It was about 2 years back, when I was still living in Pilsen and hadn’t yet become a private investigator. I had settled in to spend the afternoon writing. Not that I could see the point. My sense of literary purpose had been flagging lately. I mean, who the hell cared what I thought? Like there weren’t thousands more of me out there to parrot the same semi-masticated pulp of half-ideas and proto-feelings.
I’d been out of college for a while, so there was no one paid to argue that literature mattered to me. And while I still loved it, was in awe of it, I wasn’t sure that the feeling was reciprocated. And besides, literature was most assuredly not putting a tiger in my tank or a steak on my table. I had a crappy job temping in the mail room of a sinister n’ monolithic ad agency; a lot of stories floating around in the slush files of various literary magazines; a psychotic cat; a classically dysfunctional family back in Michigan somewhere; a romantic companion who was actually kind but not boring, but to whom I felt my mood swings, insecurity, poverty and general lack of sex appeal were probably just a burden; and few friends left. Much as I wanted to believe that writing mattered, I was having a hard enough time believing that life mattered.
Still, I sat at my desk, and I tried to write. Just to amuse myself, I tried to come up with something really ridiculous. Sometimes I’ve had luck with that when my ideas were running low or not at all. I envision the most absurd situation possible—preferably one that called for tremendously bad writing—and somehow, I relax to a point where I can just enjoy the act of writing again. But on this day, nothing was working. A gaggle of men in cowboy outfits—no pants, just chaps, with gun belts and ten gallon hats—hip-hop dancin’ to beat the band and all wearing Groucho Marx glasses. Nothing. Not even a smile.
I looked out the window, hoping that some detail from somebody else’s life might strike me as noble somehow, or at least less futile. The street was empty. It was one of those shitty autumn days—the crisp leaves and warm tones were gone. From here on out, it would be mulch, cold rain and winds that carry an ache with them. You can feel winter lurking somewhere in front of you, and with it, the end of another year, in which your accomplishments had fallen a little short of what you’d envisioned, when, at the beginning of the year, borne up on a wave of self-hatred, you’d told yourself (and actually believed, which is the kind of naïve optimism for which you were always dismissing the masses around you,) that you were going to consciously make an effort to change for the better. And here you were—a little heavier, balder and older—wondering just where the fuck your passion and sense of faith in yourself had gone.
And inevitably, at some point, your eyes would brush one of those rejection letters that you always stupidly leave lying around, as if you need some further reminder of your mediocrity, some objective, external voice to tell you what you already believed in your hearts inner core of cores—that you don’t matter, are superfluous, just more surplus population. That if you measured you net worth, say in terms of resources consumed—clothing and other goods squeezed out by various sweat shops in various desperate places that you had the good fortune to not even have to think about if you didn’t want to, (and why the fuck would you want to?) oxygen consumed from an atmosphere that’s already befouled by the exhaust fumes generated in the name of carting around your flabby ass to buy even more goods, food consumed, including, but not limited to the butchered remains of various living creatures, that, for all you know, had appreciated life as much or more than you do, and produce plucked by starving migrant laborers from field and orchards saturated in carcinogenic insecticidal agents, tons of garbage sitting permanently in landfills all around the country—if you were to weigh all the riches you were taking and all of the poisons you secreted or excreted or that were being produced on your behalf against the dubious good that you’d done for the world or its inhabitants—there was that bum you gave a dollar to so that he’d shut up, say, or the letter you wrote your lonely, fragile grandmother in her dusty, boxlike home on the outskirts of lovely Flint, Michigan, the balance might be a bit shaky.
Because you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and what is an egg, but a symbol of life—maybe a fun Easter trophy? And here comes Peter Cottontail, a clutch of rotting eggs hidden away in his basket, which has of course been lined with plastic grass that will not break down in your lifetime. And he’s got some candy for you. Maybe a six-pack of Bass ale to take your mind off of all this morbid free-associating on a topic that is so clear in a mathematical sense. As if you need to question your worth, whether in a net way, you are good or bad for anyone but yourself. You’re bad, motherfucker—not to be confused with a bad motherfucker, because you sure the hell aren’t that—and you know it.
But no, drinking alone in the middle of the day is no answer. (Nor is suicide, unless you have the balls. And you haven’t.) So Peter Cottontail will have to peddle his wares somewhere else on up the bunny trail. (And notice, as he hops away, how suspiciously his skin drags and flops, as though it were a costume. Like, maybe, that isn’t a bunny there at all, which you had to kind of wonder about anyway, given his roughly human height. Like maybe it was all just a con—whose, I couldn’t say. The government, the media, corporate America are all suspect. It lacks the drama of an al-Queda type action, but then those guys are pretty hostile toward Christian symbols, and is not Easter one of the two most significant days on the Christian calendar? And viewed from that perspective, what is old Peter Cottontail, but sort of like a goodwill ambassador for Christ. Sort of like his spokesperson for marketing purposes. Sort of like the Trix rabbit is for the Kellogg Corporation.)
No, while I recognized that on this day, writing was getting me nowhere, even if I was going to take a break, I was going to have to find a healthier way of doing it. TV, beer, mescaline, internet porn, computer games would all just lead to further self-loathing, which would lead to further paralysis, which would lead to no writing done, which would lead to further anxiety, which would lead to further feelings of pointlessness. And you do the hokey pokey & turn yourself about & C… It was a vicious cycle, and I needed break out of it. I needed clean, healthy inspiration. And I knew I couldn’t think in my apartment. I’d been alone there for too long and was beginning to feel not just irrelevant, but non-existent.
Although going outside sounded like a terribly laborious prospect, I needed to get away. Movement would be good, might even feel good, I reasoned, once I built up some momentum. At the time, I lived in a low rent, crime-ridden Chicago neighborhood. There were holes in the sidewalk through which you could glimpse garbage and lost toys lying in the dirt below. It was not uncommon to meet an unattended dog wandering about, weaving occasionally into or out of traffic. While this area offered plenty of fascinating sights, sounds and smells, it could be sort of a downer if you were already feeling inclined toward melancholia or morbidity.
I decided to head into the Loop, thinking I’d hit the Art Institute or something like that. Maybe someone else’s inspiration would inspire me. After all, it’d worked before. I’d gazed at a sculpture of, say, Vishnu, dancing on a demon’s head—something wrought by someone living in India about a thousand years before—and something in it somewhere would speak to me, in spite of the gulfs between me and the artist.
So I headed over the subway, doing my level best to look at and think about nothing, to just be Zen.
Before long, I was on the El platform. I lived near the end of the line, which meant that trains did not always arrive and depart in a timely fashion. It was cold up there, exposed to the winter wind. A pigeon was rooting about between the boards at my feet, finding very little, it seemed. It was fat, and its feathers were falling off in patches. Unsettling—only a moment before, I’d been studying the carcasses of this bird’s relatives decomposing in the gap between the platform and an adjacent building behind me. It was like a guano-encrusted mass grave for pigeons. And now, this live bird is looking at me with confused anger—a gaze not unlike those of seemingly every human being I’d passed on my way to the train. I imagined my own eyes weren’t that different.
We stood there, staring each other down for a while. Then the bird abruptly launched itself into the air, still level with my feet, heading toward the opposite platform at a terrific speed. It flew over it and would have gone past, but the Plexiglas barrier behind stopped it with an audible thump. The bird just sat there. I thought it was dead, but then it stood. Its bleary eyes found me again. Then it waddled off, up the platform, not in any kind of a hurry at all.
I rode into the city, the train leaning in close to the walls around me. I watched the sunlight glinting off of the skyline, making everything look cold and hard. I really needed that Indian sculpture now, or maybe a decent van Gogh. Thing is, when I got to the museum, there was a really long line outside. Tourists in salt-stained winter coats fended off the street vendors, their breath showing in gray clouds.
Screw that. I’d had enough depersonalization for one day, so I headed up the street, without the slightest idea where to go. This little field trip wasn’t working out at all. If anything, it was just confirming my feelings of alienation and futility. I had to find some comfort soon, or I was going to hurtle myself into the Michigan Avenue traffic, and there wasn’t a cab in the city that would hit its brakes. I came across a Border’s, and in desperation, went inside.
Usually, I avoid bookstores. They’re dangerous places for me, because I often have trouble controlling my enthusiasm. I’m immediately transformed into something like a sugar-addled ten year old, jogging from one section to the next with an ever-taller stack of books in my hands. I can’t even stand still long enough to read more than a sentence or two, but that, sometimes abetted by my standing admiration for an author, is enough to compel me to buy a book. I feel an undeniable need to take it home and tear it apart, read every word, (even the preface and introduction, if any,) shred the binding, underline phrases that I find awe-inspiring—(when I come down later, my enthusiasm in this area often seems a little unbalanced)— spill coffee on its pages and otherwise begin building my personal relationship with it.
It’s only when I hit the register and watch the cost of my purchases rise to some truly alarming number, that I have any second thoughts. However, I’m far too easily embarrassed to back down at that point. I just take my bloated plastic bag and head home, assuring myself that I will never buy another book, that I already have too damn many of them and have no idea where I’ll put more, and that it’s hard to read anyway when you’re distracted by inconveniences like eviction or starvation because you’ve spent all your money on things you don’t really need and have nothing left to put toward your bills.
I could already tell that this visit to the bookstore would be different, and that worried me. I felt nothing—or so it seemed. I really wasn’t sure. It was like I didn’t have access to myself—like I was invisible to my own eyes—a concept, rather than a person—something without blood and arteries and neural impulses—or viewed from the other end of the spectrum, a soul, mind, or heart to be affected by the expressions of others. I was beginning to think I might just dissipate right there in Borders, that I’d lost enough cohesion to even exist anymore. Whatever else you wanted to say about my friend the pigeon, at least it was clearly alive. It might be sick, crawling with parasites, freezing, hungry and unable to write a sentence, (which at the time, didn’t seem to like a very valuable ability anyway). He could hate. He had viscera, and therefore, he had feelings. It was beginning to seem that I did not.
Well, OK, that’s not entirely true. There was some small, tenuous fear of dissolution left. I was trying to hold onto it, to nurture it as a means of making myself move. I was getting a little too comfortable standing there, about 5 paces through the anti-theft gates, disappearing. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs already, and I was pretty sure I’d imagined it, but some matronly, fur-clad Michigan Avenue type had seemed to walk through me only a moment ago.
And there were the walls of books, but they were just objects, subject to the same physical principles as everything else. (Except, maybe, for myself, the reality of which seemed to be dissipating.) Truth and beauty and all that jazz did not necessarily dwell in them. Might do just as well to go looking for hope (or whatever the fuck it was I was looking for) in a slab of concrete or a pile of dog shit or one of those plastic caddy things they put in the middle of a pizza when they deliver it to you. Mightn’t you?
I couldn’t escape the feeling that knew that if I didn’t do something fast, I really was going to fade out. I stepped into the closest aisle and picked up the first book my hand touched, grateful that my extremities still seemed to be there, for the moment. The title was Breeze through Bamboo, and the name of the author and illustrator was Ema Saiko. (‘Course, I’ve no idea what the original stuff reads like, but translator Hiroaki Sato rendered them beautifully.) I’d never heard of her. I opened the book and read from a page near the middle:
Solitary Living in Early Winter
This innermost room with little to do,
is adequate to commit my plain life to.
Drink a bit, and I forget my clothes are thin,
an idea, and I let my brush run aslant…
I can’t say what it was exactly, but something in these words and the ones that followed them stirred me. To me, they seemed both musical and vivid. What’s more, they were marked by a personality, something that gave them greater weight than their literal meaning or their phonetic sound. It was that same feeling I’d mentioned earlier—that connection. As absurdly sentimental as it may sound, I felt that for a moment, long dead Ema Saiko, who had lived in a way I could never conceive of, as a woman in Tokugawa Japan, had reached out to touch me. She had infected me with her point of view. I felt that I was no longer seeing my day through my own bleary eyes—blind to color and shape, kindness and stupidity; finding only mud and ashes—but with eyes that were clean. They were not Ema Saiko’s eyes—(come to think of it, that woulda been sort of disturbing—me walking around with some dead chick’s eyes in my head)—better than that, they were my own, cleared by her influence, strengthened by her insight and rejuvenated by her compassion. It’s hard to express my feelings about this without waxing rhapsodic, but I assure you that my gratitude and my relief were genuine.
I went on to read more of Ema Saiko’s kanshi poetry. It tells simply of the life she led. She finds beauty in the domestically mundane and joy in the subtlest movements of nature. I won’t lie and say I don’t still have a tendency to become morbid, pessimistic and/or jaded, but I have managed to remain corporeal since I ran across this book. I like to think that the infection has spread throughout my person, making me calmer and more appreciative of the world around me. It’s like a gift that Ema Saiko gave me, though as Denis Johnson once said, “She probably couldn’t have imagined me.” It mingled with other influences, drawn from various points of view, cultures and circumstances, but nevertheless, contributing to my understanding of myself.
That’s a consideerable strength, I think, to cull from a single poem. And in this way, there is a real and positive process of infection in art.
Well… BURRPP… That was certainly profound, wasn’t it? If there’s anyone left out there who hasn’t fallen into a diabetic coma, or just plain dozed off, I’m gonna say goodbye for now. Steve Forceman sez: Over & out.
