Apart from all that, there was the question of Eeyore the individual. With his sensitivity to death he might comprehend the tragedy of an atom bomb incinerating an entire city, of hundreds of thousands of people dying in that instant and for months afterward and many more than that wounded. Undoubtedly, he would be shocked by the photographs of the dead and the wounded. Given the fear of death already inside him, he might even find himself being driven into the darkness of an enormous shadow of death. And certainly he would change. But this particular change might amount to receiving a wound even his father could never heal for him, to experiencing the destruction and death of a part of his own physical body. “Uh-oh! One hundred and forty thousand people died from just one bomb! And more died after. There were people who evaporated, the flash of light burned people's shapes into stone steps! Oh, it's really frightening. All those people died!”
What if Eeyore began expressing thoughts like these habitually? Would it be possible to turn him away from his interior gloom into the light? Even when his own father felt devastated whenever he surveyed the state of nuclear weapons in the world? These were the thoughts that occurred to me and that I expressed. I tried persuading the female instructors that if they were going to expose handicapped children to cruel and terrible realities, they must first consider carefully a mechanism for converting the shock the children were certain to receive into something akin to hope. Children with normal minds might be considered capable of discovering such a mechanism on their own—though surely there were those among them who could not, not only children but also adults—but to expect seriously handicapped children to perform an operation of that kind would be to saddle them with a heavier burden than they could bear.
The disappointed teachers eventually fell silent and moved away; but the problem they had presented me with remained alive. Hadn't I myself failed to create a mechanism that would allow the consciousness of the tragedy of war including nuclear weapons to open on the prospect of hope? Hadn't I failed, in other words, to provide Eeyore with a definition that would permit him to convert the shock he would receive into something positive? I could feel these concerns pushing me toward a musical about powerless people and their role in avoiding the horrors of war.
That week I wrote a script I called “Gulliver's Foot and the Country of the Little People.” A stage was to be created in the gymnasium at the facility, and a curtain would be lowered halfway. Installed in the center of the space that remained visible below would be a single, giant, papier-mâché foot that was cut off by the curtain just above the ankle. The chorus of handicapped children, including those sitting in wheelchairs, would be grouped around the foot. Gulliver's voice was to echo down from speakers high above his giant foot and behind the curtain.
I. On the beach, brandishing hoes and sticks, the little people stand at the base of Gulliver's giant foot and raise a cry of lament. There is news of an approaching warship from the neighboring country. From above the clouds Gulliver's voice booms down: Has such a crisis occurred in the past and, if so, what was done about it? The people reply: Defending themselves with these weapons they retreated into the mountains and waited for the invaders to go away. Even so, each little skirmish inevitably produced its own dead and wounded on both sides. To be sure, there has been peace in the land for some time now. People seem to have realized there was no profit to be gained from occupying a country as poor as this. But why had their neighbor chosen this moment to attack again? A war would bring suffering to them as well.
II. The king and his ministers arrive from the city. The king calls for a ladder to be leaned against Gulliver's foot and disappears behind the curtain. The ministers explain to the people. The king has come to ask Gulliver to annihilate the enemy ships in the offing by throwing boulders at them. Or to encircle them with rope and capture the entire fleet.
III. Gulliver's voice attempts to persuade the king to reconsider his battle strategy. A victory in this war would only deepen the people's hatred in the neighboring country. And even Gulliver could not massacre all the little people in the neighboring country. War would break out again and by that time Gulliver might be long gone. Better to adopt the old policy of fleeing into the mountains. If they needed help transporting things he would gladly be of service.
IV. The angry king climbs down the ladder and delivers a speech to the people: Gulliver is ungrateful. His gluttony has made the country poor yet in a time of crisis he does nothing. Those of you who are close to him must entreat him to go into battle! So saying, the king withdraws with his ministers.
V. With no other recourse, the little people call out to Gulliver to fight for them. Gulliver's silence conveys his perplexity.
VI. A representative of the people of the neighboring country arrives. He explains that his king is calling on his subjects to attack because he fears that otherwise Gulliver will join forces with the king of this country to attack him.
VII. Gulliver declares that he will not participate in war. The king and his ministers return to arrest the representative of the neighboring country as a spy, but the little people unite to drive them away.
VIII. The representative promises that his country will disarm. The little people and Gulliver watch him sail off across the sea.
When it was time to entrust the script to Eeyore, I drew a diagram of the stage as I explained the action. Eeyore knew about plays: his special class at middle school had staged The Giant Turnip, and I tried using examples from that experience to talk about the large papier-mâché foot, but I couldn't be sure from what he said, and this troubled me, whether he had understood the story: “Oh boy: That's a big foot! That's a good one. Is it Papas foot? I cant write music for a story so long. It's a major work, wouldn't you say? It's difficult, wouldn't you say? I can't do this one. I always forget everything!”
Mrs. T and Eeyore's younger sister encouraged him to begin work. His sister broke down the script into short scenes and drew a storyboard. Eeyore had chosen to see Gulliver's foot as identical to his father's, but his sister drew Gulliver's face to look exactly like Eeyore's own and this seemed to awaken his interest. Mrs. T selected from among Eeyore's compositions the strongest melodies and organized them in a kind of inventory catalogue. At each piano lesson, she helped Eeyore choose melodies that seemed to fit verses in my script and pieced them together to build the score. When they had sounded out a melody and the harmony to accompany it side by side at the piano, Eeyore's job was to transcribe it on five-stave paper in time for the next lesson.
I made only one request regarding the music. I had written the lines of the king's speech to fit a song Eeyore had already composed for another occasion, the first track-and-field-day ceremony of his own school, Bluebird Special Facility. “The Bluebird March,” as it was called, began slowly and then at the refrain became an allegro using triplets in a way that conveyed tension. I asked that the march be transposed to a minor key and made to fit my lyrics. As I had expected, the music conveyed perfectly the blend of panache and whininess that was the king's special flavor. Once Eeyore began working on the tune I often heard my wife singing the king's speech in the kitchen:
Gulliver's gluttony has made us poor
Yet he does nothing to help …
The whole family participated in completing the musical. Eeyore's younger brother pronounced my script too long and wanted it pared down until only a logical framework remained. He also discovered on my library shelves a book on stage design and devoted ten days to building a model of the set. In this way, with everyone pitching in, “Gulliver's Foot and the Country of the Little People” was completed. But shortly after we had sent it off to the facility we received a request to simplify it further in consideration of the children's ability and performance time. Once again we went back to Mrs. T, and with her help we created a final version. I succeeded in convincing Eeyore of the need to revise the script, but when it came to actually redoing the arrangements he couldn't be bothered. Apparently, it was in the essential act o
f creating the composition that he found his pleasure and his ability to concentrate.
Two days before Christmas Eve, when our musical was to be performed, Eeyore and my wife went to our cabin in the mountains. At the house for his final piano lesson of the year, Mrs. T had taken the time to remind Eeyore, who was restless with excitement about leaving, that the children performing Gulliver were not only amateur musicians but also handicapped, and that he must not be angry even if the beat were uneven and the singing off-key. On another occasion, conducting his own composition for chorus at his special class in middle school, Eeyore, who enjoyed watching not only concerts but orchestra rehearsals on television, had provoked complaints from school mothers by whipping the stand with his baton and shouting orders to repeat. Informed by Mrs. T that he would attend rehearsal as the composer but would not be conducting this time, Eeyore had indicated his agreement by removing the baton he had packed in his backpack. His compliance was almost certainly due to his high spirits at the thought of having his mother all to himself for the two days of their journey together.
Alone in the Tokyo house with Eeyore's younger brother and sister, I realized how long it had been since Eeyore and his mother had spent the night away. After an early dinner, my daughter remained at the dining table to do her homework and my son disappeared into his room and gave himself away with the stealthy beeping of a computer game. The house felt calm and orderly. Eeyore's sprawling absence here and there kept entering consciousness as an empty, chilly feeling that required us to acknowledge the degree to which his large body with arms and legs spasmodically akimbo like a baby's overshadowed our daily lives.
That evening, putting aside a letter “from a reader” that had continued to trouble me, I was making my way through Erdman's principally social and political critique of Blake. Somehow, a cloud of gloom seemed to be hanging over those of us in the family who had stayed at home. Recently, I had received a number of anonymous letters of the sort that people addressed to particular individuals because the media ignored their own assertions about this and that. While the letters were informed by feelings of victimization, they were also forceful and assertive in their way; today's, postmarked from Mikawa in the Yamaguchi prefecture, had been provoked by a collection of my speeches at student antinuclear protest meetings and handicapped children's parent associations. Those who were responsible for the nation and for society, the letter began, whether in America or Europe or Japan, must survive nuclear war by hiding in giant shelters so they would be able to rebuild the world after the Soviets had been destroyed. In normal times, entertainment may be important, but in times of crisis authors are useless parasites of society, and handicapped children the more so. In honesty, could an author and a handicapped child rebuild the world after a nuclear war? Wasn't it more likely that they couldn't build even a single house? Those who feel powerless tend to fall into defeatism. “And where do folks like that get off criticizing the leaders in the freedom camp who dedicate themselves each day to the inevitable nuclear confrontation with Soviet totalitarian fascism! I'm not suggesting that you and your retarded son commit suicide, but have you ever considered keeping your mouth shut instead of spewing your poison into our world?”
It wasn't as if I felt unable to refute the author. It was rather that his logic quickly detached from my consciousness, leaving behind only an image, assuming we had survived the nuclear war together, of building a hut for myself and Eeyore in which to escape the onslaught of the black rain. That night, we three house-sitters went off to our rooms to bed without so much as a decent good-night to one another. The following day, Saturday, happened to be the last day of school, and although we had not planned to attend the performance I arranged to meet the children at the station after their closing-day ceremony and we decided on the spot to join Eeyore and my wife.
Our cabin in Gumma looked naked and exposed; the silver birch had dropped their leaves, and the first typhoon of the summer had swept down from the plateau and uprooted the pines that grew in the shallow soil that covered the lava rock. We arrived at sunset and set out down the path toward the facility on the opposite slope, the leaves covering the ground beneath our feet glowing redly in the failing light. The view from the path that wound up through the mist from the last rays of light pooled at the stream in the bottom of the valley was so unnaturally clear that we could make out the figures of my wife and Eeyore returning toward us side by side, their eyes on the ground in front of them, from five hundred meters away.
“Let's call out to them,” Eeyore's sister suggested, but her brother stopped her: “He might think we're here because something bad has happened.” A sense of danger of this kind lurked in the children's minds at all times. This was the variety of daily life the family was taxed with, I thought to myself; but the children had already shifted to an untroubled mood and ran down the hill together, Eeyore's sister moving as always with the ease and grace of a prancing colt. Reunited, the four of them began climbing back to where I waited, looking up in my direction as they came; and in my lingering melancholy I imagined them as they would be when I was dead, just as they were now, gathered around Eeyore though he was the largest, protecting him, managing. Up the hill they marched in high spirits, singing, and in a minute I could hear the words:
Gulliver's gluttony has made
our country poor…
When we had returned to the cabin, my wife told me about the dress rehearsal Eeyore had attended early that morning. In the very first scene, as he listened to the little people singing their chorus, his elbows had lifted and tightened against his sides and he had leaned forward from the waist with his head in his hands. “Oh boy, this is surprising. This is a problem. What shall we do, Mama?” This time, Eeyore wasn't venting his anger as a haughty composer; he was deeply perturbed. To an observer it might even have appeared that he was mortified about a mistake of his own. Nonetheless, the music teacher, a small man who seemed to have his wits about him, came down from the stage with the score in hand and explained to Eeyore that he had further simplified the arrangements during the rehearsals to match the children's ability to sing in chorus, and had even converted a number of solos into group recitations. My wife listened with growing apprehension, but Eeyore had surprised her by agreeing readily: “I understand. There are times when the performer will leave out repeats, let's see, Glenn Gould is one; and in mono-aural Lupatti did the same thing!”
The rehearsal had resumed, and this time Eeyore sang along as he watched—he had a beautiful singing voice, clear as a young boy's before it changed and without vibrato—but each time the action onstage was late or a new singer began off-pitch he shook his head discreetly. The music teacher also appeared to notice, and as the piano would have to be removed to the side of the stage on the day of the performance, the problems he and Eeyore had identified together seemed to concern him. At that point, at my wife's suggestion, Eeyore had accepted the job of prompter beginning at the rehearsal that afternoon, and had made a big difference. The place he had chosen to install himself was a surprise in store for us at tomorrow's performance. Eeyore's younger brother, whose model of the stage had been used in building the actual set, was certain he knew the answer to the secret.
Using wood from the pine trees that had been felled by the typhoon early that summer and was still green, I managed with difficulty to light a fire, and the family sat around it in a semicircle and ate the vegetable rice and chicken in ceramic pots that we had bought at the Yokohama station. I felt content, but it was a different sort of contentment than when Eeyore and I had traveled to Izu in the typhoon. As we continued our conversation, Eeyore jumped up with the agility he possessed when engaging in an action that pleased him and opened wide the window on the valley side of the cabin. The deep, silent chill that precedes snow on the plateau flowed into the room. Shivering, I was about to instruct Eeyore to close the window when he silenced me by exclaiming, with a theatrical gesture, “Shhh! Listen everyone!”
Ships of war dr
aw near to where we stand
How can we know what terrible fate is at hand?
What is to become of us?
Gulliver, what are we to do, where to flee?
Keep us free.
From the facility on the slope across the valley, the sound of singing voices reached us faintly through the stillness of the resort community. It was the first chorus Eeyore had composed, to words I had written right after we had decided to collaborate on a musical play. I reproduce here the score in its original form:
Inasmuch as the music teacher is preparing to publish an account of the entire project that goes back to asking me and Eeyore to become involved, I shall be brief about the actual performance of “Gulliver's Foot and the Country of the Little People” that Christmas Eve. I shall limit myself to certain impressions of the individuals onstage that moved me, and to Eeyore's behavior that day.
Mr. M's mise-en-scène was based on his interpretation of the country of the little people as literally a gathering of handicapped children. Although they were costumed as peasants from medieval Europe, the children made no attempt to conceal their handicaps, appearing onstage in their wheelchairs, or on crutches, or not so much sitting as having slumped to the floor; and as their performances appeared to be merely an extension of their everyday behavior, it was rather like watching an ordinary holiday celebration at the facility. When handicapped children are overcoming their handicaps to behave normally, the more so if a group of them is involved, they infuse the space around them with a deep humanity and with a vitality that feels valiant. Here, too, the choruses had force and presence precisely because each of the singers was overcoming his own difficulty to achieve a natural performance as he moved about or sat motionless on the stage.