's language. On one level, the
a no hito
in my story was “father” and on another he was a symbol, as in Blake, of Everyman.

In my long novel
The Contemporary Game,
I named the patriarch who comes back to life time after time “
Man who deconstructs.”
In this fallen, contemporary world which corresponds to Blake's real world, the body
of Man who deconstructs
has been separated into small pieces and is buried in the forest; in a passionate and painful dream, a young boy gathers up the pieces one by one and attempts to bring them back to life and to restore the Age to life as well but is finally unable to accomplish his task and grieves. Martha Crowley had asked about the connection between this episode and the myth of Osiris and other sources. But wasn't I simply mirroring the circumstances of Blake's
Man
before he was reborn? Later I was able to confirm this when I read Kathleen Raine's analysis of Blake as mystic.

Perhaps, in short, I had been writing novels for close to twenty-five years by simply restating in my own words the lines of Blake that I had glimpsed in the university library as I was entering my young manhood. Nor was it only a process of unconscious influence; I had been aware of using Blake's poetry as the source of my fiction any number of times.

Sitting between the fireplace and the mattress where Eeyore lay sleeping, I grew drowsy. The sum total of my work as an author felt shallow and simplistic, not equal to a single page of Blake; moreover, it seemed to me that I had failed to accomplish a single thing I should have been doing and now time was running out. I had declared my intention to define everything in and of this world for my son's sake, but I hadn't. The definitions were for me as well, yet I was neglecting them. Wasn't I using Eeyore's brain damage as an excuse not to be in earnest? If there was indeed something childish about me though I was nearly fifty years old—it was likely to be my childishness above all that my wife and Eeyore's sister and brother were resenting about our journey to the cabin—wasn't that due to my dependence on Eeyore's disability and my desire to remain with him forever in the domain of childhood?

Yet what if he were a college sophomore today, his brain undamaged, and came to me with the following question: “Father, give me your thoughts on death when you're being as honest as you can be. I've read every definition you've written until now and I am not persuaded. I'm not asking simply to pressure you. I am troubled! Please help me; show me the definition of death you've managed to derive from all your years of life.” If a son of mine with a sound mind put such a question to me, could I sit there lost in thought while he peered into my face?

If I were to attempt a definition of death to an Eeyore whose intelligence had been restored, there is a verse in, once again,
The Four Zoas,
toward the beginning, that would provide a hint. As suggested by the title, taken from the “four living creatures” in the Greek version of Revelations, there are four fundamental principles of the universe, one of which is symbolized by the god Tharmas, who represents the material substance of this world, and whose wife, Enion, whom I have mentioned, is a symbol of material freedom. At the beginning of this epic poem, as a manifestation of the confusion of the world, Tharmas and Enion must separate, and their song of grief at the moment of separation haunts me. I feel a special poignancy in Tharmas's lines as he sits weeping in his clouds, trembling and pale: &
I am like an atom /A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity / I wish & feel & weep & groan. Ah, terrible! terrible!

What if I were diagnosed with cancer at the annual physical at my health club—I say this because of an uneasy feeling that somewhere inside me there is malignancy—and had to prepare to die within two to three years no matter how desperately I fought? How could I possibly transcend in that time the current state of my soul! And how, accordingly, could I avoid saying to my son (I was now in the grips of the premise that my son, a college student in his second year who has asked me a question, was a healthy young man): “Eeyore! At the moment of death perhaps we can only repeat the lament of Tharmas! Pale and trembling, the high hospital bed feeling like our clouds.… &
I am like an atom / A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity / 1 wish & feel & weep & groan.”
Ah, terrible! terrible!

But how could the Eeyore whose intelligence was intact (in truth, my brain-damaged son had his own fears about unfathomable death and his own approach to transcending them) take heart from an answer such as that—“Ah, terrible! terrible!"—from the father he was counting on? The thought led me to picture myself adding the following explanation on my own behalf: “What I've been reading in Blake's biography makes me think he died a splendid death. He completed one of his unique illuminations, he painted his wife's portrait and spoke gentle words to her, his companion of many years, a woman he had raised from such ignorance that she was unable to sign the certificate when they were married, and his helper in the studio, and then, after singing a song in praise of God, he died. This is the man who long ago, as a young man, when his beloved younger brother died, saw his soul clapping its hands in joy as it departed from the body.
The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife / But their Forms Eternal Exist. For-ever. Amen Hallelujah,
I wonder if living isn't just a process of preparation for this delightful half day before death? And what if that delight is merely illusion, since what follows is nothingness; why should we trouble ourselves with that! The problem is, in my case, I haven't managed to prepare for my half day of delight. Even though I'm approaching the age when my father, that would be your grandfather, died.”