Segaki (15 page)

It was the only time Muchaku was ever to see him angry. But he did not talk to Muchaku. He talked into the pot.

“Why should we have to pay for politics? Politics never change. It is only the politician who comes and goes, the man who confuses principle with self-interest ousts the man who confuses self-interest with principle, over and over again, that is all. They all want something someone else has, they never want to make anything of their own. Only the secure are altruistic. A gentleman does not meddle in these things. Politics is the only interest of the insecure, the uncompleted, and the
self-seeking
. As a study in irony it is sometimes wryly amusing.

“But really, these criminals accuse us of quietism, or, if they are overly emotional or rather stupid, which is the same thing, of cold bloodedness, but it is we who have to come along and pick up the pieces when they have destroyed the world like a child in a rage against its favourite doll because it thinks someone else has a better one. And while it is these gentlemen who are trying to reap each others’ crops, it is those outside politics who must sow them. No, we have no part in this, you and I, except that we bear the burden of our grandfathers, who did. Ah well. The man who kills someone else is always to be pitied. He only does it out of embarrassment, because he cannot think of anything worse to do.

“Of course, there are a few people who enjoy dying. There are even a few soldiers who do, the mad men
nobody
can do anything about, who get a gratified thrill out of it. It is, after all, the ultimate sensation. But it is only a physical sensation, and that no doubt is why the intellectual does not enjoy it, for since the mind is trapped in the body, it means the end of thought, and therefore of his pleasure. It must be like an orgasm, if you enjoy it. But then, that is sophisticated. Ordinary people have no real conception of individuality. Most people go through the world without seeing or tasting anything. A peach to them is not an idea but only a sensation, and a taste to them is only a sensation, and not an idea. Sensation is what they want, so dying is really rather exciting for them. But an individual likes to watch, he likes to mull over what he has seen, and as for dying, all we know of it for certain is that we shall not be able to think about it afterwards or try it again in this body.”

Yasumaro inspected the rice, and his face brightened. He served the food with great formality, and they ate it with great formality, with the panels open to the garden. Yet he still seemed angry, for he was clearly lost without women, they were the element in which he righted
himself
and so stayed afloat. Nor, in his new mood of freedom, did Muchaku any longer see this as a flaw.

Right conduct is neither too much nor too little, but one man’s too much is another man’s too little, and the less we ask about that the better. Publicly one demands only decorum, which preserves that privacy in which alone we may come into contact with what seems to us truth.

But it was disturbing. For even Yasumaro would admit
the taste harder to cure than the attendant diseases, and Muchaku’s recent experiences, as well as the danger they were undergoing, had made him randy. Violence is always naïve, and cruelty merely cunning, but the experience of either throws us back on our own primitive desires.

To eat a peach and to make love may give us the same insight, though some can achieve it only by eating a peach, and some only by making love, but still we cannot go to bed with a peach. There was that Hindu cult of Bhakti. It had nothing to do with Buddhism, but it had crept in anyway. He had always thought it contemptible. He had avoided it. The phallic stones in the temples of Japan he had thought a peasant cult, and about
mushrooms
he had not thought before at all. But Bhakti had its Japanese equivalents. There were those who felt that the only way to come into contact with religious
experience
was by a practised and elaborate copulation. He had always pitied them. But now he saw that, for themselves, they were right, for all these: to eat a peach, to spice properly a meal, to contemplate a waterfall or a problem in mathematics, or to copulate, were all the same means to accomplish the same insight, if insight was what one wanted, and if one could not attain it one way, one had to do it another, for the sake of not now, but one’s eventual, health.

It was only that so few people had merely and only a sexual outlet and a sexual ability fine enough to achieve the ineffable result, that the rest of the world did not believe such a method existed, and therefore had
contempt
for those sincere enough to appear to be charlatans.

Which reminded him of Lady Furikake, whom he did
not wish to remember. Her bhakti was the refinement of a court lady, a carefully planned dilatoriness, which he must have offended, but which his brother had been wise enough to allow, at last, to approach its final insight only at that moment when she herself had been determined that it must do so.

The wailing of the maid he could still hear. She must have been incinerated against her will. That made him blink. That was the cruel side of it. There is a difference between dying because there is nowhere else to go, and dying because that is where one is going, after a refreshing meal at the last travellers’ halt, from whose window one can look out at the goal which, in staying with Lady Furikake, he had provided, that glimpse of the goal that made the last stage of the journey energetic and
purposeful
again.

But it was too fine. He could not finish such reasoning. Besides, he could hear her voice. The smell of men, she had said, and it must have been as meaningful to her as the smell of incense had once been to him, when he was first a novice and had taken the symbol for the thing.

Not having Lady Furikake now, he had eaten furiously, each bite as it exploded in his mouth reminding him of her. Yasumaro was watching him sadly. He could not help but smile back. Yasumaro suggested they take wine on the moon-watching terrace, which they did. Each was reluctant to go to bed, and neither would admit to the reluctance.

Muchaku could not control his thoughts. He felt that unless he spoke them, they would do him damage. He had to take them out and throw them away.

“I must have hurt her,” he said.

Yasumaro seemed surprised. “Of course,” he said. “She could not have known you otherwise.” It was almost as though he had been sitting there, watching Muchaku’s thoughts, not really interested, but watching despite himself, and so weary that, though he could not leave out of politeness until those thoughts were over, still he became restive and irritable.

“It does no good to think of women,” he said. “They are only there to admit an incarnation, play the koto, and some flower arrangements are reserved to them. They write a little light verse of good quality. But sex, sex is only a recipe for hair restorer, turned to religious uses. Early religious texts are full of receipts, they are only magic cook-books, after all. Later, when one is
embarrassed
by all that holy primitivism, one gives it a symbolic meaning. The receipt for hair restorer becomes a parable of the Gods, who are only bigger men and women. And then, still later, in our day, anthropomorphic Gods are also embarrassing, so we treat them as charming and touching parables of the nature of the ineffable. It is the same with sex. The more sophisticated we are, the more the simplest things have importance only as parables of that ultimate simplicity of which we would not even be aware, had we not got so far away from it. And then, too, when we are clogged with thought, sensation clears the mind. It is strange we should need disorder in order to create order; that we should need women in order to do without them. But really it is also ridiculous. We have talked very foolishly today. I am going to bed.”

He left Muchaku alone. Not wishing to be alone, Muchaku went to bed himself. The kotatsu was out. It did not burn as did that one of the previous night. The
dog, who had been hiding all evening, came in from the garden, where it had been sniffing at the snails’ tracks, and snuggled under the quilt with him. Its nose was moist with the trail slime, but it was willing to be comforted, and therefore comforting. He dozed off.

When he woke he heard his brother tossing about, down the veranda. The moonlight was painfully bright. He lay there, staring at nothing. The dog got up and so did he. He padded down the corridor and crept under the quilt with his brother.

Neither said a word. But they fell asleep together like depleted puppies, the first night from their mother, curling up to each other for warmth, their legs and paws limply entangled, and their noses moist.

Muchaku woke abruptly, in tender morning light. The world seemed to vibrate, as though it had only now at last settled into its proper place. He lay alone, with the blanket tucked in well round him. The day immediately felt cheerful and content, as though they had looped back several days, to when the trouble had not yet begun. Perhaps they were starting over again. He blinked his eyes, grew accustomed to the light, and turned over on his side.

Yasumaro was changing the water in a bowl of flowers. Though his back was turned, he was absorbed and in a good humour. His movements had got back their accustomed wiry spring. He was barefoot, and his toes curled up and down optimistically.

He turned with a shy smile, for flowers were
something
that really mattered to him, and he had been caught out in a moment of utter selflessness. In his right hand he held an iris, whose stem bottom had gone limp and yellow. This he had been engaged in trimming off.

His fine face was radiant with pleasure, and he looked rested and alert.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said. “But they have such charm, and they were thirsty.”

“Flowers or women?” asked Muchaku.

“Ah, you were talking in your sleep,” laughed
Yasumaro
. He went away and came back with tea and a dish of cakes, which he set down beside the quilt. While Muchaku ate he watched him with judicious amusement.

“You feel better,” he said. “I thought we might go to the waterfall. I have not been for days. We could take a picnic.”

The idea was certainly a pleasant one, and besides, it got them out of that empty house into the full world of nature. The weather held. It was to hold for the next three days. It was a high, clear, cloudless day, whose air had the smooth cool texture of jade, a day out of time.

Yasumaro’s manner was one of delight, a joyous and whole-hearted evasiveness, and an attentive, affectionate eye for the world around him. He positively skipped. Finality, in his case, produced euphoria; it showed him more facets of things than would have any high purpose, and he was obviously pleased with what he saw. He was good company.

He liked to tease the world because he was so fond of it. Before they left, his last duty had been to part the garden leaves, peer down, and say good-bye to the snails. They did not, of course, pay any attention, but they were happy where they were. He was always careful to keep their private weather moist with a long necked
watering-can
, if the weather was dry. But today the weather was not dry. It had the spongyness of moss, even though the sun was shining. The air had a rippling shimmer, as after a light but efficient shower.

And Muchaku, this new Muchaku who had decided to go back to a stately fourteen, was enjoying himself hugely.
He and the dog, together, they sniffed the air. The dog, of course, had the advantage of more interesting smells, but Muchaku, for his part, had the more and taller things to see.

They skirted the battlefield and climbed the wooded granite ridge which lay between it and the country round the base of the waterfall.

It was not only another part of the country, but a steamy little kingdom of its own. This small wood dripped. There was no part of it that was or wanted to be dry, so it was a sun-shot refuge for all things that love the damp. He had not seen this wood or this waterfall for twenty years, and he realized now that he had never seen them. Not, at any rate, in this way.

There were mushrooms here and there, with that stubborn mushroom look of having popped into view just a second before one looked that way. There were ferns, too, that seemed to purr with bright green
contentment
, just for the joy of being damp. Their coiled fronds were as useful to their growth as tongues to frogs, and as alimentary.

There is a great deal to be learned from dead leaves and a few rocks. He began to learn it now. The little stony woods around the base of any waterfall must always be in some sense its loggia. As a nobleman attracts his own court, so does a waterfall attract its own flora, some closer to the presence, and some on the outer fringe, longing to work their way in, or content with their station. Some need just so much of favour and no more. First there was wood sorrel, with its folded back leaves, hanging quivering like green and rust coloured moths, and its sharp bitter flowers. Also the moss was in heat,
dusted with powdery flowers, which lay in capricious swathes against the stone.

Then, as the plunge of the water and the ripple away from the concussion which was the constant sound of the grave pool at its base became louder, drowning out all other natural sounds, they came to the inner ring of lichens. These lay in yellow and brown scabs on the boulders, like the burnt brown sugar crust of a
crème
brûlée.
These oldest living things were lowly and
tenacious
, patiently and mercilessly preparing the rocks to become ground finer, though even the largest boulder is only a grain of dust, in comparison to the detritus that coats some unseen star. Lichen has survived because though it feeds, nothing feeds on it. Yet it seems very feeble. It is only when one looks right at it that one sees its strength. There is something saurian about it. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the Orient the historic past lengthens out the farther we get away from the present, as does the geologic past. It is something man was always sure of, until science assured him it was true.

Meanwhile they were coming to the other side of that anteroom. The waterfall was hidden by the close-set pillars of the wood, for trees themselves are giant grasses, devised to support their foliage before nature invented the arch, and so the more primitive the wood, the closer set the trees. Plumes and veils of water-mist rose high and then drifted imperturbably downward through the wood. There were little rainbows
everywhere
one looked, set about like iridescent croquet hoops.

Ahead of him Yasumaro paused, but Muchaku was not alarmed. He could see from his brother’s springy
intransigent
stride, that Yasumaro had now determined on
exactly everything they would now do, and so he need feel responsibility for nothing. The monastery had shown him how futile was responsibility. It was deeply satisfying to return now to the security of being told what to do. It freed him at last from the dissatisfactions and the loneliness of having to do the telling.

Only the dog was suddenly sedate.

Yasumaro parted the branches, and they stepped out on the shingle of a tiny cove between two high boulders, into one of those covert paradises that existed long before man came along with his absurd belief that the natural balance of the world can be upset simply because he is self-seeking.

There is something deeply moving about those nooks and cranies where the animal and vegetable world goes on as it did before man arose, calm in the assurance that it has only to
wait to get its natural habitat back again, once man is over. They are one of the few places where we may still see the world for what it is, a perfectly
articulated
illusion, not logical in our sense, but with a
self-contained
logic of its own, a ravishingly abstract beauty, simply because it is a thought process without anybody to think it. Coming upon such places, we see very well how the world may be breathed out and in.

Sitting on the shingle, watching the ferns, we suddenly become aware that the world we are watching is not the same world we saw a second ago, even though it looks identical. It has been destroyed and re-created in one instantaneous respiration. And if we are very quiet, we can even become aware of that breathing. It is not precisely a sound, not even exactly a movement, but still, we know it is there.

There is nothing in knowledge that contradicts this, no matter how much we learn, for knowledge is
irrelevant
to this kind of knowing. Knowledge is merely phenomenal.

Animals and rocks live with this respiration better than we do, for the first have a life so brief, the second a life so long, that they have no choice other than to go with it, unlike man, who panics in the ebb and runs for a shore that is rushing away so fast that he can never reach it.

We did not do wrong to invent time, within our own frame of reference it is indispensable, but we did wrong to persuade ourselves that it was anything but a
convenient
system of artificial clocks, for time cuts us off from the eternal moment. The present is always with us, but the present has nothing to do with now. It cuts us off from the eternal now, for time can have no here and now. Time is always five past something, or else five to. A measureless instant cannot be measured. In the stream of duration, which is not a stream, but an infinite pond without surface, banks, or bottom, it is always now, and since the process is reciprocal and complementary, life and death are the same. In this eternal breathing in and out, everything is now.

The pool was altogether now.

It seemed natural to set down their hamper, throw off their clothes, and slip into the water. Yasumaro went first. Muchaku, having still much to learn, had to hesitate, and get into water like a man testing thin ice, waiting for it fearfully to give way, and then laughing with panic once it did so. For water, too, is time. It is always
changing
, always in motion, and always the same. It falls with
the power to beat us down, and then, quite amicably laps around us in a quiet pool. Inevitable and without inner volition, it works the same changes and is never changed.

It is also cool or warm indifferently, cold when we enter it, but friendly and warm once we move in it, as it persuades us to do.

The dog followed with that surprised look on its face as it paddled that dogs swimming do have. Tadpoles scurried away from them in the water, but the still pool’s myopic minnows continued to nibble at food that was always a little farther away from their mouths than they thought it was. They always had to dart a little beyond their food, in order to reach it.

A spotted deer, thinking of nothing in particular, turned to stare at them with juicy brown eyes, sniffed, and went on with its self-contained meditations. It drank judiciously. And all around them the ferns were jostling about exuberantly, in the sheer green excitement of growth.

They splashed about for a while. Dragonflies threaded the air with their sudden expert dart and flow. Water scooters clambered jerkily about on the tensile skin of the pool. In these creatures, too, were reflected the stark vibrant colours of Japan.

Then, shivering with cold, they sat down on the shingle, to admire the waterfall and eat their lunch. It was an exceptionally good lunch.

They ended with a bowl of fruit, at which they looked for a long time before having any desire to eat it. Muchaku said the fruit looked self-satisfied.

Yasumaro was amused. He didn’t think so. “Self-
satisfaction
is not the same as contentment. Contentment comes only with the ability to overlook self-knowledge.”

They were lazy and excited at the same time, because of the water. Certainly the waterfall was a masterpiece, and the Japanese have always realized that a waterfall or a good tree is no less a work of art than a good scroll. Thus, war or peace, there was a tree in Kamakura that had forty gardeners in permanent attendance on it, for a gardener, too, is a curator.

There were of course other and bigger waterfalls. But this one was perfect. It was justly treasured, to the point where even the warring armies avoided it.

“But then great art is not necessarily better, in fact, it is not usually so good, as minor. Greatness has nothing to do with perfection, or, for that matter, with goodness, which is perfection of conduct, the perfect matching of motive and means. Perfection is an accident, it is like cooking. A really good cook can never tell exactly what she did, that out of ten superb meals, this particular one should be exemplary.

“Nor should a cook be sad. Cooking is the only one of the arts that cannot be understood without communion. One must eat it, to realize what makes it so perfect. One cannot do that with a painting. So only the painter can know how a good painting is, since he made it.

“None of which is true, exactly,” said Yasumaro and giggling, held out a peach. Immediately the dog came clambering around them, and then, seeing what it was, trotted some distance away, squatted on the shingle, and sat there studiously, with its head darting this way and that, its nose just above the surface of the water.

There is always something vulnerable about the
self-absorbed
.
Muchaku watched it and blinked. Then the whole story of the soldier and the dog came out. He was surprised in the telling of it, to find how distressed he had been about that episode.

When he had done Yasumaro made no comment, but only looked quickly at his brother. There was nothing to say, for it was clear that though the dog put up a good show and had its own thoughts, still it missed its proper master.

“But why does it follow me? What does that mean?”

Yasumaro shrugged. “We shall have to wait and see,” he said. If it struck him as odd that Muchaku should be more concerned about the dog than about his betrayal of its master, he did not say so. Some people reproach themselves for one thing and some for another. And one can learn from a dog as much as from anyone else.

“Meaning?” he said, watching the dog’s cut velvet haunches. “Meaning and value have nothing to do with each other. Meaning is only the price we put on things. It defines nothing but our own predilections. But value is innate and intrinsic. The dog doesn’t mean anything, and as for its value, perhaps we shall find out about that, and perhaps we shall not.” Then he looked worried. “Do you suppose he would seek you out?”

“I would not blame him if he did.” Muchaku looked woeful. “Why?”

“There are soldiers from Noto in the district. Poor devils, everything has been looted already. No wonder they are desperate.” Yasumaro glanced at the waterfall and at the pool, in the late afternoon light. He looked as though he wanted to say something and did not quite know how, which made his face seem sad.