At one of their late-night readings, Kizu quoted the following Thomas poem.
"I emerge from the mind's cave into the worse darkness outside, where things pass and the Lord is in none of them.
"I have heard the still, small voice and it was that of the bacteria demolishing my cosmos. I have lingered too long on "this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards the light. To look forward? Ah, "what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface of a turning planet. What"
Kizu and Patron always began with Kizu reading aloud from his paper- back copy, Patron following along in the hardbound copy in his lap. Kizu's translations served as reference. Then they would discuss the poem, stanza by stanza. On this particular day when Kizu had read to this point, Patron thought the poem ended there, an understandable mistake since the poems in the collected works edition he was using were almost all complete on one page.
"That's exactly right." He sighed in admiration. "Only someone who's desperate, driven into a corner, could write a poem like that."
This didn't sit well with Kizu, the longtime teacher.
"Thomas divides his stanzas in unusual ways," he cautioned his pupil.
"The last word in this stanza, 'What, ' is the first word in the next stanza, ac- tually. The meaning of the line doesn't end there."
Patron's response was unexpected.
"But the next stanza isn't really necessary, is it?" he said confidently.
"How did you translate the next line? What comes after 'What'?"
"to do but, like Michelangelo's Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?"
"I see! But even though he triumphantly produced this smart stanza, if you look at the whole poem it's an unnecessary addition, don't you think?"
"Don't you believe at all in this kind of 'reciprocating touch'?" Kizu questioned him.
"These past ten years I've been in the dark," Patron said, "but I haven't relied on a reciprocating touch. I emerge from the mind's/ cave into the worse darkness/ outside, where things pass and/ the Lord is m none of them.' I've ex- perienced this more often than I can recall, but I never attempted to find God as I passed through there. Doesn't Thomas at times try to be overly suggestive?
"Do you really need to keep your balance on the edge of the abyss? When I made my noisy reversal in front of the media, falling even farther into the abyss, it was like a Ping-Pong ball trying to sink down by itself into a tub of water. Even without the last stanza-no, even with it-I agree that this is an outstanding poem."
Kizu felt a slight maliciousness from Patron as he smiled at him in the gloom. Trying to control his rising displeasure, Kizu took out a volume of Thomas's prose writings and showed the following to Patron.
The ability to be in hell is a spiritual prerogative, and proclaims the true nature of such a being. Without darkness, in the world we know, the light would go unprized; without evil, goodness would have no meaning. Over every poet's door is nailed Keats's saying about negative capability. Poetry is born of the tensions set up by the poet's ability to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
When he'd finished reading, Patron looked serious again.
"He's entirely correct," he said. "Thomas is a clergyman, but I think he says more telling things about poetry than about religion. In the final analy- sis, I should say, he's a poet."
Once more, Kizu felt he'd been given the slip. He said nothing. Com- pared to the craftiness of Patron, a man of about his own age, Kizu felt him- self rather naive.
Patron continued, trying to soothe Kizu. "Of course there's nothing of the poet about me, but I can sympathize with this particular one. This calm ability to be in hell and, as Keats puts it, the ability to be 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'-these would be wonderful mottoes for my old age!"
Under the light of the lamp stand, Patron's head jutted forward as he read, and Kizu could see saliva glistening on both sides of his dark cocoonlike lips. His voice had risen in pitch, and Dancer, sensing in this a sign of excite- ment and exhaustion, quickly and stealthily stepped to his side, gave him medicine directly from her hand, and held a glass of water to his lips. Patron gave himself up to Dancer's practiced movements. She then transferred the cup to her left hand and wiped the saliva away from Patron's lips with the back of her other hand.
It was morning again when Kizu went home, but this time, instead of Kizu's Mustang, Ikuo drove a minivan, a present from Kizu for Patron to use for meetings he planned to hold in sites outside Tokyo. Expecting that he would be attending these meetings, Ikuo was doing his best to get used to driving the van.
"I think reading that Welsh poet with you is having a good psychologi- cal effect on Patron," Ikuo said. "For the first time in a while he came out to the front of the house, to the office, and chatted with the three of us, and he used an English phrase he said was from Thomas that he'd heard from you- quietly emerge. He read the poem to us. It was in the translation that you did, and I think it's wonderful."
Kizu reached into the briefcase on his lap, pulled out the copy he was using as a text, sandwiched in between his notes, angled it up in the pale, cloudy light, and read.
"As I had always known he would come, unannounced, remarkable merely for the absence of clamour. So truth must appear to the thinker; so at a stage of the experiment, the answer must quietly emerge. I looked at him, not with the eye only, but with the whole of my being, overflowing with him as a chalice would with the sea."
Ikuo nodded. "Patron said, 'If once again God is going to quietly emerge to me, I want to welcome him calmly, without flinching. I take this poem as a sort of sermon, and when I can accomplish this and I am able to 'quietly emerge' before you as mankind's Patron in the end time, I hope you too can welcome me as just calmly, without hesitating.' That's the last thing Patron said." And Ikuo clenched his mouth, in a way that reminded Kizu of a shal- low-water fish he'd seen on TV ripping apart a turban shell, and stared fix- edly at the lights of the oncoming cars.
Kizu wasn't sure what Ikuo was thinking, but he went ahead and spoke.
I want to believe that Patron is a man of great charisma."
Ikuo drove on in silence for a while, his mouth still set in that strange way. And then he spoke, quietly, of something he'd apparently been consid- ering ever since he was getting the minivan ready to take Kizu home.
"Yes, Patron certainly does have charisma. But is he planning to lead people using that charisma? That's the question. I used to think he used the media to appeal to the dispersed radical faction when he did his Somersault, but now I have the feeling that the Somersault was necessary for him. Once again, he said, God would quietly emerge.
"That's why," Ikuo continued, "though I feel his charisma, I have no real sense of what kind of person he is. I'm not sure whether I should get more deeply involved. Since you're well grounded and have a relationship with him that maintains a certain distance, I think it might be best for me to rely on that."
3
During the week Kizu was able to talk with Dancer, who came to his apartment just as Ikuo was setting out for the office. Ikuo hadn't told him in advance, but he'd urged Dancer to pay Kizu a visit.
The only person who had sat on Kizu's sofa since he'd been in Tokyo was Ikuo, so now, as Dancer sat on it-teacup and saucer resting on her shapely thighs, watching Kizu as he spoke, her eyes barely blinking, the pink inside her mouth showing as she sipped her tea-she looked incredibly delicate.
Appearance aside, Kizu already knew she never hesitated to speak her mind. Today, too, she broached a topic that took him completely by surprise.