by Arturo Silva
Marianne is tall and thin, with full, (artistic) breasts, large eyes, a round face and a “young” American-sounding voice; pretty, but not beautiful, she speaks fast and is also a bit confused as to why she is in Tokyo, but excitement at being in Tokyo and even and perhaps especially excitement at being confused as to why she is in Tokyo predominates, for she is one whom excitement naturally attracts, and who reciprocally is naturally attracted to excitement, the costs of confusion notwithstanding, posing no barrier to the great resonance that resides inside her delicate breast – physically, spiritually, intellectually, indeed, even and perhaps especially emotionally – a resonance resident in that breast that is all excitement. She is pretty – in an odd way; this is really to say that she is very attractive. After all, who is wholly or simply “pretty” or would even want to be considered so? – there after all lies dullness, resignation, death even, death of the face and of the spirit, and what deaths could possibly be worse? (For the face is the spirit’s window and too the reverse, the spirit draws us excitedly to this face and not to that, the one leading to the other.) No, it is far better to be pretty, or handsome in the case of a man, in an odd and not a conventional way, as Marianne is, in an opposite way. And so too, appropriately, Marianne walks in an odd way: she walks in the opposite direction. In an odder confluence (or is it coincidence?, no, confluence is wholly appropriate), she speaks much the same way as she walks, that is to say, she walks and talks in the opposite direction, excitedly. She speaks against the grain as she strides forth boldly, assuredly, enthusiastically, excitedly, when suddenly she comes to a stop, appears momentarily confused, but the costs notwithstanding, she is excited, struggles to drag her way forward again, until, suddenly, excitedly, she again breaks into her confidence-filled and forthright stride until, again, she half stops and seems to drag herself forward – excitedly. It is very difficult for almost anyone – I do not include myself here – to walk with Marianne, but it can be exciting – and here I most emphatically include myself. As one converses while walking with Marianne both participants’ words seem to go in and out of a perfectly melodious synchrony and a cacophony, the one leading to the other. However, the important point here is that the “misunderstandings” that arise are not half as exhilarating, and not a tenth, not even one percent as exciting as the poetry that results, for it is a poetry that results, an exciting and essential poetry that results when one walks and talks with Marianne. But who will or ever could know this about her unless I say it here and now? There is much more, pages, volumes more that I could say about Marianne were I so inclined at the moment, and I am very much inclined, that is freely admitted, but were I not so preoccupied, so very much preoccupied that my pen cannot maintain enough speed to keep up with my thoughts so that I must write furiously and stop momentarily to arrange my thoughts, so much so that I wonder if writing what I am so excitedly composing now is not unlike my beloved Marianne’s walk, my most dear Marianne’s talk; were I not so preoccupied with saying even more essential things about this opposite direction, about truths and lies, and other no less important matters, I would say more, much more about Marianne, the most beloved Marianne of so many of my thoughts and dreams, real dreams of for me a very real Marianne. But that will have to wait for the moment, that will have to be momentarily halted, postponed, put “on the back burner” as they say, and perhaps someday when I have or am given more leisure, though I have serious doubts of that day ever occurring in a life that is filled with preoccupations of such a pressing and demanding nature to say what is essential, then I will say all the more that I want to say about my dear and beloved Marianne. For example, I will write how she, even she, the very guardian of our dreams, Marianne, the bearer of that most mysterious, magnetic, exhilarating name, is not even sure – what an enormity! – not even she its bearer is sure how to properly spell it, there being so many variations. Marianne; Mary Anne; Marie-Anne; Maryanne; Mary Ann, and so on and so forth. I could also talk about her voice, her letters to me and the photographs of her that I possess. But all of that will have to wait – for, whether they be truths (in Marianne’s case) or lies (in all but a few other person’s cases), one thing always and naturally leads to another. If I were to describe my “real-life” (village Switzerland, outside the book) friend Marianne, and the description (sex, voice, dress, breasts, walk, talk, gestures, that whole lyrical angularity of the woman; recurring phrases, reading and listening habits; passions spiritual and erotic, joys and sorrows; artistic and intellectual tastes; and more, not forgetting that splendid, ringing laugh that would raise the saints from their meditations, or that stare that overtakes her at moments as she looks into your soul), and if this description corresponded exactly with my “character-in-a-book” friend Marianne (the capitols of Europe, inside the book), if I were to undertake such a description in that thoroughly fanciful moment of leisure that will probably never occur in a life obsessed with saying what is essential and true and naming all the hundreds and thousands and millions of lies that I have listened to and endured to the point where my actual physical constitution is at stake for the sake of holding on to a very few but wholly indispensable truths, truths without which I cannot live, truths upon which this very fragile constitution depends (and, it goes without saying, truths upon which the constitution of this description depends), if, as I say, I could and were to undertake this description of my (outside) friend Marianne, and what I said corresponded note for note and word for word with my (inside) Marianne (or however it is you spell her name), if I were free (!) to describe the one, the real, outside, village Swiss Marianne, who also, by the way, is not sure how to spell her name, this most gentle and artistic and pained of all life’s creatures, and this description corresponded to that of my (inside) Marianne, this equally artistic and least consciously literary Marianne – though Marianne has read a great deal, is in fact a better-read person than even myself, and has written some few, not many but a very few, extremely valuable pages that she has allowed me to see and some to even copy and that are far worthier than these I am writing now – this Marianne whose breast – heart, soul, sensibility – seeks as it also expresses something higher than the literature of the marketplace where the ridiculous novel-whores – not to mention the art and film whores and dance and music whores – no, this Marianne, my Marianne, whose artistic sensibility came about as a result of years on the gallery circuit and even more years on the treadmill of the conservatory, followed by many more years, punishing years, years demanding to the highest artistic and human degrees possible, years spent in the cabarets and worse places, worse even than the worst imaginable song-and-dance dives of her native state, and all of these years spent in pursuit of the most essential artistic truths, truths that could only be pursued and found by choosing to go in the opposite direction– and to go until she finally succeeded; if, as I say, the description of my equally gentle and pained, well-read and artistic village Swiss friend Marianne (outside) and my (metropolitan, remember) Marianne (inside) fit one to one, exactly and without the slightest degree of slippage, though I could forever (as most readers would no doubt prefer) claim the former a fact, the village Swiss (outside) Marianne a fact and the latter a fiction, the cosmopolitan (inside) Marianne a fiction; or better, if pushed to it, I could proclaim them both fictions – or both facts! – simply because Marianne (country or city, outside or inside) by the nature of her being, of her embodying truth, is not and never could be a lie, can only and ever be essentially true. But, as our good, dear and departed friend T. has written, “it is not possible to communicate and hence to demonstrate the truth,” and, as he has also said, “to write about a period of one’s life, no matter how remote or how recent, no matter how long or how short, means accumulating hundreds and thousands and millions of falsehoods and falsifications, all of which are familiar to the writer describing the period as truths and nothing but truths.” I see her (and Lang, and Roberta) here (in the ‘mentis acie’); I hear them now (mental ear), talking as pal
pably as I am walking with them, now, here, at this very moment and place as I write in this state of complete and entire excitement and lucidity. And as T. has also said, all attempts at saying the truth become simply lies to anyone who reads them, because after all, when one realizes that to try to write and to tell the truth that one will never succeed, that the truth will always be taken as a tissue of lies, that “the description makes something clear which accords with the describer’s aspiration for truth but not with the truth itself,” then fatefully and excitedly one goes in the opposite direction, in that direction where one thing leads to another. Come now, you ask me, you certainly do not believe in these characters of yours, in this preposterous idea of a city (these “styles of walking and styles of talking”) you are proposing? But isn’t that it? It is, it must be preposterous to maintain any parcel, or segment of truth, of something essential and essentially true. To acknowledge the impossibility of communicating any truth just as one ridiculously, absurdly, flies against all the facts in attempting it. (And perhaps too to be smashed down and crushed like a gnat in the attempt – yes, one also accepts – indeed, even welcomes – that very distinct possibility.) To talk and to walk with “facts” and “fictions” (the one leading to the other) hand in hand all the while going in the essentially true and opposite direction: to be with Marianne (Swiss, outside) and with Marianne (European, inside), fiction or most decidedly otherwise; to talk with Lang and with Lang; to walk with both Robertas. But few will ever understand this, could ever be expected to comprehend this, this which is most essentially and excitingly true. A phrase, a woman, a word, one leading to the other, and suddenly one is caught, wrapped up, enthralled, and excited, one thing leading to another, and one is forever off in that opposite direction. Lord, how when one was younger one was content simply – joyously perhaps but not excitedly – to talk and walk with one’s friends. But now they are gone – into their excitements, their fictions, their essential truths, and one must make do alone, in memory, a phone call, an occasional letter, a more rare visit. I speak of my Marianne of the artistic breasts, speak of the essential excitement I found once in just being in her presence, her truth, her conversation, her essential and unending excitement without cease, one excitement leading to another; found once in a conversation at midnight in a bar in Tokyo with Lang, a conversation punctuated mostly by our deepening silences, silences deepening as an awareness of what we were saying to one another grew upon us, an awareness of how exciting and of how essential the truths we were expressing were (there were many other such conversations, all ended now); found once too when silently walking across the city with Roberta (and never revealing to her the great love I bear her); and having been within that real knowledge, real truth, within those most exciting and essential truths each leading to another – having gone, that is, in the opposite direction and seen how one thing most assuredly leads to another when one is in the midst of such exciting and essential truths as these my friends, I am free to write and speak now as I please, and to reject and condemn forever whatever lies, falsehoods and accusations the rest of the world may try and defile me with, even if their source may be you, Reader, no matter how dear you may be or might become to me, because after all – I know whom I am addressing in this two-way street where one thing leads to another.
***
On March 30, 1989, while riding the Ginza line to work, he saw the ad for “Lang’s Whiskey,” and, while not a whiskey drinker himself, resolved, out of pure auspiciousness, to not only get a copy of the ad – advertising so saturated his city – but also a bottle of this his whiskey, have it available for friends.
***
–I’ve been saved by this neighborhood. “Woman saved by neighborhood!” Really, who needs the rest of the city?, needs the High City, the Yamanote? Who needs it? Ok, ok, maybe some people do – “Man Saved by High City” – but for now I can relax, wend my leisurely way – still can’t figure out the way around the Jōmyō-in – is that it? – the way the road curves and then you’re – where? – that’s the point, isn’t it? – a right way to live – history is made in the daytime too – just by walking along the wandering paths – let the history writers try to catch up with us – but they can’t – they live outside of time – to them it’s a thing – a timeline and all that – here it’s just the living, the doing of it – it’s own reward – no wonder the people are always so amused every time some foreigner or historian or whatever kind of academic comes up to them, asking some question about this or that – how many generations has your family made these paper balloons? – please tell us again the distinction between western and Japanese ice cream – would you mind being in a picture with me, please? – what, again, is Japanese swimming? – really, they are never exasperated – are they just amused at the human inability to get things? – or the weirder human desire to – to what? – well, not to know things, but to know things in these ways – and at the expense of knowing them by doing them – but again, they never get angry – would I? – yes, at this point – maybe not later, if I live here a few years – ah, the ice-cream place! – “Woman saved by Japanese ice cream!”
–So, Roberta, what is Japanese swimming?
***
Ah, this city, van Zandt quickly reflects on a morning after, a walk through Sendagaya, run into Maria, we go to a bar, meet Stefan there, in comes Johnnie, jokes, obscenities – jeez, he knows the best dirty jokes!, some girls at the next table, flirt, a couple of name cards. Come home. Messages from Sabrina, Inez (who so rarely calls). Not a bad day.
***
Three Encounters.
1. I was approaching the station, eager to get on the train and to continue trying to read one of Calvino’s early Palomar stories in the original. Two young men and a woman – art-school types – came up to me and asked if they could take a picture of me standing in front of a poster for a pop star’s concert, the pop star silly, dressed in pink as a working woman in front of a refrigerator. I oblige. I give them my address, and they promise to send me a copy. (They never do; not intentionally, they’re just broke I suppose.) As they’re leaving, I ask them why they wanted the photo, or rather me, in it. One of the young men quickly responds, “because you’re cool.”
2. I was on the train standing in front of a small group of boys, about ten years old. I am silently reading my Pushkin, occasionally glancing round the page at the boy’s playing their silly games (or gazing anxiously into some distance, anxious about – what was it?, I wonder now). Most of the boys by now have gotten off the train. At one of my side glances, one of them grabs my attention with a smile that in a decade’s time will stop women a bit too often, and I hope not cruelly. Silently, speaking with eyes and gestures, he gains my agreement to engage him in a fierce struggle of scissors-paper-stone. He does not smile; he is intrigued by this curious foreign man who somehow represents mysteries he feels he’d like a short glimpse into. We face off; two out of three. I trounce the kid. He snaps his fingers in mock-disappointment, reaches into his pocket, takes out a five-yen coin, hands it to me, and he gets off the train. He smiles at me from the platform and I return to my Russian.
3. I was going up what seemed to be an endless number of stairs and stairways in a station I had come to for the first time. Damn, I remember thinking to myself – it was during those first years here – not only am I climbing all these steps, I’ll probably take the wrong exit, too, and then have to backtrack half a kilometer or more. Three-quarters of the way up a final flight of what look like hopeful stairs, I passed a group of three boys in school uniforms and those heavy leather book bags on their backs playing scissors-paper-stone. As one wins he gains a stair; as one loses he steps down. It occurred to me that this could go on eternally, and I imagined the boys, their mother’s bringing them their meals, fellow schoolmates helping them with their studies (their diplomas delivered by motorbike messenger), phones and faxes set up on the stairs (they are portable, able to go up and down the stairs as the game proceeds �
� a shower and toilet too) so that the boys – men now – can work and support the families they have propagated (in the discretely placed beds, also portable) ... until finally, decades hence a small temple has already been installed anticipating the day when the three boys will become saints and worshipped as examples of friendship and stick-to-itiveness. I remember that I laughed to myself at the silliness of the fantasy I’d just fashioned and had just emerged from the station – aha!, it was the right exit. – and I heard a great triumphant shout, and a second later, an equally great moan. Had a soul been released? But it had been no fantasy: I really had been present at the birth of a myth: one boy had been liberated, up another rung closer to the light of day, while another had been sent hurtling so much deeper below. I make a mental note to come back to this station in a couple of days.
I think of these encounters now, think that I participated that small much in the real, the natural, the deep life of the city – but that in all three instances – being cool, winning five yen, seeing the birth of a myth – I had only a functional part. It was not me, it was not my life that was involved here, I instigated nothing: any other foreigner would have been just as cool; the kid would have a good laugh at dinner when he told his parents and then forgot me; the boys on the stairs took no notice of me, the myth was only seen by me, it will live its life without me. I was not, in short, a part of the city. I would that the city would love me back, and yet. These thoughts leave me bereft. (And in that do I become a part of the city? Is my bereftness that of a man or a boy? Am I that much more a part of the city in being ignored by it – and is this in fact an acceptance of some special sort?)
***
On his deathbed, near Uguisudani, the poet Masaoka Shiki wrote of the things he most wished to see: “moving pictures; bicycle races and stunts; lions and ostriches in the zoo; ... automatic telephones and red letter boxes; a beer hall; women fencers; and Western-style theatre. But I haven’t time to list them all.”
