I mentioned experiences that had planted this feeling in me so it was there inchoately, waiting to be activated by the words “rain tree.” I want to describe those moments. The stone Buddhas beyond counting that covered the mountain of stones at Borobudur were in the process of being restored; the coexistence on the mountain of a construction site and an archaeological ruins side by side struck me as impossibly valiant. At the bottom of a long flight of stone steps, in the very best location for a vendor's stall, a little old man—or was he roughly my own age, I wondered, withered in appearance, not only his skin but even his posture, by the tropical sun and exposure to wind and rain in his life out of doors?—was selling thick tea and purplish-silver frogs made of paper and clay. The frogs were toys: the head was hinged like a bellows, and when you tilted it up it croaked like the Indonesian frogs I had heard frequently along the way.
The man wore a faded batik shirt with long sleeves, and on his left hand where it protruded from the sleeve I glimpsed a baleful sixth finger like a spur. Doubtless, that finger had secured him the prime location for a stall at one of Java's top excavation sites. Accepting a paper-and-clay frog and my change from his six-fingered hand, I stepped into the meager shade of a tamarind tree and imagined that Eeyore had been born and raised in Java; the object attached to his skull like a second head would likely have earned him his own prime location for a vendor's stall. I reflected wistfully on the communality of Indonesian society.
The philosopher N, the principal authority in our party, has written about the universal significance in island folklore of the “temple of death” in Pura Darem, the scene of my moment on Bali. If I can summarize the gist of his essay, it will help me to convey my own sense of just where I was when I stood in the courtyard that day. In every Bali village there are three temples that together comprise a single institution. The seaside of the island has negative value and stands in opposition to the mountains, which are positive. Pura Darem, at the sea, is a temple for the souls of the dead before they have been purified, that is, before their funeral. When they have been purified, the souls of the dead are celebrated at a second temple. And there is a third temple that directs the communal life of the village. The patron spirit of Pura Darem, the witch Randa, invades a variety of people and possesses them. She also uses her magic to cure the sick. Following is a direct quote from N's essay that reveals the creativity he applies to developing a thesis that is grounded in Bali folklore: “The persona of the witch Randa permits human weakness and evil to be rendered manifest and even celebrated rather than suppressed or ignored, and this superbly effective mechanism in Bali folklore protects the islanders from pathos even as it vitalizes their culture.”
We entered the village of Pura Darem. It must have been a festival day; girls with flowers in their hair moved across the ground still wet from a cloudburst in their bare feet and entered a high stone gate bearing offerings on banana leaves. In the courtyard, little girls wearing sashes of red cloth watched from a thatch-roofed building resembling a barn. As we walked around inside the temple grounds, pausing here and there to observe the function of holy space, the young women and the little girls began to leave, perhaps because the sun was setting. Finally, only one girl remained, with two children who seemed to be her siblings, and appeared to have no intention of leaving. It was as if they intended to offer a special prayer in the interior of the temple, and were waiting for everyone, including us, to leave first. We became aware of this all at once, and in a subdued mood that was clearly a response to the temple space, conversing in lowered voices, we walked toward the entrance to the courtyard. But I had left my notebook on the sturdy, raised floor of the thatch-roofed building. When I went back alone to retrieve it, the girl and her younger brother and sister had just descended to the courtyard and were heading for the stone gate that rose in the dusk like a pagoda. As the girl turned toward me I saw that one half of her lovely, charming face was horribly disfigured by what must have been a congenital deformity. Even so, she exuded a calm and graceful naturalness that included her deformity and was somehow reinforced by her bearing, which was elegant, and by the obvious respect and intimate affection for the siblings accompanying her. As if I were again a child crossing the grounds of a Shinto shrine by myself, I bowed respectfully to the space of the enclosure where I was standing, and withdrew. Had Eeyore been born on Bali, we would have made it our solemn custom to present ourselves each evening to Pura Darem to offer a prayer to the witch Randa. I felt certain of this deep inside me, and my certainty encouraged and even inspired me.
Returning from Bogor to my hotel room in Jakarta, inside a loneliness that was close to panic and not the variety that could be left behind by an early round of predinner drinks, my first and only such attack on the trip, I worked on my sort of poem until it was time to join my friends for dinner downstairs, and I called it “Beyond the Rain Tree”:
Toward the rain tree
And through it to the world beyond
Our spirits merged, consubstantial,
Yet selves as free as they can be
We return, …
Later, I realized that these lines had been influenced by my longtime mentor and my friend, the composer T. Even the title, “Beyond the Rain Tree,” was based directly on a piece for violin and orchestra that T was composing at the time and had spoken to me about, called “Beyond the Distant Call.” Later, when I was working on the rain tree stories that had their origin in my sort of poem, revising my manuscript, I would encourage myself by singing aloud, “Somewhere over the rain tree way up high / there s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby,” or again, “Somewhere over the rain tree blue birds fly / birds fly over the rain tree, why then, oh why cant I?” and both the melody and the lyrics were from T's arrangement for guitar of “Over the Rainbow.” T had not accompanied us to Bali, but he had visited the island earlier, and it was his talk of the deep and lucid beauty of gamelan music that had laid the ground for the trip. Accordingly, as I sat in the courtyard of that temple whose stone pillars and even the trees pointed toward the sky as though by design, raptly watching royal Balinese dancing to the accompaniment of gamelan music with the stars high above me in the dark sky, I could almost hear T's quiet voice as though he were squatting beside me in the Bali night. In my rain tree series I related how he had been inspired to compose his rain tree chamber music by the metaphor I created in the passage I quoted above, and how in turn I had been inspired to create a series of stories when I took my wife to hear a performance of his composition.
As it turned out, I didn't include my sort of poem in the rain tree series: in the heat of writing one story after another, my “rain tree” caught fire and burned to the ground. I did make notes for a draft of a full-length novel that was intended to bring the rain tree back to life, but I decided to leave things as they stood at the end of the collection:
I still commute to the pool every day and wonder as I swim freestyle laps without resting whether the day will ever come when I discover the lost rain tree once again, even as a metaphor? I have no idea, and also wonder, that being the case, what led me to believe that if I continued writing this draft I would eventually get to a concluding chapter in which the rain tree was reborn? What led me to cling to the pathetic hope that something fictional rather than actual could guarantee me the encouragement I need in real life? No doubt my momentum would carry me to a concluding chapter, but how could the rain tree that appeared there be anything but a fake? And how could a fake carry me outside my ailing self to a genuine experience no matter how hard I swam and continued to swim?
Today, at work on the concluding chapter of this chronicle of William Blake superimposed on my life with my son, which I intend to complete for his twentieth birthday, I sense that I am fully aware for the first time of the meaning lurking inside that sort of poem I wrote on the island of Java four years ago (I would almost rather say, imitating Blake, that I had merely copied down what was passed on to me by the spirits of the trees in t
he Bogor Botanical Gardens). Having completed my initiation into Blake with a tour of his mythological world, I am also certain that I shall continue reading him for the rest of my life. I need hardly say that my own lines had become clear to me through reading Blake. I was already aware of the importance of his esoteric thought, which subsumes neo-Platonism, when the cultural anthropologist Y, who was on the trip to Bali and gave us a lecture on the mythological universalism in the island's folk arts, loaned me Kathleen Raine's book Blake and Tradition. The subject of this monumental work was precisely that aspect of Blake which I hoped to understand in more detail. It helped me bring into consciousness and reformulate the scene in the final chapter of my novel The Contemporary Game, which I recall having completed the day before I left for Bali, in which I described a landscape I had pictured to myself in the valley in the forest and then had actually discovered in a dream. Raine also delivered into my grasp the significance of my vision in “Beyond the Rain Tree.” I went so far as to consider that Blake's esoteric thought had found a new expression in my rain tree metaphor.
Perhaps the chapter I am writing now about Blake and my son might also serve as the conclusion to my “rain tree” novel: “Toward the rain tree and through it to the world beyond”—when I wrote these words I was thinking of my own and Eeyore's deaths. “Our spirits merged, consubstantial, we return….” Eeyore and I cross over into death's domain and remain there beyond time. As though illuminated by a reflection from that image itself, the significance of my life with Eeyore in the present seems to rise into the light.
The wooden gate opens with a clatter that no one else produces. Large shoes shuffle down the path to the house and the front door slams open. Gym shoes are shaken off, first one foot and then the other, and thud to the concrete floor just inside, and finally Eeyore appears in the doorway to the family room in his student uniform as though he were stepping onto a stage, filling the space, a beaming smile on his face and his briefcase in his hand. This was a moment late in the afternoon, almost a ritual, that I awaited eagerly every Monday through Saturday.
One day early this year, as I lay on the couch reading Raine's new essay collection, Blaike and the New Age, a dictionary and pencils on top of a wooden box at my side—my son had spent a full year in his special class at middle school painting the box orange—Eeyore, who had appeared in the doorway as always, looked down at me with troubled and somehow mournful eyes and, with the merest nod at my words of welcome, hurried past me into the kitchen and reported the following to my wife:
“It's my turn to go to the dormitory! Are we ready? I'm moving in next Wednesday!” He paused, then continued: “Will Daddy be all right while I'm away? Will he make it over this next hurdle?”
At this my wife laughed aloud, but I was unexpectedly moved, and while I smiled involuntarily I believe I felt like sobbing.
“You sound like an announcer at a sumo match. But the pressure will be on you, not Daddy. You've been having seizures in the morning because you stay up so late—at the dormitory you'll have to take your medicine every morning as soon as you wake up!”
Each of the students at Eeyore's special school was required to spend one term in the dormitory on the campus. We had known for some time that Eeyore's turn was coming up, and he had been apprehensive about it. During the New Year's vacation, when we had assembled as a family for late breakfasts, his normal dispatch at table had gradually slowed until he was barely moving. He did manage to finish his meal, but the tension in his face as he lay on the couch after breakfast made him look like a different person—he appeared to have transformed all at once into a man past middle age with somehow ancient features. I found myself recalling the solemnity, I want to say the aboriginal solemnity, that appeared in Professor W's face when he was on his deathbed. Presently, a flush appeared in Eeyore's upper face, his eyes seemed to gleam with an amber light, and his expression revealed a suffering that he did not understand and thus could not complain about in words. When I placed my hand on his large, prominent forehead it felt hot with a leaden heat. He had forgotten to take his epilepsy medicine and was having a seizure. My wife had continued to insist that Eeyore was not epileptic, and although I knew that this kind of seizure was considered a form of epilepsy, I refrained from asserting what I had read.
The day he was to move in to the dormitory, as Eeyore studied the weekly FM program guide that was inserted in the newspaper, I tried to determine what was behind the words he had spoken to his mother. “Eeyore, you asked whether I would make it over this next hurdle. When was the last hurdle?”
I had half expected him to say “I forget,” his standard reply at times like this. But he lifted his face from the page and, narrowing his eyes in what appeared to be a glare as he rolled them upward at an angle, responded with a lucid answer: “When Mr. H died of leukemia! Saku had cancer at the same time! It was a terrible thing. But you made it over—good work! It was a whole week around the twenty-fifth of January three years ago!”
It turned out that Saku—Eeyore's younger brother—hadn't had cancer after all. He had urinated blood in sufficient quantity to notice it himself though he was only a child, and when tests at our local clinic came back positive for blood in the urine for several days in a row, we had begun commuting to Tokyo University Hospital. He was given a battery of tests which lasted for days but which failed somehow to prove conclusively that Saku was, in the words of the doctor in charge, “not guilty.” Even when Eeyore's younger brother had to endure an agonizing bladder examination, he was unfazed. I did less well; gradually our visits to the hospital together had worn me down.
We rode the train to the Ochanomizu station and then waited at the bus stop on top of the bridge for the bus to the campus. Twenty years ago, I had waited countless times in the same spot for the same bus with my classmate H, who now lay dying of leukemia in the hospital directly across the canal from the bus stop. For a time he had shown signs of recovering, but at the end of last year he had suffered a brain hemorrhage and had been in a coma ever since. When Eeyore's younger brother had finished his tests for the day, I sometimes left him in the outpatient waiting room at this hospital and paid my friend “a visit,” a conversation standing in the hall with his wife, wasted from the effort of nursing him and in a kind of frenzy, after which I returned gloomily to the waiting room downstairs.
H died, and I accepted the role of host at his funeral. At the wake, as I sat on the porch around the house greeting guests in a cold wind, I was troubled by thoughts of my son still undergoing tests, and further troubled by a remark an older writer who was one of the guests was said to have made: “It's a terrible shame; this time it's his younger boy that's sick and not the older brother.” I must be honest, the remark seemed to have caught nimbly and skewered and pushed into my face a cruel thought that had glimmered for just an instant at the back of my consciousness: “Better Eeyore than his younger brother!”
At dinner that night, I asked Eeyore's brother a question. “When they tested your kidneys because they thought that might be where the trouble was, we discussed me or your mother or Eeyore giving you one of our kidneys if yours had to be removed. Which one of us would you have chosen?”
“Good question.” Eeyore's younger brother always paused to consider before speaking and now he was being even more deliberate than usual. “Eeyore's taking Hidantol …”
I seethed. How could he say such a thing! How could he be so egotistical! Maybe it was hard not to think about how healthy the donor's kidneys were, but to make that the basis of a judgment against his own brother! Abstracting somehow the words that rose in my gorge, I asked the following question: “So you're assuming that Eeyore's kidneys are damaged?” Once again Eeyore's brother paused to deliberate, visibly flushing. He must have been ashamed of the image of himself reflected in his father's misunderstanding. “Eeyore's taking Hidantol,” he repeated, wanting accuracy. “I assume that an epilepsy suppressant must be full of harmful ingredients. Wouldn't he need both his k
idneys to process all that toxin?”
I apologized, and I acknowledged that his concern for his brother was appropriate. After dinner, Eeyore tried to respond to my suggestion that he choose the records he didn't have on tape so that he could record them and take them with him to the dormitory, where he would be allowed to use a tape recorder. But he seemed stymied by this task: sitting on the floor with his legs beneath him, he had been staring at the pile of records in front of him for more than an hour but hadn't selected a single album. “You can't dawdle this way when you're in the dorm or you'll be a nuisance to the others,” my wife cautioned. Eventually, his younger sister said, “To Eeyore the whole thing is music; maybe he can't choose a part of the whole.” “That's right! Exactly! Thank you kindly!” Eeyore said.
I told Eeyore's sister that I thought her observation was accurate. That night, before they went to sleep, the younger children were talking in the bedroom. Eeyore's sister seemed to be looking for confirmation from her brother that I had praised her. After his customary pause, I heard his response: “It felt good, didn't it! I was praised, too!”
Partly because of Eeyore's imminent move to the dormitory, my wife and I had been concentrating our attention on him. Apparently his younger brother and sister were feeling overlooked, by their father in particular. Downstairs, still seated in front of his records with his legs tucked beneath him, Eeyore was mumbling to himself as though he were speaking for me: “This is a problem. This is truly a problem!”