I have the feeling I did in fact stay underwater for a very long time. I even feel that I'm still there, it's as though my whole life until now were summed up in what I read in the ceaselessly shifting pattern created by the carp as they adjusted their positions. Nevertheless, at a certain moment I moved backward from the direction I had taken through the rocks and suddenly my jaws and head were clamped tight in the narrow passageway. What remains in memory after that is flailing around in terrible fear and choking on the water I had swallowed. Then I remember powerful arms thrusting me forward deep inside the cave, in the direction opposite my struggle to extricate myself, then hauling me out with my legs in a tangle. Blood spreading like smoke from the cut in the back of my head. I had been released from the rocks and the grip of hands, and now the current dragged me, still underwater, toward a shallow rapids. As I write, I stroke the back of my head with the fleshy pad of my left thumb and locate the scar from that gash on the rocks. If I had remained there in the cave I would have no wound in my head, I would have stayed on as I was in the valley, naked as the day I was born like a fiend hid in a cloud, without tasting labor and sorrow, not learning and not forgetting—in the grip of these often repeated and familiar sentiments, I trace the line of the scar with my thumb.…
The phrase I just quoted as it came to mind, “like a fiend hid in a cloud,” also happens to be Blake. The association is rooted in having recalled while reading Blake later the boldness and bravery of that experience, the feeling I had had of thumbing my nose at the world and everything in it with a grin on my face. The poem is a well-known work titled “Infant Sorrow” (I translate piping loud as “screaming in a high voice” rather than the more conventional “crying with voice raised”):
My mother groand! my father wept
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
When I read these lines about the birth of a child, they evoked for me the ruinous exuberance of that morning. Churning the light of the river's surface with joy, I had set out for the pool at the Couple in a direction that was exactly opposite that of a newborn baby's cry (as though I had affixed a minus sign to it). Symbolically, I was trying to return to my mother's womb along a road in the opposite direction of birth (by advancing in the direction of the minus sign I had installed). But the groaning occasioned by the pain of birth, related neither to grief nor to joy, is neutral; there should be no need to convert it with a minus sign. Dead already and therefore on the other side, my father would welcome his son's return. From the dangerous world, I was returning to the place of safety where I had begun. Helpless, naked, piping loud; / Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
That is what I took away from the experience, brought to clarity through the mediation of Blake; and implicit in it was yet another definition of death that was dear and familiar to me. That morning, it was my mother who had discovered me, awash in the shallows like a wounded fish, bleeding, my body thrust up at an angle to the river's surface, and who had taken me to the hospital. Apparently, suspicious of her son's odd agitation that morning, she had followed me from the moment I descended the slope to the river. Which seemed to mean that it must also have been my mother who had pulled me up from the depths of the pool at the Couple after first pushing me, as though in punishment, back into the cave. Through the water clouded with blood (like amniotic fluid!) I have the feeling I may have seen a woman in her late thirties with dark eyebrows arched in an inverted V like a cat's back, her narrowed, angry eyes glaring at me. But could a woman underwater have been capable of that tremendous strength? From the beginning, I had been aware in a child's way that there were elements of this experience that were difficult to talk about. As a result, I said nothing about the incident even to my mother, who, for her part, told me only that she had discovered me bobbing up and down in the shallows, and, to this day, has said nothing more. If it was my mother who came to my rescue at the bottom of the river, it was also my mother who gave me the wound in the back of the head, which remains as a scar even now. What I remember about that wound is that I became feverish and unable to move, and that my mother cradled my upper body in her lap and repeated, as she changed my bandages, “It's too cruel, too cruel…” Even for a child, it was not possible to interpret this exclamation as being limited to the wound in plain sight; as I turned the experience of that day over in my mind, it became increasingly difficult to ask my mother about it.
As time passed, I became convinced that the image of my mother's angry face in the water was merely an echo from a dream I had had later while feverish, a conclusion that was part of a process that released me from my mother. The dream was recurrent, but, for precisely that reason, I was able to conclude to myself every time I awoke that it was in fact a dream and not reality.
However, when I married and my first child was born impaired, the image in my dream was exposed to a new light of reality. This was due partly to my mother's attitude and her habit of consciously alluding to things in fragments, and partly to memories she called up in me with her insinuations.
When my son was born with a bright-red lump the size of a second head attached to the back of his skull, I found myself unable to reveal the true situation to either my wife or my mother, and, having installed the baby in critical care for infants at Nihon University Hospital, I wandered around in a daze. Meanwhile, not only the actual head but also the lump appeared to be well nourished and growing; the lump in particular was beginning to radiate vitality that was obvious at a glance even through the glass partition around the critical-care ward. Two and a half months later, I asked Doctor M, who had been caring for my son—and looking after me as I struggled unavail-ingly to recover from the shock of his birth—to perform surgery.
My mother had arrived in Tokyo the night before the operation intending to help and, having decided before lifting a hand that her presence would be if anything a burden to my wife, was preparing to return to the valley in the forest in Shikoku the following morning after accompanying us as far as the hospital in Itabashi. She was terrified, and my wife, who was no less afraid, was trying to comfort her. Still in her twenties and yet to recover from her debilitation at the time of the birth, I recall that my wife was like a baby chick being blown in the wind. I sat there, in our combination living and dining room, banging my rattan rocking chair against a glass cupboard and feeling out of place as I watched the women. They were sitting on the synthetic rug on the wooden floor of the adjoining room, facing each other across a small trunk, their heads nearly touching as they spoke. Strangely, for two people with such a difference in age and no blood ties, they looked very much alike.
My wife spoke absently, her voice thin and frail. “Eeyore doesn't respond to his parents’ voice like a normal baby. If there's a moment during the surgery when life and death separate, we won't be able to call him back to the side of life, it worries me sick …” My wife had been saying the same thing for days, and my response had been that a normal child wasn't going to be much better off if that happened, all we could do was leave it to the surgeon and hope for the best.
My mother's agitation was resonating with my wife's anxiety and amplifying it. With emphatic nods more like a furious shaking of her skinny neck, she said, “That's exactly the way it is! In our area, there were lots of times when a life that was bound to die heard the voice of its relative and came right back to life!” Inhaling sharply, she seemed to bite down on her tongue.
On an impulse, selfish when I think about it, to find someone who would commiserate with me about my son's abnormality, I had gone to see my mentor, Professor W, at the private college where he had moved to create a new department of French literature. I had written elsewhere that I watched him flush bright red from his brow to his neck, and now I was recalling what he had said in that state, in a tone of voice he might have used to tell a joke with grief in it. Sitting in his bright new office, his eyes averted from everyone, he had whispered: “
In these times, it's not clear that it's better to have been born than not to have been born.”
“If the body incorporates elements aimed at both life and death,” I said now, “and if a baby exists at the border between the two, maybe we should honor the baby's freedom, the baby's body's freedom! In times like these, it's not clear that it's better to have been born than not to have been born!” These words, spoken diffidently as I banged my chair against the wall in the cramped room, my wife and my mother both ignored, but I saw the profile of my mother's face turn pale and stiffen. Ah, I thought to myself, regretting the imprudence of my remark, this face with eyebrows like inverted V's isn't simply tense, it's very angry!
“You heard him, that's who we're dealing with, so we can't count on him, we're obliged to use your strength to help our Eeyore.” My mother spoke in a whisper, and my wife, her hair in pin curlers and her face seeming even smaller, nodded fecklessly.
It wasn't until later that night, when I sprawled alone on the bed in my study, that I came to the conclusion that I had misheard my mother, or rather, misunderstood her. It was clear to everyone that strength, mine or my wife's, would have nothing to do with the operation in the morning. All we could do was rely on Doctor M. That had been implicit in my wife's apprehensive conversation with my mother about the difficulty of ascertaining the baby's own will toward life. Then I realized that my mother must have meant blood, from the blood—chi-kara, rather than strength, chikara. Two kinds of blood flowed in the infant's body, mine and my wife's. Having decided that blood from her side of the family could not be counted on where the body's inclination toward life or death was concerned, my mother must have been suggesting to my wife that her blood would have to encourage Eeyore in the direction of life.
Having realized this much, I felt certain that the face I had seen in the depths of the pool at the Couple, with the inverted V's for eyebrows, had indeed been my mother's face, and I felt I understood as well that she had angrily written me off at the moment of the accident as a person capable of stepping off the road to life intentionally. Looking back, I could identify a number of instances between my son's birth and his first operation when she had revealed this judgment about me.
Thanks to Dr. M and his assistants, the long operation was a success, my son was liberated from the glistening lump that was like a second head, and my wife and both our mothers were understandably overjoyed. As the young father, I was also very happy, but I recalled the conversation the night before the operation and felt constrained and embarrassed about demonstrating my joy.
A definition of death. I am not able to say that I have provided my handicapped son with a definition of death that is at once accurate, uncomplicated, and capable of encouraging him. What is worse, my wife and I have used the word carelessly in his presence. Looking back, I realized that this had been going on for more than two years until the crisis that made us aware of it, repeatedly. I am clear about how much time had passed because it was late in the spring two years ago—my experience has taught me to believe in the hidden link between the changing seasons, that is, the cycle of the universe, and events that occur deep inside our bodies—that my son experienced an epileptic seizure, an incident that was an unmistakable turning point in our daily life with Eeyore at its center. As we didn't consult a specialist at the time, it wasn't exactly the case that the seizure was diagnosed as epilepsy. Even so, when we informed Doctor M of what had happened, he did not object to my insistence on describing it as an epileptic seizure.
From the onset, my wife and I were of different minds about this. We weren't necessarily opposed—where my son was concerned we often faced in the same direction but took different views. There were times when my son lost his sight briefly and froze where he stood in the street. If this had happened at a railroad crossing or in a crosswalk it would have been dangerous. These events had been occurring intermittently for five or six years, and Dr. M had been controlling them with Hidantol, a drug that caused Eeyore's gums to swell to rosy redness until they protruded from the spaces between his teeth like kernels of red rice but had no other apparent side effect. Hidantol was an antiepileptic, and as such provided me with a basis for diagnosing my son's new seizure.
My wife had heard from her friends in the PTA at our son's special school that epilepsy was a different animal, and that if this were indeed epilepsy it was a very mild case. The term used on the report after the medical exam for middle school was “brain separation syndrome,” and although these words were more than adequate to strike terror into the hearts of our nonmedical family, the word “epilepsy,” as my wife insisted, did not appear. I searched a number of encyclopedias, looking under “epilepsy” for a subentry on “brain separation syndrome,” and failed to find it.
As it happened, my wife wasn't even home when my son had the first of these major new seizures. It began with an unusual atmosphere that felt like the concave underside of pro-truberant symptoms like screaming or spasms. We were in the living room; I lay reading on the couch as always, and my son was sprawled on the rug on the floor listening to a Mozart record at low volume. Presently, instead of putting on a new record, he pushed away from himself with both elbows, like an infant with no appetite weakly rejecting his food, the pile of records he had selected. This registered in my consciousness like a small thorn. But I continued to read. Before long, an impression of interruption reached me from where my son lay. I looked up. He was propped up on his elbows, all expression gone from his face and his open eyes like stones. Saliva was drooling from between his slightly parted lips.
“Eeyore! Eeyore! What's wrong?” I called out to him. But Eeyore was engaged completely with the difficulty inside himself; as if to say this was no time to be responding to the exterior, not even to the voice of his father, he remained motionless, his head propped heavily in his hands, his face a void.
I jumped up, and, in the brief moment it took to move to his side, he began slapping the floor with his left palm and arm, not wildly but with deliberate force. Slap, slap, he struck the floor, and now his eyes rolled up and showed white.
“Eeyore! Eeyore! Are you all right? Does it hurt?” As I shouted meaningless questions I wrapped the handkerchief I took from my pants pocket around my left thumb and forced it between my son's teeth. He bit grindingly down on the joint and I moaned as though to express the pain he was enduring in silence. A minute or two later, he stopped slapping the floor and relaxed his clenched teeth. I lifted him as he rolled over on his back, and when I laid him on the couch he fell into a deep sleep and began to snore at a menacing volume.
It was this physical display by my son's body that I chose to interpret as epilepsy symptoms. Partly because he was home on spring break, my son had apparently neglected to take his medicine for several days. But was this really epilepsy? I needed a definition, and though I consulted a number of encyclopedias in search of one, my wife and I did not go back to Dr. M for a detailed explanation. Over the course of more than ten years we had come to understand that, where our son's illness was concerned, the doctor would make sure to inform us about anything it would avail us to know, and that asking about the rest was an exercise in futility for laymen like ourselves. Admittedly, our custom of not asking may have had to do with deep-seated fear.
Since that first episode, I find myself constantly on the lookout for information that I can feed into my definition of epilepsy. For example, a recent article by the cultural anthropologist Y, in which he analyzed the Greek director Theo Angelo-poulos's film Alexander the Great, Apparently the chieftain of Greece's peasant guerrillas is portrayed as an epileptic. When the troops descend to the banks of a river to replenish their water, Alexander has a seizure as he gazes at the river's surface. Instantly, to shield him from the gaze of his men while he is in spasm, his next-in-command shouts “About face!” On the march, Alexander baptizes the young men they encounter along the way and christens each one of them Alexander. In an attack by government forces, one of the young men is wou
nded in the head but is lifted onto a horse and manages to escape from a same battle in which the chieftain is killed and the army decimated. Later, in the scene where the youth enters Athens, the narrator intones: “Thus did Alexander enter the city.” The almost too obvious significance of the line was to establish a connection between this scene and the episode when Alexander the chieftain appears in the village as a young man with a wound in his head.
In my biased reading of Y's analysis, I paid particular attention to the above references to epilepsy. Superimposing the wounded youth who was entering Athens now onto the chieftain Alexander in the past led me to the following conclusions: leaders were epileptics because of wounds to the head sustained when they were young; the youth who had just now received his head wound and who was destined to lead the resistance as the next Alexander would just as certainly develop epilepsy. In this manner I created a mythological logic that connected head wounds, epilepsy, and leaders.