Segaki (18 page)

It was just before or after dawn, it would have been difficult to tell which, of one of those absolute,
irrefrangible
days during which we utterly relax, realizing that in some way everything has been planned out in advance, and that there is nothing for us to do but watch. But he knew, even as he awoke, that he must look with care and remember everything, in order that he might understand whatever was about to happen.

Then, fully awake, he stood up, and realized he was alone. In the distance the imperturbable mountain began to glisten like sherbet, but he did not give it more than a glance. Dimmer against the increasing light, the glow in his brother’s improvised room was still burning. He went to investigate.

Coals were chuckling to themselves in a charcoal brazier. But that was not what he noticed. What he noticed was the Fa Ch’ang. It lay on the floor, and his brother must have sat up with it all night. Looking down at it, Muchaku tried to understand why.

It happens that we know that painting very well, for it still exists, in the Daitojuki, in Kyoto. It is a simple
picture
, so simple as to be terrifying, unless one is reassured by the inner meaning of things rather than by their mere appearance. It is small, but also vast, and it has the stark
impertinence of insight. It is a picture that swallows up the beholder, until he loses all consciousness of himself, and becomes the consciousness of the thing depicted instead.

Yet nothing is depicted. Only, somewhere in the vast void of awareness, for no particular reason except their own inner waywardness, six persimmons have appeared. Five of them stand on the same level. The sixth has not been able to appear properly, and is a little below the others. One feels sorry for it, and yet in some way it is the most significant of the lot.

The others are at all stages of becoming and fading away. The moment is fugitive. They are there, and yet, even while we look, they might not be. They have loomed up out of the vast flux of being, taking this accidental appearance, very aware of each other, and yet all the same thing.

One is very puzzled by them. Two are of an identical intensity, yet each of the two seems the more actual, as we look, until we realize neither is actual. It must be the paler one on the left, the same tone as the one that is not quite successful. Then these fade out, and one is aware of the outlined ones on each end.

Each unique, each becomes the other, without
somehow
changing in itself. And their fuzzy, darting stems, which seem to have broken from no branch, but to have grown from the fruit itself, are also different, as though to say: the thing by which we hold a thing is not the same as the thing held. Looking at them one can taste their pulp, their ravishing, ineluctable bitter sweetness, that when we are weary reminds us that life is never so.

But their taste is not really the taste of persimmon pulp. It is the refreshing savour of experiencing the nature of things. And realizing this, one sees instantly that it is only a picture of persimmons.

Then, as one realizes that, they capriciously alter again. They are not persimmons. They have merely assumed a shape to remind us that being is more manifold than existence.

Muchaku looked at it for a long time, while the panic drained out of him. He was almost ready to accept.

But the mood broke. He heard a pattering to and fro in the monastery building behind the hall. He ventured out there, timid, afraid again of what he might find.

It was the dog and then Yasumaro appeared. He was in the best of spirits, with a high unclouded cheerfulness that seemed to make the dog feel playful. He had been for a walk in the woods, before dawn, to admire them, and he had returned carrying an old wooden pail full of spring water. He set down the pail, and the dog
immediately
began to lap it up with an eager pink tongue. Yasumaro only watched and laughed, as the dog,
trembling
with eagerness, slipped, hit its throat against the rim of the bucket, scrambled up, and lapped again. He took it in his arms, shook it vigorously, while it tried to scramble away, and then began to cook breakfast. He looked astonishingly young, and his eyes glittered with
merriment
.

He did not speak to Muchaku. He was busy with
something
he had not begun to set down yet, so that a zone of creative privacy had already settled over him.

Muchaku did not know what to do. He went to the balcony of the terrace, unable to stay away from there.
Unthinkingly he was straining to catch a glimpse of Lady Furikake’s house. He felt he needed reassurance, not realizing that the time for that was over. His brother had gotten him beyond that point, though he did not know it, at which he any longer needed to be reassured. For his brother was tactful. Now his own life was complete, Yasumaro wanted to help someone else to completion, before he went on his way, but he would not have dreamt of saying so. Besides, to say so was to defeat one’s
purposes
.

Muchaku could not see the house anywhere down there. The ruins were too well hidden. But he did catch a glimpse of the monks’ dwellings at the foot of the temple foundations, without even noticing the symbolism of their situation.

He became aware that his brother was watching him, with that dewy shyness he exhibited on those few
occasions
when he had something to ask of someone else. He suggested that Muchaku take a walk, if he did not mind. He wanted to be alone.

Though Muchaku was instinctively hurt, he did not mind in the least. He took a walk in the woods, with the dog, and learned quite a lot from doing so. Somehow, today, the world had so much to teach.

When he came back he found his brother had dressed himself with great care, shaved, and was physically
immaculate
. He was sitting cross-legged on the platform, facing Fuji, and painting busily. For a while Muchaku watched without coming forward or making his presence known. But then his brother was so absorbed, he would not have known whether Muchaku was there or not.

The dog, sensing that something human and important
was going on, trod in a tight circle and then flumped down to watch.

It was, for Yasumaro, not a mood in which he missed women, for he was now in a world beyond the sexes. Great art, even when it seems erotic, or shows us a nude, never is sexual. It is far beyond that.

He had never seen his brother paint before. There comes a point in everybody’s work when, if he devotes his full attention to it, he finds it boring. Unfortunately that is the point of mastery. We are then so caught up in it that there is nothing to do but go on.

That Yasumaro was a master there was no doubt. Only he himself knew that there was anything in any of his works to be done better. It was interesting to watch him at work, but also embarrassing. Painting, to him, clearly, as to any master, was an infinitely slow bending over
possibles
, solemn, stately, and a little shivery. For there is always something faintly ghoulish about the creative mind. It is something a little beyond life, as it sits there calmly choosing which part of existence it will express itself through, what form of the living world it will take possession of, in order to animate itself, for the thing it selects is really the thing it discards.

Art is always a ghost. It is always returning with its messages from a world that has not come into existence yet. It is dreadful to watch this process of choice, of which the artist is so unconscious, for what he does not choose to animate, is denied the right of birth.

Yasumaro was painting in sumi, in the liquid, nervous, sparse style for which he was famous. He was not really looking at Fuji. He had only wanted to be in its presence. And, as his poised brush hand hovered over that blank
paper, defining what the emptiness contained by evoking, in a few vivid splashes of ink, what it did not, Muchaku felt for the first time the full moral force of the artist, who always draws out of nothingness not what he wants to save, but what he has discarded. So children, trading marbles, in putting aside those which to us seem without a flaw, show us the true flawlessness of the one they have kept, besides which the perfection of those they have been willing to dispose of suddenly dwindles and shrinks.

To leave one’s deepest beliefs unknown takes great moral courage. Any form of insight takes great courage. He understood now why Yasumaro was always so
insouciant
and whimsical, even at the wrong times. It was because he took life so seriously.

His brother sat there motionless for hours, his fingers full of the ethics of the brush, which meditates not upon what one should do, which again is merely morals, but upon the nature of what one is about to do, so that one may do it with a full realization of its own nature, which is a higher concern altogether.

It was an object lesson in correct conduct, but the lesson was a hard one. Muchaku looked away. When he looked again, Yasumaro had put the painting aside, and was sitting there with his eyes closed, sniffing the
coffee-bean
aroma of his inkstick.

As for what the painting meant, or if it was done, Muchaku did not want to look. For clearly, if this was what Yasumaro had wanted to do, then it summed him up. Besides, he began to realize now, meaning is not to be defined. Meaning is a metaphysical paper chase. We can tell roughly the direction that which eludes us has taken, but we shall never find all the pieces strewn out,
we shall never catch a glimpse of the runner, and here and there the trail may suddenly vanish in a gust of doctrine. We will be lucky then if we can see it continuing on the other side of the glade. And then, a paper chase has no real goal. It is merely the pretext for an exciting excursion through woods which become the clearer for having this momentary path through them. Probably when we get back we shall look behind us, see a few pieces of paper, and realize that we were only chasing ourselves. It was we who threw the paper out, even though we can never get all the pieces back again. And so it was the trip through the woods that was important after all, for we would not have run through it otherwise.

Yasumaro’s painting would be as painful and as
enlightening
as the persimmons. It would be there and not there. But he was very glad that he had seen it being done. That had taught him something about himself. He had given way to doubt only because that was the only part of belief that one could ever see, the marbles set aside that made the other one show for the unique thing it was.

For belief is always self-interested and limited. It goes in blinkers. Disbelief alone shows us how vast belief can be. It indicates the presence of the thing that can never be seen, even by one’s self. To see anything, you must always stand outside it, for if you stand inside it, you are not aware of its dimensions. In order to help anyone, one must be one’s self beyond help.

His moment of insight held and then broke. The air was too still. It made distant noises mercilessly clear.

He only became aware now that something had been happening below them all morning. Though it was
peaceful
here, the woods below were restive. Then far off, they
heard it, the sinister hunting horn, the battle music
imported
from Korea to urge men on to hunt each other in packs. It seemed to come from very far away.

Yasumaro opened his eyes and winked jovially. “At last,” he said, sighed, and began to grind a little ink.

“What shall we do?” asked Muchaku, more to himself than to anyone else, for he sensed that what they should do had already been taken care of. Yet he could not help but feel uncertain.

“I come here every summer to paint,” said Yasumaro. “So I shall go on painting.” He added water to his paint stone and went on methodically grinding.

Though the sound was far away, and soon stopped, those who had made it were moving closer. The morning wore on.

People speak of the tortures of the damned. They never do so of the tortures of the saved. If one is sensitive, those exist, for one is saved only at someone else’s expense. Muchaku wondered what to do, no matter what his brother might say.

Yasumaro seemed to suffer from no such doubts.

It was about one when the troops reached the plain in which Yasumaro’s house stood. The battle music began again, the Genaku Biro played since the eighth century, a weird, brittle, lusting sound. Muchaku went to the balustrade and looked down. Small figures were running back and forth over that miniature hummocked plain. Cheated of the loot that might have been in Lady
Furikake’s
house, they were setting fire to the other villas. He could hear nothing, what was going on was too far away, but he could watch the flames blossom, as each copse took fire. There seemed no order down there.
Order was up here. Nor did that down there seem to have anything to do with themselves. Muchaku thought it better not to mention what he saw. He forced himself to look at Fuji in the distance instead. It was as calm as ever.

Yasumaro had gone to make tea. He gave a bowl to Muchaku, sat down where he had been, and sipped
reflectively
. Everything seemed to have a heightened reality. The tea was almost painfully correct, with the last moment perfection of something that has to be done exactly right because it cannot be done again.

The fires in the plain began to burn higher, and though they could not be seen, Fuji began to shimmer and shake, as smoke tumbled upward, invisible except for that refraction, through the air.

From somewhere far below them the battle music, a thin horripilating death rattle, began to sound again. Then, pantingly, it stopped, the way a dog stops baying when it begins to close in for the kill. In its absence they could hear other noises from the wood, as the game began to move restlessly away, making always for higher ground, snapping twigs, and the swoosh of forest boughs being forced apart and then meeting again. Even this sound ceased.

Yasumaro put down his cup and reached beside him for a battered straw gardening hat, which he must have found somewhere in the temple, a frayed disk with chewed-up chin strings, which he clamped on his head. The gesture seemed involuntary.