Chapter 32 Turning into a Flower
Turning into a Flower
On the last day of my mini tour of Japan I went to Nikko, a mountain town surrounded by shrines and temples, ninety miles north of Tokyo.
Despite the short distance involved, getting there was a minor odyssey. You had to take the bullet train to the industrial city of Utsunomiya and then change to a local train, which seemed to have last been refurbished in the nineteen-seventies.
Sitting on a bench seat upholstered in red velvet, I was prompted by my first sight of woods in the countryside to return to Titus’s book.
After I left Osaka we’d waged a lengthy text-messaging war.
It had taken him a while to admit he was the author of the postcards that had lured me to the other side of the world, but he’d eventually confessed.
I thought his remorse was sincere. He even offered to reimburse me for what I’d spent on my flights, paying me in installments after September.
“But I won’t cover your accommodation, food and drinks, because you’re the one who’s sleeping, eating and drinking,” he’d said.
I’d replied, “We’ll see.”
As for Gabriela, we’d exchanged a couple of messages at the most. I asked her if she knew about Titus’s hoax and, while acknowledging that she did, she added that it hadn’t been her idea. She was still in Paris and was showing signs of depression.
As if I give a damn, I thought. The train trundled on, bearing me, in that antiquated carriage, through a dreamscape of bluish hilltops where it had just started to rain.
In a moment of satori enlightenment, I suddenly had the insight that this gently undulating countryside was a perfect image of my inner topography. The only good thing about being a middling kind of man is that catastrophes, too, are homely.
I flipped through the anthology, looking for the text about this kind of awakening.
The author was D. T. Suzuki, the man who introduced Zen to the West. He said that meditation seeks as its ultimate end the fusion of subject and object, observer and observed.
Only when we penetrate the essence of things can we understand them in their profundity—an idea which Suzuki explains beautifully by taking as his example a person absorbed in meditation and a flower:
To know the flower is to become the flower, to be the flower, to bloom as the flower and to enjoy the sunlight as well as the rainfall.
When this is done, the flower speaks to me and I know all its secrets, all its joys, all its sufferings—that is, all its life vibrating within itself.
Not only that: along with my “knowledge” of the flower, I know all the secrets of the universe, which includes all the secrets of my own Self, which has been eluding my pursuit all my life so far, because I divided myself into a duality, the pursuer and the pursued, the object and the shadow. [ . . . ]
Now, however, by knowing the flower I know my Self. That is, by losing myself in the flower, I know myself as well as the flower.
It was a simple but uplifting idea. I had to read the text a couple of times to understand what it was saying.
What, then, does the flower teach us? Does it only teach us to look?
Maybe when we learn to contemplate the smallest things without filters, we’ll be able to turn our eyes toward ourselves.
Very few things are beautiful or ugly. Beauty and ugliness are only in the eye of the beholder.
This thought took me back to Mizuki. It was only five days since I’d been at the bar and the barbecue place with her, but my journey seemed to have stretched the time that separated us.
I imagined her climbing the craggy mountains on the island in the north of Japan. We’d arranged to meet the following night in the bar named after me, but I was suddenly assailed by fear. What if Mizuki had gone through with her original idea and would never come back?
I calmed myself with the thought that the person who really plans to commit suicide never announces the intention but simply goes ahead and does it.
With this foggy, changing mental landscape matching the one all around me, the train stopped in Nikko.