Vaseline Buddha (13 page)

But when I woke up from a dream about chasing someone while being chased by someone else, a situation which, in dreams, makes everything seem drawn out and urgent at the same time, which ended with me entering a forest, and which I don't remember in specific detail—I did remember, though, seeing crows floating on a pond and thinking how strange it was—it was peaceful all around, as if the war really had ended long ago, or as if a war had never taken place there. But I suddenly recalled, while still half asleep, that I once dreamt about a forest with a bed and a table with coffee cups on it, as if my house had been relocated. In the dream, in which all objects had, to a large or small extent, lost their original shape and size, I spooned up a little cloud that was hovering low above my head and tasted it, but there was no taste to it. But when I put the cloud in a cup of coffee, the coffee tasted good as if it had cream in it, and the cloud went very well with the coffee.

I thought that it would be nice if there were pots of plants and a mirror in the forest now. If there was a mirror, I could lean it against a tree and see my foot, for instance, in the mirror reflecting trees. And if I tilted the mirror at a certain angle, I'd be able to see my foot along with a cloud in the sky. I thought of several more scenes that would look well in a mirror in a forest, which included me sitting in a crimson velvet chair with an earwig or a green frog, as if we were indispensable to each other. The reason why I pictured something like that might have something to do with my recalling that at a certain point in history, people began to view the world through windows, and that at a certain point in the history of art, people began to paint by holding up an object to the mirror and reproducing the image reflected in the mirror. Objects, and sceneries, do not lose their essence by being in a frame, but are endowed with a new essence, and become clearly different from before.

I looked at the scene again and it was beautiful, and there was something about it that appealed to the heart, although I wasn't sure exactly what it was. And when I pushed aside a branch of a bush that was slightly blocking my view, so as to get a better look at the stage of the Hundred Years War, I saw a fortress-like structure in ruins on a hill, which convinced me that a war had indeed taken place there long ago. The landscape that lay before me did, in fact, look like something that two countries would wage war over. (I also fancy that England and France went to war because the English couldn't bear to think that the French ate on a daily basis delectable wine and cheese, which they themselves couldn't eat, and wanted to keep the French from doing so, if not for anything else.) There must have been another reason, of course, for the war, one that was less romantic or lyrical, but I thought that waging a war so as not to let the opponent take possession of such a landscape, so as to take possession of it yourself, was quite reasonable as a reason for waging a war. And the region was famous as a grape and truffle producing district.

At any rate, people started many wars for ridiculous reasons, and did many ridiculous things even during wars. People of a certain period, thinking it would be advantageous to make spears as long as possible, did make spears as long as possible, and ended up being unable to even pick them up—they probably couldn't fight with them, for they couldn't even pick them up—and during the First World War, Italians, flaunting their remarkable fashion sense, made red uniforms that became easy targets for the enemy, reducing the chances of survival for their own youth. During a war, it's possible to see an antiaircraft gun in someone's garden, through laundry flapping in the wind, and in fact, it was possible to see such scenes at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese. Perhaps war is a stage that lets people do the most ridiculous things in the easiest way.

As I looked at the landscape before my eyes, picturing scenes from the past of people fighting, the herd of animals in the distance drew nearer. But I still couldn't tell what the animals were exactly. I was pleased to think how I had been led to think about the Hundred Years War, and to watch a passing flock of animals with interest, on this short trip I took to see a girl I didn't even know very well, who had rejected me.

In the meantime, things that were clear or unclear continued to appear and disappear, or stay, in clear or unclear forms, and I watched them without losing sight of them, or watched them, losing sight of them. And smelling pine leaves, I rejoiced a little, as if it brought me ineffable joy to smell, in a forest in a French countryside, the smell I'd smelled in a forest a long time ago in my childhood.

And a wisp of wind blew for a moment, and then it stopped. The wind seemed to blow, but then it didn't. And when I took a deep breath and breathed out long and slow through my mouth, the wind didn't blow as if my breath had stirred it up or anything. Nevertheless, the moment I thought that there was nothing I could do about this wind it began to blow, as if it had read my thought or was supporting it. Whenever the wind blew, I thought I had something to do with the wind blowing stronger, exhaling and adding breath to the wind.

And when the wind grew weaker, I exhaled more softly, and repeating the process, I recalled that I liked to treat objects as ideas, and ideas as objects, and thought that the wind seemed like some kind of an idea at that moment. Some ideas are sticky like ice cream melting in a child's hand, and are fluid, being soft like a jellyfish, but other ideas are solid like a hammer and can be used to drive in a nail, and yet other ideas are fixed, like a nail that's been driven in, and then there are things, such as certain birds that fly in a formation toward the equator or a polar region, that are ideas in themselves. (Endowing an idea with the shape and characteristics of an object, and coloring an object with an idea, is probably a task belonging to poetry, not fiction. I might be trying to make this become more like poetry than fiction.)

Thinking, This wind, at least, has a wavering belief, and is faithful to that belief which is bound to waver, I enjoyed the strange game with the wind, and soon got tired of it and forgot about the wind.

But looking at the grass, wilting in the midday heat and gently swaying in the wind, I recalled some thoughts about my existence that were deeply rooted in me, which were difficult to shake off, and it occurred to me that by thinking that the grass was wilting, I was inflicting injustice on the grass, and viewing it in an unjust light, so I withdrew my gaze, and the thought, and was about to root out the thoughts that were deeply rooted in me, which were difficult to shake off, but then stopped and let them take root even more deeply in me. And among those thoughts, the one that became the most deeply rooted was the thought that I was barely managing to stand, as if floating, on some kind of a foothold I couldn't quite or ever touch, since it never existed in the first place, that there were no grounds for my existence anywhere, which had more than enough grounds in me, but was groundless in itself if you thought you had found the grounds for it. The idea that everything in existence existed by accident, that inevitability was only a part of a tremendous accident, was something I could never shake off, and made my life so difficult, and yet so easy.

As I looked at nature spread out before my eyes, it looked as if it were weary, or bored, of being nature, of having no choice but to be nature. By and large, nature made me feel at ease, but at that moment, it looked much too steeped in self-satisfaction, and I felt somewhat uneasy. And the question I'd long had on my mind of why nature always looked natural rose to my mind again. If nature held a power that made everything that was placed in it an inevitable part of itself, what kind of a power was it? And other questions naturally surfaced among my thoughts that seemed as if they would come to a stop, again and again, but didn't. Were unnatural things something that only humans could create? Was nature, which seemed indifferent, obsessed with balance? Did nature not commit errors? Or was it free from errors? And was it because nature couldn't be accused of errors, regardless of whether or not it was free from errors? Was nature free of responsibility, and could it not be held responsible for something? Was nature free of responsibility for everything, including itself? But could you say that something was free from errors because it couldn't be accused of errors? Or could errors exist regardless of whether or not you could accuse something of them? (I wanted to continue on, in any way I could, with questions whose answers it was possible not to arrive at, perhaps because “the question marks weren't placed deeply enough,” as someone said.) But was nature really natural? Why were some of the things that humans created not natural? Couldn't it be said, in a broad sense, that everything humans created was also part of nature?

But, as always when I had such thoughts, I failed to obtain answers to the questions over which natural philosophers of old could have agonized. I thought that the earwig which I thought appeared before me at that moment, although it didn't, and placed on my hand and watched as it stayed still, as if dead, after squirming for a while—the earwig, at that moment, represented nature—thoroughly ignored my question. So I became a little angry and wanted to mock and slander nature in any way I could, and thought that a modifier was necessary in order to do so, and said that nature was shabby, false, ashamed, squalid, squalid beyond measure, and above all, cruel beyond measure (I wanted to inflict injustice on nature through an excessive use of adjectives), but as could be easily predicted, I was the one, not nature, who was shabby, false, ashamed, squalid, squalid beyond measure, and above all, cruel beyond measure. So I harbored an ill feeling against nature, and thought that I could expose it without hesitation—I could, in this way, harbor an ill feeling against anything at all, and expose it without hesitation—but I just harbored it without exposing it.

And I looked at the scenes in the landscape, ignoring perspective with my eyes as I'd done before, as if looking at a painting in which perspective is ignored, and switching around the scenes in the landscape which had become messy in the process, I thought that nature was exposing, almost audaciously, the fact that it was perfectly indifferent to everything that happened to it, or hiding it, through its various faces. I looked around, thinking that there might be something that belonged to nature, a squirrel, for instance, that was watching me in secret as I thought that about nature, but I didn't see anything. Still, I felt as if something were watching me in secret.

But such thoughts seemed dull, and I decided that I wouldn't think anymore. Lying still, I looked up. But as often happens when I'm lying on the grass in a forest, thoughts that seemed trapped in a sort of endless repetition floated around in my mind, and they had a delicate but tenacious feel to them, which made me think that their roots were touching the roots of the grass on which I was lying, that they were taking root in the ground.

As I often do at such times, I tried to fix my gaze on an object so as to break away from tangled thoughts and drive my thoughts to a single point. But there was nothing that held my gaze. I looked around with vacant eyes. Branches were blocking out the sky. Some branches at the top of a tall tree were shaking almost imperceptibly, and the branches, which had nothing really special about them, gave off a very strange, indescribable feeling. It seemed that you would begin to shudder if you looked at them long enough, but I didn't begin to shudder, no matter how long I looked at them. And yet the strange feeling was indescribable indeed, and although I had the feeling, it seemed that the feeling, in the end, couldn't be mine.

Perhaps it was because the tremor of the branches that were shaking so faintly seemed like the waves of a quiet sea, which made it seem as if I were looking up at the surface from under the sea, and as if everything I saw were an underwater scene. At one point, it felt as if the trees were coral reefs, which was a very easy feeling to have, and a feeling that seemed okay to discard, so I discarded the feeling.

Still, in a brief space of time, I let the sun, which was very gradually passing between those branches, and then between those branches and the branches of a neighboring tree, pass very gradually while I was watching it, although it was of course passing as always at a regular interval, and at one point, it looked as if it were caught by the tip of a branch. It was nothing more than a feeling I had, that I was making things up in my mind, but I let myself stay in that state for as long as I wanted.

Peace of mind, which came to me so rarely that when it did come at an unexpected hour it made me feel somewhat awkward and uncomfortable, and led me to keep an eye on it, slightly suspicious because I wasn't unaware that it would soon disappear, came to me like a rain cloud that comes dawdling, but although you couldn't say that it had nothing to do with the peaceful landscape before me, it wasn't just because of the landscape. Peace of mind always came for no good reason, and disappeared for even less of a good reason than when it came.

For quite some time I looked at the branches that gave off an indescribable feeling, and then away from the branches and at the sun which was slowly moving across the vast and boundless sky, and then suddenly leapt to my feet, unbuckled my belt, and began to wrap it around a tree trunk for some reason. I didn't know why I was doing it, but it seemed that it was an okay thing to do. Anyway, the belt fit the tree perfectly, and I was pleased that the girth of the tree was the same as my own. At any rate, the belt was old, and I'd been grappling with the question of how to give it a proper end. (Even after a long time had passed, I thought from time to time about the tree around which I had wrapped a belt, and felt happy to think that somewhere, there was a tree wearing a belt, one of the few trees in the world wearing a belt, perhaps the only one. And it could perhaps stir up the imagination of those who found it.) And indicating that nature should go on doing whatever it was that it was doing, and hoping that nature, which was always silent and seemed impertinent as a result, would stay deeply absorbed in itself for ever after, I gently bent a branch that touched my hand and then let it go, thus bidding nature farewell.