Frank Walters

There are things which a healthy or sick man ignores, either because he does not come across them or because they are too insignificant.

                                          Lu Xun (1881-1936), “This Too Is Life” (1936)

Most mornings I’m up at four to write, but this morning is different.  It’s just after three, and it will take a while to shake it off the dream that woke me.  To keep busy, I go through my notecards with quotations from Lu Xun’s essays.  One notecard stops me.  In an essay called “Death,” he writes of the ghost he will one day become:

Starting last year, whenever I was recuperating from an illness, I would recline in my wicker chair and inevitably think about all the things I had to work on after recovering: what essays to write, what books to translate or publish.  After arriving at a definitive plan, I would conclude by saying: that’s settled, then—but I’m going to have to get to work at once.  This line of thought, of having to “get to work at once” never occurred to me before and came from the subliminal reminders prompting me about my age.  But I never directly thought about death.

The story is that Lu Xun wrote “Death,” and a companion piece, “This Too Is Life,” in September of 1936, a month before he died of tuberculosis, at the age of fifty-six.  Having outlived him by two decades, I am where he was, writing and dying.  “Naturally,” he also writes in “Death,” “there are bound to be those who sort of just die off without even realizing it.”  Dying off: for some it is the slow draining away of a life soon to be forgotten.

It was the same dream I’d had the night my mother died from emphysema.  But that was years ago.  Why now, after so long?  Had I missed something?

The gardenias outside the window have blossomed, so I open it to let in their fragrance.  The flowers reflect the light from my lamp.  They look like small white mushrooms floating in space, and I am pulled back to the photograph I saw in the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima.  It shows a different, much larger mushroom, a grainy mix of black and gray billowing ominously from behind a ridge.  A museum guide, an older man in a blue suit, told me that the photograph was taken from the port city of Kure, situated on the Seto Inland Sea, about fifteen miles south of Hiroshima.  I expect the photographer had never seen anything quite like it.  The sudden blinding flash in the blue morning sky, the ominous column, the residue of brown dust and yellow haze that would forever blur his vision.  No one in Kure, the guide said, had a clue as to what had just happened.  At most they might have felt a low rumble beneath their feet, like the passing of a distant train, or sensed a tremor in the air.  The bomb had detonated at an altitude of six hundred meters.  Within minutes an estimated 80,000 people were killed, many of them simply erased from the earth.  By year’s end, some 140,000 would be dead.  The exact number will never be known.

“Do you suppose Harry Truman ever wondered how many people would die?”, the guide asked me.  “Not soldiers,” he added.  “I mean the people who lived here.”  He left to greet other visitors, leaving me, an American in Hiroshima, to ponder one of my country’s most persistent and baleful myths.

I hadn’t cried at her funeral.  Could that be it?  I still don’t know why.  All I know is that the guilt has not gone away.  Maybe if I immerse myself in writing I’ll find out why.  Or forget, finally and for good.

The roses along the front walk have come and gone; so too the azaleas and dogwoods in the wild area between our house and the one next door.  Carol, my wife, came up with term “wild area,” because that is what it is: a place where things grow unchecked, seemingly immune from the destructive forces we unruly humans invent but cannot control.  There will be another burst of roses later in the summer.  Until then thorns, but also new shoots.  Beauty blooms, fades, blooms again in defiance of the dangers that lurk nearby.  All about us are the remnants of what’s gone and premonitions of what’s to come when we are gone.  Nature’s way of reminding us of our place.

Throughout the house are lamps Carol and I have found in antique shops.  Each lamp comes with a glass globe for a base, each globe decorated with painted flowers--roses, peonies, tulips, daisies--each globe drilled through the bottom with a hole just the right size to accept a small nightlight bulb, which we leave on through the night, suffusing the house with a warm glow that lights my way to the kitchen, where I make a small pot of coffee.  We like old things.  Hand-cranked coffee grinders.  A 1920s Hoosier Cabinet.  On a bookcase in the foyer an eight-day clock that’s been in Carol’s family since before the Civil War ticks faithfully and without a concern in the world.  I can hear it through the closed door of the office, and again I am pulled back.  Ten years ago, Mark, our son, who now lives in Hiroshima, had been in his room at the other end of the house typing his dissertation, and I could hear the tick-tock clacking of his keyboard through the floor grate under my desk.

I am driving north on Interstate 65 in Tennessee, toward Nashville, when a white SUV pulls alongside.  It must be white, I think, and I am aware that the significance of this will become clear, just not now. 

The essay I am writing—this one, it so happens—glows on my laptop.  Ernest Hemingway said that the trick to writing was to sit down at the typewriter and bleed.  Arthur Quiller-Couch is reputed to have been the first to advise us to kill our darlings.  I have no idea how to reconcile the romanticized self-absorption that seems uncharacteristic of the laconic Hemingway with the autotelic execution of our most beloved sentences called for by Quiller-Couch.  Kill our darlings?  All of them?  Good heavens!  We will do so in the course of our lives anyway if we care at all about them and write and because darlings are so rare in our lives.  We bleed because they are gone or because we were missing when they called for us.  Out of guilt and too late we remember them, and so we hope that a jolt from our pen, as if it were hot-wired to the firmament, can Frankenstein them back to life and reanimate ours with purpose.  This might be the reason we write essays, but the genre offers no cure for our sickness.  We must treat the essay, therefore, as its name implies, as an experiment in the art of living in the midst of affliction.

There is a woman sitting in the front passenger seat.  She rolls down the window and turns and looks at me.  Who is she? Her gaze makes me think I should know her.

Does it seem that I am fated to share with Lu Xun a strain of morbidity that provides the platform in my work for a kind of exaggerated pessimism?  Hardly.  I think of it as an attenuated optimism driven by a dogged determination to keep pushing deeper into the creased uncertainties of life, punctuated by cycles of flailing and flying, sinking to perigee today and tomorrow soaring upward to a brief and heady apogee.  Essaying, we call it in the trade.  Montaigne called himself an “accidental philosopher,” still the best two-word description of the practicing essayist I know.  Striking off to the unknown, relentlessly driven and ill-equipped for the journey.  Descent: Illness.  Ascent: Recovery.  The air is thick and foul in the valleys, clear and pure in the uplands.  Life broadens our perspective and so prepares us for closure.  The path forward goes on forever, our days upon it grow fewer.  In writing, I have come to understand, we concede a future without us.  The precariousness of the enterprise was not lost on Lu Xun:

My life, at least a portion of my life, has already been wasted on writing these pointless things, and what I have received in return is the increasing desolation and hardening of my soul.  But I’m not afraid of these things and don’t wish to conceal them; in fact, I’m quite enamored of them because they bear traces of the vicissitudinous life I have led amid sandstorms.  Those who feel that they, too, are living a vicissitudinous life amid sandstorms will understand the meaning of this.  (“Preface to Inauspicious Star,” 1926)

Sandstorms obliterate, but it should not be forgotten that they also clear the way for what comes next.

She leans out of the window and waves at me.  She shouts something at me.  I can’t hear what she is saying.  Then she laughs.  Now I know.

The summons of termination (shortness of breath, wheezing at the left and right main bronchi, rattles and rails deep within the alveoli, clearing of the throat that cleared nothing but only moved the hardening slurry of corrupted lung tissue from one bronchial structure to another) was delivered to my mother not long after her second marriage and the divorce that ended it a year later to a man whose only good quality was that he was a superb dancer but who was otherwise an indifferent and sometimes cruel husband and father.  I remember standing with her in line at a bank while she tried to explain to me, her breathing rapid and shallow, how to adjust the valve to the oxygen cylinder slung across her back.  She was new to this terminal way of living.  The hard, cruel reality of emphysema is that you can’t empty your lungs to make room for your next breath.  As the carbon dioxide builds up in your blood, you become progressively weaker.  Brain cells die.  The heart labors.  It’s a matter of inches straight through the chest to the deepest alveoli, which number approximately 700 million in both lungs, average 200 micrometers in diameter (about the thickness of a human hair), and form clusters that, seen through a microscope, resemble a bunch of grapes.  But how far away they really are no tape can measure.  We are unaware of their existence.  And when they begin to harden, still buried in the body’s deepest cavity, their first call for our attention is easily ignored for its insignificance.  This slow dying off?  This too is life.

My God she is beautiful!  She outshines the sun and the stars!  Her hair is spun gold and wind-blown, like the heroine’s on the book cover, not the gray-white ropes of old age and ruin.  Her skin is fresh and smooth and white, like a new bar of Ivory soap, not mottled and sallow, wrinkled and folded, like an urban wasteland.  She is Aphrodite, not Pemphredo.  Her eyes are sparkling emeralds behind the lenses of her glasses.  I reach across the gulf between us to touch her hand, but she is always just out of reach.

She lived the last two years of her life tethered to an oxygen tank that was mounted, like a bag of golf clubs, on a cart with wheels next to her bed.  Her whole world was a small but comfortable spare bedroom on the first floor of my sister Jan’s house in Spring Hill, Tennessee, just south of Nashville.  It took two people, one supporting her by the arm, the other pushing the cart, to walk her down the hall to the bathroom, a trek that could take fifteen minutes.  The uncomplicated task of rolling over literally took her breath away.  As the end came nearer the very act of breathing became so physically taxing that oxygen had to be pumped into her disintegrating lungs with what must have been the force of water shooting out of a fire hose.

What explains her interest, in her last days, in books about mountain climbing in the Himalayas?  When I was a boy she had bought Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna through a book club.  She was in the full bloom of health then, the free and wild summer of her life after her divorce from my father, with honey-blond hair and big curious eyes, bright and green, magnified by her 1950s housewife glasses.  And now, beside her on the bed where she will die, I see Tom Hornbein’s Everest: The West Ridge, and Joe Tasker’s Savage Arena, a memoir of his mountaineering adventures, the last of which would lead him, only weeks after he turned in the manuscript, to his death on Everest in 1982.  Reading was only slightly less taxing than rolling over; sitting up against a stack of pillows put a strain on her weakened lungs.  Grasping the book, adjusting her glasses, turning the pages, things we ignore in their pittance of significance, she did, but with effort.  And yet it was in these pages where she read about strong, young men climbing into the Death Zone.  There, the simple act of breathing is a miracle, and she must have known that she was not alone.

And she is breathing!  Gulping in volumes of air!  Air by the cubic foot!  Air that is fresh and clean and pure!  Air that comes to her without the assistance of tanks and tubes!  Her laughter, which has the melody of the gods about it, contains all the words I need to hear.

And so, dying and breathing, she spoke.  Her sentences were short, and after each she would need three or four breaths, quick, shallow, and painful, to recover from the effort.  And then she would speak another sentence.  And then silence.  Speak.  Silence.  Recover.  Speak.  Silence.  Recover.  Not ad infinitum, for we must all die someday, but laborant per lapsum temporis, for it is by labor through the brief slip of time that is ours that we live.  Her sentences were drawn out of the memories of her girlhood, of Jan's and my childhood, of the good years of her marriage to my father, sentences she labored over and delivered like milk from the breast.  I think now that this was the frame of mind she wanted to be in when Death, bored and yawning, cleared its throat and announced: It is time, Joanne.  It is time.  It is time.  It is time.

Let Death yawn.  She will speak those sentences, and no vicissitudinous sandstorm holds the power to disperse her words or drown out the sound of her voice.

Mark is the youngest of three, and he has a special relationship with his mother, perhaps because he lives so far away.  We talk often on Zoom, and when we finish Carol wipes away a tear.  “I miss him so much.”  The distance to Japan we know intimately, having flown it three times.  The psychic distance is less easy to measure.  We want our children to grow up and establish their own lives, but we also want to keep them close by, for it is we, if all goes as it should, and it does not always, whom they will bury.  The first lesson in geography: you are your children’s darlings.  Do not expect their tears at your funeral.

He teaches English to Japanese children in the Hiroshima Public School System.  Each day on his way to work he passes the skeletal remains of the Hiroshima Praefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, at the confluence of the Ota and Motoyasu Rivers.  It was built in 1915, and for the next thirty years it was an imposing multi-story structure, topped by a Romanesque hemispherical dome, a rare sight in Japanese skylines.  Its designer, the Czech architect Jan Letzel (1880-1925), had spent a good part of his working life in Japan, only to see many of his buildings destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.  But not the Promotion Hall.  It took the bomb to do that.  What is left is called Ganbaku Domo, the A-Bomb Dome.  Its skeletal remains comprise the centerpiece of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

Some of Mark’s students are most likely descendants of the 140,000 who died.  He has told them that the structure of the English sentence makes it possible for the speaker to accept or evade responsibility for the action expressed by the verb.  The Ganbaku Domo, stripped of adornment and spare of structure, is an eloquent rebuke of those who hide behind a curtain of self-exculpatory verbiage, as Harry Truman did in a letter he wrote to Chicago Sun Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, on August 5, 1963.  Contained in its Bart Simpson evasion of responsibility is a logic that should induce gasps of horror, as I think it must have for the museum guide:

I have been rather careful not to comment on the articles that have been written on the dropping of the bomb for the simple reason that the dropping of the bomb was completely and thoroughly explained in my Memoirs, and it was done to save 125,000 youngsters on the American side and 125,000 on the Japanese side from getting killed and that is what it did. It probably also saved a half million youngsters on both sides from being maimed for life.  (http://www.rjgeib.com/heroes/truman/truman-atom-bomb.html)

The Promotion Hall has been left exactly as it was after the blast as a memorial to those 140,000, young and old, all on the Japanese side, who were not saved from getting killed, and to the countless tens of thousands of others, young and old, all on the Japanese side, who were not saved from being maimed for life.  It is a fitting testament to what a sandstorm unleashed can do.

Some of Mark’s sentences can be found in a paper called “Cinematic Images of a Neoliberal Hong Kong,” adapted from a chapter of his dissertation.   He analyzes the extent to which postmodernism has influenced the urban imagination of Hong Kong filmmakers around the turn of the millennium.  He writes, “Cities project utopian ideals of opportunity, upward mobility, and endless leisure activities, yet they are simultaneously highly uneven spaces of social and power conflicts.”  In many of these films, post-apocalyptic mayhem clashes with the aseptic scenographic architecture of the modern steel and glass city.  In these films we see the dramas of “junkspace,” architect Rem Koolhaas’s term for “the residue mankind leaves on the planet.”  The artificial environment we build to live in destroys the natural environment we need to stay alive.  In one film, Pang-Ho cheung’s Dream Home (2010), a young woman serially murders the tenants of an apartment building in a fashionable neighborhood of Hong Kong, hoping that the negative publicity will drive the rent of an apartment down to a price she can afford.

“Cities . . . decay by nature,” Rebecca Solnit writes in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and by “war in which humans run wild.”  When he was growing up, Mark had devoured Japanese Anime comics and films, many of whose plots involve characters surviving in a post-apocalyptic world where humans had run wild.  The dream of neoliberalism, heir to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment belief that reason and logic would drive the wildness out of humans, suffered one crushing blow after another as the twentieth century drained, spent and exhausted, into an already fissured twenty-first.  Junkspace is everywhere we look, not just in cities, but in the sky, where the residue of the Enlightenment surfs the radioactive waves of the jet stream along with the rest of the nuclear smoke and ash.

She takes one last breath, as if to signify that nothing is insignificant, and the white SUV speeds away and disappears over a hill, somewhere between Spring Hill and eternity.

Mark comes from the country that is the foundry of the apocalypse, a country running wild and rapidly turning into junkspace.  And yet, despite living near the hypocenter of the first apocalypse, Mark expresses a confidence there won’t be a third.  I want to share in that confidence, but I am reminded of what Socrates tells Alcibiades in Symposium: the mind’s eyes see more clearly as the body’s eyes dim, and you are not yet old.  Mark is not yet old, but I don’t think I’m the one to pass Socratic wisdom on to him.  Not yet.  We risk killing our darlings when they are not yet old by taking away their vision and substituting our own.  He’s on his own until I invade his dreams.