A ZEN-LIKE REVIEW OF THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS BY RUTH OZEKI (2021)
If and when I become an unorthodox Zen Master of the universe, including the world-wide-web and the world herself, I will, as a benevolent secretary of culture in the One World Administration, outlaw all death in fiction, for we have enough of that in real life. Or maybe, should we ban fictional tragedy altogether and regale in Dionysian Bacchanalia instead, at least in fiction ? Not for nothing did Friedrich Nietzsche entitle his treatise on this matter ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus’.
So, there is death and tragedy in the first chapter of Ozeki’s Book of Form and Emptiness, and it grinds on until in the end there is a happy ending. Benny, the main protagonist exclaims:
You’re a book, you can fix it! You can make it come out right!
So, why bother with the tragedy in the first place? It’s fiction, for heaven’s sake, not fact. We all know the facts of life, as Ozeki describes it in ever more painful detail together with an unorthodox Marxist commentary by the Slovenian Bottleman named Slavoj.
Has Slavoj Žižek (never acknowledged as such) escaped to the US and is living underground as a hobo in a wheelchair, recuing damsels in distress and dispensing words of wisdom via the tragic damsel who names herself The Aleph after a Borges story?
“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 nedicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we’re crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That’s fucking crazy …” (p.365)
All so true but as the Aotearoa-Marxist author Shannon Walsh puts it: ‘Everything's fucked: But the point is to go beyond that’. Sounds a bit like Nietzsche’s ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’? Sounds a bit like Zen?
Before we get to the latter, let me just mention a minor irritant in the novel: whenever Slavoj speaks he must speak with this ridiculous speech impediment that is commonly ascribed to Germans when trying to speak English (ve haf ze veys to make you laff), in a somewhat haphazard fashion, e.g.
We must learn to luff our garbage! To find poetry in our trash. It is ze only way to luff the whole world.” (p.538)
What on earth is the point in that? Should I have cited Nietzsche with Ze birth of ze tragedy or ze Kreeks and pessimism? Since Ozeki seems to very fond of Walter Benjamin, prefacing chapters with quotes from his “Unpacking my Library” why not
“Unpackinck ze Library”?
Anyway, not to worry, I’m just a bit upset because I’m German too, and zis is my story about Zen – before we get to Zen Ozeki’s way.
I think I was in the last years at the Gymnasium Hohenschwangau when I was first introduced to Zen Buddhism, reading Christmas Humphreys’ Zen Buddhism and then Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki‘ Essays on Zen Buddhism (bit of a worry when later discovering his alleged sympathies for fascism), moving on to the Americans like Allan Watts and finally Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I say ‘finally’ because in my life’s journey I became less interested in Zen Buddhism as a sort of religion (following Marx’ dictum that ‘religion is opium for the people’ – also quoted by Ozeki) while maintaining an interest in Zen as minor ingredient in my political and linguistic involvement, following a Zen Master of sorts by the name of Noam Chomsky. A Zen interlude was when in the early 1970s on my travels around the world, I happened to visit the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi Tree in Anuradhapura, a Buddhist num gave me a leaf from the tree and pronounced me a bodhisattva. I carried the leaf with me for many years until I lost it. I interpreted this loss as never having been and never will be a bodhisattva. Many years later in Kyoto I saw the famous Zen Garden – rocks in the sand – and while I am now an enthusiastic gardener myself, I was quite disappointed by this little patch of ‘emptiness’ that is supposed to trigger satori (at least for those who are ready). Zen these days has become a fashion accessory, what with Zen perfume, Zen spas, Zen retreats for celebrities like Leonard Cohen on Mount Baldy – I actually quite like Leonard Cohen and wrote an obituary poem calling him a Zen Master of Music.
In that context one has to mention Ozeki’s tragic protagonist, Annabelle, having a ‘Zen massage’ with a bit of erotic after play. I can see a bestseller entitled ‘Zen and Sex’. In fact, one of my favourite koan is that of a Zen Master being visited in his cave by a prostitute who asks him to marry her so she can escape her sordid profession, and he does. I can picture the happy couple in a slim two-story apartment in Kyoto, he, working in the local supermarket and she being a demure but pretty housewife looking after the kids. They visit the Zen temple on Sundays.
So, now that you have learned of my Zen experience and hopefully allow me to pontificate on the subject, let’s return to The Book of Form and Emptiness, a sort of koan in itself. Ozeki being a Buddhist ‘priest’ herself pays homage to ‘Zoketsu Norman Fischer and to the lineage of Zen teachers whose words suffuse these pages’. In the book, Zen as the Deus ex Machina involves a rather quaint story of a young Japanese marketing professional who turns her back on the material world and joins a small Zen-Buddhist temple as a disciple of an aging, dying Zen Master. To save the temple from decay she hits on the idea to write a book on Tidy Magic, the Zen way to declutter your life. As a self-help book it becomes a best seller what with the author travelling the world to promote sales – naturally she ends up at Annabelle’s local Library where she conducts a short ceremony to send off Kenji’s ashes to the heavens. Of course it all starts with the hoarder Annabelle (hoarding as a traumatic response to her husband’s untimely death) coming across Tidy Magic plucking at hersubmerged heartstrings, writing unanswered emails to the author (until in the end she asks her assistant to reply) and slowly but surely rises to the occasion in the end, and declutters her apartment and turns it into a little Zen living quarter for herself and Benny, her son. Zen saves the day.
I suppose this is quite a clever deceit in that Ozeki as the Zen author has a character in her Zen book that is a best-selling Zen author. A sort of Russian doll format. I suppose there are various contradictions involved: how can a Zen person write a book for sale for the capitalist publishing market and then stoop so low as to do promotional tours to sell some more? Not that Ozeki is the only one – there is now a whole industry devoted to all things Zen. The Aleph and her tutor Slavoj would have to use some strong language to counter these trends (or shall we call it self-criticism?).
But then again, isn’t Žižek and Co. flogging books as well? Didn’t Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Borges and Co. become famous by way of writing their respective books that sold well (not necessarily in their lifetimes though)? Are books innocent? Surely not. Hitler (yet another Austrian/German) wrote a book too.
This is of course another one of Ozeki’s clever devices: having the book speak as a character, sidelining the author as a typist? In the brief beginning chapter entitled ‘In the Beginning’ she/they write(s):
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.
As a poetic recipe this is fine. As a linguist I beg to differ (paraphrasing Chomsky): in the beginning is the syntax of a thought, filled in with words to create a meaningful (semantic) sentence. You also can create a meaningless but grammatically correct sentence like the famous Chomsky sentence: ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ – which almost turned into a Zen koan in its own right, i.e. Zen often dwells on paradox, demonstrating the need to go beyond good and bad, beyond black and white, to overturn the human obsession with dualism. Sure, when language became reduced to a writing system, letters (pictograms, characters) became ever so important, especially when Gutenberg (yet another German) invented the printing press. I always joke that the Bible got it wrong with the beginning sentence ‘In the beginning was the word …’ and even worse by the stupid story of the Tower of Babel where God stopped the enterprise by confusing the builders with creating different languages.
Anyway, books, books and more books. In Alexandria I saw the newly built Library, the mother of all libraries, a modernist architectural failure, in my view. Still, quite amazing to stand at the place where over 2,000 years ago the likes of Benny were hiding away from the turmoil outside. Well, Benny’s and Co. library in Ozeki’s book sounds like nothing like a normal library, what with the homeless and alcoholics (Slavoj) hiding away during day and nighttime hours. Where I live in Auckland (NZ), they also still have libraries which I frequent on occasion but here the librarians keep out all non-desirables (or ‘deplorables’ as Hilary called them). Not that the homeless and somewhat degenerate intellectuals (Slavoj) in general are interested in invading temples of civilization where high-brow pretenders walk the aisles.
Still. It makes sense that in The Book of Form and Emptiness the library is a focal point, as an island of calm in the sea of turmoil. The library even has a good librarian – as opposed to the dour school librarians I remember – by the name of Cory who in her first incarnation reads stories for children (Benny as a toddler included) and many years later (when Benny is high school age) saves Benny from going crazy in the library and then saves his mother by visiting her and getting her to start the decluttering enterprise. Cory is of course also present when, at her library, our Zen author of Tidy Magic performs the final act for Kenji’s ashes. Can Zen also save the library? Can libraries survive the digital age?
Just like Annabelle’s analog newspaper monitoring job becomes redundant but continues on a bit as a digital business – but not for long. Same fate for the local community libraries? Of course, some of the more prestigious temples of books (cf. Alexandria) in the USA like the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will remain as ‘living’ museums. I mention the latter as I took part in an on-line book discussion group organized by the Folger, with a distinct feeling that this is a virtual place to be seen to be believed. There was even a slight discussion of American democracy.
Ozeki replays this scenario a bit what with a looming election that descends into a riot when the results come in. Sounds familiar? To be replayed as I write this a week before 5/11. That Benny gets arrested in the fray, and hospitalized again on the psychiatric ward (due to the intervention of his psychiatrist) is an evolving story that is the other centerpiece of the novel.
When young Benny starts to hear voices in his head – coming from the outside or wherever – culminating in his stabbing his physics teacher with scissors because the scissors told him so, we are in the territory of psychiatry. Dr Melanie (first name only), his psychiatrist at the ward is first portrayed as the mainstream professional who hasn’t much of a clue apart from the dominant paradigm of Behaviourism in league with Big Pharma. She has never heard of the fact that all sentient beings/things have voices – scissors included – and people like Benny can hear them, or at least some of them, some good some bad. Dr Melanie insists that such voices are the product of a confused if not sick brain that can be subdued by appropriate medication. The other kids on the ward, including the mysterious Aleph, also suffer accordingly. Poor ‘old’ Benny becomes a basket case, shunted in and out of the psychiatric ward, in and out of ‘special’ education programs at school, until he finds a secret message from the Aleph to go to the ‘library’ to meet her and Slavoj and other like-minded outcasts. Benny manages to excuse himself from school by deception and forthwith goes to library instead of school. Some of the extra-curricular adventures involve meeting Slavoj and the Aleph at their ramshackle headquarters in an unused factory building on the fringe of town, where he learns, amongst other things, that everybody hears voices and that this is quite normal and nothing to worry about. Slavoj says that all good poets – like himself – compose poems dictated by voices. Benny also spends a night in the park with a ‘posse’ of bros, one which beats him up by mistake. Then again, a longer sojourn involves the burial of the Aleph’s pet rat, requiring a trip up the mountains. Camping in the open air, Benny develops some horny desires towards the Aleph but is cruelly rejected. “I love you” says the Aleph “but not like this”. So, there you are. Tragic for Benny but good too because the voices from the badlands subside and platonic love invades his adolescent mind, calming his head. In fact, he now begins to follow Slavoj’s lead to write it all down, whatever the voices have to say. His voice. Other voices. It’s all the same. Benny on the way to become an author? If anything, this is cathartic therapy that Dr Melanie should pay attention to, moving away from pills and conversion therapy, to the new (some say ‘old’) age of a psychotherapeutic treatment that encourages the creativity of the human mind. Sounds nice, I know. Having studied 101 psychology myself at university and having a partner who worked as a psychiatric nurse in ED for many years, I also have some reservations. When psychotic patients arrive by ambulance with a police escort there is no time for therapeutic discourse, there is only the needle that injects the sedative. Aotearoa/New Zealand has, however, the famous case of the psychotic patient released from a psychiatric hospital, only to write a best-seller about her experiences and goes on to become one of the most celebrated authors in New Zealand (her name is Janet Frame). But for every Janet Frame there are thousands who never see the light of the day in terms of literary talent. Maybe it was a kindly orientated psychiatrist that expelled Frame from the asylum, recognizing her talent as a writer before she started to write. Maybe in the same vein as Van Gogh’s psychiatrist in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence provided him with a studio to paint and then sent him on his way. They who are recognised (in their lifetime) as worthy of artistic genius are perhaps as lucky as those winning the jackpot in a lottery, the rest of us waiting for the day when everyone is a winner.
In any case, during Benny’s unexplained absences from home, Annabell, the mother, is freaking out, not knowing what to do, who to call (she has no friends or relatives), where to go – but all is well, sort of, whenever Benny returns, goes to his tidy bedroom and will not tell his crazy mother what is going on. All Annabelle can do is go to the charity shop and buy some trinkets to add to her ever-growing collection of junk - that is before the Tidy Magic takes a hold. But when the latter does kick in, there comes the next tragic event: she falls down the stairs carrying junk to the dumpster, lands on the back porch and passes out. Benny is out on one of his adventures and doesn’t know about it. Next morning or so, the No-Good son of the next-door ‘good’ landlady (Chinese) finds her covered in a blanket of crows, thinking she has died, and the crows are feasting on her dead body. In a tragi-comedic turn he takes a stick to scare away the crows and Annabelle wakes up, thinking No-Good is trying to kill her. Eventually this is all resolved by the story that the crows, whom she had been feeding for a long time – to the chagrin of No-Good who thought of crows as a pest – so when she collapsed the crows came down and settled on her to protect her from the cold night. Bit of a silly but heartwarming story! Anyway, when Benny returns and finds his mother in hospital, there is not much else that can go wrong, or rather shall we invoke Murphy’s Law ‘what can go wrong will go wrong’.
As a parable of middle America going to the dogs, this is all painful stuff, were it not for the glimmers of hope in the shape of working-class people coming to help each other, like Cory the librarian, and even Dr Melanie and a social worker who eventually relent and do not demand anymore that Benny is taken into foster care. Of course, Slavoj, the Aleph and Slavoj’s Slovenian friends come to the rescue too, sprucing up the apartment for Annabelle and Benny. How real is that? In my travels in the USA, I’ve seen glimpses of this happening, like in Chicago when working class people gather in the park to listen to union speakers who seem to be genuine ‘voices’ of the left, preaching solidarity and people power. However, as we all know, the big picture is as depressing as ever, as we speak, with Harris and Trump as a side-show for screwing the working classes (the proletariat or precariat) for all that they are worth for. Proxy wars around the world keep the armaments industries laughing all the way to the bank while the factory workers squeeze a minimum wage from the corporate owners, happy that they have a job at all, producing bombs on the assembly line.
Ozeki and her ilk of good guys wearing Zen robes can see the cosmic joke in all of this MAD madness, and perhaps they are right. What else could it be? The sound of one hand clapping? A case of form and emptiness?
