Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (5 page)

When I wrote just now that I “skimmed” these lines, I didn't mean to imply that I could read Blake fluently. On the contrary, it remains difficult for me no matter how often I read and reread the original year after year. In particular, the voluminous poems known as the “Prophecies,” from Blake's middle period, are knotty with passages that impede the foreigner's understanding. Even so, I always imagined that even I could have made my way close to the full meaning of a poem had I taken the time to move carefully through it with the help of a commentary. And I did make it a point to acquire whatever Blake studies and commentaries I found in Western bookstores. I still do. At the same time, since my student days I have had a kind of fear that once I began reading Blake line by line I would come to feel that no amount of time was adequate, no matter how much time I spent. Besides, I wanted to taste whatever I felt moved to read, for example the entire
Four Zoas,
which is 855 lines long, and so, with a sense of urgency as my guide, I have made a practice of finding my way along the stepping stones of what I am able to understand unaided.

If I were to quote another passage from
The Four Zoas
that has stayed with me vividly, without reference to the complex narrative of the work or, for that matter, to the premise of God or the godlike person at the center of Blake's unique view of the universe, it would be the following:

The first time I read these lines, quite out of context, I was a student in the department of general education in my first year at college. I recall the circumstances clearly, and even my posture as I read, my head thrust forward. I can't have been at college for more than a few weeks. I was sitting in the library that had been there since the days of the Imperial Upper School, on the campus that was apparently of botanical interest for its variety of azaleas (on the way to the library, the azaleas were in full bloom, and I remember having remarked about each and every flower that it couldn't compare to the real azaleas that blossomed on the mountain slopes that rose out of the valley where I was born, not to mention the fact that my azaleas protected the loam on the cliffs with their roots).

I discovered the verse in a folio-sized book that was lying open on the table next to where I was sitting. A number of other Western volumes were bundled in a partially untied silk cloth alongside the book, but there was no one seated in the chair in front of them. Lifting myself out of the chair I had just settled in, I peered over at the opened book and began to read, distracted by the direct and indirect quotation marks at the beginning of each line, the nearer, lower half of the right page. When I came to the lines quoted above, I sensed that I had been handed a decisive prophecy about my own life, only now entering a new phase—in truth, I sat there stunned. Just then, the owner of the book that had been left open—as I think about it, he must have been younger than I am now—a person who appeared despite his youth to be a professor or an assistant professor, returned to his seat. He stared at me unblinkingly, his eyes fastening themselves to me as though with glue, and as the thought flickered across my dazed brain that this was perhaps an area of the library that was reserved for the use of faculty, I left my seat as though to flee. The professor or assistant professor never took his eyes off me, and I wondered uneasily if he might be thinking that I had been trying to steal the Western books that belonged to him (in those days, imported texts were not readily available to students).

As for the verse which had caught my eye, I had not even asked the book's owner to confirm for me whose poetry it was or the work it came from—it had seemed to me to be a dramatic poem—but I was not about to forget lines which had shaken me in this way, and it was my thought that I would certainly be able to track them down again on my own. In those days, I tended to rely on the power of my memory; besides, the lines in question had lodged themselves firmly inside me. I had been sitting near a corner where a large Webster's dictionary had been installed on a high stand, another reason for supposing that I had chosen an area for use by researchers and scholars with special privileges, and had stood up reflexively; cutting diagonally across the vast hall of a reading room, I sat down in the opposite corner, and, without taking out the Gide novel I had been struggling my way through with the help of a dictionary, I cradled my head in my hands and lost myself in thought.

…
& return / To the dark valley whence he came
—I remember thinking first of all that I had never consciously considered the valley in the forest where I was born and raised a “dark valley.” The area in our village along the main road that included our place was known as “the Naru-ya” and since the word we used to denote flatness in our dialect was
naru-i,
I had taken the name to mean “flat.” But the children of the Korean laborers who had been brought to the village under coercion to haul lumber out of the forest said that
naru
was the word for sun, and ever after I had conceived of our valley as a sunny place.

Now, having left the valley for this great city, it occurred to me abruptly as I sat there in that large, impersonal building, holding my head in my hands next to a lamp attached to an even more impersonal cubicle, that my valley was in its way also a dark valley, although it was not only in the negative sense that I was thinking of the word “dark.”

That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget
—the notion that “labour” and “sorrow” were not opposites but two adjacent aspects of life was not unpersuasive; it put me in mind of my mother's labor after my father's death when I was in my late teens. The words that followed struck me as a frighteningly accurate prophecy about my own future.

I had entered Tokyo University and was just beginning to study French. I had chosen the field after a year of deliberation following my graduation from high school, and I felt no hesitation about continuing it. Even so, I was aware of an undercurrent of incongruity. Now, through the agency of Blake's verse, I sensed I would be able to bring this uneasiness to the surface by thinking about its connection to having left my valley behind me. I had set out from a poignantly familiar place to live a marginal life in a corner of a giant city whose very topography was a mystery to me. I was studying French, but other than that, except for some part-time work, I was being spared from having to “labour” at anything. Which meant that, for the time being, I was also being spared “sorrow” I was living a life on a plane apart from
Labour
& sorrow,
but only temporarily. To be sure, I was learning French, but before long I would forget it, I felt certain of that.

… &
learn & forget
—it was as if, in my case, I was learning only in order to forget. I had left the valley as though I were being chased away only to begin a life of seclusion in the giant city and this was the entirety of that life. In the end I would return to the valley. Whereupon the “labour” and “sorrow” I was being spared temporarily in my life in the city would begin in earnest.… &
return / To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew.

Slumped heavily in the chair, I sat without moving, my head in my hands. When it was time for lunch, I bought bread and a croquette at the stand at the entrance to the dorm and made a sandwich like everyone else, dousing the croquette with sauce—the student association had posted a notice at the stand that was a sign of how miserably poor the times were: “If you have not purchased croquettes, please refrain from pouring sauce on your bread!” I ate my sandwich standing among the crowd around the drinking fountain: I didn't have the money to buy milk. I surveyed the prospect of my life and had the feeling I was just now accepting the dismal view for what it was; the students all around me appeared naive as children.

As I had expected when I read those lines on the page opened next to me, I did after all discover on my own that the poet in question was Blake. To be sure, it was nearly ten years after my experience in the library at the Komaba campus, about a year before the birth of my eldest son. While I was a student of French literature, and for four or five years after I graduated, whatever reading in a foreign language I did was exclusively in French—I continued to feel that I was “learning in order to forget"—and always while sitting at a desk so that I could use a dictionary and make notes in the margins. Somewhere along the way, perceiving that I was not going to be a scholar of French literature—confirming an early sign of where &
learn & forget
was heading—I began including books in English in my reading once again; and, feeling free to lie sprawled on a couch, I made my way through a wide variety of English literature consulting the dictionary infrequently and writing nothing down. The change was due in part to a new lifestyle that came from being married.

And so it happened that I was reading an anthology of English poetry, which included Blake. As I read a stanza from one of Blake's Prophecies, I felt certain that the style, the shape, and the sentiments of the language were identical to the lines that had struck me so forcibly that day in the past as I was moving from boyhood to youth. I felt so certain that I went to Maruzen bookstore that same day and purchased Blake's complete poems in one volume. Moving from line to line with only a glance at the first few words, I began a search for that verse which was in my memory yet not literally memorized. By the following day, I had succeeded in identifying the lines in the long poem I have mentioned,
The Four Zoas.

It was already the middle of the night, but I telephoned my friend Y, a classmate at Komaba who had gone on to graduate school in English literature and was now a lecturer at a women's college. I asked if he could think of a scholar who might have had a book open to Blake in the library and would have been a middle-aged professor or assistant professor in the days when we were students. If the scholar in question had published anything on Blake, perhaps there was a commentary on this section in
The Four Zoas.

“Professors with some connection to Blake at Komaba in 1953 or ‘54, or on loan there from the main campus, right? That would be Professor S or Professor T, but the age doesn't fit. They would both have been over fifty in those days.” As long as I had known him, Y would always cite the objective facts before he was willing to speculate, which he now did as follows: “I suppose it's possible, and this is only conjecture, that it might have been a famous character who was known to people in English lit in our years as the ‘autodidact.’ The story was that he got sick and had to drop out of the old Imperial Upper School. About the time we were there, he recovered and was trying to talk the university into readmitting him. There was no chance of it happening, the system was entirely different, and he had a history of mental instability, but apparently the Dean's Office was letting him hang around in the library. He'd show up with a volume of poetry, usually John Donne, and he'd ask a student to open to any page and then predict the student's destiny from the metaphors and symbols he found. I never met him in person.” I had received an unmistakable signal that it was precisely my own destiny that was foretold in the verse, in this case not from Donne but Blake, on the page opened on the desk next to me. I had retained this impression for close to ten years, and I had just now gone so far as to track down the lines.

“The nickname ‘autodidact’ came from Sartre, your specialty, I think from
Nausea.
” My friend sounded uncomfortable, but he also seemed to enjoy the revelation. “Apparently he proposed things, you know, in the nature of homosexual acts to the students he got to know when he predicted their destinies.”

“I wasn't good-looking enough to get into that kind of trouble. But I am thinking the man who opened his book to Blake next to me must have been this ‘autodidact.’ Which would mean the book must have been his own and not the library's, so there's probably no point in going there to look for it now—unless of course he still shows up with the same book—”

“He's dead. He got blatant about that behavior I mentioned and, just like the Sartre character, he was thrown out of the library—in
Nausea
I think he was arrested, wasn't he?—anyway, he wasn't permitted on the campus anymore and apparently that triggered his depression. Someone at the Dean's Office got worried and went to his apartment. He'd been dead two or three days when they found him. It was in the papers.”

The lines I had seen and remembered are a description of the “caverns of the grave” spoken by one of the wives of the divine figure who is a character unique to Blake's epic poems. At the time of my first encounter, if I had possessed the city-boy poise to question “autodidact” about the verse when he returned to his seat, perhaps he would have touched on my own destiny in the course of his explanation. If his words had overlapped the augury of my future that I had read in the poetry myself, I might have believed his prediction—I have no idea how the other young men he encountered had reacted—and become his disciple. Sooner or later, of course, his homosexual advances in my direction would have put an end to the relationship.

… &
return / To the dark valley whence he came.
The
dark valley
in this line, despite the negative adjective “dark,” filled me with powerful longing. After the birth of my eldest son, which seemed to make definite all over again the impossibility that I would return to my valley—what purpose could French possibly serve there?—I found myself unable to say
my
valley except in the domain of my imagination; nevertheless, there were times when I dreamed of returning with my son. I want to emphasize that I was not dreaming while asleep; these were reveries that had the curious quality of occurring in the brightness of consciousness while I was awake. I say this to readers who might otherwise be tempted to divine my fortune in these dreams as though they were of a variety familiar to them.