Somersault (13 page)

The mid-October sky was threatening rain, the gloomy road beginning to lighten in the approaching dawn, as they sped toward home, Ikuo at the wheel. Kizu, meanwhile, ruminated on what Patron had said regarding Thomas’s poem and his accompanying translation.
‘Younger I deemed truth/ was to come at beyond the horizon,’
he mused. I think that’s true. Isn’t that why I set out for America? And what was the result? I ended up never really investigating that truth.

Ikuo got out of the car for a moment. As Kizu opened the side door next to the main entrance with the same key he used for his apartment, he heard Ikuo’s voice, almost apologetically, from behind.

“I wish I could come up to my room now, but Ogi and Dancer have this plan we need to work on.”

Kizu turned around and nodded.

“Yesterday, after I drove you and went back to the office,” Ikuo went on, “Dancer told me that Patron would like you to donate something he needs, something of great value. Did you talk about this? Religious leaders might seem unworldly, but they have a practical side too, don’t they?”

Kizu suspected that Ikuo and Dancer were behind this pronouncement of Patron’s. But he merely nodded again, pushed open the solid American-type steel door, and went in alone.

2

This year Kizu sensed that the seasons were changing quickly. Even on days when the morning light shone into his room above the branches of the wych elm, the position of the light was changing, no longer reaching the spot where he sunbathed in the nude.

Kizu’s sunbathing, his middle-aged-man’s habit, wasn’t something he wanted others to see. Ikuo might be living with him and modeling in the nude, but even if Kizu often lounged nude on the sofa he never invited Ikuo to join him. Not that there were many chances to do so, with Ikuo now so busy at the office.

When he was alone, Kizu spent his time painting and preparing his readings of R. S. Thomas for Patron. He reread his note-filled paperback copy of Thomas’s poems, gathered books of Thomas’s prose writings, and read the theses and monographs that young Welsh scholars had written, like good conscientious sons. He faxed the assistant in his office back in the States a request to look for these books. Coincidentally, the assistant’s father happened to be an immigrant from Wales, from Thomas’s own parish, in fact. Though he wasn’t an Anglican but a member of a minor denomination, her father remembered seeing Thomas, a clergyman, walking through the fields wielding a walking stick like some kind of sports equipment. She added a note in the package of books saying how surprised she was to find that even the Japanese were reading Thomas’s poetry.

At one of their late-night readings, Kizu quoted the following Thomas poem.

“I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them.

“I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on

“this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
the light. To look forward? Ah,

“what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What”

Kizu and Patron always began with Kizu reading aloud from his paperback copy, Patron following along in the hardbound copy in his lap. Kizu’s translations served as reference. Then they would discuss the poem, stanza by stanza. On this particular day when Kizu had read to this point, Patron thought the poem ended there, an understandable mistake since the poems in the collected works edition he was using were almost all complete on one page.

“That’s exactly right.” He sighed in admiration. “Only someone who’s desperate, driven into a corner, could write a poem like that.”

This didn’t sit well with Kizu, the longtime teacher.

“Thomas divides his stanzas in unusual ways,” he cautioned his pupil. “The last word in this stanza,
‘What,’
is the first word in the next stanza, actually. The meaning of the line doesn’t end there.”

Patron’s response was unexpected.

“But the next stanza isn’t really necessary, is it?” he said confidently. “How did you translate the next line? What comes after
‘What’?”

“to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?”

“I see! But even though he triumphantly produced this smart stanza, if you look at the whole poem it’s an unnecessary addition, don’t you think?”

“Don’t you believe at all in this kind of
‘reciprocating touch’?”
Kizu questioned him.

“These past ten years I’ve been in the dark,” Patron said, “but I haven’t relied on a reciprocating touch.
‘I emerge from the mind’s/ cave into the worse darkness/ outside, where things pass and/ the Lord is in none of them.’
I’ve experienced this more often than I can recall, but I never attempted to find
God as I passed through there. Doesn’t Thomas at times try to be overly suggestive?

“Do you really need to keep your balance on the edge of the abyss? When I made my noisy reversal in front of the media, falling even farther into the abyss, it was like a Ping-Pong ball trying to sink down by itself into a tub of water. Even without the last stanza—no, even
with
it—I agree that this is an outstanding poem.”

Kizu felt a slight maliciousness from Patron as he smiled at him in the gloom. Trying to control his rising displeasure, Kizu took out a volume of Thomas’s prose writings and showed the following to Patron.

The ability to be in hell is a spiritual prerogative, and proclaims the true nature of such a being. Without darkness, in the world we know, the light would go unprized; without evil, goodness would have no meaning. Over every poet’s door is nailed Keats’s saying about negative capability. Poetry is born of the tensions set up by the poet’s ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

When he’d finished reading, Patron looked serious again.

“He’s entirely correct,” he said. “Thomas is a clergyman, but I think he says more telling things about poetry than about religion. In the final analysis, I should say, he’s a poet.”

Once more, Kizu felt he’d been given the slip. He said nothing. Compared to the craftiness of Patron, a man of about his own age, Kizu felt himself rather naive.

Patron continued, trying to soothe Kizu. “Of course there’s nothing of the poet about me, but I can sympathize with this particular one. This calm
ability to be in hell
and, as Keats puts it, the ability to be ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’—these would be wonderful mottoes for my old age!”

Under the light of the lamp stand, Patron’s head jutted forward as he read, and Kizu could see saliva glistening on both sides of his dark cocoonlike lips. His voice had risen in pitch, and Dancer, sensing in this a sign of excitement and exhaustion, quickly and stealthily stepped to his side, gave him medicine directly from her hand, and held a glass of water to his lips. Patron gave himself up to Dancer’s practiced movements. She then transferred the cup to her left hand and wiped the saliva away from Patron’s lips with the back of her other hand.

* * *

It was morning again when Kizu went home, but this time, instead of Kizu’s Mustang, Ikuo drove a minivan, a present from Kizu for Patron to use for meetings he planned to hold in sites outside Tokyo. Expecting that he would be attending these meetings, Ikuo was doing his best to get used to driving the van.

“I think reading that Welsh poet with you is having a good psychological effect on Patron,” Ikuo said. “For the first time in a while he came out to the front of the house, to the office, and chatted with the three of us, and he used an English phrase he said was from Thomas that he’d heard from you—
quietly emerge
. He read the poem to us. It was in the translation that you did, and I think it’s wonderful.”

Kizu reached into the briefcase on his lap, pulled out the copy he was using as a text, sandwiched in between his notes, angled it up in the pale, cloudy light, and read.

“As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea.”

Ikuo nodded. “Patron said, ‘If once again God is going
to quietly emerge
to me, I want to welcome him calmly, without flinching. I take this poem as a sort of sermon, and when I can accomplish this and I am able to
‘quietly emerge’
before you as mankind’s Patron in the end time, I hope you too can welcome me as just calmly, without hesitating.’ That’s the last thing Patron said.” And Ikuo clenched his mouth, in a way that reminded Kizu of a shallow-water fish he’d seen on TV ripping apart a turban shell, and stared fixedly at the lights of the oncoming cars.

Kizu wasn’t sure what Ikuo was thinking, but he went ahead and spoke. “I want to believe that Patron is a man of great charisma.”

Ikuo drove on in silence for a while, his mouth still set in that strange
way. And then he spoke, quietly, of something he’d apparently been considering ever since he was getting the minivan ready to take Kizu home.

“Yes, Patron certainly does have charisma. But is he planning to lead people using that charisma? That’s the question. I used to think he used the media to appeal to the dispersed radical faction when he did his Somersault, but now I have the feeling that the Somersault was necessary for
him
. Once again, he said, God would
quietly emerge
.

“That’s why,” Ikuo continued, “though I feel his charisma, I have no real sense of what kind of person he is. I’m not sure whether I should get more deeply involved. Since you’re well grounded and have a relationship with him that maintains a certain distance, I think it might be best for me to rely on that.”

3

During the week Kizu was able to talk with Dancer, who came to his apartment just as Ikuo was setting out for the office. Ikuo hadn’t told him in advance, but he’d urged Dancer to pay Kizu a visit.

The only person who had sat on Kizu’s sofa since he’d been in Tokyo was Ikuo, so now, as Dancer sat on it—teacup and saucer resting on her shapely thighs, watching Kizu as he spoke, her eyes barely blinking, the pink inside her mouth showing as she sipped her tea—she looked incredibly delicate.

Appearance aside, Kizu already knew she never hesitated to speak her mind. Today, too, she broached a topic that took him completely by surprise.

“There still is a lot of criticism of Patron,” she said. “So much it makes me realize how much more vicious the attacks must have been ten years ago. Every time some article lambasting him was sent to us I always asked Guide for his opinion, but now with things the way they are.…

“One famous retired journalist writes the most abusive, scathing things, but I don’t pay him any mind. I’d say the problem’s more with the person who’s writing than with anything to do with Patron. Recently we received a copy of a university bulletin that contained an interview between a Protestant theologian and an associate professor who’d just joined the same church. Overall it was typical overbearing criticism of Patron, the main point being their agreement that since Patron had abandoned his own church, the only way he’d be saved was to join a proper church.

“I told Patron about this, and he said he wants to keep apart from all established churches, Protestant, Catholic, or whatever. Every person has that right, he said. If he were to share the same certainty in an objective external God with the other members of a church, his critics included, he said, he might
very well lose his faith entirely. Instead of climbing into the same bed of faith with these people, he said he much preferred a gnashing of teeth and the uncertainty of belief, lying over seventy thousand fathoms, where he could taste the reason he was living in this world.…

“What I wanted to ask you, Professor, was what did he mean by
over seventy thousand fathoms?
I asked him, but he just said you mentioned it in one of your talks. Is the phrase from one of Thomas’s poems?”

Dancer stopped speaking, her lips slightly parted as usual, and gazed at the artist.

“It’s originally from Kierkegaard,” Kizu replied, “though Thomas used it several times. I do remember linking the phrase with the poetry and discussing Kierkegaard with Patron. This wasn’t directly from Thomas’s poetry collections, but something from a volume published to commemorate the poet’s eightieth birthday. . .
this
book, in fact. The author of the text I chose discusses the metaphorical uses Thomas has in his poems for the desolate farmland and sea in Wales.… The author quotes two poems; the latter, entitled “Balance,” directly mentions Kierkegaard. Let’s take a look at it.”

No piracy, but there is a plank
to walk over seventy thousand fathoms,
as Kierkegaard would say, and far out
from the land. I have abandoned
my theories, the easier certainties
of belief. There are no handrails to
grasp. I stand and on either side
there is the haggard gallery
of the dead, those who in their day
walked here and fell. Above and
beyond there is the galaxies’
violence, the meaningless wastage
of force, the chaos the blond
hero’s leap over my head
brings him nearer to.
                      Is there a place
here for the spirit? Is there time
on this brief platform for anything
other than the mind’s failure to explain itself?