Mister Timeless Blyth, page 37
Expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
I have taken to scribbling little hospital haiku in the margins of these pages, after the manner of those anonymous Celtic scribes in the Middle Ages who wrote out laboriously the great manuscripts, like the Book of Kells, with their elaborately embellished lettering. From time to time they would take respite from their labours and jot down a little observation.
How pleasant to me is the sunlight on these pages as it flickers so.
That is pure haiku.
My own marginalia owe much to Shiki, and his poems of sickness, of convalescence
The light through the window
tells me it’s evening,
tells me it’s autumn
The small hours, the dog watch –
the young nurse, wakeful
in the light of her lamp.
Beside the sickbed
the persimmon
uneaten
15
BLYTH’S SHADOW
Among my papers I just found a list of words copied out by Nana when she was small, the words written out in crayon with such concentrated care.
A fox. An ant. A cat. A camel. A doll. A dog. An egg. A box. A man. A lamp. A plum. A zebra. A violin.
Nana.
The simple power of lists, like those of Sei-Shonagon in her Pillow Book – Things that quicken the heart. Or my favourite, Disagreeable things.
A long-winded visitor when you’re in a hurry.
A man, when he’s with you, praising a woman he previously knew.
Nasty little fleas that get under your clothes.
A dog that barks when it sees your lover coming to visit you secretly. (Such a dog, she says, should be killed).
That long-winded visitor brings to mind an old blowhard I know – an Englishman – who once came seeking me at home in Mejiro. I saw him from the upstairs window and knew he was coming with the full intention of boring me entirely to death with relentless small talk about the Japanese and their inscrutability, their exotic and mysterious ways. Nana was the only other one at home, and I called down to her to send him away, tell him I had gone out and she had no idea when, if ever, I would return.
I listened from above as the poor child, with infinite politeness, explained that the man would not be able to see me on this occasion.
Undaunted, he kept talking, asked if I had gone far, and when I might be back, and whether he might come in and wait.
In the end I could take no more and I shouted to Nana that she should tell the gentleman I was most definitely not at home and that was an end of it.
I heard the door close and his footsteps down the path, and I threw back my head and laughed, and Nana, released, laughed too, the pair of us wonderfully complicit.
I heard later he had taken to blackening my name, calling me a cantankerous old misanthrope. I have been called worse.
There’s a drawing by Sengai which shows him sticking his head out through the open window of his dwelling. The caption says he was in the habit of calling out to visitors, announcing his own absence.
I’m not home!
My favourite calligraphy by Sengai shows a briskly executed zen circle, incomplete, drawn with a single stroke of the brush. The injunction underneath reads Eat this and have a cup of tea!
Eat the void.
Nobody home.
I used to have another list on the wall above my desk. I had written out by hand a series of exhortations to myself.
Not to be sentimental.
Not to be cruel.
Not to be selfish.
Not to be snobbish.
One of my students – nothing if not direct – asked me if those were faults to which I was particularly prone. I laughed and told him he had hit the nail on the head, and that I hoped in time to get round to addressing other failings I was yet to recognise or unwilling to acknowledge.
Nana came to visit this afternoon, as she does most days. I had teased her that as my old brain grew more and more tired I was finding it more difficult to think and converse in Japanese. This was actually the truth of the matter but I tried to make light of it, telling her she would have to improve her English. So today she brought the little book I had edited for use in schools, Easy Poems. These were simple, but to my mind profound verses that could be committed to memory. I had taught them to Harumi and Nana when they were younger. (Tomiko had stubbornly resisted, thinking the poems were childish).
Tell me one to read, said Nana, handing me the book.
Rain, I said, knowing the little verse by Stevenson was one of her favourites. In fact she knew it so well she did not have to read it, but recited it from memory. By heart.
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea
Perhaps, I said, my living has not been in vain.
Too difficult, she said.
Everything’s good, I said.
A rough translation.
I could draw up yet another list, of things I might have learned from the Crown Prince. Not to overstate or exaggerate things. Not to go to excess. To consider all questions from both sides. Not to condemn others. To give careful consideration before making a decision. Not to tell lies.
People ask what I taught the Crown Prince. The better question might be, What did he teach me?
I received a most unexpected gift from him yesterday. He sent a note, handwritten on his own notepaper embossed with the Imperial chrysanthemum crest, expressing his sincere hope that I make a speedy recovery. It accompanied a little package, exquisitely wrapped, in a special container to keep it cold – a carton of ice cream from Princess Michiko who had added a message of her own, saying the ice cream was home-made by the palace chef, and she hoped it would cheer me up.
As has happened so often recently, I found myself tearful at the sheer kindness of it all. I have been eating less and less and my once portly figure is much diminished. But I sat up in bed and set to with a spoon. The ice cream was indeed delicious but to finish it was beyond me. I asked the duty nurse, who was most impressed at the source of the gift, if what was left could be kept for me in the refrigerator, and she bowed and carried it off like an acolyte bearing a holy relic.
It occurred to me after she had gone that I might never finish it. If that is the case, I hope the nurse or someone else will polish it off.
Do this in remembrance of me.
How it will be. I will eat even less, continue to diminish physically, fade away to skin and bone. This too, too solid flesh (or sullied flesh) will melt. The care will become palliative as they concentrate on easing my pain.
Existence is suffering, its cause is desire. Suffering can be conquered, there is a way.
The four noble truths. The noblest of them all. Its cause is desire. Ay there’s the rub. If I were tickled by the rub of love. It can be conquered, if only.
I heard more Bach today on the hospital radio, the aria from his St Matthew Passion. Mache dich mein Herze rein. Make my heart pure.
What would Bach have said if he had been told on his death-bed that he was not going to Heaven, that God was not going to wipe all tears from all eyes, that his sleep was to have no awakening?
Would he have answered that this too was God?
And would he change the music by a single note?
Would he still speak of God’s loving hands? Or would he remove that one word?
I think he would not change the word. In fact I believe its meaning would be more deeply painful for him, as it is for me.
Loving.
I think Bach believed in God as absolutely and without doubt as I believe in Bach.
He is beyond compare. He breathes an altogether more rarefied air than, say, Handel. Handel has no Zen. His music is mere shouting.
Music is not emotion. Music is Zen. And the Art of Fugue is pure Zen, from beginning to end.
There. I have had my say. Contradict me who dare!
Shoot me down in flames.
The fallen.
Those young boys from Gakushuin, marching off to die.
Akiko came to visit one afternoon (not so long ago it seems, but who can say?) She was taking away a stack of these pages I’ve been writing, with the intention of typing them up, keeping them in order. I told her it would be easier to burn them but she insisted. She sat for a while beside my bed, saying nothing but saying it loudly.
If dirt is matter in the wrong place, sin – or evil – is energy in the wrong place.
But the whole question of sin is a vexed one anyway. I like the mediaeval idea that without Adam’s sin there would be no need of salvation, and Christ would still be loitering in Heaven, waiting for someone to die for.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Answer came there none.
So, what is Zen? (Yes, I’m still asking this at the last).
Zen is what we don’t say when we’re not asked about it.
(The wordless is expressed when it is not asked for).
To write about Zen (or poetry, or beauty, or love) has something disgusting about it.
The question is, how much love has the writer in his heart, in his pen?
There is no truth in the world unless we are true. There is no beauty unless we are beautiful, no love unless we are loving.
So what is the realised man to do?
He could play the violin – very badly – in front of 2000 people at Carnegie Hall.
Or…
He could tiptoe through the tulips, dwell in marble halls, work endlessly on building a perpetual motion machine.
He could go to sea in a sieve, or eat with a runcible spoon. Hear the soundless sound of one hand. Believe six impossible things before breakfast.
He could just walk. He could just sit. He could just have a cup of tea.
See a grain of sand in a grain of sand.
Come on, Blyth. What is the realised man to do?
The answer, I suppose, is whatever he chooses, and with all his heart.
And how are we to understand Nirvana?
The annihilation, the transcendence, of the self?
A state of bliss?
The individual fire returning to the All-Fire?
Questions, questions.
Why did Daruma have a beard?
Why did he have no beard?
Why did he have five-and-a-half beards?
How do we even begin to answer?
I hear Harumi is flying from America to see me and bringing her baby boy Taro, my grandson. I hope for her sake she is not too late. I shall do my best to hold on. Deo volente. Inshallah.
It is with increasing surprise and sense of shock these days that I confront my reflection in the mirror. I have lost a great deal of weight and the face that looks back at me is gaunt. The fancied resemblance to Olivier (or even Chaplin) is long gone. My white hair has grown wispy and if I do not allow myself to be shaved for a day or two, I resemble no one more than Abraham Lincoln.
I once dismissed Lincoln’s entire speech on the Declaration of Independence as humbug, empty rhetoric.
And yet.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…
If only.
Often in these last days my thoughts have turned unbidden to young Lee and what befell him.
I heard about it much later, in a rare letter from Annie. It pained her, she wrote, to tell me what had happened.
Lee had gone back to Korea, intending to teach English. But when war broke out there, his very fluency in the language meant he was under suspicion, and the North Koreans placed him under arrest. They then forced him, on pain of execution, to broadcast propaganda aimed at US troops. After the war he returned to the South and was arrested by the authorities there as a traitor. A Quisling. A Lord Haw Haw. There was no proper trial. He was denounced, charged, sentenced, taken from the court and executed by a firing squad.
Did heaven look on, and would not take his part?
The question of questions. Answer Yes or No.
If there is an answer it is not Yes and it is not No.
It is in asking the question, as Shakespeare does.
It is there in Hamlet, in Lear, in Othello, in Macbeth. If we read them or see them performed, it is there, perhaps only for a short time before the glow dies away. We know the answer. Not Yes and not No.
Not-Yes, and Not-No.
Not Not-Yes, and not Not-No.
What, then? Joshu’s Mu?
Nothing.
Nothing is but thinking makes it so.
Nothing is but putting it into words makes it so.
But now, sometimes, language is slipping. Slipping away. Slipsliding. Slippage.
I cannot remember things I once read…
I was asking for a pen the other day, and the word for it escaped me. I knew what it was, the object, but it had slipped free of its name. I knew it was the thing-you-write-with, but what it was called I had no idea.
I got to it through the Japanese loan-word. Borupen. Ballpen.
Yes.
A pen.
This pen I’m holding now, as I write.
Nama rupa. Name and form.
I have another pen, one I’ve had for years, a gift from dear Dora on my departure from England. So long ago. It is a fountain pen with a gold nib, a blue marbled pattern on the barrel. Everything about it was pleasing – the feel of it in my hand, the flow of the ink, the sound of the nib scratching on the page. Scribble, scribble.
There were times when I thought the squeak of the nib on the paper held more meaning and less error than anything I was trying to express. I loved that pen, loved its suchness, its fitness for purpose. I loved the pen-ness of it.
But refilling it with ink has become too finicky. I had to put it aside and use this borupen.
I’m forgetting the names of places and people.
The Scotsman who was in the cell next to mine in Wormwood Scrubs.
Did ye hear about the lonely prisoner?
He was in his sel.
His self.
His cell.
Robertson. That was his name. Davie Robertson.
There was a young fellow named Reg…
And Bishop the butcher who wouldn’t kill men.
And the other one, younger than me. Dickson, Paul. Poor, poor Paul.
The other night I heard my mother’s voice, her voice when she was young, so long unremembered, but speaking to me now down fifty or sixty years. When I was very, very small, a little nipper, a tiny wee lad, she would tell me stories, or sing to me, or recite scraps of poetry – nursery rhymes, nonsense verse.
And this was the one that came back to me:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
I would shriek and laugh at the sheer ridiculous mystery of it, the hilarious impossibility
Again! I would shout, and she’d repeat it, and I’d laugh even more as if being tickled.
Again!
And she came and told me it again, a few nights ago, her remembered voice so clear and close.
I wish, I wish.
I could even smell the house, dark redolence of furniture polish, tang of camphor, reek of my father’s pipe smoke, all comforting beyond measure. I was back there, five or six years old, in Leytonstone, E11. 93 Trumpington Road. Then waking to this.
This.
Those unmistakable hospital smells, cloying and metallic, chemical. And the burning.
Women’s voices, quiet and singsong.
This morning I woke from a vivid dream of Korea, the Sushi Hisa restaurant and its mad zen chef Momota-san with his samurai blades.
Oi!
Hai!
That was almost thirty years ago and I found myself salivating at the memory. Perhaps that persistent odour of burning was transformed in my dream into the smell of the food. I could almost taste it. Sadly, the hospital food is dull fare, unimaginative and bland. Once again the vegetarian’s lot is not a happy one. It is back once more to rice and vegetables, vegetables and rice.
Nana saves my life by bringing me a bento box, lovingly prepared, beautifully packed, wrapped in a furoshiki cloth for ease of carrying.
What have I done to deserve this? I ask, and we laugh. But I mean it. I mean it.
She fills the box with my favourite items, like the inari tofu pockets I love. They are also said to be the favourite of the fox-gods (and why should I doubt it?) and are placed as an offering at Shinto shrines. There are tamagoyaki rolled omelettes, folded into layers and sliced. Nana has even included two temaki sushi, the nori folded round the rice, and through the middle a dash of umeboshi salt-pickled plum, sharp and tart but fragrant, an explosion of taste.
I am becoming the poet of the bento box!
The consultant tried to say it in English, but the word was beyond him. Inoperable.
That’s easy-for-you-to-say!
So he said it in Japanese. Shujutsu fukano.
But the English word drums in my brain. Inoperable. Inoperable. Inoperable. And some inconsistency in the word itself keeps niggling.
A system is inoperable – it cannot be operated, it does not work.
