The future of the past
Nils Sundstrøm called: “I’ve got something of yours,” he said. “I’ll bring it by if you’re home.” I said I was. “Okay,” I said.
“Did you remember you had this?” he asked, holding it up. “Because I’ve had it at least a couple of months, and who knows how long Axel had it before that?”
“Axel?” I said. It didn’t look like something Axel would have.
“I think he may have gotten it from Bel Monk,” Nils said, “but it has your name in it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s mine. I did wonder a couple of weeks back maybe, or a couple of months back” - I have a hard time with time: it may have been a couple of years back, or two days ago [*] - “I was wondering what had happened to it.”
“It’s an odd thing for anyone to have - Chinese poems in German,” Nils said. “Where did you get it?”
“Japanese,” I said.
“Right.”
“From a friend,” I said. “Who was German. He’s dead.”
“Can you read it?” (What did that mean?)
“Pretty well,” I said.
“Do you know anything about these guys?” Nils asked, holding up the book again.
“Not much,” I said. “Something.”
“Hey,” he said, “do you mind if I come in?” He mimed shivering in his distressed leather jacket with the big pockets on the chest, brass buttons. Nils has adopted the Valley of Virginia’s idea of how cowboys would dress if they had the money and fashion sense of country-western singers. You could do it without money in the local Goodwill and thrift stores if you paid attention, that is, if you made the rounds every week.
It was an odd look for him, I thought. He had the head for the hat and the shoulders for the coat and the shirts, the hips for the jeans and the feet for the boots, but he couldn’t escape his Midwestern self-consciousness at playing dress-up. He wanted to look comfortable in his skin inside his clothes, but the skin would have been more at ease, I thought, in a watch cap, a Norwegian sweater, heavy wool pants, and snow boots.
Since he still had hold of the book, I said, “Sure,” and stood aside. Doing that, standing aside, made it sound like. “Sure. Come on in” even if I really meant, “Sure, I do mind.” Another one of those things you get into that you don’t want to because you can’t figure a way out of them. For example, couldn’t you have said, “No, just give me the goddam book”?
Nils took off his hat, as he stepped through the door. Then, he took off his coat, gestured at the sofa and before I could say anything, even nod my head, putting it beside him and his hat on top of it, sat down.
“Bashō,” Nils said. “I’d heard the name before.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Sit down,” he said as if it were his living room. I sat down.
“I like this one,” he said. He read it. His German was good:
Wintermorgenschnee ‒
Selbst die Krähe, sonst verhaßt,
heute ist sie schön!
He translated: “Winter-morning snow. Even the usually obnoxious crow is beautiful today!
“Is that right?” he said.
“Sounds good to me.”
“And this one,” he said.
Wieder schwand ein Jahr ‒
und ich trage immer noch
Pilgerhut und -schuh.
“Another year gone by,” the German from the Japanese into English: “I am still wearing my pilgrim’s hat and shoes.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t think ‘pilgrim.’”
“But . . . .”
“I know that’s what the German says, but I’ve seen that poem in several English versions. It’s always ‘traveler’ or something like that. I like to think ‘hobo,’” I said, “or ‘tramp.’”
Bashō, to give you a rough idea, was born two dozen years after and died a half-dozen hears before John Dryden. Unlike the English poet/critic/playwright who attached himself to London so that once he arrived he would never leave (except to avoid the plague), Bashō renounced urban and literary life - the society of writers and writers-about-writers - more than once. Then he would leave Edo; he would walk away from “literature” to experience and describe the world. In bits and pieces, the way the world comes to those walking around in it. Everywhere Bashō walked he found something different.
“Er war aber Zenmeister,” Nils was saying. He was leafing through the book. “See,” he said,
Matsuo Bashō war Laienmönch des Zen-Buddhismus . . . .
it said, sure enough.
“I’ve heard different accounts. Historians seem to disagree,” I said. “I don’t think Zen did anything for him. He went off partly because it didn’t.”
Having watched them at work, I have great respect for historians. Still, even if what they know is precious, they know precious little about the past. The literary historian doesn’t only take pictures of every piece of Bashō paper he can find in every archives that he can find; he flies to Tokyo: he takes his hand lens, his trowel, his brushes, pans, and bottles, and digging down several feet, he peers it into the streets of 17th-century Edo; he crawls hands-and-knees (carefully against the traffic) along the paths the poet traveled to the East and to the North and to the West and to the South; but there are only ashes to be found in his burned-out huts. Still, the historian crawls along the road to collect and classify even if there are to pick up only bits of sand and glass that may have been floating in the air when Bashō was alive.
Historians know precious little about the past, but they know far, far more than prognosticators, climate scientists, e.g., do about the future. (I am indebted to my friend Gaspar Stephens for this insight.) For while historians know something of the climate of Ogaki in Gifu Prefecture in 1694, let’s say, climate scientists know nothing about future history. Nothing at all. And actually, as far as I can tell, they care nothing about future history.
A church-historian friend of mine once said to me about faith, that it was better to have questions than answers. For if you had answers, you became fairly certain fairly quickly that you had something better than faith: you had Answers. The same is true of numbers. Why try to see what people may or may not do, why wonder about what discoveries they might make, what ways of thinking they might take up or discard; what they might begin or stop doing; why think about people at all when you have numbers? Never mind, incidentally, that the best numbers don’t go back to 1694, not a third so far.
I didn’t say any of this to Nils. He’d have accused me of waffling, of giving in to the enemy, the dunderheads that don’t believe because they cannot see.
I don’t see. But neither does Nils. Neither do they, the prognosticators. Or, we all have tunnel vision. We can see what we can see, but what we can’t see we don’t want to. It’s complicated enough as it is without looking there.
12.18.18
