This is IT: the perfect reading destination.
A dripping wet grey day I want to go on forever. Nothing but the sound of rain. A million wet little legless boots pounding the metal roof and wood and ground and budding leaves all around me. Rolling down the windows. No human sounds.
Alone, at home, in bed. Invisible. Just me and the rain and my books.
The song makes rain and the first day of the week depressing, but as long as I’m not *out there* being *perceived* as some kind of lonely clown, I’m happy to be one.
To be honest, though, I *am* depressed.
Maybe it’s the book I’m reading: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
It’s not like I haven’t read a dozen sad Murakami books and stories with similar themes and issues. But most of the time with those I’m able to get spiritual sustenance from them while maintaining a certain level of dreamy detachment that doesn’t wind up bogging me down too painfully emotionally. This book is a little too familiar-feeling, though. The experience of entering the age of official adulthood while being cut out of your best friend(s)’s life. With dramatic, surreal, inexplicable finality.
For me, I actually did receive an explanation: my friend told me my father is Satan and her father is the Lord. That I was possessed by spirits and she was no longer allowed (by her pastor and parents) to associate with me.
My friend and her family were in a bible-based cult. A number of years later, that pastor wound up going to jail and being convicted of crimes related to the abuse he inflicted on her family and others under his thumb.
Having read Murakami’s unusual nonfiction book Underground about the Tokyo subway gas attacks adds a whole other layer of understanding to reading his fiction now. It seems that crime perpetrated by a number of individuals via manipulation by the Aum cult / leader, and Murakami’s extensive immersion in putting that book together and trying to understand how it happened and why, is woven into a lot of the stories he wrote after that. Colorless TT strikes me as a story of that kind of loss and grief, of the person or people you have the strongest bond with suddenly making this very extreme BREAK away from you, relegating you to an empty nonsense-world. Profoundly excommunicated, out of reach from those you thought knew you best and had a lifetime commitment to you. Telling you there is something so profoundly WRONG with you as to make you untouchable … unseeable.
This is not a good way to step out of childhood and into adulthood.
Anyway. This book is making me pretty sad. It’s not just the memories it brings up, but the awareness and grief that this is happening right now on a very broad scale in our country. And just like with the Aum cult members and with our thoroughly rejected colorless main character, there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO to change it. No way to make it make sense.
One of the most helpful things I’ve heard anyone say about how to look at what is going on right now I heard on the Daily Stoic podcast. Ryan Holiday says to have empathy for them, and recognize it could be you if you’d walked their paths in life. That instead of being angry, mean, or punitive towards them, to recognize them as having been SEPARATED FROM THE TRUTH.
*****
My mom is in her third(?) year battling pancreatic cancer. She just finished a series of radiation treatments. She is 80 years old.
My mom was the first person, I think, to call the police about my friend’s (our neighbors’) pastor. She embarked on a mission to take his ass down. amd started investigating where he had been before he started that congregation, what he had done before he came to our town, and who had already escaped his clutches and for what reasons. While he wouldn’t have wound up in legal trouble purely due to my mom’s efforts, I do think she helped get the ball rolling. Ultimately, of course, it required more people being hurt more severely and them having the courage to acknowledge the harm he was doing (and they were doing together) and leave, and being willing to press charges and testify against him.
When my mom flew into action out of anger for the hurt that caused me, her child, it was in the days before the internet, before mobile phones. When you had to call people with landlines and search through newspapers and actually physically drive to places like Everett, WA to find out what kind of crazy grifting-ass shit a mofo like that was doing.
At the time I swore I would never allow resentment to overtake me the way it did my mom. But here we are decades later, and I struggle against that poison. And I struggle with being patient and loving towards my mom. Towards everyone, really. Towards myself.
We really do get split up into different entities. Related, but different. And you never really can put yourself back together.
I’m grateful this year for books like No Two Persons really driving home to me the truth of fiction. The relevance and importance of stories and characters that tell real truths to help you forge through the dark muddy waters of “reality”. Especially when the reality is our world is being shaped by people who are very prone to being told it is something unsupported by evidence, and swallowing whatever outrageous, murderous, toxic manipulations some amoral, parasitic, crooked, gold-plated toilets dish out.