The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

(According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies. —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being.

Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.

He said he didn’t need religion because he had jazz.

but they hadn’t gotten around to it, and the months had gone by, and who had time for ceremonies?

Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.

That’s what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we’re able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely.

Annabelle had never been happier. She was, by nature, a creative person and being pregnant suited her. Her body felt fertile, like a landmass or a continent, lush with this new life.

Dreams are like doors. They’re like portals to another reality, and once they’re open, you better watch out.

The dark side has its allures, Benny, but most people don’t want to go there. They prefer to stay safely on the bright side instead. But artists and writers and musicians like your dad are helpless to resist the dark side’s pull.

Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else? When you eat a wing or an egg or a drumstick, at what point is it no longer a chicken? When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?

Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

books are patient. We know how urgent and compelling your lives are, and so we bide our time.

What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there any limit to the desire for more?

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Imagine your body is heavy and filled with sand, and as you exhale, feel the sand slowly draining out of you. Breathe and exhale until the sand is all gone.

books have minds of their own, that they chose him as much as he chose them.

He liked the past. He also liked the future. It was the present that was the problem.

“Are you a scientist?” “Sort of. I’m an artist.” He looked down at the pieces of paper. “Is this art?” “Well, yes. Or a kind of a Situationist intervention into our intellectual commons.

Everything speaks, young schoolboy! But it is only poets and prophets, saints and philosophers who hef ze ears to hear.”

Hef you ever tried composing a poem? Hef you tried contemplating a philosophical question, or leading a revolution?” “No.” “Vell, there you go. You cannot possibly know since you hef never tried, so I suggest you try immediately. You must start small. Start with a short poem, or a simple philosophical question, or a smallish revolution.

“Never be afraid of not knowing, young man. Not knowing is ze practice of poets and sages.”

Children have a limited ability to understand a parent’s inner life, perceiving it through the lens of their own subjectivity and understanding only as much as impacts them.

“It’s just more stuff. More junk, cluttering up the world. The B-man says we have to learn to love our trash and find poetry in it, and that’s true, but there’s enough useless crap already without me adding more.” Benny thought about this. He didn’t think her globes were crap. He thought they were beautiful. “How can you be an artist if you don’t make stuff?”

“Maybe it’s time for artists to get out of the studio and move into the streets? I want to focus more on unmaking. On direct action. On interventions. Slavoj says the artist’s job is to disrupt the status quo and change the way people normally see things.

The photograph showed the planet, partially obscured by swirling clouds, floating all alone like a blue glass marble in the vast, black infinity of outer space. This historic image, dubbed the Blue Marble, became a symbol of the environmental movement and caused a profound shift in the way people conceived of the planet, shrinking it from something incomprehensibly immense and awesome into a fragile, lonely orb that you could cradle in the palm of your hand or crush beneath a careless heel.

just because I’m not good at making art doesn’t mean that I’m not creative.

Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.” He sighed. “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.”

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.

What is a story before it becomes words? Bare experience, a Buddhist monk might answer. Pure presence. The sensation, fleeting and ungraspable,

Most people don’t even notice when their book comes calling.

Does the boy write the book, or does the book write the boy?

How weeding and raking the moss in the garden helped me understand that what’s important is not finishing a task but rather just doing it, completely. 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.

She says I am a fool to take foolish risks. But vat choice do I hef? I am a poet. Poets must take risks. And I am a fool, so my risks must be foolish. I see no way around this, do you agree?”

“You are who you are, Benny Oh. Just don’t let anyone tell you that’s a problem.”

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.

That’s the thing about words. They want to be out in the world.

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?

They were all overachievers with exploding heads, and this was not a good thing . . . or was it?

“Okay,” she said. “I will try.” “But please don’t try too hard. You must take care of your heart.”

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 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.

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?

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.

Why was it that women could never work hard enough to quiet their nagging fear that they were not enough? That they were falling behind? That they could and should be better? No wonder they wanted simple rules to govern the way T-shirts should be folded, children raised, careers managed, lives lived. They needed to believe there was a right way and a wrong way—there had to be! Because if there was a right way, then perhaps they could find it, and if they found it and learned the rules, then all the pieces of their lives would fall into place and they would be happy. Such delusion.

Your life is not a self-improvement project! You are perfect, just as you are!

And what of the writer, then? Well, as any book would tell you, writers are primarily a conceit, which doesn’t mean that they aren’t necessary. Quite the opposite. Books need writers. Of course we do! We don’t have fingers, we can’t type. Your big human brains are our vectors, your sensual bodies are our vehicles, and your ambitions are the fuel we need to propel ourselves into being. Writers are our interface and our interfingers.

Those books she’s read are the co-parents of the book she writes, and she will act as midwife to its birth.

And then, when she’s finished and the book ventures out into the world, the readers take their turn, and here another kind of comingling occurs. Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book’s contents. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. And because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave. Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their own destinies.

If your left hand gets a painful splinter, what does your right hand do? Does your right hand say, “Oh, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem”? No, of course not. The right hand pulls the splinter out. This is interconnectedness.

“It is ze problem with possessions,” the Bottleman said. “Eventually they possess you. .