Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan Read online

  It was good that the world had come back to the real-time exactness of such things, that life proceeded once more on foot, and that, though roads intersected hard by the gardens of Hall Place, stillness had long replaced the sound of engines. As cold and comforting as an image in water, this silence was some recompense for the many losses.

  Leaving the grounds, Addyson reflected: he was more quickly sated than when younger, but not as often or easily bored. Now he crossed the silent pitted road to the wooded parkland, barely tended, around whose perimeter was an old wooden fence whose rusty metal predecessor he vaguely recalled. His feet shuffled through leaf mold as he ascended the hill. Electric lights dimmed to darkness or soundlessly blinked into radiance at intervals that had the arrhythmic calm of nature about them, as if they were toadstools, regulating their own ambience according to arcane fungoid principles.

  Enough of the outdoor world for now; he desired to be inside, observing the activity of his mind in the circle of a lamp. He had no students today, so there was no need to hurry, but eagerness grew in him to steep once more in the comfortable and melancholy solitude of the domestic environment, with only the movements of the air in the mid-distance and the occasional stir of humans on business that did not involve him, to suggest the largeness of the world that supported his existence.

  How old was he now? If he thought about it, he surprised himself with a vertigo like looking down and trying to count the rungs of a ladder he had just climbed. He supposed—if not for a certain giddiness would have been sure—he was now a nonagenarian. These daily walks were a necessity at his age, especially in the cold months when the days sank deeper into darkness with each rotation of the world upon its axis. They were necessary to circulate his blood and accustom him to the cold (his frosty abode would feel warm by comparison for an hour or so after his return); they were necessary to stoke the dying coals of his health and coax from them a few last flames of life; and they were necessary to remind him that life was now more inescapably than ever what it had always been—a matter of today and today and today.

  Perhaps this was even a gloomy manner of looking at things, but he had been this gloomy, too, forty years ago or sixty, or seventy. He remembered that Katsushika Hokusai had anticipated finally attaining to the mastery of his art at the age of one hundred and ten. That age was still in Addyson’s future. But then again, it had still been in Hokusai’s future when he died.

  He fitted the key in the door of his flat more by muscle memory than by sight. He would not be able to read, of course—the short days were half hellish for that. There was light, but not sufficient for his pain-afflicted and enfeebled eyes. One thing he missed from the days of large-scale electric power was bright artificial light. But in the last of those days lighting had, anyway, become dim, because of the kind of more or less arbitrary bureaucratic and executive decision that soon translated into the physical universals those living in the world had to suffer. Bright artificial light was simply one of the many things that had seemed eternal because they were present in the world when he was born into it, and one of the many of those many that had since proved temporary.

  In the hallway, his breath still showed, but a little less than before. He closed the door but did not remove his coat. Even here, books were piled up against the walls. He pulled the string that dangled from a wall lamp, and the energy that had stored in the battery that day was diffused as a phosphorescent glimmer. This brought out a little of the color of the book jackets. Objects that create homeliness also create warmth—so he often told himself. Still, he had to plan awhile the best use of his resources this evening, for light and for heat.

  He decided that today he would sit in the near darkness of the single lamp until he was hungry. Then his cooking would provide an interval of light and warmth.

  He rested cross-legged in the sitting room with his back against the section of the wall between kitchen and bedroom. Unable to read, he would put his past reading to the use for which he believed it had been meant. Books, surely, always left off where life was intended to begin. This intention in the writing of books was divided into different forms. In one form it was imperious—both proud and self-hating—urging the reader, paradoxically, to discard all that books represented, and to live in the unrecorded motion of going beyond and going beyond and always going beyond. This was the anti-literary intention. But Addyson felt that this form of the intention was somehow jejune and stemmed from an undeclared love of the action adventure carried into adult years. Life, he had found, was not that dramatic, and to expect such drama was to deny the validity of what truly formed life’s greater portion—the less than seductively beautiful, the dull, the pointless, the in between. So the second form of the intention was the literary. This form did not incite to drama—it focused on atmosphere and manner. Many people thought it artificial, etiolated and irrelevant, but properly understood, its purpose was precisely to validate that dull center of life that cannot be escaped. The intention in this case was not that the books be discarded for adventure, but that they be internalized.

  Of course, a person was under no obligation to remain faithful to one of these forms of the intention and antagonistic to the other, but Addyson knew, with the resigned intimacy permeating a sinner’s knowledge of sin, that he, anyway, would always find his way back onto the footpath of the literary form of this intention.

  He closed his eyes.

  There was something that immediately gave a faint glow in his tactile consciousness—a glow of the kind that suggests “second skin” or “second nature.” It was his thermal underwear. Obvious enough to be bathetic—yet true. “Long johns” was the term he preferred. It had that almost folkloric resonance, that sense of a jocular familiarity with death, also to be found in expressions like “Davy Jones’s locker.” His long johns were undoubtedly literature—they had all the qualifications. They brought him warmth in the cold. They were a private concern. They bore with his lack of cleanliness in philosophical equanimity, following the shape of his legs in a way that was friendly, unobtrusive, and showed the flexibility necessary for complete realism. And though they were gray and their cut was not dashing, in their everydayness there was a kind of eremitism, in their eremitism a kind of openness, in their openness a kind of beauty, in their beauty a kind of romance.

  And so he read them now, as he might read a book, read their close, almost indiscernible contact with his skin, and became absorbed in a complex story of elusive memories woven with an airy fabric of wide universals. Austerity embraced sensuality, and surprisingly personal, surprisingly detailed revelations scribbled themselves in infinitesimal tingles on this hairy page.

  In time his eyes, sensitive behind their lids to the shimmer of the lamp, with only this slight stimulus, and darkness, and rest, began to produce in his brain trailing fantasies of color, whose shapes and motion were as emotionally intelligible as music, and as indefinable in their import.

  Eventually the cold of his surroundings began to feel like sobriety, and there was a sense of rising, as to the alert and immanent two-dimensionality of wakefulness.

  His hands reached out, groping, first for the switch of another lamp, and then to forage among a litter of loose sheets and scraps of paper that he had scavenged from various sources. He found one that was mostly blank, picked up a nearby pen from its resting place by a pot of pens (most of them inkless), and began to etch letters upon the surface of the page with craftsman-like seriousness.

  Life sometimes feels like a fairy tale. I do not intend to mean that it tends toward a happy ending, but now—and it cannot be accident—I have summoned that meaning too. What I had meant to mean is that its eeriness suggests a fairy tale (which may also reassure us, or remind us of the feeling of being reassured).

  If I take two magnets and introduce the north polarity of one between the north and south of the other, there is a point where attraction and repulsion is ambiguous—this fairy-tale qua
lity is similar. It is a sensation that occurs when I seem on the verge of being obliterated by how different the outer world is to my inner. Something in the very opacity of the outer world, in its detailed refusal to recognize me, causes a swell of feeling from a nonexistent inner world. No, not an inner world—the inner world. It becomes the definite article and so, nonexistent or otherwise, ceases for a moment, in its swell, to require validation.

  It’s not quite the obvious thing that it sounds. My explanation doesn’t capture the indeterminate edge of the thing—but that, in fact, is the thing. The feeling is definite, but has no name. It recurs at intervals, not especially frequent. It might be easiest to explain through suicide.

  I have considered suicide many times in my life. “Considered” is the wrong word. I have tried to find my way through to the cold heart of the furnace of suicide, but never made it. When I was still young, I was able to believe that dreams might be waiting to come true—by the pressure of their nature. By the time I was forty, I saw I had misjudged the nature of dreams. “Coming true” was not a necessary part of their definition; if anything, the case was exactly opposite to this. Therefore, when I failed, in my forties—as I did many times—to kill myself, it was no longer because I thought suicide was a tragic impatience that would rob one of the otherwise inevitable, or even possible. It was not that the dreams were gone by that age, exactly, but the “come true” suffix no longer attached itself to my dreams as something credible.

  When, at that age, I drew close to suicide, I would compare the alternatives—an abrupt end to my existence, or that existence continued. And, in a natural reaction to the thought of oblivion, the latter would start to clothe itself in images of alluring things that might happen this time if I refrained from self-destruction. These were, in one form or another, the things my life always should have been. But I knew they were utterly false. It is perhaps fifty years on—I can use the word “knew” with legitimate authority. I knew I was right then and I know it for sure now.

  The point is this: when I discarded the alluring possibilities as false and accepted that my life would continue essentially as it had been, I felt that that actual life—the one I would continue—was the falsehood. I could regret—in hypothetical anticipation—cutting my life short, because it would mean I never got a chance to live. But I knew this “I” never would get its chance, even in continued life, and without this “I” getting its chance, nothing was real. And yet, in some way, it is true that this “I,” never expressed, would have been thwarted by a shorter life.

  Was it this—that I was no longer living to live my dreams, but only to dream them?

  That is too much to the point, and it is not the point. I think even the dreams that I knew to be hopeless refused to let me die. In this sense, life and dream are inextricable, and somewhere on the edges of this inextricability, somewhere …

  He became aware that he was losing his way in precision and stopped. He closed his eyes in quiet weariness, incurable and therefore not worth giving attention to. There had been no children. There had been no success. People who took those two things for granted had lectured him over the years on the harsh realities of life. He did not want to write in a language that pandered to them—the logic that disproved itself.

  He began to write again. It was only a scribble, but inside him the motion was the descent of a blade, and something, sliced, toppled:

  The familiar

  Fact of the moon, above trees

  With half-bare branches

  And topiary beasts. I,

  Eclipsed, sleep outside this dream.

  Anyway, he would lay aside the pen for now. He put the leaf of paper back with the litter from which he had extracted it.

  Fletch came round while he was still eating the stew he had prepared for himself. There was some left in the pot, so he served this up for Fletch, who, in turn, produced a pot-bellied bottle of wine. Fletch, a little less than half Addyson’s age, was nonetheless a friend of many years, and one of his most frequent visitors. Tonight, he had arrived on a cart, bringing with him two boxes of Addyson’s books.

  “I wish you didn’t have to sell them,” said Fletch, at that point in such an occasion when the food is more or less out of the way and there is a sense of easing more deeply into drink and talk.

  “So do I,” said Addyson. “But my students are not rich enough or numerous enough to support me by themselves. Besides, books should circulate. It’s a bonus if I’m paid for that circulation.”

  “But who do they circulate to?”

  “Well, yes, that’s the dilemma,” Addyson conceded. “The books are too good to be read.”

  Not so much by calculation as by the interaction of his nature with circumstance, Addyson had come to invest his precarious energies and material resources in the accumulation and maintenance of an extendsive private library. This had required ingenuity, since he lacked the storage to contain what had, for most of his life, been an ever-expanding collection. The bunch of keys for his current flat, in which he had lived for some decades, included the key to an adjoining garage, of which he had taken advantage, and the flat also had cellar space, a feature that had become more common in the period just before he moved in. Nonetheless, as his collecting peaked, it had required him to outsource the collection itself to various bibliophile friends, who would look after indefinitely borrowed books in exchange for the obvious benefit of being able to read them.

  “I haven’t actually read all of these,” said Fletch, indicating the boxes.

  “Keep them till you have, if you like. I still have others I can sell off here.”

  Fletch reflected.

  “No. It’s all right. Maybe I’m just keeping them out of circulation. And maybe if you had more money you’d be able to write again.”

  “I am writing.”

  “I mean … I don’t want to sound brutal, but there’s no knowing how much longer you’ve got. I know there was much more you wanted to write. I wish you would. You really shouldn’t be putting things off now. I wish I had the money myself, so that you didn’t have to teach and sell books, but I don’t.”

  “There’s always more,” said Addyson. “But you’re right. Some of the things I had planned as my life’s work, I’ve had to let slip by. I feel that.”

  He took a sip of wine as if indicating it was necessary to refrain from speaking for a while to let things unspeakable and unbearable breathe.

  What was unbearable was breathing through him, and soon breath became voice once more.

  “Some of those books are antiques, by the old definition—older than me. They’re all antiques in terms of scarcity. But, in a sense, the whole of existence can be looked at as an antique.

  “There’s a quote—‘The greatest of poems is an inventory.’ I think the next line goes, ‘Every kitchen utensil becomes ideal when it’s washed up from a shipwreck.’ Something like that. That’s G.K. Chesterton. Funny the things you remember.

  “Anyway, the point is, although the older parts of existence are often rarer examples of their type, all of the known world is finite, and each part of it, actually, is unique. It’s all just what has survived. The present moment is all that is washed up from the shipwreck of the past. And so every single molecule of it potentially has the fascination of the antique.”

  “That sounds too detached,” said Fletch.

  Addyson was puzzled at the disapproval in his tone.

  “Detached?”

  “Yeah. As if it doesn’t matter what survives and what doesn’t.”

  Addyson understood. It was the detachment of mysticism that Fletch feared, the renunciation of the world in the seeming affirmation “It’s all one.” If he tried to defend this mysticism, it would complicate matters, and if it were worth defending, perhaps it needed no defense. Besides which, he had meant what he said—but was it so simple?—as the opposite of detachment. />
  “Ah … I see what you mean. No. It’s like seeds.”

  “Seeds?”

  “Yes. That’s how I see it. Like a seed bank. That’s what my library and my writing are. You know, many years ago, although it barely entered into the newspapers, there were people in power who made the possession of certain seeds illegal, because they wanted a monopoly on crops. Now, this was a crime, a real crime, to limit existence by trying to eliminate the potentialities contained in those seeds.

  “Well, but, if you have managed to hide away even one seed somewhere, it is possible to grow those potentials again. And a book is a seed too, of course. And maybe there could come a time when there is only one book left, but in such a case we would have to hope that it would contain enough information to regrow the lost culture.”

  “Okay,” said Fletch, apparently satisfied, and he nodded.

  In many ways, Addyson hankered for solitude, or he required it. However, the moment of parting was always something he needed to steel himself for, if it was from anyone who might truly be considered company. This too, perhaps, was a sign that games were over. Some kind of communication needed to take place, and it was work, and—this was the whole thing—he had to be alone to have a chance of communicating with others. But it was dreadful work, if he could call work what had so long remained in his head, untranslatable.

  The body takes longer to heal as it grows older, and, in the same way, the transition from engagement with human presence to solitude had become unexpectedly jagged and painful to Addyson. He had to get on with this work of his—whatever it was—but when Fletch left, in theory allowing this, he felt incapacitated by the pain, as if he were a scraggy old bird from whom another patch of feathers had just been ripped out. It was clear that he could not concentrate on much for the moment, but he was not going to sit dazed now. He would carry out some very simple task, requiring only the barest presence of mind—enough of a task to soothe, not enough to tax.