The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

(Pro captu lectoris) habent sua fata libelli. (According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies.

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.

Music or madness. It’s totally up to you.

Benny was always a small boy and slow to develop, as though his cells were reluctant to multiply and take up space in the world. It seems he pretty much stopped growing when he turned twelve, the same year his father died and his mother started putting on weight. The change was subtle, but Benny seemed to shrink as Annabelle grew, as if she were metabolizing her small son’s grief along with her own.

He studied the body, lying there in the fancy coffin. The eyes were closed, but the face didn’t look alive enough to be asleep. Didn’t look alive enough to be dead, even. Didn’t look like something that had ever lived.

Later that evening, they reconstructed Kenji’s poem, but Benny never touched the magnets again or made another poem with them, and for a while, the raggedy constellation of words remained frozen. My abundant woman mother goddess love r we are symphony together I am mad for you

Disturbed by the movement of air, the row of neatly hanging flannel shirts waved their arms in gentle greeting, but it was the smell that she first noticed—Kenji’s smell, pungent and salty like wind coming in off the ocean. It caught her off guard. She closed her eyes and leaned in, letting the smell envelop her, soft and warm against her skin. She inhaled until her lungs could hold no more, and then she exhaled a long, single, shuddering sob. With her eyes still shut, she plunged her hands in among the row of hanging clothes and wrapped her arms around a cluster of shirts, thick as a torso.

People were doing that, making memory quilts from the clothing of departed loved ones. It was a beautiful idea, really, to wrap yourself up in memories and give old clothes a new life.

When my dad was alive, they used to talk about their big romance, but they only told me some of it, like that my dad fell in love with my mom the moment he saw her, and she was so pretty, and he was so kind, and they were destined for each other, etc., but I could tell they were leaving stuff out. Sometimes when they looked at each other, their eyes would literally sparkle with secrets they didn’t want their kid to know, and they’d smile and look away, or press their lips together and change the subject. I didn’t mind. I liked that they had secrets if it made them happy, but when my dad died, Mom got sad, and the secrets didn’t sparkle anymore, and if that’s the case, there’s no point in keeping them secret, right? Obviously there are things a kid doesn’t need to know about his parents, but you could tell some of them.

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.

As experts in the field of romance, we have evoked your acts of love in more ways and words than any single human mind could possibly imagine, and yet we will never experience what it feels like to take our beloved’s hand and press it to our lips—Oh, that we had lips! It is true that many of us have been loved, hugged, caressed, and even tenderly kissed, and all of this we cherish, but in the moment when real lovemaking commences, we are the ones that get kicked aside and swept off the bed. Discarded, we lie facedown, splayed upon the floor, our pages crumpled, while mysteries unfold above us.

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?

I really want you to know that I’ve thought very seriously about what’s happened to me, so you won’t just write me off as a random lunatic who imagines he’s some kind of ambassador for the things of the world. It’s not like I think I was chosen. It’s not like I wanted to be the spokesperson for the fucking toaster oven, even if it thinks I am.

No sooner are we made than we are discarded, left to revert into unmade, disincarnate stuff. You turn us into trash, so how can we trust you?

A new solidarity is emerging as we, the Made, begin to realize that we are not superior to the Unmade after all. Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We, too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the planet, and things will change whether you like it or not.

That afternoon, a sparrow flew hard into the window glass in Benny’s classroom. THWACK! The children’s heads all turned at once to look, but the sparrow had fallen and lay dying on the concrete sidewalk below. Realizing that it was just a bird and not an active-shooter event, the children did not crawl under their desks or into the cupboards. They were accustomed to death, and this was a minor one.

My mom said we had plenty of books at home, which was true, but I was pissed because she’d promised. I think part of her didn’t really want to go. I think the Library made her too sad, because she had to drop out of school when she got pregnant with me, and even though she always said I was worth it, I knew there was a part of her that was sorry for giving up her dream. Kids know these things about their parents, even if they don’t completely understand.

The first words of a book are of utmost importance. The moment of encounter, when a reader turns to that first page and reads those opening words, it’s like locking eyes or touching someone’s hand for the first time, and we feel it, too. Books don’t have eyes or hands, it’s true, but when a book and a reader are meant for each other, both of them know it, and this is what happened when Annabelle opened Tidy Magic.

The sound of those doors, locking him in, locking her out, was the sound of her defeat and failure.

The sound of pages turning is so nice, and so is that soft shushshushshushing sound that things make when they know they’re being taken care of. You’ve been to the Library. You know what I mean.

He would wander the stacks, letting titles catch his eye and books tumble into his waiting arms, and discovering in the process that books have minds of their own, that they chose him as much as he chose them.

A book must start somewhere, he discovered. Starting with the first syllable on the first page, he mouthed the words as he read them, pronouncing them out loud as they combined to form sentences, until he felt as if the words were animating his lips, borrowing his tongue as they whispered their way into the world.

She had arrived early, and some of the kids saw her sitting in the waiting room. A contagion of sly texts and surreptitious chats ensued as rumors about her and Kenji spread, and by the end of the first week, it was understood by everyone, even the most clueless, that Benny and his family were to be their ostracized Other, against whose strangeness they could define their collective normality. They clucked like chickens when he passed, whipped out their phones to call him names, so that when he walked down the hall, you could almost see the silent cloud of text bubbles, trailing after: Loco, Loony, Mental, Midget, Jap, Retard, Freak. Does this sound familiar? Maybe you’ve seen this kind of cruelty emerging and even helped it along, or maybe you’ve just been quietly complicit and watched as the bigotry spread, or maybe you’ve been targeted, too. You know how it goes—

This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurling it at his feet. The Angel wants to stay, to awaken the dead, to make whole what has been smashed.

But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it got caught in his wings so violently that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call . . .

Take that apple, for example, a thing that existed outside Eve, whose terrible magic pulled her into it—or it into her—causing both to lose themselves in the merging. But did the magic power to enchant lie in the sweet flesh of the rosy red fruit, or in the forked tongue of the snake who told its story so deliciously? And was the apple equally beguiled?

When she pulled her hand away again, it was cupped, like she was holding something. She placed her other hand on top to keep it from flying away, then she held her hands out and opened them to show him. He heard a pulsing sound, soft and wet and quickly rhythmic, and he looked down and saw. Cupped in her paint-stained hands was his wild, beating heart.

Strange things happen in Libraries, Benny. The Public Library is a shrine of dreams, and people fall in love here all the time. Maybe you don’t believe this, but it’s true. Books are works of love, after all. Our bodies may not be made to enjoy the mysteries of corporeal conjugation, but even our driest tomes, the most unromantic among us, can make your dreams come true.

“I thought progress was a good thing.” “Well, maybe not if it just keeps piling up more junk and keeps you from fixing stuff from the past.”

From there, they crossed into the Old Wing to a distant corner in back of the 331.880 stacks, where the books about the philosophy of labor lived. There were books on countermonopoly theory, industrial democracy, and unions as instruments of class struggle, but they walked right past them. It was okay, though. Books like these do not get a lot of readers in this day and age, and they’ve gotten used to being ignored and neglected. They lack the vitality to propel themselves off shelves, and yet still they remain hopeful.

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

Even as the Blue Marble was miniaturizing your conception of Earth, it was inflating your sense of importance in relation to it, endowing you with a godlike perspective and agency. The image caused, in other words, a derangement of scale, from which you people still suffer. As your anxiety about the disastrous effects of your behavior on the biosphere grows, you console yourself with the thought that by changing a light bulb or recycling a bottle or choosing paper instead of plastic, you can save the planet.

What Slavoj said was this: People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced. If even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. And he said you don’t have to worry about being creative. The world is creative, endlessly so, and its generative nature is part of who you are. The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so. We are here to help you.

Inside, his heart was slamming against his injured rib, and he was afraid if he opened his mouth, it would scramble up his throat and hurl itself at her and burrow, beating, in her lap or between her breasts, because how could he trust it? How could he know that hearts do not behave like ferrets? He kept his lips tightly sealed and glanced sideways at her. She smiled.

“Let me tell you something about poetry, young schoolboy. 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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

Most people don’t even notice when their book comes calling. They’re too busy checking their cell phones.

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.

And in the new ending, just as the littlest boy was floating away through the trees, he happened to look down and see his mom crying, and at the last minute, he grabbed hold of the very top branch of a very tall tree and he held on tight. And because he was still small, the pull of the moon’s gravity wasn’t so strong on him, so he was able to haul himself all the way back down the tree, until he reached his mom. And he held on to her hand and told her that he’d changed his mind. He was different from the other boys, he said, more grounded, and he wanted to try to find his identity right here on earth.

But I remember there was a time, once, when I was really little, when he didn’t need the pot, and music really was it for him—pure space—and big enough to hold us all. And I was it, and Mom was it, too—we were all it, back then, and I remember what it felt like, when everything was beautiful.

“She says I am irresponsible. Ach, of course she is right! 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?”

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. . . .”

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.