by Pico Iyer
I walk into the park—the light is failing now, the evenings are coming early—and I think the boys playing baseball would have no trouble believing that fairies could put spells on us so we fall in love with the first person we see upon awakening. Gods make sport with us here as if we were living in ancient Greece (or modern India).
Every morning, in my home, my Japanese companion rings a bell and lights a stick of incense in the shrine she’s made next to her Panasonic boom box. She closes her eyes, says something very fast—or nothing at all—and I remember how, when first I met her, I took her to an amusement park, and she came out of the haunted house genuinely shaken. Ghosts are real to her; behind the flashing lights of Japan is something dark, and very old.
I look at all this strangely; growing up, I had no grandparents within several thousand miles of me, and took that to be liberation, a chance to make my own future (even to choose my own past—I could take my gods and elders, the global order told me, from Japan as much as from my ancestral India). Those born into the modern world are free, at times, if they are sufficiently comfortable and sufficiently modern, to make their own sketches of their futures, as their grandparents never could (though what they actually draft on their blank pieces of paper sometimes looks surprisingly close to what they would have drawn through inheritance).
And yet in Japan, walking around the park in the autumn light, everything blazing, and about to pass away, I wonder what it means to get one’s grandparents, one’s ghosts, vicariously (because one is missing grandparents and old wives’ tales—missing, in effect, those pieces of collected wisdom passed down from age to age that we laugh at even as we’re secretly committing them to memory). We go, some of us, to places where we can live, for a few weeks, by candlelight; we pick up a novel by a Chinese woman in San Francisco who reports that her mother saw the whistling of the wind as a wailing from her old nursemaid in Shanghai, many decades ago. Gods and ancestors are all mixed up in the old cultures—where grandmothers may be taken, as much as deer, to be messengers from somewhere else; a belief in ghosts, the shrine by the boom box says, is just, in effect, a way of having faith in what you can’t actually see.
One morning when the blue above me is immaculate, I go out and, past the long line of tearooms and souvenir stores in the center of town—glove puppets sold in the shape of Buddhas and deer—come to a small wooden gate that leads into a shy, largely forgotten temple. A white board—high-rises on all sides—tells how the temple remembers the time a deer stole in, a thousand years ago, and ate a piece of calligraphy. A young monk, seeing the intruder, threw a stone at it, and the deer collapsed. The monk, though only thirteen himself, was condemned to death, by Nara custom, for slaying a messenger of the gods. Now, the stone turtle in the temple garden asks people to pray for the boy, who would otherwise go unmourned.
When I return to my apartment, the light still radiant, my partner tells me that she just went out to see her closest friend, and the woman, hardly older than herself, held her and held her, and said that they would never meet again. She’d been diagnosed with cancer, in its final stages.
My friend silently lights her stick of incense, and rings a bell, over and over; her eyes remain closed long after the bell stops ringing.
Outside, the days turn and the leaves come down. The people in my neighborhood change their futons, pull out heaters; autumn brings festivals in commemoration of the old, and of the very young. Winter will bring a whole other set of rites, and colorful occasions whose meaning has been forgotten, but whose observance continues amidst the video games and robots. People do things because they do things here, the way we used to sing hymns in church: indeed, autumn makes the least of us philosophical, even if our philosophy never evolves, but just says the same thing every year. And the saying of the same thing becomes part of the pattern of the world, its natural shape.
I walk down the street and wonder if a large part of the human enterprise isn’t just the task of fitting ourselves into the larger order, adjusting to a scheme that will roll on and on long after we have been replaced by someone else. In England, when I was growing up, we thought of life as a play, a performance of some kind in which we were given a script at birth, asked (quite politely) to play our part as convincingly as we could, and then told (no less politely) to retreat gracefully and make room for someone else. This can mean—it usually does mean in Japan— fitting oneself into a social order, a family, a community, a company. But for those of us who choose not to be a part of that—to be permanent foreigners, you could say—it means only reconciling ourselves to, and around, the larger cycle. The woman who was sitting at my dinner table a few weeks ago, in the prime of health, is about to die. The last warm days are about to pass until they return again, five months from now.
One virtue of grandparents, of seasons, or deer who come down from the hills, is that they remind us that we don’t know everything, and can’t make the world up entirely from scratch; much of it—most of it—is beyond our reach, even beyond our reckoning. In the larger view of things, available to grandparents and ghosts, trivial things have fallen away, and important things never change.
Only the old, in some sense, are in a position to appreciate this, and to see what the young can bring with their reviving freshness. And that lady who sets up a spirit-house on her lawn in West Hollywood is telling us, without a word, that we can all of us save time by remembering the lessons of those who’ve gone before us; a large part of who we are isn’t very individual at all.
One day I pick up Ryszard Kapuśsciński’s most recent book on Africa and read that the elephant, on what is said to be the oldest continent in the world, is treated as a sacred animal, in part because he has no enemies, and also—so the legend has it— because he never dies. He just gets exhausted and walks into a lake, never to be seen again. His death is never seen or talked about; in that sense, it never happens, or is regarded only in the invisible world. I read such things—I’ve never been to the country Kapuśsciński is describing—and feel I’m hearing news from a distant radio station I can hardly catch.
Then I think of the deer, not far away—the area in which I live is called the “Southern Slope of Deer”—their ears cocked, their eyes watching from the trees, to protect the territory that is their own. In Oxford, at the college where I studied—the college I’d visited often as a small boy, growing up in the city—there was a deer park, as near where the Buddha taught, and forty or so animals walked among the elm trees beside the buildings where professors held their weekly tutorials. The deer were protected from us by a fence, but we could touch them through the gratings, and always see them as we went to classes, or back again, to plays.
It was said that the number of deer must always match the number of Fellows in the college, leading to an easy joke about what might happen every time a deer died. And once a year, in the autumn, some of us were invited to a great feast of venison when, for whatever reason, the number of deer had to be brought down. I didn’t know the meaning of the phrase “tutelary spirit” then, and even if I had known it, I would not have paid heed to it or stopped to think what it might connote: now, however, half a world away, I think of what happens when the darkness falls on Nara Park, and almost nothing is visible but the nighttime outline of the great temple and the stone steps leading up into the dark. Outside the temple, in the emptiness, you can see the large stone guardians taken from China as emblems of protection; everywhere else, the deer, stepping through the trees.
2002
THE FOREIGN
“It was as if a world of neat hollow squares and snappy counter-marching had deteriorated into rout or mindlessness.”
—GODOLPHIN, an eccentric British explorer in Thomas Pynchon’s V.
NIGHTWALKING
I fly and fly, across the largest ocean in the world, over ice floes or tropical islands, far from any season I know, and get out in an airport that dissolves all sense of time and place. Long corridors, panels of glass, screens above e
very door, clicking over. Men in suits disappearing down this escalator, appearing from that one, drifting away along that moving ramp.
I walk and walk as if across a screen myself, and at another gate, more men in black waiting to disappear into a hole, a stranger comes up to me and says, “Excuse me. Are you Pico Iyer?” I don’t know what to say, but the safest answer seems yes, and he places a book of poems in my hands, stands beside me as a flashbulb pops, and then is gone again.
We go up into the sky once more—six miles above the earth now, and darkness everywhere—and when we descend, a few hours later, the pilot welcomes us to Ninoy Aquino International Airport, named after the opposition leader who was killed on this very tarmac not long before. The night is dark, and my body, up now for twenty-five hours—or forty, by my watch—is full of life, ready to walk out into the morning.
I get into a car and we drive down Roxas Boulevard, sudden fireworks of silent lights around the gaudy discos and the karaoke parlors, and then the dark returning all around. I put my things in a hotel and go out again, with a new-day briskness, to get my bearings in this foreign place. Men appear in front of me talking about this girl, that club. Music thumps out of a darkened doorway. Faces are peering out at me as the door opens, and as I take shelter in a beer garden (2:00 a.m. now for the people around me, eleven in the morning for me), I see rats scuttling under the chairs where young girls, alone, eyes closed, are singing last year’s love songs.
I get up and walk, to ground myself, to try to imprint on my floating mind something solid and substantial, and as I do I pass a young girl, sitting up abruptly on the sidewalk, and starting to pass a comb through her long, straight hair. She couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen, and yet she gets herself ready for bed as if in a Manhattan duplex, and then lies down again, on the street, and pulls a sheet of cellophane above her.
Around her, all around, whole families are sleeping. Children are huddled on the main divider of the street, and parents, with clothes like mine, who look as if they expected a future not so different from mine, are stretched out in careful patterns beside the streaking taxis. I walk among these outstretched figures in the dark and another woman smiles out at me from the bushes. She is young, and very pretty. She says how warm it is tonight, how lonely. She smiles at me in the dark.
I walk and walk, to try to get back what I knew this morning (or was it last night? Two days ago?), but whatever I thought I knew has been effaced, by everything around me. In the casino on the main drag—3:00 a.m. now—there are so many bodies I can hardly move, the lights from the chandeliers catching the excited faces as figures press and shout above the spinning wheel. I step out and go exploring in the beauty salon next door, climbing the grand staircase of an old colonial mansion, and finding, at the top, girls recumbent in the hair-cutting chairs, too poor, I assume, to have real homes in which to sleep. In one room, no less mysterious, a Japanese boy lying flat out on a treatment table, a young woman coming in now and then to adjust the sheet above him, his feet protruding beneath it.
On the street again, by the cloud-covered ocean, the first fathers and their children are beginning to extend their fishing rods over the water as the sun comes up and the traffic begins to intensify behind them. In the grand hotel down the road, which remembers Marcos and MacArthur, sweepers are making the halls impeccable and uniformed workers pass through the dining room like ghosts. The first elderly couples are out now in the park, whole clusters of them, skittering, the women flashing their bright skirts like tropical birds as they practice ballroom dancing.
I go back to my hotel, ready for a good night’s sleep—it’s coming on for 9:00 a.m.—and when I awaken again it’s dark, the traffic beginning to subside outside my window, the roar of the vacuum cleaners outside my door long gone. The streets are beginning to empty out as I go out into the dark, the men, the women beginning to congregate in the shadows. But everything is less strange now because I know the routine in some way, half expect that whisper behind the trees. Very soon I won’t make out the people sleeping in the streets. The shock of the poverty will have become part of the daylight world for me, something I could easily take for granted.
In my regular life—the one I call “real”—I go to sleep every night at eight-thirty. My body gets me up as soon as it is light and by the time darkness falls I’m starting to lose consciousness, fast. All the corners of the night, therefore, everything associated with the sleeping world, is as foreign to me as Antarctica. In my regular life I know the time so well that I can tell the hour to the minute without looking at my watch.
Under jet lag, however, all that is thrown into convulsions. Not just the steady routine, the sense of clear divisions, the ability to get on with the world, in synch with it. No, something deeper is dissolved. I get off a plane, seventeen hours out of joint, and tell naked secrets to a person I know I don’t trust. A friend starts talking about her days—her plans, her friends, the things she wants to do—and tears start welling in my eyes, in a restaurant. I can’t sleep at night (because I’ve been sleeping in the day), and so I try to go through my routine, as I might in the daylight world. But I write the wrong name on the uncharacteristically emotional letter. I shower the stranger with endearments. When the lady at the bank offers me a $3,000 credit for the $30,000 cheque I’ve given her (a large part of my yearly income), I smile and say, “Have a nice day.”
I often think that I’ve traveled into a deeply foreign country under jet lag, somewhere more mysterious in its way than India or Morocco. A place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago, and yet, now, a place where more and more of us spend more and more of our lives. It’s not quite a dream state, and yet it’s certainly not wakefulness; and though it seems another continent we’re visiting, there are no maps or guidebooks yet to this other world. There are not even any clocks.
I live these days in Japan, and my mother, who is in her seventies, lives alone in California. Every time I want to look in on her, therefore, I get on a plane and take the ten-hour flight across the Pacific. But for a week—at least—after I arrive, I’m not myself. I look like myself, perhaps, I may sound something like myself, but I’m wearing my sweater inside-out and coming out from the unremarkable movie Bounce very close to tears. I’m not the person I might be when I’m antic or giddy or have been up too late; I’m a kind of spectral being floating above myself.
Every time I fly back to Japan, I become the meridian opposite of that impostor, a Sebaldian night wanderer who can’t be trusted to read or write anything for at least another week. If I visit my mother four times a year, therefore—a reasonable thing to do in the ordinary human scheme of things—I spend eight weeks a year, or almost a sixth of my life, in this nowhere state. Not quite on the ground, yet not entirely off it.
A day, a human day, has a certain shape and structure to it; a day, in most respects, resembles a room in which our things are ordered according to our preference. It may be empty or it may be full, but in either case it is familiar. Over here is the place where you rest (10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., perhaps), over there the place where you eat or work or feel most alive. You know your way around the place so well, you can find the bathroom in the dark.
But under jet lag, you lose all sense of where or who you are. You get up and walk towards the bathroom, and step into a chair. You reach towards the figure in the other bed, and then realize that she’s seven thousand miles away, at work. You get up for lunch, and then remember that you’ve eaten lunch six times already. You feel like an exile, a fugitive of sorts, as you walk along the hotel corridor at 4:00 a.m., while all good souls are in their beds, and then begin to yawn as everyone around you goes to work.
The day is stretched and stretched, in this foreign world of displacement, till it snaps. I sleep, and sleep again, and the dreams that come to me, suddenly and violently, seem to belong to someone else. A Buddhist scholar (whom I’ve never met in life) is talking to me about transience, I’m talking of a house burning
down, I’m slipping into a back room at a wedding with a long-ago girlfriend. Every one of the dreams, I realize when I awake, is about the dissolution of self.
Of course it is, my more settled, sensible self will tell me, your sleep itself is jangled. You’ve been hurried into the next room of consciousness before you’ve had a chance to pack. You’re falling into unconsciousness in the middle of a sentence, with the TV on, and all the parts of you undigested.
And yet, somehow—such is the state of the spell—I can’t hear this voice in the place where now I find myself. My stuff has been stolen—and stolen again—and I am suddenly bereft. A woman is speaking perfect English to me (though we are on the streets of China), and I know, somehow, that she speaks like this because she grew up in Fiji. A parade of ladies of the night walks past, and the woman, in a Chinese café, asks me what I should do about my stolen things.
When he was a boy, I recall, Rudyard Kipling awoke one night with a start, and realized that he’d been walking in his sleep. All the way through the dreaming house and out into the garden, as the light came up. “The night got into my head,” he wrote, and soon thereafter became the laureate of Empire’s troubled subconscious, all that happened on the dark side of the camp.
I go out again, as obscurely proud as a child who has climbed Everest before breakfast, and greet the figures streaming off the boat—it is Bangkok now, 6:00 a.m.—as they go to work. Vendors selling chili with meat, or mint leaves, and, on the far side of the river, monks paddling from home to home in the early light. At each house built above the water, a woman bends down to give the monks an offering of vegetables and rice.
