The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

sing motherache beneath our stormy boy mad music sad sea

Feigned or not, his casual indifference infuriated her,

“In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.”

You give form to a woice so others can perceive it.”

❗️

Ze emptiness of a page can be unnerving. Too much unformed potential. Sometimes things get self-conscious and clam up. Don’t force them. Just try again.”

The leg is remembering something.

If you want it, it’s right here, she said. She put on her coat and squatted down. I’m sorry, baby. I gotta go. She paused in the doorway. The table leg remembers the tugging as the baby tried to follow. It remembers the baby crying. Now the mother is gone. The baby is gone. The bottle is gone, and the scarf is gone. Only the table leg is still here, in the Library, remembering.

I mean, it’s not like I was just making random shit up, but I also didn’t hear the words the way you hear words when a person is talking. It’s more like trying to write down the kinds of feelings you feel with your body and then remember later on.

You know how a dream can be totally real-seeming, but when you try to put it into words, it just kind of dissolves and melts away? That’s what happens to the dream stories of things. Their feeling-voices are impossible to put into words, and as soon as you try, the story starts to evaporate, which was why what I wrote down came out so shitty. I told the B-man all this, and he said poetry was like that, too, like breezes or winds in the mind. At first you might not feel much, not whole words or sentences, but more like currents of air moving across an open wound. You have to keep your mind open and try to feel the voice of the poem as it blows by, even if it hurts a little. He said the trick is not to grab at the wind because as soon as you do, it won’t be there. He showed me with his hand. He opened it and said to pretend it was my mind, and then he closed his eyes. He said I should hold very still, and keep the hand of my mind open and let the voices come to me. He sat there for a long time with his eyes closed and his palm open, like he was expecting a poem to drop from the sky. Usually when I hear voices, I try to block them or use a Coping Card to make them go away. It never occurred to me to just let them be. When I told him that, his bushy eyebrows went up his forehead, and he looked shocked. He said my voices were a gift and I should never block them or try to make them go away. He said I must have a strong gift because I did a good job with the table-leg story and ...

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! It’s like your leg is talking to you, or the memory of your leg is talking to you, and even though the leg’s not there, you can still feel the itch and it still means something, right? And he said yes, that was right, and that doctors had a name for this. It’s called a phantom limb phenomenon, and so maybe what I have is a phantom object phenomenon.

What is a story before it becomes words? Bare experience, a Buddhist monk might answer. Pure presence. The sensation, fleeting and ungraspable, of being a boy, of losing a father. Being a book, we wouldn’t know. All we know are the thoughts that arise in the wake of bare experience, like shadows, or echoes, giving voice to what no longer is. And after these thoughts become words, and words become stories, what is left of bare experience, itself? Nothing, the monk might say. All that remains is story, like a molted exoskeleton or an emptied shell. But is that really all? We books would say no, that story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

The Bindery contains everything, the Bottleman had said. Anything is possible, and now Benny understood. The Bindery was primordial, a place of vast, boundless silence that contained all sound, and emptiness that contained all form. Benny had never heard such silence before. Never felt such imminence. He shivered.

and thank you, too, for what you said just now: I knew you were mine. These are words every book wants to hear, and they sent a tremor of delight down our spine.

“Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”

❗️

Doing connects me to this moment, this weed, this patch of moss. This moment is my real life. I am not separate from this moment, or from the floorboards, or the trees, or the monks, or the weeds. And then the weeds grow back, and that’s okay, too.

She and her sons had all kinds of cool adventures together, but then all the pale sons started growing up, and the bigger they got, the harder it was for the mom to hold them down to earth, and they started having trouble in school and stuff. Finally things got so bad, they had to have a family conference, and the pale sons told their mom that they had to go back to the moon. It was important for their self-esteem, they said. They had to go back to find their impact crater so they would know who they are. The lady astronaut was very sad when she heard this, but she realized she had to let them go because she wanted her sons to have healthy identities and lots of self-esteem, even though she knew she would be very lonely without them. The pale sons offered to take her with them, back to the moon, but she said no, because she was an earthling and one trip to the moon was enough for her. When the day came, she took all her sons outside on their strings, and she used her little embroidery scissors to cut their strings, and one by one the sons floated away into the bright blue sky, waving to her as they got tinier and tinier and paler and paler, promising to come back to earth, but they never did.

If you had asked him how he felt, he would have shrugged and said fine, but in reality he was numb and detached, like everything in his life was happening at a very great distance. It’s normal for one’s past and future to feel far away, but Benny’s here and now felt that way, too. Space and time were hopelessly entangled, and the present moment was growing increasingly remote.

the books were beside themselves with loathing. They longed for human hands, for human touch. They bristled with ire at the indignity of their situation as they were spun, flipped, rotated, scanned, sorted, sent sliding down rackety gravity chutes into bins or hoisted hydraulically onto trolleys. It was more than any book could bear, and their lamentations rose above the clamor of the machines—We are not units! We, who once were sacred, next to God! The sound of their heartbreak was almost human.

Since his question was real, then the washroom must be real, too.

“That’s why I called them TAZ,” she said. “I was reading about ferality and temporary autonomous zones, and the name just kind of stuck. But now that they’re dead, I wanted to bring them back into the wild. I felt like they deserved a more permanent autonomous zone, like on top of a mountain.” Benny thought about this. “You could rename them,” he said. “PAZ . . . ?” She smiled sadly. “That’s a nice idea, but they weren’t permanent. Nobody is.”

She’d been trying to train him to take food from her hand, even though she knew she shouldn’t. She monitored news for the Park Service, so she knew it wasn’t good for wildlife to get acclimated to humans, but this crow was so cute, and smart, too.

“Close your eyes and really listen,” and so he did. It was a strange sensation. Ever since the voices started, he’d fallen out of the habit of really listening. He couldn’t help hearing the voices because they were there, but he learned he didn’t have to listen, and most of the time he tried not to. But this was different. He could hear the wind, and that was all—that was all—and it was so simple and beautiful, rising and falling, whistling and tapering off and then swelling again. It was real. It was the realest thing he’d ever heard, and when he opened his eyes, the Aleph was watching him. “Did you hear it?” “The wind?” “The world, breathing.”

He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear pain in her voice, and this surprised him. He was used to hearing pain in the voices of things, and he often knew at once what they were feeling. But human beings were more opaque. And then there was the question itself. Why would he know what the B-man would feel? She knew him so much better than he did. “No,” he said, but he had no idea if this was true or not.

“Say it,” she said. “Do I think because you hear voices, you’re going to end up like the B-man, a random old homeless dude in a wheelchair, with a missing leg and rotting teeth, who needs a shower and drinks too much and collects cans and bottles and begs for spare change?” The edge of her voice was turning into a blade. Danger! “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” she asked. Eyes narrowed. Watching him. He nodded, miserable. She studied him. He held his breath, his entire life in balance, waiting for her verdict. “No, Benny,” she said finally. “Most definitely not.” He felt a rush of relief, but she wasn’t done. “Because that’s not what the B-man is, either. You think he’s this crazy old hobo, but he’s not. He’s a poet. And a philosopher. And a teacher. And it’s not him that’s crazy, Benny Oh. It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit! It’s the doctors and shrinks and corporate medicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we’re crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That’s fucking crazy. . . .” She was breathing hard. The sun had disappeared behind a thick bank of clouds on the horizon and the sky was darkening.

“So what if you hear voices. A lot of people do. That doesn’t make you like him, but who knows? Maybe you’ll be a poet or a philosopher or a revolutionary, too.” She squeezed his hand and then released it. “You are who you are, Benny Oh. Just don’t let anyone tell you that’s a problem.”

A crow perched on the roof. It cocked its head and trained a beady eye on Annabelle. Another crow arrived, and then a third, and then the flock followed. One by one, they flew down, landing on the ground beside her. Cautiously at first, and then with more ease, they ambled over to her, flapped and settled on top of her, spreading their feathers to keep her warm and dry.

The Aleph’s hand crept across the moss like a small burrowing animal looking for warmth. Benny heard it coming, felt it brush against his arm and travel down into his sleeping bag past his wrist to his palm. He felt her fingers twine through his as she drew his hand back across the moss toward her. She brought his knuckles to her lips and then clasped his hand between hers, tucking it under her chin like a prayer. His shaking subsided. He didn’t care that she knew he was freaked out. He wanted her to know, and the B-man, too. He wanted them to know everything, but the words wouldn’t come, and in the long silence that followed, one by one, they fell asleep.

She was covered with crows, and they were eating her. Nobody deserved that. A tangle of golf clubs lay on the ground. Grabbing a nine iron, he ran at the crows, brandishing the club and screaming, “Get off her, you motherfuckers!”

But you’re not entirely wrong, either. Because while we didn’t make you do it, we wouldn’t have stopped you even if we could have. Books do like a little romance, a little drama, and that’s the truth. Call us prurient (and many have), but we needed you to taste her lips so that we could taste them, too. We wanted those words to describe your kiss. You people get swept away by passions of your body, but for books, our lust for words is equally undeniable.

the thought of having a book inside you was monstrous.

“And your drawers are always tidy,” she added brightly. “So your things must be happy, too!” He crouched by the forlorn heap of crumpled socks and started shoveling them into the garbage bag. “I don’t do it to make them happy,” he said. “I do it to make them shut up.”

and it crossed my mind that maybe you two are related. You don’t happen to have a long-lost brother named Kenji, do you? Aikon sighed, took off her reading glasses and switched on the desk lamp. Konishi was a fairly common name, and she did not have a long-lost brother named Kenji.

she would gaze up at Senju Kannon and think about the Hungry Ghosts, with their great, big bellies that were always empty and their insatiable appetites and never-ending desire for more. Their mouths were as tiny as pinholes and their throats were as thin as a thread, so they could never consume enough to satisfy. Aikon understood their torment.

I don’t mean to complain. The good news is that my ankle is healing, and my concussion is better, too, and the doctor said I can use the computer again as long as I take it slow, but with the elections coming up in a week, there’s so much going on in the news that I have to work overtime, and there just aren’t enough hours in a day! So that’s my question: How am I supposed to tidy completely, with love and compassion, when I have a broken ankle, a sick child, and a country that’s on the brink of disaster? And if I can’t finish tidying up, and we get evicted, where will we go? Our landlady, old Mrs. Wong, was fond of my husband and never raised our rent, but I barely make enough money to cover it, and rents in the city have shot up so high, we won’t be able to afford to live here anymore.

You were expecting the page to be blank and white and empty, but the words were still there. You thought you’d liberated them, thought they would have fled by now, but instead, there they were, all those words and letters, neatly aligned and serving their sentences, while the page cried out in pain. It was too much. How could words be so servile? So obedient to the status quo and blind to the conventions that bound them?

Once a thought is thought, it cannot be unthought. Once riven, how can trust be regained? There are no easy answers.

He was right. She should try to believe him, and if she couldn’t believe, then at least she could imagine. What if there really was a book in her mind, reading her thoughts? What if a pencil could speak? What if talking objects were real, and what was “real” anyway?

It had happened before, people sneaking in overnight, stealing food from the staff room. People always blamed the ghosts.

We were singing the round, the same canon perpetuus that your parents used to sing and you listened to from inside your mother’s belly. As our voices merged with all the other unbound books who came and went like specters through the Bindery, the overlapping verses confused the ears of the intruders, and that was the point. We sang so that beneath the lyrics of that eternal lullaby, our murmured conversation would be indiscernible to them. Our words that night were for each other. Every boy has a book in him, Benny, but not every boy can hear it when it speaks. Not every boy is willing to listen.

in the Bindery, where phenomena are still Unbound, stories have not yet learned to behave in a linear fashion, and all the myriad things of the world are simultaneously emergent, occurring in the same present moment, coterminous with you. Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is born. In this Unbound state that night you encountered all that was and ever could be: form and emptiness, and the absence of form and emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in. And us. You let us in, too, and once inside, we could access your sense gates and finally understand what it might be to see with eyes, hear with ears, smell with a nose, taste with a tongue, and touch with skin, and this is what books want, after all. We want bodies, and for the first time, we could imagine what it might be to have one. We were able to perceive the consciousness that body gives rise to. If we gave you the unbound world, this was your gift to us.

❗️

The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken. Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way, don’t you think?

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

It’s good to hear your voice again.

“This isn’t a job,” she said, getting slowly to her feet. “This is my life.”

They swaddled the hardware in shipping blankets like newborns, trailing cables like umbilical cords as they carried them out to the truck.

His body felt unbound, as if all its different parts were suddenly asserting themselves, discovering their independence and gleefully striking out on their own. Due to their inexperience and their lack of basic coordination, he grew clumsy and started to drop things. Seemingly overnight, soft hairs started sprouting from his groin and underarms. His penis and testicles grew larger, and they liked that. His feet were growing larger, too, only they didn’t like the change, and one morning, soon after his readmission, he woke to find they were refusing to move.

They had been conditioned to believe they were not enough, and were so focused on self-improvement they forgot about their inherent perfection.

But your critics are saying that books are under no obligation to make people happy. That some books bring sorrow or confusion, and that is okay, too.”

All books were not created equal, she thought. There were many that should be weeded, particularly in the self-help genre, but this one seemed different. The little book was woke to the fucked-upedness of carbon-based consumer capitalism that was wrecking the planet. The problem was systemic, the book seemed to be saying. A person’s clutter wasn’t the result of laziness, procrastination, psychological disorders, or character flaws. It was a socioeconomic and even philosophical problem, one of Marxian alienation and commodity fetishism, which required nothing less than a spiritual revolution in a person’s world view, and a radical reevaluation of what was real and important.

agency is a matter of perspective, and were you to ask those books, they would claim the dozing writer is the one who has been chosen. They picked her, and while she is dozing, they are hard at work, colonizing her neural networks, that dark netherworld tucked away in the subconscious she calls her imagination. There, they engage in their own form of conjoining, merging their DNA with her memory and experience, and bringing another of ourselves into being.