Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (21 page)

Until now, it had been my goal to provide definitions of things and people for Eeyore's sake; but at this moment it was Eeyore, presenting me with a stanza from Blake's
Milton
as a lucid vision, who was creating a definition for his father:

This vision went on, however, to unfurl an urgent, baleful image of a black cloud redounding from my right foot to cover Europe, my contemporary world. And as if in hopes of finding courage to confront that ominous image, I lifted my own voice and truly began to sing.

6
: Let the Inchained Soul Rise and Look Out

W
e signed Eeyore up for occupational therapy at the Setagaya Welfare Center for the Disabled. For two weeks, on leave from his school for handicapped children, he would be commuting to an actual job. The homework he was assigned to help him prepare was inserting wooden chopsticks—the kind you pulled apart—into their paper sleeves. When he returned from school and removed from his satchel a large number of white wooden sticks and a sheaf of paper sleeves, it was as if the world of the diviner—purity or defilement was unclear—had been brought into our daily lives. At an appropriate distance from two audio speakers, Eeyore hunkered down like a reclining walrus, his legs drawn up alongside his large rear. Then he spread the wooden chopsticks on a patterned mat and proceeded slowly and painstakingly to sheathe them in their paper wrappers. But not before examining them closely. When he discovered one that was broken or split he would exclaim regretfully, “
Too bad! This chopstick's missing a piece!
” and carry it to the kitchen where he would respectfully bury it in the garbage.

When he finished one hundred pairs and had counted them again, my wife would line them up so that the printed surface of the sleeves was visible from any angle and then apply a label and package them in plastic wrap. This final step was difficult, but apparently it was a technique readily mastered by an adult. When we went to the supermarket as a family, my wife would halt in front of shelves we normally would have ignored, appraising similar packages of one hundred wooden chopsticks with an artisan's critical eye before pushing our basket slowly down the aisle.

It came time for my son to go to the job training center, the first time in his life that he would be participating, however quirkishly, in society. I had some thoughts about this, and apparently my wife was thinking along similar lines. Late one night, when she had finished preparations for the opening ceremony, she said to me as I sat reading at her side, “I think I'll put Mr. F's pamphlet on the constitution in Eeyore's smock pocket—that's sort of what he asked us to do.”

I went upstairs to my study and brought back from a cabinet where I kept mementos of friends and associates I admired who had passed away a booklet that had been published by the Okinawan Teachers Union twenty years ago, when Okinawa was still under U.S. military jurisdiction. The man who had presented the pamphlet to me, someone who definitely belonged in the category of colleagues whom I loved and admired, an Okinawan named F, had been dead for some time: early this year an important Okinawan folk ritual commemorating the thirteenth anniversary of the man's death had been celebrated on his home island of Iejima. F was an activist in the movement to repatriate Okinawa to Japan, and he had died in a fire at a hotel where he had been staying after a demonstration. A heavy drinker, he had been in an alcohol coma when the fire broke out. I had never seen him under the influence when we were working together and was surprised to hear after his death that he loved to drink and that he was sometimes abusive when drunk. I remember only one encounter with him that made me think he might have been drinking, a scene in which Eeyore had also played a role.

There was a period when Eeyore was a child when he and I were devoted to eating pigs’ feet. I can still hear him ordering in his lucid bell of a voice: “
Pigs’ feet with spicy miso
” I enjoyed taking him to Korean restaurants here and there and feeding him pigs’ feet that were the specialty of the house in each place with slight differences in the preparation of the miso and how the meat was steamed. When he was served a single pig's foot split down the middle on a plate, Eeyore would eat the thick skin first, then the meat, then the gelatinous tendon underneath, and at each joint in the foot he would remove the small knuckle and line it up on the table with the others. One day I noticed him staring at a knuckle with a quizzical expression, apparently at a loss for where to place it in line; when I picked it up and examined it, I saw that one of his baby teeth had fallen out. Young as he was, Eeyore's approach to pigs’ feet was governed by principle: he was not finished until he had aligned the knuckle bones in their proper order.

One winter evening—I recall having had to travel some distance from home to find a Korean restaurant that served cold noodles out of summer season—we were walking down a street of bars and restaurants in the district called Sangen-jaya on our way home when a small man with a hulking head and barrel chest and strikingly short legs emerged from an eatery that served the biting liquor the Okinawans call
awamori
and turned in our direction the face of a tired child. Bundled as we were in our winter clothes over the corpulence we had in common, Eeyore and I must have looked a strange pair, but there is no question the man saw and recognized us. He stopped dead in his tracks as though glued to the street, and as I hailed him—“Mr. F!”—he appeared to sob, and pushed through the awning at the entrance back into the eatery from which he had just emerged.

The late Mr. F and his comrades in the movement against U.S. control of Okinawa had carried in their breast pockets a pamphlet about the constitution. To my wife, who was not given to theatrical behavior, slipping that same pamphlet into Eeyore's smock as he was taking his first step into the outside world may have been a tribute to the life of a man so tenderhearted that he was wounded by the mere sight of an acquaintance walking down the street with a handicapped child.

My wife went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with our daughter; I placed the pamphlet with its brown paper wrapper on the dining table and reflected, as I drank my whisky nightcap, on my plan to create a collection of definitions for handicapped children relating to our world, society, and mankind, a project that was to include a retelling of the constitution in my own words for Eeyore's sake. I had not achieved my goal, but not because it was too difficult. It wasn't even that it lacked interest as a challenge to a writer. Nevertheless, while I talked about it often enough, I had left it untouched. Even now, I was writing a series of short stories and attempting to transform them into a collection of definitions, but as I had released myself from the condition that the language must be comprehensible to handicapped children, this was not the project I had originally planned.

There was a concrete reason for my thinking to have developed in this direction: David V. Erdman, the definitive editor and commentator on Blake since Keynes and one of the compilers of the
Blake Concordance
I relied on. Recently, I had been reading Erdman's book
Prophet Against Empire.
Based on exhaustive research of newspapers and pamphlets written in Blake's day, the book interprets the poet's language in the long poems he called Prophecies in the context of social issues of the time and against the background of the Napoleonic Wars. I found the book to be filled with new hints and provocations, but I was particularly interested in Erdman's analysis of Blake's poetic expression of the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence in his long poem
America, A Prophecy.
According to Erdman's reading, in the lines following the sixth of eighteen illuminations in the folio edition, Blake reconfigures in poetry the assertions in the Declaration of Independence. He begins with “Life”:

Then “Liberty”:

The “pursuit of happiness” follows:

The conclusion proclaims that overturning oppression is a right and a duty:

Readers are likely to divide into those who find these lines exalting and others who hold that Blake has merely refigured the
ideology
of the Declaration in overwrought verse. Perhaps the latter response is the more natural: for the mood of Blake's age has nothing in common with that of our own, nor do we relate to mythological metaphor from the Bible. Nevertheless, I am among those who are deeply moved by these verses. And my feelings about them echo the shivers of emotion I experienced as a youth at the radical changes that came just after the war—perhaps I should say during and after the war—and most particularly at the promulgation of the new Japanese constitution that was the climax of that upheaval. I have described my experience at the time in commentary and essays that have been the target of criticism by those who dispute the importance of the five years of real democracy that followed the Surrender. How, they argue, can someone who was eleven or twelve years old when the constitution was promulgated have been so moved by its abstract language!

A desire to respond to this variety of criticism and ridicule must have figured in my determination to use the constitution as a point of departure for a collection of definitions for Eeyore. And I must admit that my difficulty in getting started has been due at least partly to the fear that I would not be able to convey adequately my excitement at the time. This is not an impossible task, nor did it lack interest as a literary undertaking: what had prevented me to this day from sitting down to work in high spirits was the presentiment of unavoidable and specific difficulty.

Such were my thoughts late that night as I gazed at the pamphlet on the table in front of me and consumed a quantity of whisky that far exceeded the dosage I normally required to fall asleep. Presently, I recalled in vivid detail a scene that had slipped from memory and that now, reviving, revealed to me the source of my wife's remark about the pamphlet that had seemed abrupt and unaccountable. Several months after our bizarre encounter with Mr. F, he had visited us in Tokyo to ask for my support in the first Okinawan election to be held under U.S. occupation jurisdiction. As he made no reference to the incident at Sangen-jaya, I began to wonder if I had been mistaken about the man who had emerged from the restaurant. On the other hand, he was clearly nervous around Eeyore, looking up as though startled every time Eeyore wandered through the living room where we were talking.

We served Mr. F a simple meal that night; I recall that he drank only some beer, emphatically declining my offer of whisky. As my wife was serving us, he said to her abruptly, speaking as a former teacher, “Your boy's handicap doesn't seem that serious; if this were Okinawa, you could put him in a regular class!”

My wife was feeling low at the time and replied that she and the other parents of handicapped children had only one thing in mind wherever they happened to be—at home, at PTA meetings, wherever—and that was living even one day longer than their children so they would always be there to care for them. Hearing this, Mr. F thrust forward his wasted baby face with the dark, soft look of an old man's penis and declared: “Mrs.! You mustn't think that way! That's defeatism! In the society we must create, your boy would carry this pamphlet in his shirt pocket, and whenever he had a problem he'd hold it up and say ‘Look here!’ and the problem would go away! Anything less than that goal is defeatism!”

Mr. F had died in a fire at the hotel run by the Japan Youth Center before the reversion of Okinawa had been accomplished. And my wife had slipped the pamphlet he had left for us that night into Eeyore's pocket on the day he set out to be trained to participate in society for the first time. Needless to say, she was painfully aware, though ten years had passed since our friend's death, that we had not succeeded in creating a world in which a handicapped child in a moment of distress had only to produce a pamphlet on the postwar constitution. More likely, she was simply saluting her memory of the little man who had lurched along with the gait of a corpulent dwarf but who had opposed defeatism with giant finality.

In the verses I quoted above, Blake weaves political principles into Christian symbolism; and this direct expression of his political position differentiates
America
from his later prophecies. Sparks from the American Revolution ignited France, and eventually the fire spread even to England. Blake prophesied:
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night / For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease;
but reaction set in before this vision could become real, Blake's gloom deepened, and he stopped writing about politics explicitly.