Wherever They Are to Be Found

 

“We’re always buying books,” the Artist used to tell people who wondered what we did all winter. We felt it as a big loss when all three bookstores in Benson closed (one because of death, one due to retirement, and one when the owner moved out of the area). The only independent bookstore I know of in Cochise County now is down in Bisbee, and getting to Bisbee always seemed to take a lot of planning, so much so that we hadn’t been there since spring of 2021. And why would I go without my husband, who loved to read the New York Times at the library in Bisbee (only library in the county to carry it) and to enjoy a generous bowl of pho at the little hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant? 

at Bisbee library

Awaiting lunch in Bisbee

As for where to find used books, there are still thrift shops and little shops run by various Friends of the Library groups in Cochise County. The Friendly Bookstore in Willcox even has an outdoor 10-cent book table, which the Artist and I have perused for years on a regular basis. (That reminds me of someone who came in my bookstore in Northport to ask where my 10-cent books were. Nowhere, sorry! I am working for a living, not on salary or pension!) Books on the table remain outdoors night and day, in all kinds of weather, enduring baking sun and punishing dust, and in the event of rain (a rare occurrence), soaked volumes are hauled off to the waste transfer station down the road and the table refilled with a “new” lot of used books. But on my own in recent weeks, I haven’t been doing much book shopping. It isn’t the same by myself, we have plenty already in the cabin, and I can borrow books from the library. 

 

The other day, however, a shady parking spot was available across the street (shade for puppy), so I stopped, and a glance through the 10-cent books turned up a little paperback I figured had to be worth gambling a thin dime. Author Stephen Levine’s book, Meetings at the Edge, had a subtitle that began Dialogues with the Grieving and the Dying…. Now, I do not think (or feel that) “the Universe” put that book out there for me to find. On the other hand, the subtitle did speak to my situation. 

 

Each chapter begins with someone calling “the Dying Project,” a free telephone consultation service provided by Stephen and his wife Ondrea (1979-82) for the “terminally ill and those working closely with a death.” Some callers had cancer, while others had family members who had received a terminal diagnosis or were already near death. One woman’s daughter had been murdered. There were occasional professionals who worked with dying patients and had a crisis of their own at the same time.

 

A family member wrote to me recently that “when we open ourselves to love, we open ourselves to pain,” and reading that it occurred to me that the briefest way I can describe the lessons in Meetings at the Edge is that the author gradually brings his callers to see that they – and that is, we, all human beings-- must be open to pain and loss and even to death in order to be fully open to love and to be truly alive, because if we fight against what is, we cannot be fully alive in the world as it is.

 

Disclosure: I am not a Buddhist. (In fact, I am so not-Zen!) And this book is saturated with Zen metaphysics. But just as I find the way people treat other people much more important than anything they say they believe, so as I read this book I set the metaphysics to one side and focus on the practice, which is not a turning away from or attempting to cover over grief but a sitting with it, acknowledging it, with all its pain, in order to get beyond pain to a core of – Levine calls it “undifferentiated,” “eternal,” or “universal,” -- I’ll call it undying love.

 

In my last post, I quoted myself as follows: “There is no shortcut to a long relationship.” Similarly, there is no shortcut through grief. There is no spiritual pain pill, no bromide, no set of magic words to clear away the clouds of bereavement once and for all. 

 

I have written about the deep gratitude I feel for my years with the Artist, for our rich life together, along with gratitude I have for the support and love of family and friends, attentive neighbors, and even a very demanding puppy that gets me out of bed one morning after another. And all that is true and real, and the sun is shining here in Arizona (even as it snows again in Michigan), and I realize I am a very fortunate woman in many, many ways . But if anyone thinks my heart is not often heavy, that my throat does not ache and that my eyes don’t fill with tears as I drive down the highway, then I have painted a very, very misleading picture. 

 

How to wrap up this post? Perhaps I won’t even try. It is early yet in my journey….

 

Summer morning light, northern Michigan

Book Review: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

A Tale For the Time Being

By Ruth Ozeki

NY: Viking, 2013

$28.95

Do you love wordplay? Are you fascinated by the mysteries of time? Have you ever felt all alone in the world? Hopeless? Do you think the direction of a life can be changed? Have you ever tried meditation, or do you practice it regularly or maybe just thought about it? What about walks on the beach and finding surprising objects washed up by the waves? Do you believe in magic of fiction? Answering ‘yes’ to even one of these questions tells me that you will find this book as absorbing as I did.

For the time being,
 Words scatter . . .
 Are they fallen leaves?

In Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, one of the two protagonists is named Ruth and has much in common with the author. Ozeki says of Ruth the character that she is “semi-fictional,” adding that “if pressed, I would have to call myself semi-fictional, too.” One difference is that Ruth Ozeki the author is a Zen Buddhist priest, as well as an author and filmmaker, while Ruth the character only learns about meditation from Nao.

Nao. Now. Can we ever grasp ‘now’? This is one of the questions that the character Nao brings to the story and brings to Ruth the character (hereafter called simply ‘Ruth’), who finds Nao’s diary washed up on the beach inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox protected by a series of plastic bags, the outermost covered with barnacles. There are letters in the package, too, and a Japanese military watch from World War II. Did the plastic bag ride the tides all the way from tsunami-struck Japan to Ruth’s island off the coast of British Columbia?

Ruth is a novelist and has been working on a memoir ever since her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and is now deceased, came to live with Ruth and Oliver on the island. The memoir isn’t going well, and Ruth worries at times that she herself may be developing Alzheimer’s.

The spring had dried up, the pool was clogged and stagnant. She blamed the Internet. She blamed her hormones. She blamed her DNA. She pored over websites, collecting information on ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, parasites, and even sleeping sickness, but her biggest fear was Alzheimer’s. ... Like her mother, Ruth often forgot things. She perseverated. Lost words. Slipped in and out of time.

And now comes the distraction of a diary washed up on the beach, the diary of a Japanese teenager who writes as if addressing an unknown friend, as if she is writing to Ruth.

Nao’s voice begins the novel. She is writing because she has decided to commit suicide and before dying wants to record the life story of her great-grandmother, Jiko, still living, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun. Nao writes with a purple gel pen in a repurposed book—that is, a book in which the original pages have been removed (“hacked,” she says) and replaced with blank pages. She writes in English, having spent most of her girlhood in California before her father lost his job and the family returned to Tokyo. The title on the cover of the diary, the title of the book it used to be, is À la recherche du temps perdu.

The girl’s life has become a nightmare. Her father is unemployed and depressed, suicidal. The family’s savings was lost when the dot-com bubble burst and his American stock options went belly-up. Now back in Tokyo, they live in cramped, miserable housing with the sounds of their neighbors’ sex-for-hire activities coming through the thin walls. Her years in America schools have put Nao behind her classmates in Japanese language and thus in every other subject, and they bully her unmercifully, so severely that it amounts to torture, and her clueless mother (Nao hides her victimhood from her parents), working to support the family, can only suggest that Nao spend more time with her “friends,” maybe participate in some after-school activities. All this Ruth learns gradually as she reads the diary, pacing herself to try to read at the same speed that Nao was living when she wrote the pages.

At first the reader may suspect a deus ex machina when Nao is packed off, against her will, to spend the summer with her great-grandmother in a remote mountainside temple. Will the girl solve all her problems through learning meditation? Her father accompanies her to the temple, and when she sees how happy he is there, it begins to seem like an answer for his unhappiness, too. Nao decides will persuade him to spend the summer there with her. Perfect! But no, when she wakes in the morning he is gone. And while Nao learns much from old Jiko and passes the summer contentedly learning the temple ways, when summer is over she must return to a father still depressed and suicidal and classmates intent on finding ever more ingenious ways to torture Transfer Student Yasutani.

Jiko is an important character in the book, perhaps the central character in a way, although she says less than anyone else, but also important, in their different ways, are Nao’s father, Haruki Yasutani, and Ruth’s husband, Oliver. Oliver is an eccentric botanical artist with visions of enormous, time-dependent, living works that few can understand or appreciate, a fascinating character in his own right. Then there is the cast of the scattered isolated Canadian island community, people such as Muriel, a retired anthropologist who worked on middens and who loves nothing better than sorting through garbage, and Benoit, the  Québécois who runs the local dump. Here is a description of Oliver and Muriel at the kitchen table:

Oliver and Muriel talked on, although it was not quite a conversation they were having, Ruth noticed. Rather, their exchange sounded more like a session at an academic conference, two professors taking turns at the podium presenting information that they both knew, and more or less already agreed with.

Although facts are being presented, the talk is more mutual grooming behavior than any delivery of information. Haven’t we all heard and even been part of such sessions? Ozeki does not write about "social glue" but catches the gluing in process.

Nao’s troubled relationship with her father finds quieter echoes in Ruth and Oliver’s marriage. Ruth shares the diary with her husband, reading aloud to him at bedtime, but is offended and upset when he does not respond in the same way she does to the unfolding story. Does Oliver think Ruth is crazy? Does Ruth see Oliver as a loser?

The dead in this story have a great influence on those who remember or rediscover them, adding their complications to developing plot. Ruth’s mother lives on in island memory and in her daughter’s love and fear, while across the Pacific Nao discovers her great-uncle, Haruki #1, through her great-grandmother, and elevates him to hero status for his suicide death as a patriot kamikaze pilot. When she compares her father to him, she is ashamed of Haruki #2, who cannot even commit suicide successfully.

The living and the dead, the spoken and the written reveal themselves only in and through time. There is no all-at-once but a gradual unfolding. Oliver’s cat, the cat at the temple, the crow that calls to Ruth from a tree in the yard and in her dreams—all these, too, are time beings.

Because you see, on the first page of this novel we are jolted out of an ordinary, unreflective and passive reception of words. “Oh, it’s all right for the time being,” we say casually. For now. Until something better comes along. We put the accent on the first syllable of the word ‘being,’ having given the first three words equal, unstressed status. We are accustomed to the phrase and give it little thought, and so the title does not jar us. Then Nao introduces herself: “My name is Nao, and I am a time being,” and to make sense of this statement we must put the stress on the word ‘time’ and rethink the phrase. And so it continues through the novel, the gentle pressure to rethink what we think we know.

“Together we’ll make magic,” writes Nao to a reader she imagines in the future. Ruth Ozeki has made magic with this novel. I finished it one afternoon and began rereading the same evening.