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. —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

He saw the burning throat and the tongue of flame, heard the basso growl of fire and the sucking air, mingling with the threnody of a lone trombone from the street.

My abundant woman mother goddess love r we are symphony together I am mad for 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.

skin marks the border where an I ends and a you begins, then that night they did all they could to cross it.

But what a sweet story it is! And in the end, to us, that’s what really matters. 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. Oh, sure, you can say that acts of literature are a kind of impassioned boundary crossing, too, but literary acts are inherently disembodied, more notional and distributed. We rely on you to embody us, and...

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?

Umwelt

Face a blank wall. Pretend the wall is a mirror. Say good morning to the toilet. Thank it for taking all your shit. Pretend you are very old. Move at half speed. Hug yourself and say I love you. Repeat until it’s true. Walk like you’re happy. Change directions. Be a pussy. Purr. Lick your beautiful fur. Regard the world upside down. Make eye contact with your meds before you swallow them. Ask them, “Are you for real?” Do everything backward. Smile at someone you don’t like. If they smile back, give yourself a point. Lie on your back on the floor and listen. Feel free to sing along.

“Fluxus, man. Subversive shit. They think she’s a bad influence, taking the piss out of the system and not taking her own mental illness seriously.” Benny didn’t understand what Fluxus meant. He’d never heard of the radical political art movement from the sixties. He just thought it was a cool swear word that Mackson was using. But he did understand something important, another rule of the ward: the punishment for subversive shit is that they make you grow up. Fluxus, man. The ward felt different after she left. Hollow. Muted. Dull. Later that day, during art therapy, Benny swiped a glue stick, and when he was back in his room he glued all the slips of paper into his Composition notebook. He wasn’t thinking of it as art. He just liked the way they looked, all lined up neatly in a column.

The Library Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

Many of us remember the literary holocaust of the 1990s, when a quarter million books from the San Francisco Public Library were disappeared and wound up in a mass grave, buried in a landfill site. A “hate crime directed at the past,” one critic called this catastrophic weeding.

That fly on the wall isn’t a coping tool, Benny. It’s the sound of a young person finding his voice, and in the world of books, this is nothing short of a miracle.

as Benny approached, the old hobo’s big hands lifted from his blanketed lap as if they had minds of their own and began moving through the air in a semaphoric dance that was beyond Benny’s comprehension or the Bottleman’s control. But the old man barely seemed to notice. He kept his gaze fixed on Benny’s face, a steady beam amid all the flapping and clapping.

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.

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.”

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, of being a boy, of losing a father.

Walter Benjamin, was a passionate bibliophile and book collector, who owned many, many books. He wrote a famous essay on the subject, called “Unpacking My Library,” in which he elaborates the ways a collector can acquire books. He can buy them or win them at an auction. He can inherit them or borrow them with no intention of returning them. But, Benjamin says, “Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.”

He concludes his essay about the books he owns with the memorable lines, “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.” With this, we have no quibble. 42

How polishing the floors had given me a deep connection with the temple buildings, and also with the trees that gave wood for the floorboards, and the monks who had scrubbed them for hundreds of years before me. 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 then the weeds grow back, and that’s okay, too.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. —Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels

playing his favorite track “Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing)” from the 1938 live recording at Carnegie Hall. He’d play it over and over again, and every time he heard it, he’d start to cry, and I could never understand why, so he’d try to explain. It’s live, Benny! Listen! That’s Babe Russin on tenor sax. And Harry James on trumpet. And Gene Krupa on drums—oh, man listen to those tom-toms, he’s killing it!