The cultural anthropologist Y, whose theoretical work on the “center” and the “periphery” has earned him an international reputation, is a friend of mine and someone who cares a lot about Eeyore. My son was quick to sense this right away. It was therefore gratifying to discover that Y's theory could be applied, as above, to my relationship with Eeyore. With Y as my starting point, I thought to expand on the significance of Eeyore's use of my feet as “periphery” in establishing a channel to me as an approach to defining the function of my son's consciousness overall. My thoughts on the subject led me straight to the question of imagination. Here again, clearly, Blake seemed relevant. For that reason, while I have a theme to develop here, I want to begin by reviewing my personal history of writing fiction about my son and reading Blake.
I have described my chance encounter as a young man with a few lines from The Four Zoas that unsettled me deeply. Thereafter, as a student and after graduation, before I had ascertained that the verse was Blake's, there was a period in my life when I found his shorter poems highly evocative and wrote some fiction that was centered around them. This amounted to selecting a poem, or a few lines from a poem that I might not have read from beginning to end, and working them into my fiction in a manner that might be called arbitrary, or even willful. Looking back now, I find examples where I would have to say I had misunderstood the lines I used (even now, entering the forest of dense and twisted symbolism in Blake's long Prophecies with only my amateur, self-taught understanding as a guide, I am undoubtedly guilty of new errors). Nonetheless, when I notice as I make my way through Blake again a mistaken reading that was once powerfully evocative for me, it should lead me to a new discovery about myself at the time. Today, I know that Blake is a poet I shall continue reading until I die; this amounts to a feeling that Blake may enable me to construct a model for living my own life as I move toward death. As I confirm misinterpretations in my own fiction and am moved by them once again, I recall comprehensively the working of my imagination when I was young; in effect, my use of Blake provides the opportunity to take my measure today against myself in the past.
The first time I quoted Blake was in a novel I wrote just after Eeyore was born with a handicap and which I based on my actual experience at the time, A Personal Matter. From the so-called Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I took the line, “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. …” The fact that I replaced the period that belongs at the end with an ellipsis, as if I were abbreviating a passage that followed, suggests to me that I had not actually read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Moreover, in translating the line, shifting responsibility to the young woman in the novel by having the translation come from her, I rendered it appropriate to my story. “Better to kill the infant in its cradle! Rather than ending up nursing unacted desires. …”
Looking back from my more comprehensive vantage of Blake's work today, I understand that unrealized desires represented a mode of living that Blake condemned violently, and that his emphasis was accordingly on the second half of the line. Clearly I should have rendered it as an impassioned appeal: “Compared to nurturing unrealized desires, even murdering an infant in its cradle is the lesser evil.” There is no question that my translation is incorrect; what is unclear to me all these years later is whether I twisted Blake to meet the requirements of a scene in my novel, giving the line to the young woman in the story, or whether the experience of the birth of a son with brain damage was controlling my reading of the line.
The young woman in my story volunteers magnanimous encouragement including sex to the youthful protagonist, who is in regression from the trauma of having had an abnormal child. I portrayed her as a liberated young woman, quite the opposite of the “virgin” Blake rails against in the final chorus of “A Song of Liberty”: Nor pale religious lechery call that virginity / that wishes but acts not. Even so, inasmuch as I failed to realize the connection between the “desire” I quoted and these lines, and must therefore have been unaware of Blake's idiosyncratic view of “desire,” it seems likely that I had read—more properly, misread—that Proverb of Hell just as I translated it in A Personal Matter. Yet it was this mistaken reading that provided me one of my motifs in that early novel. I recognize the possibility, strange as it seems, that I have constructed an author out of myself from precisely this variety of mistaken certainty.
When my son was five or six years old and able to sit in a carrier attached to the front of my bicycle, during a period when I was taking him every day to a Chinese noodle shop, I wrote a novella with a Blake poem as its “core,” which I called Father, 0 Father, Where Are You Going? It was in the following kind of dialogue that I began using Eeyore as one of my son's names in fiction about him: “And as he rode home on his bike with his face flushed from the steaming noodles and burning in the wind, he would ask repeatedly, ‘Eeyore, the pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola were good?’ and when his son answered, ‘Eeyore, the pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola were good!’ he considered that complete communication between father and son had been achieved and was content.”
The “I” in this story, who is in part superimposed on myself when I was young, is a writer attempting to write a biography of his father. “I” works on his draft as though he were dictating it into a tape recorder. In that section, I quote from Blake: “Father! father! where are you going? / O do not walk so fast. / Speak, father, speak to your little boy / Or else I shall be lost.” The poem is from the widely known Songs of Innocence. To this I added the last stanza of “The Land of Dreams” from the Pickering Manuscript: “Father, O father! what do we here?/ In this land of unbelief & fear? / The Land of Dreams is better far, / Above the light of the Morning Star.” (Father, o father, what are we doing here? In this land of unbelief and fear? And the land of dreams so very far as it is, beyond the light of the morning star!) After mistranslating Blake in this way, in the same style, as if the poem were continuing, “I” speaks into the tape recorder about himself: “Father, Oh father! What are we doing here? What were you doing here? And what do I think I'm doing in the middle of the night, in this land of unbelief and fear, seated earnestly at a tape recorder as if it were a device to send signals to you, eating pigs’ feet with mustard miso Korean-style and drinking whisky, what kind of an appeal am I supposed to be making all the way to the land of dreams so very far as it is, above the light of the morning star!”
Reading this novella that I wrote in my early thirties, I discover today that the protagonist “I” is identified with the child represented in Blake's poem. “I” is of course Eeyore's father, but more than that he is a lone child and, together with Eeyore, two baby birds screeching in the same nest, is calling out for his lost father.
I have relied on Blake's thought not only in my fiction but also in my literary criticism, in which I have quoted passages from Blake. Perhaps this was the painful groping of someone who had become an author with no experience of life. From early on in my career, I have thought about imagination. I have proposed that imagination is at the core of the function of language in fiction and is critical to observing the circumstances of our contemporary world. This has required me to study the theories of imagination of my predecessors. Beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre, I arrived, after a number of detours, at the work of Gaston Bachelard; when I wrote “A Methodology of Fiction,” I quoted the following passage from Eiji Usami's translation of Bachelard's Air and Dreams:
Even today, Imagination is considered to be the ability to form images. But it is rather the ability to deform images presented by perception, the ability to liberate us from basic images, the ability in particular to change images. If there is no changing of images, no unexpected merging of images, there is no imagination and the act of imagining does not occur… . If a present image does not recall an absent one, change images, liberating us from, in particular, basic images. As Blake proclaims, “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.”
In my ear
ly readings of this passage I paid scant attention to the Blake line. I was ignorant of the importance of the word “imagination” in Blake's mythological world, and I also felt in my arrogance that since my own thoughts about imagination seemed to connect to Bachelard directly I had no need of Blake's mediation. However, since the spring, when I began reading my way through Blake's complete oeuvre, I have reconfigured my own construction of the word “imagination.”
The line quoted by Bachelard appears in Milton, which I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. The capitalized words in this passage, Imagination, State, are in each case used by Blake idiosyncratically to connote meanings unique to himself, which, once understood, sweep away from the text the impression of mysticality or ambiguousness. What remains, and can be read, is a tangible, lucid presentation of Blake's basic thought:
Judge then of thy Own Self: thy eternal Lineaments explore What is Eternal & what Changeable & what Annihilable? The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself
Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination
The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State Created to be Annihilated and a new Ratio Created Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated Forms cannot The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife But their Forms Eternal Exist, For-ever. Amen Hallelujah.
Locating the word “imagination” in Blake's texts is easily accomplished: “The Eternal Body of Man is the imagination, that is God himself; the Divine Body is Jesus, we are his Members.” “Man is All Imagination God is Man & Exists in Us and We in Him.” “For All Things Exist in the Human Imagination.” For Blake, the substance of God is founded on the Imagination. The same is true of the ultimate Man. Man reaches God through the agency of Imagination. Man will be redeemed from this fallen world of illusion when all Mankind becomes the single body of God, and it is Imagination which is the means of achieving this State: when all Men at last conjoin with the Eternal Body, that is, with God, that moment in and of itself will be the fulfillment of Imagination.
It is from these thoughts on imagination that the earlier quote proceeds: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” Once the ultimate man is envisioned as conjoining with God, a conjoining enabled by the imagination, it should be possible to accept straightaway the view of “Imagination” as substantial, human existence itself. Where Blake becomes difficult to understand is in his singular use of terms like “State” and “Forms,” the “State of Man” in this fallen world, or the “Forms” that express the essence of what will become the ultimate Man.
Now then, if imagination is human existence itself—I find myself compelled to use Blake's definition as the basis of my own thinking—in what form does imagination live in Eeyore? The following question looms to the surface as a major issue (in truth, I have taken this detour in order to arrive at it): “Eeyore—do you have an imagination ? Assuming you do, how does it work? “ Again and again I have experienced the pain of posing this urgent question. Until it has seemed to me that discovering an answer was life's most difficult challenge, not only to Eeyore himself but also to me!
In Jerusalem, his last “prophecy,” Blake wrote:… as in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven / and Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within / In your Imagination of which this world of Mortality is but a Shadow. Reading these beautiful words, was I able to acknowledge with a calm heart and mind that the fundamental source of existence in this world was lacking in my son?
Since about ten years ago, during the period corresponding to Eeyore's puberty, what we have been able to see of his interior life has been revealed chiefly through music. That said, I must add that I personally have been unable to connect these stirrings in Eeyore's soul in response to music with either the exercise or the development of imagination.
As a child, Eeyore was an expert at identifying bird calls. In my novel The Flood Has Risen Unto My Soul, in which I call the character modeled on my son “Jin,” I described this as follows:
“Whenever he was awake, Jin's life consisted of listening to bird calls his father had transferred to tape from stacks of records. And it was the bird calls that drew ‘words’ from the toddler for the first time. From the tape recorder next to his pillow on the cot where he sits or sprawls, a bird call issues at a volume just perceptible. Through scarcely parted lips, his voice even lower, Jin sighs, ‘Thrush—it's dusky thrush,’ or ‘Titlark, it's titlark, it's flycatcher, nightingale, it's nightingale …’ In this way the child with dimmed intelligence learned to distinguish no fewer than fifty bird calls and discovered in listening to them the same pleasure he took in eating.”
When I became aware of Eeyore's budding interest I poured effort, perhaps wasted, into nurturing his inner affinity for the sounds of birds. When he entered a special class at elementary school and began to make friends, his passion shifted to the music of Bach and Mozart. But it lived in him throughout the preschool years of his childhood. Hearing the strong, high-pitched “peep” that dipped gradually lower in the scale, for example, he would say, “Kingfisher—it's ruddy kingfisher,” Since I was operating the tape recorder and Eeyore was receiving my signal and responding with words, I took this to mean that communication had occurred. Perhaps, but did that mean that my son's imagination had been engaged? There was no possibility that Eeyore was picturing the shape of the bird from the sound of its voice on the tape. His vision was impaired in a way that could be corrected only by a complex configuration of prism and lens. In those days before he was wearing glasses, he couldn't possibly have resolved the shape or figure of a bird; even so, I went to the trouble of pointing to photographs of birds on record-album jackets and repeating for him, “This is a magpie; this is a starling.” But it seemed never to occur to him to look at the photographs on his own as he listened to the tape.
In short, the bird as object did not exist; the signal of the bird call was merely invoking the name of a bird. Nor did providing Eeyore with the signal of a name elicit a bird call from him. In other words, the excitement of conjuring the concrete existence of the bird in question in the space between the bird call on the tape and the name spoken in a whisper by my son was being experienced in the father's imagination only.
As Eeyore encountered other children with handicaps similar to his own, his interest shifted from bird calls to music created by people, and although this transition unmistakably occurred and was an important event in our family's life, I don't believe I could explain its significance satisfactorily to an outsider. I have the same feeling about the special procedures for communication that have developed between Eeyore and me over time: I am certain they will also appear strange to an outsider, and I feel that I am losing my nerve even as I prepare to describe them. To my wife and to Eeyore's younger brother and sister, our procedures, which were spoken aloud, were familiar sounds. We had two, and both began as games. One evolved into a kind of joyful acknowledgment; the other concealed a threat of punishment that makes me reluctant to describe it.
It is now seven or eight years since a young Korean woman paid me a visit to deliver a request from a writer in Seoul on her way to New York. Her errand required only a brief conversation, and when it was time for her to leave, the person she was to see next who had arranged to pick her up at my house failed to appear. He was a Korean resident in Japan, and I knew his name, but he was not the sort of person whose address was available so there was no way I could take her to him. The hour was already late, and as the young woman began to show signs of real distress, Eeyore came up with a game to keep her entertained. She spoke no Japanese, but when she sang stanzas from Korean songs, Eeyore would play them on the piano and add chords to the melodies. During and after our conversation the young woman had seemed guarded, an almost stern expression on her face, but gradually she became caught up in the game, adjusting the pitch on Eeyore's bongo drums, his favorite instrument when he was young, and thumping out Korean rhythms along with his p
iano.
The young woman went on her way to America, and a number of Korean folk songs and melodies that were based on them remained in Eeyore's repertoire. Presently, I added lyrics to one of the melodies he liked to play. As the result was a simple ditty, I'd like to print it with the musical symbol at the beginning of each line that we used to see in popular magazines just after the war when they published a hit tune.
♪Don't fret. Nothing to fear
Not when my dear boy Eeyore is here—♪
Originally I had written lines leading up to these, but somewhere along the way Eeyore had forgotten the words and I had forgotten the melody and we ended up singing only the refrain. Over time, the song came to serve as a signal of acknowledgment between Eeyore and me. “Do-oo-n't fret,” I would begin singing, drawing out the first words, and from whatever corner in the house he may have wandered into Eeyore would appear, timing himself to arrive at my side as I finished, “Ee-ee-yore's here,” and say, extending an arm to touch me as though we were a tag team in a wrestling match, “Thank you very much?”
The origin of our game was spontaneous, it was not something I had contrived with a purpose in mind. I would sing the lines offhandedly, as if to myself—“Don't fret, nothing to fear, not when my dear boy Eeyore is here”—and Eeyore, hearing me, would return to my side and respond with “Thank you very much!” and an exaggerated gesture to go with it, and that was all. I do recall that just about this time, whereas until then he was rarely out of my sight, burrowing under my desk while I was working or waiting at the front door for the sound of my returning footsteps when I went out, Eeyore had begun discovering things to do all by himself in out-of-the-way corners of the house. Before long, I had begun using our song, not always but often, as a means of summoning him to my side when he failed to appear when he was called.