Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (16 page)

I seem to have spoken these words aloud (to be sure, I was surrounded by the roar of the storm, which showed no sign of abating), which must have meant that I was drunk. I think I was also half asleep. Presently, I felt the touch of a calm and gentle hand that was scarcely a touch at all on my shoulder and my arm and around my chest, waking me, and I heard a voice: “
It's all right! It's a dream, you're just dreaming! There's nothing at all to be afraid of it's just a dream!”
And even so it seemed that I continued where I had left off, lifting my voice against the noise of the wind, speaking to the half-phantom that was my son. When I opened my eyes, Eeyore was kneeling at my side, quieting my body with both arms outstretched, holding me in the gaze of his ink-colored eyes beneath eyebrows that were thick and dark in the light of the fire. As I sat up, Eeyore moved backward with the nimbleness he sometimes displayed and, putting Tiny Chiyo to the side, made a place for me to sleep. Then he lay down again on his back like a mummy, his arms folded across his chest, and I lay down beside him and pulled the quilt over both of us.

With the momentum of the sake I fell asleep at once, before I could reflect on the curiousness of Eeyore's words to me. For an instant, I did seem to be aware of something quietly receding through the dining area that adjoined the living room and through the door, which had been left open into the darkness of the stairs beyond.…

When I woke up, Eeyore's body was not beside me, and the window farthest away from the fireplace where I was lying had been opened and light was coming in. Piercing the smell of smoke that filled the room, the acrid scent of pine was so raw it made my head pound. I twisted my body toward the light and discovered a darkly silhouetted figure slumped forward in one of the chairs in the dining area between me and the whitened window. It was my wife, and she appeared to be dejected. Through the frame of the sunlit window behind her I noticed there was something out of the ordinary about the view outside, something deficient. Moreover, something black and flat appeared and disappeared in that sparkling space, as though it were being thrown upward and thrown again. Groping out of long habit in the area around my head, I found the eyeglasses (which should not have been there) and recognized the blackness as a crow, I should say a great, fat crow, an old bird I knew well. It would perch in our giant pine and take flight at times as if to get some exercise, and glide out of sight, and then return and rest its wings. Now the exposed knot on a branch near the top of the tree where it was easy to perch was gone, and gone with it was the entire pine.

“Eeyore found your glasses and wouldn't let anyone else bring them to you. Everyone's outside cleaning up. They want to store the broken branches to use for firewood.” My wife seemed to have sensed all along that I was awake.

“The big pine must be down! An ancient tree like that survives everything until now and then one night it suddenly snaps—it's strange. The crow is frantic.”

“It fell right across the road and brought down the phone lines—it's as if they built a bridge to our property. Did you hear the noise?”

“I did—didn't you?”

“We just got here this morning.”

“Really! I thought I saw you standing at the head of the stairs late last night.”

For an instant, the silhouetted body seemed to tighten; then, in a voice that struggled to contain strong feelings, my wife said, “There's no way I could have been standing there watching you. The three of us stayed in a business hotel in Ito.”

After Eeyore and I had left, my wife and the two younger children, in accordance with a proposal made by Eeyore's younger brother, had set out for Izu themselves via the bullet train from Tokyo Station. But even the bullet train was slowed down on its way to Atami as a result of the typhoon, and by the time they reached Ito and learned that the tracks ahead were closed, it was nearly ten o'clock. The taxi they found in front of the station happened to be the same one that had brought me and Eeyore to our cabin. The driver was not unwilling to bring them as well if they were determined to go, even though the wind-driven rain was worse at that time than it had been two hours before, but he insisted on stopping at the police station along the way to register us as a potential family suicide. He then took my traumatized wife and children to a business hotel teeming with commuters from Izu who were avoiding the storm, and helped them to check in.

“Family suicide, what a cheerful fellow!” I tried to cover with a laugh, but my wife's shadowed profile remained taut.

Early this morning, under a sky that was clear and bright, they had driven here in a cab through the raw damage left by the storm, but just inside the entrance to the resort-home area a fallen tree had required them to abandon the cab. As they made their way to the house on foot around and over fallen trees and boulders overturned in the road, my wife had stumbled and skinned both her knees. Just now, aligning two chairs, she had finished swabbing them. As my eyes adjusted to the glare and shadow, I noticed her two unexpectedly plump legs propped up in front of her.

I lay back again; the unfinished wooden beams crisscrossing at the ceiling glowed palely in the shadows. When we were building our first house I had joked that I would prefer to have no exposed beams since without them I couldn't hang myself. My wife had communicated this, literally, to the architect, and when we asked the same man to design our mountain house five years later, in what may have been a form of psychological compensation, she had requested exposed beams throughout the living and dining areas.

“I was thinking about what the driver said about family suicide,” I began. “Don't you think it was more the fact that we were going to the mountains in the middle of a typhoon than anything he saw in me and Eeyore or in you that made him say that? There may have been incidents like that in the past….”

My wife declined my invitation to generalize and spoke instead the words she must have been considering deep inside herself until now: “You said you saw me standing here last night. I should be thankful it was me and not the ‘ghost of a flea.’ In her letter to me, Martha wrote that what frightened her wasn't just that Eeyore saw the ghost of M's severed head but that the professor also seemed to be seeing it with him. Yesterday, Saku said Eeyore would probably calm down when he got to the house, but there was no way of knowing what Papa might start thinking when he got to Izu. So we'd better go after them, he said, because of Papa!”

I could hear what was now a dry and even wind and the children's voices, particularly Eeyore's self-important instructions to his younger brother and sister to gather smaller pieces of wood while he took charge of the heavier. I lay there, puzzling over how I was going to approach my wife and explain why half my face was swollen. Given my behavior the day before, I would have to get right to work repairing the psychological damage between me and my wife and Eeyore's sister and brother. I sat up into the light and said the following, as if to encourage myself and the others, aware of my wife flinching once again as she noticed the swelling in my face: “Maybe Eeyore doesn't dream, but he does know that people have dreams! As he grows older, if the day finally comes when he dreams, I think he'll be able to tell it was a dream. Learning that made last night worth it.”

I feared that Eeyore's first dream would be a painful one, and that I might no longer be alive and would therefore be unable to stand by his side. But I knew that Eeyore would be able to say, turning to himself as dreamer, “
It's all right. It's all right, it's just a dream.
” Why should I torment myself? Eeyore would be able to turn to himself and continue, “
You re just dreaming! There's nothing at all to be afraid of. It's just a dream!
”

5
: The Soul Descends as a Falling Star, to the Bone at My Heel

I
t is extraordinary how the grotesquely odd and the familiar can reside together in Blake's invention. I have sensed this often, and have moreover come upon any number of passages that somehow accord with the dell tails of my life with my son. The beginning of the epic poem
Milton,
for example, when the poet descends to this fallen world after having risen to heaven and attempts to bring about the salvation of his wife and daughters and, indeed, of all mankind. I have in mind the passage which relates Milton's descent to earth, and begins:

Milton's soul enters the body of Blake, who resides in this real world, and they embark, in one body, on a journey through hardship and pain, but before they set out Blake writes that Milton's spirit arrives like a flame. When I began reading Blake again in Frankfurt I realized gradually that the illustration on the cover of my paperback volume of complete poems, a man who seemed about to fall with a shooting star at his feet, was one of the thirty plates that accompanied
Milton.

I cannot resist comparing the notion that Milton's spirit entered Blake's body at the bone in his heel or instep with my son's unreasoning love for, or at least extraordinary interest in, his father's feet. Whenever he senses that our relationship is not going well, Eeyore attempts to restore communication between us through the agency of my feet. Milton's spirit descends like a star and arrives at Blake's core by entering through the tarsus. In the same way, Eeyore relies on the mediation of my feet in seeking to reopen the passage to my core. This practice had its origin in the days when I was suffering my first attack of gout and the power relationship with my young son seemed to reverse itself. At least that is what I have always assumed: that my definition of feet to Eeyore was based on coming down with gout.

But have I taken Eeyore's feelings fully into account? Was my definition valid from Eeyore's point of view? A wall rises between myself and Eeyore. He is terrified of looking into my face, of looking directly into my eyes in particular. If possible, he would prefer to move past the crisis with faces averted, as if we were unaware of the location of each other's face. A head-on charge directed at his father's “center”—a father who appears to Eeyore to be angry at him—would require more courage than he possesses, nor would the thought occur to him. Instead, he seeks a handhold at the “margins” of his father's body. The feet as the periphery of the human body. The feet which appear to protrude, as a man sprawls back with his legs thrust out in front of him, past the border of their owner's body. The head, face, chest, and other parts which constitute the body's center appear to be connected directly to the individual's, in this case to my own, consciousness, but the feet are at a distance, beyond the reach of consciousness. For this reason, they have the feel and tangibility of quintessential objects; even in their shape they are worthy of loving care as independent objects. It is as objects, therefore, that Eeyore clings to my feet. In this case, however, the feet in question are indeed connected to his father's center and thus by rubbing them he is able to discover a channel between himself and their proprietor.

The cultural anthropologist Y, whose theoretical work on the “center” and the “periphery” has earned him an international reputation, is a friend of mine and someone who cares a lot about Eeyore. My son was quick to sense this right away. It was therefore gratifying to discover that Y's theory could be applied, as above, to my relationship with Eeyore. With Y as my starting point, I thought to expand on the significance of Eeyore's use of my feet as “periphery” in establishing a channel to me as an approach to defining the function of my son's consciousness overall. My thoughts on the subject led me straight to the question of imagination. Here again, clearly, Blake seemed relevant. For that reason, while I have a theme to develop here, I want to begin by reviewing my personal history of writing fiction about my son and reading Blake.

I have described my chance encounter as a young man with a few lines from
The Four Zoas
that unsettled me deeply. Thereafter, as a student and after graduation, before I had ascertained that the verse was Blake's, there was a period in my life when I found his shorter poems highly evocative and wrote some fiction that was centered around them. This amounted to selecting a poem, or a few lines from a poem that I might not have read from beginning to end, and working them into my fiction in a manner that might be called arbitrary, or even willful. Looking back now, I find examples where I would have to say I had misunderstood the lines I used (even now, entering the forest of dense and twisted symbolism in Blake's long Prophecies with only my amateur, self-taught understanding as a guide, I am undoubtedly guilty of new errors). Nonetheless, when I notice as I make my way through Blake again a mistaken reading that was once powerfully evocative for me, it should lead me to a new discovery about myself at the time. Today, I know that Blake is a poet I shall continue reading until I die; this amounts to a feeling that Blake may enable me to construct a model for living my own life as I move toward death. As I confirm misinterpretations in my own fiction and am moved by them once again, I recall comprehensively the working of my imagination when I was young; in effect, my use of Blake provides the opportunity to take my measure today against myself in the past.

The first time I quoted Blake was in a novel I wrote just after Eeyore was born with a handicap and which I based on my actual experience at the time,
A Personal Matter.
From the so-called Proverbs of Hell in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
I took the line, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. …” The fact that I replaced the period that belongs at the end with an ellipsis, as if I were abbreviating a passage that followed, suggests to me that I had not actually read
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Moreover, in translating the line, shifting responsibility to the young woman in the novel by having the translation come from her, I rendered it appropriate to my story. “Better to kill the infant in its cradle! Rather than ending up nursing unacted desires. …”