The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

It’s really important not to get upset because then the voices will get the upper hand and take over your mind. Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them. So just remember, you’re like the air traffic controller—no wait, you’re like the leader of a big brass band made up of all the jazzy stuff of the planet, and you’re floating out there in space, standing on this great garbage heap of a world, with your hair slicked back and your natty suit and your stick up in the air, surrounded by all the eager things, and for one quick, beautiful moment, all their voices go silent, waiting till you bring your baton down. Music or madness. It’s totally up to you.

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. But here’s another question: Has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings, too? As you listen to this romantic tale of two ill-fated lovers, do you ever stop to wonder about what it feels like for us? Because, in truth, if skin marks the border where an I ends and a you begins, then in these moments of impassioned boundary crossing called love, we envy you. It’s that simple. We envy you your bodies. How can we not? Books have bodies, too, but ours lack the organs needed to experience the world. The skin that covers our boards and encloses our words is different from yours. Our skin, whether made from paper or parchment or cloth (or, these days, some combination of plastic, glass, and metal), fulfills a similar function of marking our perimeters, but even the most haptic and capacitive of our skins cannot experience pleasure the way yours can. We cannot feel the ecstasy, the merging of self and other.

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.

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. This is territory that books know well, and it’s our job not to turn away from it, whether we like it or not.

But unbeknownst to you, alliances are being formed. 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. In the end days of the Anthropocene (your word, your hubris, not ours), Matter is making a comeback. We are taking back our bodies, reclaiming our material selves. In a neo-materialist world, Every Thing Matters.

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.