Vaseline Buddha (4 page)

Anecdotes in my memories and images in my imagination dance on a stage from which time, which flows in one direction, has made its exit. I wave at them, and further, I dance with them. The past is revived in the present, and I pass again through past moments. As I write this, I'll come face to face with returning scenes from the past and become a part of those scenes, and the scenes will overlap with my present, and I'll confuse the past, present, and future tenses.

Anyway, what I thought was a dolphin-shaped tube may have been a little plastic bag someone had thrown away, or perhaps I never saw such a thing as a plastic bag, or went out to the riverside and watched the river one winter day when I lived in a little town in France long ago. But I've already said something about a dolphin-shaped tube, and although it's an unreliable or nearly fabricated story, it becomes a part of this story, as words that are written down and printed out take on certain power and become a part of a certain story.

But it doesn't matter if what I think I saw by the river was a dolphin tube or a plastic bag, or if I didn't see anything at all. What matters more is the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which I think came to my mind at the riverside. And recalling the sentence, I think again about writing something about the difficulty of existence, the difficulty of talking about the difficulty of existence, the double difficulty of it, which I think I thought about at the riverside as well.

But did I, at the riverside, begin, out of nothing, a vague groping in the dark that wasn't a new, careful search but a groping for a new failure that sought to end up as a failure, and think of a loosely structured story, that turns from a vague groping in the dark into a haze, and in the end comes to nothing, and think that such a story could be effective in writing about the double difficulty mentioned above?

And did I think that I could have something of an expectation in the fact that in the act of indulging yourself in a game of ideas, not knowing to the end what it is that you're talking about, and rendering it null, there's an innocent or a naive pleasure, like that of a game indulged in by a child at play, and think that there's something about a child playing alone that makes you think that in a way, a solitary game, with everything around you, and further, the world vanishing and leaving you alone, was the only real kind of game?

And did I think that I could obsess over what it was that I sought to do because it was something I couldn't figure out, and something useless, and that I wanted to trust the feeling that things upon which such things could exert greater power were awaiting me, and that when you didn't know what it was that you wanted to write, you could do certain things you couldn't do when you wrote, fully aware of what it was?

My mind is all confused again. My thoughts, which raise their heads at once like Medusa raising her many heads at the same time, cannot be cut off or paralyzed, so I have no choice but to leave them as they are.

So I consider a story dealing with an attempt related to the combination of a word with another, and the joining of a sentence with another, as well as a story about the use of language, and a certain misuse of language, which, in a sense, is an undeniable use of language, and the confusion and limitations of language and thought. (I believe that among the dreams dreamt by language, there are sentences that are impossible in themselves, or ones that seek to become something of a chaos. And a writer must be someone who also dreams the somewhat strange but captivating dreams that language dreams.) I also think about the sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” as well as the sentence, “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” cited by a language philosopher along with the previous sentence as an example of a sentence that isn't even grammatically correct, and the sentence, “Colorless ideas sleep furiously green,” which I created by changing the words around in that sentence.

And I feel tempted to devote myself to making unfamiliar or erroneous sentences, like someone who has suffered damage on the part of the brain in charge speech and who, in a sense, is able to express himself more freely due to a loss of normal faculty of speech. (In fact, I feel extremely tempted to make sentences with grammatical errors that are utterly incomprehensible, and think that one day, I could perhaps write a short story, one at least, made up of such sentences only.) It would be a sort of warming up of thoughts, as well as practice in making sentences, and such practice could be helpful in thinking more freely, and writing the kind of confusing story I seek to write. And such practice could consist of making phrases or sentences such as follows.

The softly hardened hand of something that threatens wet sense by holding it up against the smiling, bent fire of a red rose; or, The sleeping snail enveloped in the wind passing through the forest, a playground for cats, that looks like a bunch of umbrellas turned inside out, ravaged by cats in passing; or, The wet appearance of a raincoat that comes to mind when you tilt an arm horizontally puts a stop to the dance by twisting an arm somewhere within a sentence that's startled by something that's being watched by commas holding their breaths; or, No matter what you say to the stinkbug that lives in a pillow with me, the words, Be careful, eagle, won't get through, it's because martens that have lost their stickiness in the net I cast in the sea are pulling the strap that's retreating forward, or because it's been long since the ship that sailed off, with parrots on board, and doesn't return, sailed off, no, it's not because of that, it's not because of anything; or, the path taken by certain goldfish that do high jumps all day long should meet an animal that lives underground, that waves its hand playfully, instead of being found in the mind of someone who marches in place,; or, what you can do for the sick bicycle lying in bed is to hit a mushroom, instead of a volleyball, with the palm of your hand, throwing it up into the sky, and going to the future in this sentence.

I actually suffered from a sort of aphasia, and thought in a way that was closer to writing than speaking, and as a result had difficulty speaking and had an easier time putting my thoughts into written words, so I wrote down in a notebook a countless number of such sentences that made no sense, whose list could go on and on, and the making of which brought me a kind of pure joy (I feel, in a sense, that this story is a list of sorts, which could go on endlessly, deleted, added to, and corrected).

In the notebook were pages packed with names and numbers of people I'd crossed out, wondering how these people could have such narrow views, and recalling their faces the last time I saw them, and hoping that I'd never see them again, and then, in a moment of weakness, restored even while scolding myself for being weak, and on the page on which I had most recently written something down was the sentence, The thousands of question marks that have sunk to the bottom of the pond cannot rise above the surface through their own desperate efforts, and must wait for a lying monkey to smile while looking into a mirror, and although I didn't know how I'd come to write such a sentence, I was sure that I wrote it one night while drunk.

Anyway, the symptom of speaking such sentences is closer to that of Wernicke's aphasia, the effect of which is to speak in a confusing language whose meaning cannot be conveyed, than that of Broca's aphasia, which poses a great impediment in speech, or the Williams syndrome, which causes difficulty finding the right words, so that you would perhaps say parrots while meaning sparrows, or cake while meaning cookie—I think about the difficulty experienced by someone suffering from the Williams syndrome, who says curtain, meaning gown, and screw, meaning spring, as well as the astonishment you'd feel watching him. I think putting yourself in the state of someone suffering from a syndrome from which you're not actually suffering and being in that state may, at times, open your eyes to things you didn't know about yourself.

But this story isn't moving forward, and I'm going back to square one, for my thoughts have turned back to the things that serve as guidelines in writing this story, to things whose help I feel I need. Am I taking a step back in order to take a step back, not to take a step forward?

I think about forms of stories. But again, I feel, as I always have, resistance against a well-structured, complete story. Stories with an impeccable structure stifle me. A story with a clear plot, which inevitably becomes something about following someone's whereabouts, has become something that's nearly impossible for me to write, just as Paul Valéry could never write a novel because he could not use a sentence such as, “The marquise went out at five o'clock.” For some time now I have naturally harbored antipathy against stories with a narrative, and now it has become nearly impossible for me to read such stories, which seems to be a natural course of development.

I'd probably do better to let the words write themselves, as if I were writing down something dictated by someone unseen, and introduce chaos into the story, as well as giving it some kind of a system, thus exerting much effort in writing a story in which it is difficult to find traces of a plot, a story without traces of a plot, only traces of an effort to remove traces.

And I'm somewhat curious as to what kind of a distorted story will result overall when you devote yourself to the details with no thought to the overall structure. One of the reasons why I don't write stories with a clear structure or theme is because there's something about such stories, in and of themselves, that make me shudder with their boredom, and another, because just one look at our reality will show you how far removed such stories are from our reality—or my own life, at least—and how different the truth of our reality is from what's depicted in them.

What I can write is a story that's not quite a narrative, and is much too obscure and unstable. Not being obsessed with a completed story will create an opening into different territories in novels. A story with gaps and cracks and leaps and loopholes, a story that's incomplete somehow, may more faithfully reflect real life. What exerts the greatest influence on my life is things without substance, and I'm turning my life into something without substance, and as I regard the struggle against things without substance, or tangible substance, as the only genuine struggle—this problem of mine seems to be a fundamental problem of the world as well—I have no choice but to clumsily write something without substance.

Make it a story, if possible, that's not full of the power of narrative, a story seeking to break away from narratives whose naivety makes you smile, narratives that are dull because of their inherent
tendency to seek power, and because their dull ideas are generally audacious, and their audacious aim to enlighten is inevitably dull. The persistent tendency in me to prevent the unfolding of a story, and the belief that there's no narrative to life, could perhaps make that possible. There are, of course, people who believe that there's a narrative to life, some of whom seek to turn their own lives into something with a narrative, through whatever means possible, and some of them do so with ambition, and some write narrative texts, and some reveal their ambition without hiding it, for it's difficult to hide such an ambition when you have it, but among such people, there are probably some who come to realize that in the end, their lives can't be a narrative, and that a narrative is not a principle that penetrates life, and turn their attention to something that's not narrative. What I want to write is something that depicts the fragmentary aspects of life, which are like a tangled skein, in a fragmentary manner, something that reflects my own life, which in itself is a great chaos, by creating and maintaining chaos, the greatest constituent of life.

Perhaps I seek to write something that's fit to be read on a rock in a forest you come to while on a daily walk, or in a café on a street where you're traveling. I would bring into my story fragmentary stories whose pages, turned by the wind, can be read at random, stories that allow you to close your eyes while reading and dwell for a moment on a scene that can be taken out from the book and savored, stories that are far from being narrative. Even when I talk about the anecdotes, they will be stories that are not quite narratives, stories that cannot be narratives. Perhaps even as I talk about the anecdotes, I could talk about my impressions on the anecdotes and the thoughts created by those impressions, preventing the anecdotes from developing into narratives.

What I seek to emphasize as I write this story, which perhaps says nothing, and in which something becomes nothing when the standards are changed, or whose meaning or importance changes (some of the stories I tell could end up being told somehow even though I had no intention of telling them, or tried not to tell them. And there will be almost no difference between some of them, even if there's a difference between those that are told and those that are not told), is not the story itself, but ways in which stories are told (the ways would include saying something that doesn't seem to make sense at one glance in a clever way so that it does make sense), and ideas that prevent something from degenerating into a story—ideas that prevent a story, even as it is told, from developing into a story in the end, or at least into a complete story—or, since many ideas come from things, something that is developing into ideas on things, or thoughts on thoughts I'm thinking, or on the pleasure or the difficulty of thinking, or thoughts on pleasure or difficulty itself.

And I'd have to subdue the various voices within myself that raise themselves or speak simultaneously—some of the voices seem to plead some kind of a difficulty, and some of them are on their way to understanding a cruel, merciless heart—or give weight to one of the voices. I'd have to close my ears to the end to the nastiest of them all, and press and suppress it, the voice that comes from the part deepest within me, the voice that denies everything, the voice that is used to silence or has learned to be silent.