My children are adults now and they live according to their own certainties. If they have to make a decision, they do not ask me what I might think of the options. It was different when they were young. They did not ask in those days either but that didn’t stop me sharing with them the endless circling of all that was on my mind. I was unable to communicate a clear and simple message to them. And if I was unwilling to tell them to be like me, then I also did not know what to tell them to be like. I have always sensed my ideas are not my own but that thoughts tend to intrude messily upon each other, appearing in uncertain relation to me, and without much about them to help me distinguish one from another. How should I select one thread from the tangle before me, with ideas arriving constantly from the outside and only taking shape, settling in my head, for a short time before being pushed aside by jostling others? We are receivers not transmitters, readers not authors. I don’t think anyone truly possesses what they say and in general I am against holding individuals responsible for the words that might erupt out of them. It seems to me, they can’t much help the lines they are compelled to recite, being bound by some perverse logic, and often
shocking themselves with what they come out with - and what they are employed to say has that unpredictable but ‘it is written’ inevitability about it. How often it strikes me that I knew they could not prevent themselves from saying what they had to say. Then, my question of how to speak one word when I might so easily speak another, has also become the question of my life. My predicament is quite unlike that of my parents, who were contracted to be very certain of themselves. They thought they said what they thought. They were not uncertain of their certainties, but then, that world, their world, seemed too small to me, and I fell out of it. That also could have been predicted if they had only known. From my youngest years, I was oriented towards something outside of our family, something which lay beyond the certainties my parents tried to communicate. This other realm, or my awareness of it, if it did not actively contradict them, undermined with irrefutable subtlety, the sense of importance they tried to instil in me. Sadly, the story of my childhood is the perpetual drawing away of my attention by some cuckooing imp, capering behind them as they tried to convey their sincere best intentions. They could not hold me to their world with their ‘good talkings to’, and I drifted out of their world without ever having to resort to open rebellion. Perhaps they were tantalised with the idea that if anyone could be persuaded, then it was me, precisely because I was polite and not rebellious. As they redoubled their efforts to win me over, the values they communicated became more stark, more desperate and, so it seemed to me, more cruel. I did not blame them. I did not want to provoke or confront them. I was sorry. I was sad. But what I did want was to be free from everything that had to be. I wanted things otherwise, even if I also knew somehow that I would never escape them. I am bound to the world through their words and it is this binding that always does the damage. Sometimes a short and simple sentence spoken by a parent can condemn a child forever. Sometimes a sentence of that sort is like a grave. My parents tried to bury me in the grave of one such short and simple sentence. They stood beside the grave they had dug and wanted to bury me in it. But the grave, like their certainties, was too small for me to fit in, too narrow and too short. I was unable to lie in it so I sat instead with my head and limbs poking out. They could not bury me like that and so gave up, even if they never retracted their sentence upon me. How could they? The imp of my distraction continued into adulthood, and by the time I understood I had no choice but to make words appear as if from the position of a parent, I was still uncertain. How was I to decide upon which words to say and which to not say? Where my parents’ certainties are something like those remains extracted from beneath Enon Chapel following the 1848 burial act, a matter of public health, the nebulous cloud of my uncertainties are more like the smoke hanging over Toribe-No, that supreme symbol of transience in Heian Japan, as forming, or unforming, a hazy boundary between city and afterlife. Then, I was able to speak to my children only if, in accordance with the practice of my Kenosis, I also deflected the direction and character of my primary message with a proliferation of extraneous and modifying secondary messages. One game of ambiguity that I liked, which my children did not, was to tell them something truthfully but in a tone of voice which could not be believed. Sometimes this concerned a rule that had to be observed which I told as a joke. And sometimes it was about an event or fact that seemed, in my telling, too unlikely to be true. Sometimes they played along with me and asked flurries of exploratory questions, trying to catch me out and fix the truth in my words once and for all. Sometimes they would become infuriated and start shouting at me, demanding, is it true or not true? The game then entered its second stage, proceeding either from their questions, or from their shouting. There must have been a last time we played that game. Did they ever play it? Was there, after all, also a grave in my game? They live in their own certainties now.
