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M O R N I N G S

A DRAMALOGUE

The Friend – The Father

Life and death, past and present -

Marionettes on a toy stage.

When the strings are broken,

 Behold the broken pieces.

                    [Zen verse]

It has begun - as my prophetess said it would. A slow, painful unwinding: an attempt to find that marginal space where despair and joy dance. It is a space I found many years ago, and now must find again.  So many questions to answer: but one above all others - "why?" Not "why life?" Not "why death?" But only the question stripped of substantives. I have had to do it before.It seems no easier now, even though I must do it not for myself but for my friend.

At the first dawn the questioning came as surely as dawn itself. An awakening without explanation. Without explanation, we invent mythologies and seek refuge in sleep. Sleep: a necessary separation to ease the anguish of the unanswered question. We years for separation as inexorably as we yearn for conjugation. But in desperation it always seems to diminish its restorative power. My friend cannot find it now, I know. Can I?

How many times has the question occurred? We cannot know because the dawns are beyond imagining. The whole body of recorded literature is one drop in the ocean of questioning; a single note in all the possibilities of sound; and resonance; and harmony; and discord. At moments the question has had peculiar force, as on Calvary. It seems to have transported the Buddha into eternal sleep. There must have been many more, but their cries, and any answers they might have given are lost in the silences, and all we can now imagine is what they tell us of unimaginable eruptions, and interminable alternations of ice, rain, and drought. What capacity to survive have we lost in this vast unwinding since the first dawn? And how can we recover a little of it? The prophets are always somewhere in the future. But what if time were just another little invention, like sleep, to pacify the terror of unknowing? Might not the prophecies be dim memories of what has been? My friend must survive: but can I find the means to project an internal acceptance to another?

Words — the universal toolkit of the being: a refuge, as necessary as separation and conjugation. So fragile, and ultimately so useless, because we can only frame the questions, and suggest an answer with them, and they have no permanence. Each answer that that has ever been is turned and wound into something that fits now. And now, in the vastness of time, is just a moment frozen before another dawn. When the word fails the act waits patiently as understudy, used less now as we bury ourselves in paraphernalia. Our life form, a precious inheritance from the convulsions and extremes of history, is ever more a preoccupation with junk. Without dustbins life on earth would disappear as we conceive it; think it; see it. Even our precious words have become inseparable from the paraphernalia. And yet it is only words which can help now. But will he listen?

Birth. A dawn for those responsible: a little creature struggling rom warmth and comfort, as fragile as the word – destined to be misunderstood, abused. The beginning can be the end, because there must be interference: in birth as in death. The separation of a baby from its mother after birth, even for a moment, may do irreparable damage. But theories must be obeyed. Euclid defined the line, the circle, the square; and we are taught to model the universe upon precise and provable theories. There are forms to be completed; innumerable theories about mothercare framed by well-intentioned males with their souls securely lodged between their legs. Civilisation is predicated upon the statistics of birth and death by males for whom tidiness and reckoning is all. As soon as we learned to plant, and invented the idea of a settling-place with granaries, the reckoning began. The ultimate obscenity became a grain or a body unaccounted for, dead or alive. Statistical cime is anathema: the eleventh commandment. A little controlled rage might help?

We are subjugated to commandments: they surround us like the poisonous atmosphere we have created. By statute we have all been declared offenders, without exception. We legislate existence: the comings and goings; the triumphs and failures. All pleasures save one are subject to tax; and since this freedom to conjugate and propagate is crucial for adult sanity there will be immortal fame for one who can find a way to tax this freedom. But what of the fragile creature that emerges from the ecstasy?

One must cry for the young: bright with hope, faces shining with beauty and promise. The eagerness is there if one can perceive it, but there is also despair. There is an awareness in the young that we face an unwinding. In eternity it is a moment of no importance, but the young do not understand the vastness of eternity, and its essential emptiness. They have been infected with a dread disease: belief in progress. It is far more dangerous than the contemporary plague, for it encourages the illusion of hope. Improvement is the creed of the age, in spite of the obvious fact that we are entering shrivelling of hope and vitality.

My inner being trembles for his suffering, for he must bear the pain of incomprehension. He will be swamped with condolence; but this is not an event for which condolence has relevance or meaning. His son was not the victim of an accident: he chose to die. There is nothing in Western philosophy which prepares a man for this. It is anathema – like a body unaccounted for. The religions of the West do not accept death as a choice: strange since Christ chose to die.

My son ended his life in an act of deliberate and violent protest and affirmation; my friend’s son has done the same. So we have become brothers; survivors of dramas enacted within our space and our perception. We survive to tell the tale, and give it meaning, if we can. Pavese, a suicide as notable as any this century, put the problem in his characteristic way:

The connection between destiny and superstition: the former is an instinctive action, not yet understood or foreseen, the latter is an instinctive action after its meaning is understood. The first is a way of being alive, the second of being dead.

It is a wonderful riddle - whether we choose to die by living or live by death. Either way, the destination is the same.

Morning I

Morning has limped as gracelessly as it can in Northern latitudes; the sky distressed, uneager to lighten. I heave myself into a routine which has been unchanged for many years. I perform little rituals which have become comforts. I know the bare facts, and I know of the suffering that has had to be endured for several weeks. Doubt and uncertainty brought fantasies as comfort to him. His son was safe - somewhere. Then the cold reality of knowing that he was dead - by his own hands. Grief has made him seek me out, because he knows he is now in territory I have visited before. Grief must be transformed into understanding if he is to survive. I have not seen him since he learned the truth, and I am not prepared for the harrowing to come. Though what has been done once can, I suppose, be done again. Loss and emptiness can create strange patterns of acceptance. Artificial order is what I need, and it is bestowed by the familiar cup; and the invariable discontent with the cat that refuses to see that the world is in turmoil. The bell rings, and I know that the first morning has arrived.

You look ghastly, old friend. I know what pain you are suffering, but I have prepared a jug of Blue Mountain coffee that will remind you of happier days in Jamaica when we were young, our eyes undimmed by sadness.

You are kind and gentle - the only one I could turn to. Why? In the bloom of youth? Nothing in my life has prepared me for those dread words - "your son is dead."

What do you imagine could have prepared you for such a shock?

Nothing.

Nothing is an empty space, without margins and boundaries. Your life has been too deeply concerned with youth to permit such a negative thought. The "subtle thief of life" - you once wrote a poem on that theme.

At the time it seemed a clever fancy. So much poetry is fancy with words and ideas. This is real. I simply do not understand the taking of one's own life. I never will. It is abominable.

You will, if you have strength to make it so.

I have not.

Then I will try to lend you some. You know I have mourned as you do; lost as much. Drink your coffee - it will make you feel better.

I hate coffee. It was his preferred drink.

If you won't drink it to make yourself feel better, then drink it as a homage, a bitter- sweetness that will put your grief in perspective.

How can there possibly be perspective in what he has done? He has declared an unwillingness to live.

A willingness to die. There is a difference.

The difference seems academic; not worth the argument.

It might be. But it will take more effort than you ever devoted to persuading the young that Chaucer's humour was easily accessible. What of Keats' letters to Fanny? How do you explain them?

Fortunately, I have never had to. They are "background". I have always regarded life as separate from literature; predicated upon pattern; an orderly proceeding from one thing to another; goals; effort. All things are achievable, but only in time and with effort. I remember telling him that when he was ten, I think. This violent revenge; this hurt to those who loved him; it is unacceptable.

If literature is separate from life, why read it? And, as for time, the young today do not see it the way we do. One must cry for them: bright with hope; faces shining with beauty and promise. The eagerness is there if you can perceive it, but there is also despair, born of an awareness that we confront unwinding. In eternity it is a moment of no importance. But they do not understand the vastness of eternity. They have been infected with a dread disease - belief in progress. It is far  more  dangerous than the  contemporary plague, for it encourages the illusion of hope. Improvement is the creed of the age - in spite of the obvious fact that we are entering another shrivelling of hope and vitality. There are too many threats to continuity, too many dangers.

But we have learned to accept the fact that change is possible, but only imperceptibly. Why can't they?

They feel that time is running out; that everything is running out. Their songs are lamentations, filled with despair, longing, and a sense of the hopelessness of effort. Have you not listened to their music?

I have heard it, but I have not listened - I cannot bear the turmoil and overwhelming noise. I have never thought of music as a displacement of reality.

That's it, precisely. The level of noise, the persistent heart-beat - it is a consolation because it is neverending. Their songs do not end: they fade to give room for another modulation of melancholy. In our youth a song had an ending, a resolution. I suppose that is because our music, our harmony, derives from the ceremonies of the Church. Their's has its roots in a primitive consciousness. We look forward; they look back, with the unconscious memory of another state of being in which the inner anguish mirrored the turbulence of existence. We have grown too used to life without pain, just as we have grown used to life without purpose.

I never thought of it that way. I have spent my life in teaching, which is a commitment to the future. The past I have always thought of as a vast body of undiscoverable history, its meaning only partially available, and even so only with enormous effort.  

The young are capable of effort, but they see no good reason to exert it for outworn ethics. They see nothing in the orthodox religions to answer their questions; neither can they believe in the shallow optimism of commerce and business, getting and spending. That is why they flock to unorthodox solutions - the sects grow daily and multiply. They will, quite literally, try anything.

Are all the old answers invalid? Must everything be swept away? Why don't they try?

They do try. But they are not unintelligent - especially those who, like your son, read widely and deeply. After all, that is what we encourage them to do. And having read they look about them. And what do they see? A world resolutely bent upon self-destruction. Self-destruction has become respectable: politically justified, economically necessary.

They seem so selfish, wanting everything their own way, unwilling to wait for anything.

They think us selfish, because we have so little time for their sadness, and the urgency of resolving the tragedy they seem to be living - the terror of unknowing; the absurdity of it all.

I thought I understood my son, but it is obvious that I did not; could not.

None of us understand our children, because we want them to be like us. We want them to benefit from our experience, and we want to save them some of the pain we have known. These are utterly useless premises upon which to build understanding. They know that, but they cannot easily bring themselves to ruin our illusions.

But they do, by their manner of dress and appearance; their adoption of eccentric life- styles. Their rejection shrieks at you as you walk down Oxford Street.

True - but they still have compassion for their parents. They try to come home for Christmas, even though it has now become a wholly commercial celebration.

How can his self-destruction, and the chaos it has brought, be seen as compassion? Answer me that!

There is an answer, believe me. But it cannot be framed in a sentence. There is much patient disentanglement to be gone through before it can begin to emerge. We shall find it together. But I need your help.

I will help in any way I can, but my whole being is disordered. I seem to have lost the power to think, even to remember. I find myself in situations completely unaware of how or why I am there at all. Everything seems so pointless; life meaningless. Dejection has made me numb and unresponsive.

Yet you were not unresponsive a moment ago when we were discussing the problems of youth.

That was a flicker. It is already dead.

Then it must be rekindled until it awakens like a reluctant bud when the wind blows. 

That seems to me as unlikely as is the thought of seeing him again.

There is a level of awareness beyond mere seeing. Your son may be out of sight, but not necessarily out of reach.

I did not come here to be instructed in the mysteries of Buddhism. I have come for help. I know how you came to accept the loss of your son, and your wife. That way is not for me.

You do not know. All I ask of you is that you rule out nothing. Try to empty your mind of all those allegories of life that have determined you as a citizen of the Western world. It will be difficult, because the prejudices lie deep, and were put there at an early age.

How can one cease to be what one is?

By accepting that the spirit has eyes to see what is denied the eyes. That is why the Buddha always seems to be asleep. What we see is so often a distortion of reality. The police have learned this fact - eye-witnesses of an event seldom tell the same story.

I gave up the search for reality when I read the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials at the age of sixteen.

So, I think, did a whole generation which had no understanding of history. If facts become unbearable we replace them with fictions. The important point to bear in mind is that some of the fictions come closer to the truth than rational thinking has ever done. Some fictions, on the other hand, are little more than self- deception. At perhaps no time in recorded history has self-deception been as universal as now. Wherever you look you can see spiritual values surrendering to that omnivorous monster of a philosophy - material progress. And the greed which fuels its advance is in plentiful supply, unlike the resources it relentlessly devours.

Why do you insist on making me more depressed than I already am?

If truth depresses you, then you may be beyond help.

You have always, as long as I have known you, talked about "truth" and "reality" as though they were self-evident; subject to definition. I have always found both as fugitive as "beauty" or "justice".

There is a reality which can blur the distinction between what a man is and what he thinks and feels, and can give substance to just one sublime decision. It is a reality which cannot be understood in the way that a book or a friend can be understood. Books and friends, as Mishima (the author of spectacular suicide) said, are the spiritual companions of youth; the one ever constant, the other ever changing. At varying times in our life we have one or two books of neverending importance, and we are drawn to them  because they support and validate a deeply felt conviction, a truth that somehow explains and mitigates the chaos within and without. For Mishima, that book was Yamamoto Tsunemoto's Hagakure. If we have read widely and sensitively, we can find the words scattered throughout our reading - paraphrases which lend substance to what is felt. That is why, at times in our life, we search so desperately for the act of communication, especially with those we love.

He was always talking to me about the difficulties of communicating; the ambiguities inherent in our use of words. I could not make him see that words are just another convention, like opening doors for women, or giving up one's seat in a bus. Even courtesy is taken as an offence these days!

He had, I suspect, come to regard words as altogether too important. That is one disadvantage which comes from too much reading. The need to communicate can become a crisis; and crisis insists upon resolution: for it is the invisible point where choice is finely balanced, where dark meets light. It is a moment which cannot be sustained for long, because it is the one moment in our existence when all possibilities are available: a minute definition in a neverending story which resists definition; a moment of true spiritual and physical freedom, when the real is at last rid of its shadow, the apparent.

Words do have their uses, after all. You have a way with them. Why then did he feel that only the act of self-extinction was left?

The clues are all in Hagakure - the book of the Samurai. The Tokugawa peace lasted for two centuries; but it had hardly begun when philosophers began to complain that the old heroic ideals had given way to luxury, excess and weakness. It is all contained in the word ukiyo. Originally it signified the Buddhist world of sorrow and grief. The new meaning it acquired was the "floating world" of sex and money, and one image it evoked in ukiyo-e art was that of the wave, the spending of passion in endless shapes and forms; a majesty of natural art dissipating itself in rippling foam.

What on earth has that to do with the chaos he has created?

More than you can now imagine, for he understood better, perhaps, than you the battleground where mind confronts body. He had read about Seami, the architect of No theatre. He is for the Japanese what Shakespeare is for the English. Of his many perceptions one comes to mind:

     What the mind sees is the essence;

     what the eyes see is the performance.

You are, understandably, concerned now only with what you see - an inexplicable event; the performance of death chosen in preference to life. Only the mind can help you illuminate the essence; the reason why.

You make it all sound so plausible.

It is not so difficult to explain the way to a place one is familiar with. Dawn? Tomorrow? At the first dawn the questioning came as surely as dawn itself. An awakening without explanation. Without explanation, we invent mythologies and seek refuge in sleep. Sleep - a necessary separation to ease the anguish of the unanswered question. We yearn for separation as inexorably as we yearn for conjugation. But in desperation it always seems to diminish its restorative power. Now - there are some practicalities. I take it that the university has given you compassionate leave?

Yes, they have been very considerate.

I think you should make some token contribution to university life - now and then. It will help to consolidate the important role you still have to play. There are other young. And what you have suffered, and will continue to suffer, will make that contribution more effective. The next practicality concerns Janna - how is she taking all this?

With stoic determination, of course - as she seems to take everything. A "daughter of the reolution" one might say. If I understood him little, I probably understand her less.

Do not fool yourself into thinking that this will not affect her deeply. But she is more private than you. One cannot be wholly private and be a teacher. You must be very gentle with her. Give her space to find her own way of coping with grief. As a mother she will find it difficult to accept that he never asked her for help.

I don't think he asked anyone. I certainly had no clue that he could do this dreadful thing.

He probably had someone in whom he could confide.

I have done everything possible to find that person.

You may never know. It is odd that the world so quickly turns the other way at the sight of grief. It offends, like the bureaucrat's distress at a grain unaccounted for.

I don't understand the obvious embarrassment felt by colleagues I have known for years.

You will. Now - there are things you must do. There are books you must read, because your son read them, and they influenced his final decision. And you must assemble all the evidence to enable us to reconstruct the state of his mind as the end drew near.

He left so few clues.

But what he left is undoubtedly significant. So overlook nothing. Now - go back to your family who need you now as never before, and bring me what evidence you can find tomorrow. Then we can begin the disentanglement. It may be a long process, and one which will inevitably cause you pain, because the happy moments in his life are as important as the unhappy ones. I have had to go through it all, and much of the territory is familiar.

I suppose you know best. But how will I cope with the vacant spaces when you are not there? Those are the times which I dread. You have a way with words. For the first time in my life they are like disobedient children.

The spaces will, in time, give up their vacancy, and words will once again give meaning and perform as they should. The mind cannot tolerate vacancy for long, and if we did not have so much work to do, you would undoubtedly invent something. That work begins tomorrow. You have much to do, as I have. There are four lines by Richard Garnett which I have written out for you.

Without reading it, for fear of what it might say, and for fear of being overcome and appearing unmanly, he left.

     Love wakes men, once a life-time each;

     They lift their heavy lids, and look;

     And lo, what one sweet page can teach,

     They read with joy, then shut the book.

Throughout our brief discussion his voice has wavered between controlled calm and that special kind of sound humans make when the impulse to cry almost overwhelms the ability to speak. He will cry, I know, but in privacy, or wrapped in the arms of his wife. Because I have lived many years in Japan he knows that I have come to adopt a strict discipline where the display of excessive emotion is concerned. In the days to come that may  be helpful, and lend to our discussions a steadiness which is necessary when trying to understand events of great significance.

Noon is the best time to sit in the shade, surrounded by light, and with the minimum of shadow. I pray for a kind  English  summer to help us through this crisis. After many years in the harsh extremes of Northern Japan I have come to love the gentleness of an English garden: not only a work of art to admire, but also a source of strength, encouraging the illusion that we might, after all, do battle with Nature and win a skirmish or two. I thought about the circumstances of the event which has brought such distress to my friend and his family, and the ways in which it mirrors those which led my son to end his life. Love is nearly always at the root of such catastrophes. move men to extraordinary courage and desperation has been celebrated in the literature of all races. There is a passage in Lafcadio Hearn's Kokoro which I might give him to think about. It has a coolth  which an understanding of Japan has brought to many Western writers.

The biologists tell us that most of what we are is inherited, including our resistance to death by disease. There are other inheritances too, but they resist clinical proof. I will have to dredge up much of my friend's past, and his relationship with his son, for I am overcome with the conviction that it is not solely Ishi who holds a key.

They who have vainly loved only seem to die; they really live on in generations of hearts, that their desire may be fulfilled.

I wonder.

The dawn overflows with a brightness that one seldom sees in England - an annunciation.  Birth. A dawn for those responsible; a little creature struggling from warmth and comfort, as fragile as the word - destined to be misunderstood, abused. The beginning can be the end, because there must be interference: in birth as in death.  This dawn may be a blessing, for I feel sure it has wakened my friend, and he will soon be here. I must be prepared. The coffee. The comfort of tidiness and composure.

Morning II

You look a little less ghastly than yesterday. How are you?

I could not sleep. Too many memories, swarming like bees.

How is Janna?

As always. Determined that nothing can shake her confidence in herself.

Have you seen the other children?

Yes. They are baffled. They are both well-equipped for a certain kind of survival, but this has shocked them. The self-denial of life is something they have never even considered as a possibility. So they say. They find it unforgivable.

And Janna?

She, too, can not forgive. It is a monstrous act - against Nature.     

Nature permits things undreamt of in philosophy.

I have been scavenging for clues, but they are so few. He seems to have thought of everything.

Does that not suggest that when he left for Innsbruck he had already decided that there was only one ending? That this had somehow been ordained?

But why?

That is what we must try to discover. We can only do that by working backwards. When did you last talk to him?

The night before he left for Innsbruck. He had been dejected since Christmas. He never talked much about his inner life, but his face told everything. When happy, it took on the promise of dawn; when sad, it reminded me of November, the month when everything is in haste to retreat. We talked intimately that evening, for the first time in many years. He did not unburden himself, but rather gave me the impression that he fully understood the consequences of Ishi's impending rejection. I urged him not to go, but his innate pragmatism was plausibly argued: he had paid for the ticket, so why waste the energy that had gone into earning it? He said he would get married anyway. I remember rebuking him for being cynical about deeply important feelings. How could I possibly have known that at that moment I might have deflected him? That I was in the presence of a being crying for help, but unwilling to utter it?

You probably know less than your faithful dog knows. You have been civilised. That is to say, you have been taught to believe that what yousee is what is. Have you forgotten perception?

What do you mean?

Perception, like courtesy, is a capability which life today values little. It is beaten out of us, at an early age, because it threatens the order of things. The civilised person has answers and explanations for everything. He has been brought up to believe in answers. The civilised are bulwarks in their own way, but they cannot understand innocence. Your son was an innocent, and his innocence doomed him. The wise learn guile because it helps us to survive. 

But innocence is so beguiling. How could it have driven him to such violence?

Innocence, my innocent friend, enables a person to do things the rest of us can only marvel at: it is a quality which often lies behind heroic refusals to accept the world as it is. The truly unselfish are invariably innocent. Unfortunately, innocence is often at the mercy of misunderstanding - Cordelia is a good example in Shakespeare. In our century there have been many. A few days before Pavese killed himself, he recorded in his private journal that he never felt so "alive", so "young". The business of living, as he called it, is mysterious. And who, as a writer, could have been more successful? Why did he think, then, that he had gathered "nothing", and was falling back into quicksand? "I have nothing left to wish for on this earth - except the thing that fifteen years of failure bars from me." The last sentence tells all: "I am sickened by all this. Not words. Action. I shall write no more." It was, perhaps, the very success of his career which heightened his awareness of the absurdity of life.

That word again.

From one vantage point, life is totally absurd; meaningless. Innocence cannot comprehend the contemporary obsession with the pleasure principle. Even the ecstasy of orgasm succumbs to sadness at its passing, and the sadness can give way to rage that the anaesthesia of the moment is an illusion. Reality returns all too quickly. That is why Pavese wrote about Rome - the equivalent of your son's London:

Easy friendliness, taking life as it comes, 

money earned and spent without a thought, yet  everyone's standards, tastes, desires are wholly subjugated to money making.

What brings an innocent to rage? To desperation?

An overburden of misunderstanding, perhaps.

I tried to understand.

But he perceived that you really did not. Your premises were too far apart. It was probably the same with Ishi. For all we know he might have felt misunderstood in his school. Surrounded, as he probably saw it, by misunderstanding he sought freedom.

In death?

Where else?

It is so strange: in his everyday life he seemed to possess extraordinary patience - all his friends and colleagues have mentioned that. Yet he had no patience with life. He was also a gentle person - the children at his school loved him. Many of them wrote letters trying to explain to us why they would miss his good humour.  Yet his final act was violent. It is ironic that misunderstanding, which so frustrated him in life, now surrounds his death.

But with this difference - that he has put a question which cannot be ignored. Your life was unaffected by ambiguous doubt in failing to comprehend his view of tragedy. The questions he has now put demand answers.

Why did he not at least try us while he was with us?

He probably thought that if simple truths eluded you, then only  gesture remained.

But what he did was not an affirmation - it was a surrender.

He surrendered to the freedom of decision. It is as simple as that. Not an act of cowardice. An illustration of a truth he had discovered. He has good company: Van Gogh, Woolf, Crane, Plath, Modigliani, Hemingway - a tribe of innocents, for whom the final event was a statement.  Pavese's suicide, not as spectacular as Mishima's, was anticipated in his journal, and he posed the problem in his characteristic way:

"The connection between destiny and superstition: the former is an instinctive action, not yet understood or foreseen, the latter is an instinctive action after its meaning is understood. The first is a way of being alive, the second of being dead."

When did you last make a statement?

I have made statements every day for years, but they have a hollowness which sickens me. Everything about life has always seemed to me tentative. Janna is a woman for whom statements are all-important. It is strange that she cannot accept his statement. I think I will give up teaching. If you are tentative you are accused of being indecisive; if decisive you are accused of intellectual bigotry.

Nonsense. The art lies in stating your tentative interpretations with decisiveness. When you have come to an elementary understanding of what your son achieved, your teaching will graduate to a higher level.

What do you mean by "achieved"? What achievement can there possibly be in concluding his life at thirty, and bringing such grief to those who admired and loved him?

That will, I hope, become clearer when we have considered all the evidence. At the moment your mind is over-clouded with grief. You say that he seemed composed the evening before he left for Innsbruck?

Yes. He betrayed nothing of the anguish he must have been enduring. He was strangely calm.

That, I suspect, was because he was already past the point of anguish.

You mean he had already decided?

Not necessarily - but he probably saw death as one of two alternatives, and he may have been living with them for some time. For those brave enough to contemplate the escape from futility, death is a possibility kept in reserve - the spade in a game of no-trump. There is a passage in Hagakure which emphasises the importance of being prepared:

         When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your reasoning beforehand, there is most often shame. Reading books and  listening topeople's talk are for the purpose of prior resolution.

The decision was one he was prepared for: it was only a matter of "when?" not "why?"

When we went to Innsbruck - after he had disappeared - we went through his belongings. He took nothing with him. There were tickets for plays paid for in advance; some school work; and some books to read. Nothing to suggest that he did not intend to return.

Because he knew that the other possibility was to accept Ishi's decision not to marry him; reconstruct himself, and pick up the threads of his life with part of his inner being lost for ever. Not to be able to live life whole can be  a dreadful prospect. We learn to do it, of course, because we accept the fact that life is a neverending subtraction from wholeness. It is the way of an unheroic age.

Do you really lose part of your inner being when your love is rejected?

There are volumes of testimony. The question lovers have always asked themselves is whether life is worth living with that part of the inner being, given to another, lost. The gift of self is only exceeded by the gift of life.

But what a terrible gift for the receiver! What torment has he committed her to? Can you imagine what she must feel now, and will continue to feel for the rest of her life? What we feel?

Yes, I can. But you must understand that what he did was not as revenge. Her pain, like your's and Janna's, will pass, and he will remain as part of you until you die. What he could not achieve in life he has achieved in death.

I have always found it difficult in teaching literature to explain to young minds, as yet untouched by love's fury, why it is so often associated with death.

I know. A young mind cannot comprehend the  two great mysteries of love and death, until it has at least experienced something of the irresistible power of love. It is the key to all mysteries.  There is a passage in Hearn's Kokoro which you may remember:

         Modern science assures us that the passion of love, so far as the individual may be concerned, is 'absolutely antecedent to all relative experience whatever.' In other words, that which might well seem to be the most strictly personal of all feelings, is not an individual matter at all. ... There would seem to be some sort of ghostly remembrance in first loves. It is true that that science, unlike Buddhism, does not declare that under particular conditions we may begin to recollect our former lives. That psychology which is based upon physiology even denies the possibility of memory- inheritance in this individual sense. But it allows that something more powerful, though more indefinite, is inherited, - the sum of countless billions of trillions of experiences.

Your son must have loved greatly to have reached a perfect acceptance of death: the inevitability we understand least, and fear most.

We will never know. He destroyed everything that might have betrayed the truth that only he knew.

That is as it should be. No one, not even you his father, could possibly understand; for when we love deeply we illustrate it in gesture and touch and manner. Those illustrations were for one only, and are irrecoverable. From what you have told me about him in the past I suspect that he did not verbalise his love for Ishi.

He wrote me once, before her first visit to Europe. All he said was - "be kind to her. I love her."

Economy with words is one feature that must have appealed to him about the traditional ways of the Japanese.

And their insistence on courtesy. That is why, when he lived with me for the last year of his life, he introduced me to the ceremony of preparing and eating supper. He tolerated, with good grace, our Western eating habits, but he clearly felt uncomfortable at our lack of ceremony, and the apparent panic with which we attack food.

The traditional tea ceremony derives from an age of extreme violence, and its stillness is a metaphor for the concept of yugen - all that is remote, unfathomable, beyond vocabulary. The concept pervades No theatre too, which is why the No actor needs gesture to intimate what words fail to suggest. It is a space of eternal tranquillity and beauty to which all art points, so it can be felt, but never described - like Eliot's Chinese jar which moves perpetually in its stillness.

I remember once participating in a traditional tea ceremeny in Kyoto. Though I did not understand the significance of the complex ritual, it was deeply moving.

We shall return to this, when you have read more deeply some of the sources for our knowledge of medieval Japan. Meanwhile, we must try to find indirect sources to help our research. What has survived?

His books; some essays written at the university; and his two theses. Oh, and two letters from Ishi which came the week before he left for Innsbruck. All her other letters were destroyed.

Janna has an uncanny instinct for the relevant. Ask her to look through his books and pick out those which might help us understand his state of mind. I would like to read his essays and the two theses as well. Can you get the theses copied so we can read them independently?

There is no need - there are two copies of each: his own, and mine. I can have the essays copied.

Until we have digested the evidence which he chose to leave we cannot go much further.

What do you mean by "chose to leave"?

It is obvious that your son planned everything with meticulous care, destroying what might reveal his relationship with Ishi, but leaving clues for you to understand what he did. Those clues, and how you respond to them, are a vitally important part of his plot.

Plot? I don't understand.

My friend, you are living in a play he has created for you and Janna, and Ishi and her family. "The world's a stage" is no longer a metaphor. He did not know how it would end, of course, but I think he trusted you not to compound the tragedy.

I don't understand.

What is the point of tragedy? Surely, it has a moral purpose? Otherwise, the pain and suffering we witness on the stage is little more than  rhetorical anger at a world governed by blind furies. I don't think he believed that. Nor do you, or you would not have been a teacher as he was, however briefly. Unless he had some confidence that you would find the clues he left, and eventually understand what he tried to illustrate, he would have left nothing. No audience will tolerate total ambiguity. 

Drama was always for him the form which gives the artist the greatest possibility to portray the fundamental enigmas of life, and tragedy its most sublime manifestation.

Quite so. What he conceived was momentous: not a contrived situation to which you can only respond - or not respond - as observer, but one in which you are a participant and must perform your part. It is a part with many possibilities, and there are choices to be made at every point. Extraordinary.

What is?

I was just thinking of Prospero's Epilogue, and the reference to his project. And the last two lines:

         "As you from crimes would pardon'd be,

         Let your Indulgence set me free."

I wonder what he made of that?

I can't remember, even though I read his thesis carefully.

Bring what you can tomorrow. By then I shall have read the play again - with an empty mind.

In a world in which nothing is certain, we are cast, without a specific role, to play our part. Whatever we create we are haunted by the inadequacy of  vision. Condemned to view the world through a darkened glass, we are nevertheless driven, every minute, towards the absolute. Our own shadow is a dark reminder of what we are and what we must return to: the dark distorted shape of a two-legged creature sprawled on the dust of the earth. Haunted thus, we voyage out towards the ever-receding horizons of our dreams.

                                                           We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Morning III

Our insatiable quest for the truth drives us from all that is immediate and draws us towards an understanding of our limitations. In defining our point on the circle we approach a definition of stasis. We becomes a sculpture, without sense or sight, frozen in a world of ceaseless change. How strange that he should choose to embrace his transformation at Easter - the time of daffodils and cherry blossom. Noon is the best time for such thoughts, before the shadows come.    

         I have re-read the play - it disturbs me. So many riddles. A dream - a dance - enchantment and terror, the spirit and the flesh. Magicians command, and we are, like willing subjects, subjugated by commandments: they surround us like the poisonous atmosphere we have created. It is not now possible to exist without breaking one of the multitude of forbiddings. By statute we have all been declared offenders - without exception. We legislate existence; the comings and the goings; the triumphs and the failures. All pleasures but one are subject to tax, and since this freedom to conjugate and propagate is crucial to adult sanity there will be immortal fame for one who can find a way to tax this freedom. But what of the fragile creature which emerges from the ecstasy?

I see you have come with evidence. More than I expected. You look much better today.

Five little goslings hatched yesterday. One was rejected. Janna brought it in, fed it with an eye- dropper, and held it close to her all night. I never heard such tiny sounds of gratitude as the little creature made. This morning it suddenly asserted itself; decided that life was for living, and did what new-born goslings are supposed to do. Within minutes it was returned to its rightful mother, who has accepted it. Rejection, and then acceptance. It is strange.

Wonderful, I would say. Animals are so realistic, unlike us trapped with illusions. We do not observe Nature closely enough - we are too obsessed with its attractive disguise. Now, show me what you've brought.

Well, there are his two theses. The books which Janna thought significant, and essays written while he was an undergraduate, as well as some when he was doing his postgraduate research.