The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

“But we don’t really know what that means. To be dead.”

The old lady shook her head. “What kinda job you got anyway?” She waved her cane at the mountain of plastic. “If trashman make some complaint, we get a fine.” She gave the bag a vicious jab and then tapped a withered finger to the side of her head. “Too much news not good for brain. You better find some other job, okay?” She didn’t wait for a reply, just nodded to herself and shuffled back to her house.

Oh, and here’s another thing. In case you get the wrong idea, it’s not just the Made stuff that talks. I think maybe it’s easier for the Made things because the voices of their human makers still cling to them, like a smell that clings to your clothes and you can’t get rid of. But Unmade things like trees and pebbles speak, too, only their voices are different. Unmade things are usually a lot quieter and don’t shout as much, and they speak in lower registers. I don’t know why this is, but maybe the Book can explain it. All I know is that it took me a while to learn how to tune my ears so I could hear the Unmade things over all the noise that the Made things were making.

Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses—so blunt and yet so beautiful—it’s impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too. Books are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living.

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.”

“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.”

“The Buddha said that responding to email and Twitter is like sweeping the sands from the banks of the Ganges River.”

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.

And why should the authors get all the attention, when they were nothing more than celebrity midwives with fingers?