Vaseline Buddha (3 page)

But watching the swallows brushing against the water and soaring at the poolside reminded me of an experience I had in a little airplane flying precariously among snow-covered mountains over eight thousand meters high, and the swallows washed away all my regret for having come to Nepal. The old airplane of a small airline company, named Gorkha after the historical little kingdom in Nepal, began to rock with the updraft, and it seemed that it would crash any minute. Not only was the seatbelt broken, but the seat itself was shaking and I had to hold on to the back of the seat with my hands. No, things like the seatbelt didn't even matter. If the plane crashed, it would be difficult just to salvage the dead bodies. It seemed that the plane was playing out a situation just prior to a crash. Anyway, in that urgent moment when my life was in peril, I suddenly recalled the apple in my bag that I took from the hotel cafeteria that morning, and so, looking out the window in the rocking airplane at the snow-covered mountains, thinking that I could easily die that moment, and chewing the apple as though in quiet meditation, I thought what comfort it brought to eat an apple for the last time in an airplane that could crash, and as I did my heart did in fact calm down and great joy came rushing in (and it was while I was quietly eating the apple on the dangerous airplane during the half-hour flight that I came up with a story about an apple with teeth marks on it on a bench in the kingdom of Budapest, which will develop into a story about dentures in the end, and which I may tell here).

I couldn't tell why the swallows were doing such a thing, but they looked as if they were deriving some kind of a pleasure from doing it. I suddenly recalled that when I was little, I saw the same thing, meaning swallows swooping down and brushing against the river and soaring, countless times at the river in the summer, and that I swam in the river, and at times jumped from the branches hanging over the river.

Anyway, I raptly watched the swallows that seemed rapt in doing what they were doing, closed the book I'd been reading, and very much enjoyed the stunt being performed before my eyes. I wished that the swallows that swooped down and brushed against the water and soared would keep on doing what they were doing, and the swallows kept on doing it as if it were nothing at all to grant such a wish, and kept on doing it even when, after a while, I thought it would be all right for them stop now, and kept on doing it, giving me no heed, when I shouted to them in a loud voice, in my heart, to stop it this instant, and kept on doing it when I said in a somewhat dejected voice that I wouldn't tolerate them if they didn't stop it this instant, now, so I said, in a faint voice, that they should keep on doing it if they had to, if they had no choice but to do it, if it was something that couldn't be helped.

The performance by the swallows went on for over an hour, and in the end, I whispered, What you're doing has nothing to do with me, but what's more, it has nothing to do with yourselves either, and only after a while did they fly off somewhere else as if nothing had happened in the meantime.

But even after the swallows stopped doing that strange thing and flew off somewhere else, I calmly made my swallows go on kicking the water and flying up for a long time in my heart, and I actually felt excited, as if something somewhere inside me were giving me a kick and calmly soaring, and therein lay my idea of a moment of fiction. Perhaps it was because I am infinitely drawn to things that are caught up in some kind of a blind passion, and feel driven to describe such things.

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 Alizarin
^a
a
” such as the following, dominate my everyday life.

                
Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:

                
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
^b
b

                
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.