Somersault

May I add to my previous post that the conventions of literature lull you into a false sense of security only to surprise you? I have never anticipated that I would sympathise with the leaders and members of a religious cult. Perhaps part of this sympathy is pity, which would be more expected.

I'm reading Somersault by (Nobel-Prize winner) Kenzaburo Oe at the moment. (Disclaimer: I'm only 170-odd pages on.) The novel follows the reformation of a cult in Japan, which initially disbanded because a radical faction attempted to take over a nuclear-power plant in order to turn it into a nuclear bomb. The title refers to the leaders' denial of the principles of the entire cult, which is seen as a somersault by the media and its consumers.

The novel begins years earlier, when we are introduced to three of the main characters. A fourth is introduced separately. This introduction is brutally honest and yet empathetic, and is my favourite part of the book so far.

The novel then speeds forward and we are introduced to the fifth and sixth characters, the former leaders of the cult. They are known only as 'Patron' and 'Guide', encouraging us to think of them in mostly symbolic terms. Yet their names seem to mistranslate the nature of their roles, which in turn begins to breed a mistrust of these characters. Which is in turn countered by the natural sympathy we feel for those who are physically ill, which they (and another character) both become.

This longwinded approach brings us to my place in the book and a paragraph that has illuminated my feelings of sympathy and mistrust. Patron says of Guide, "He gave meaning to the disaster that had ruined half my life, and through his help I discovered a new whole sense of self. What he made whole was me, the Savior, whether false or genuine."

"Whether false or genuine." What should we make of this? That this is a personal crisis projected onto a mass audience, that the man is mentally ill, that he doubts himself? Was the earlier somersault the truth? Are the leaders sadists or just in denial? If there is doubt, surely the natural conclusion is: false. Yet his followers hear him say this and experience no doubt.

Can this be seen as a comment on the nature of religion? That faith encourages one to overlook inconsistencies. That it requires such oversight? The novel boomerangs between sympathy and mistrust, and so many other emotions, that I am losing confidence that it can answer these questions. All I can do is record my questions and revert to them when I am finished reading.

When I read over this draft, I take back my original premise. I am not surprised and I do not feel much sympathy for the leaders of the cult, but for the followers, which is a common reaction to these things. Are the leaders more accountable than the followers, or vice versa, and can cultishness ever be justified? The questions keep piling up.

Life as narrative

My life is a string of narratives, and not in the academic sense. The books I've read have become the stitching of my life. Tell me a story about your life and I'll point to a book it reminds me of. Every emotion, every thought, every idea and every line I have written finds a corollary in a book I have read.

Literature is an escape from my life and is my life, it is my religion and my occupation, the basis of friendships and my only friend.

I've been reading since I was seven - when someone broke into our house and stole the TV, so my father took us to the library to keep us occupied. I can remember the pages of my first book (crocodiles swimming in a crowded landscape, where no matter how many times you looked you always found something new), but not the title.

I remember climbing trees to read in their uppermost branches, sitting in sunshine with a book, listening to thunder and lightning punctuate dialogue, reading in the light from the passage after bedtime, sitting on the school bus with these friends. The smell of certain books. The plastic slips over the covers. My preference for paperbacks which has lately shifted to hardcovers. The bruises between my thumb and forefinger from holding them up.

My day begins and ends with books. I read over breakfast. (Well, under breakfast, literally, because I usually hold the pages open by placing my bowl on them.) I read in bed. I read in between too.

Some books possess me, others bore me, some make me think, many more fuel existential crises, others inspire me or challenge me or just baffle me; there are those that claim me, refine my principles, change my mind, teach me, lambast me, require more of me, allow me to be less than perfect, and of course, entertain me.

How sad, that I have little else to say for my life. How alone I am. How lonely. How privileged I am that I have had so many meaningful conversations. That I have the language to tell my story and those of others, that I have lived so many lives and met so many people, and loved them all. Even the vile ones.

The stitching of my life is multi-coloured and various. It holds my own narrative together. Most people have a crutch, I think, and this is mine. But I am not afraid of mine, nor ashamed, nor lame without it. It has taught me to tell other stories and see into other lives. But perhaps, for every gift, something else is withheld. Perhaps a distance between my world and that of others is the price of this privilege.

Plowing the dark

It seems as if technology in the 21st century develops so quickly that soft- and hardware are obsolete as soon as they are released into the market. The same could be said about my latest read.

Plowing the dark is set in 1989/90 and was published in 2005. It juxtaposes two settings: a multinational’s lab, intent on being first-to-market with quality virtual reality technologies, and a man who is being held hostage in Iran by religious fundamentalists.

In the first setting, the characters wrestle with the dangers of virtual reality versus the enthralling experience of it, the differences in perspective between generations, the constantly updating technology. It asks why we need to replicate daily experiences virtually and why art no longer fills our aesthetic hunger.

In the second, the man is in isolation and treated like a chained dog. He gets through the days, weeks and months using routine and his imagination, and negotiating for small, everyday concessions which he appreciates as great gifts.

In the first few chapters of the book, I was uninspired by the themes, which seemed dated six years later. Perhaps the author means to trick the reader into apathy, maybe not. Reading on, the characters contribute so many perspectives to any debate, whether about technology, art, accountability or moral philosophy.

The chapters featuring the hostage, in a few pages, provide a key to his experiences, experiences far from our own lives if we have the luxury to read this book. It stands on its own (to be honest, I wish more pages were spent with the hostage), yet provides an apt metaphor for the concerns of the first set of characters.

As with Three farmers on the way to a dance, the novel is more concerned with exploring its theses than the conventions of fiction, but unlike that first novel isn’t didactic (although, again, I felt differently in the first few chapters).

Since I’m only halfway, I could only speculate any further. Perhaps the remainder will swing back to trite didactics; perhaps it will prophesy our present and future; perhaps asking this of any novel is too much of a burden. Regardless, the novel has already made me think and even hunger for the physicality of art and quiet spaces.

The Seizure of Power

A good author creates characters who sit beside you while you while are reading and walks beside you when you are not. Sometimes you identify with them, sometimes not; sometimes you empathise with them, sometimes sympathise, sometimes neither. A good author writes characters into life.

But have you ever encountered a character who is you? One who tricks you into believing you're not alone or crazy, until you remember that they're fictional. (Perhaps that is better - they will remain frozen in time, never disappoint you and never grow into someone you don't recognise.)

Peter Kwinto (Quinto) in The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz is my fictional doppelganger. He is an officer in the half-Russian, half-Polish army that is pushing back the German troops who have captured (and razed) Warsaw at the end of World War II. At the beginning of the novel, he is plagued by conflicting emotions, but is essentially idealistic, justifying the fear the army instills on communities already traumatised by war as part of the process of attaining freedom.

Despite having been exiled to the Urals and now implicated in the tragedies of war, he remains idealistic about life and human nature: "The bliss of being among the living... Peter lifted his hand and moved his fingers, overcome with wonder at the year, the month, the day and the hour."

As the war ends, Polish Socialists fight the influence of Russian Communists, who believe they have equal rights to the minds of the Polish people given that they made up half of the victorious army. Those minds are plagued by unexpressed doubts: about whether the Socialists can offer anything different to the Communists or the capitalists, about the future, about whether the war has really ended.

Peter is no different, except that these doubts coalesce into doubts about humanity, about the repetition of history, about the nature of time and existence. After he learns that his wife is dead, these doubts became increasingly, conflictingly hopeful and nihilistic. The death of his wife confirms what he has always known: that he is alone.

He comes to believe (hope?) that only a traumatic history can create a utopian future, through incremental changes in the collective consciousness. Thus he, stuck in this traumatic moment, can only hope for the absence of death or the absolution of escape.

Yet, in appearance, he bends to the requirements of society, acquiring a job in the government and even informing on another man. This leads to other doubts - about one's accountability for one's self, toward other people, within a community. Is this accountability or blame, and with whom does it rest?

Around him, people smooth over these doubts saying, "Everyone plays a part nowadays and nobody believes in anything."

Despite the absolute statements that he finds in doubt, Peter is essentially at the whim of his emotions. Towards the end of the novel, he cries, "Why? Why are you responsible for what you really are? Can anybody say: 'I am myself' when he worships in spite of himself, worships what he hates?"

The final line embodies Peter's quest: "...was it not better, instead, to ponder the only important question: how a man could preserve himself from the taint of sadness and indifference."

I wonder, how can one not come to the same conclusions, not be assailed by the same doubts and the same conflicting emotions, focus on the everyday when questions like these, seemingly only theoretical, form the foundations of this moment in time? Life is an eddy of trauma and joy and more, but these become blurred in the larger context of human history. There are really only two options in this moment: to escape or to find whatever joy one can in each day. Sometimes the two options are the same.

A Suicide, a War and a Shipwreck

Just as a piece of writing is threaded with symbols and themes from the writer's subconscious - it being the real writer, I would argue, and us just fingers pounding a keyboard like the hypothetical monkey - so that same piece of writing adopts the symbols and themes of the reader's subconscious, and is kneaded into a slightly different, still recognisable shape. Nothing revolutionary here: the author never died; he just joined hands with the reader, the text itself, the larger context and so on. Like a nursery rhyme. (What this means for the higher power that Nietzsche pronounced dead, who knows. Maybe he was always just a pretty rhyme.)

Everything I read is forced into conversation with everything else, into saying things they perhaps didn't mean to or didn't know they were going to say.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides references a scene from Mrs Dalloway and by extension, for me, The Waves both by Virginia Woolf and, of course, the movie The Hours. From postmodernism to modernism, from a novel in which the collective narrator points to us as fellow voyeurs, to a novel in which we are invited to watch. All of this ends in Ms Woolf walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks and nods to Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven. Giving the finger to a world that we are all forced to watch consume itself. By defiantly consuming one's self. Although Mr Eugenides might argue that this act is really desertion, leaving one's fellow soldiers to advance on the front-line alone.

Then there's A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the structure of which mimics that of Mrs Dalloway, but with only brief moments of her sympathy, which is demoted to sentimentality, as if to protect one's self against the fire from the front-line. And briefer moments of shining transcendence, which are even more self-consciously sentimental and ultimately held underwater until they stop shining.

And where has this extended metaphor of war come from? From The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz, where political allegiance is a bit of flotsam being hurried along the world's oceans. From here to the desecrated naivety of Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (both of the characters and the author) and a leap to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, in which the French Revolution is a soup of naivety, childhood traumas and survival mechanisms.

I could swim my way into science fiction, psychology texts, African literary fiction and South American magic realism in a few strokes, but I suspect you're already swimming in another direction or colliding against one of those pieces of flotsam - or perhaps clinging to it together with Pi's tiger from Life of Pi by Martel Yann.

The world is just another text or a library (an underwater one if we want to continue the metaphor) - gosh and here we escape into the corridors of Jorges Louis Borge's infinite library and his lottery.

If you want to see my soul, here it is, laid bare. (Prometheus and his liver.) It's as good a map as you're ever going to get, although there is no key except that of your own subconscious. (And ricochet back to A Single Man and on to Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo....)