Despite certain popular misconceptions to the contrary, the individual is not capable of living an isolated existence. Indeed, the very concept of an individual, understood as a being comprehensible without reference to relationship, context, history, and so forth, is almost certainly erroneous. Human beings do not exist uniquely in themselves, walled off as a nuclear essence, self-substantial and alone. We are created in relationship to others—other people, places, times, events. Our being slips over the boundaries of ourselves, spreading itself web-like through the body of the world. We cannot be found solely in ourselves and can be found, more or less, beyond ourselves, in the people and events to which we have some connection.
This truth has been articulated by many the artist, philosopher, and mystic, but few to my mind have displayed it with such subtlety as the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata in his novels The Old Capital and especially Thousand Cranes. Both of these novels explore to varying degrees questions of identity and the lives of individuals stretching beyond the bounds of their own persons.
The first of these, The Old Capital, tells the story of a young woman, Chieko, who was born an identical twin to a poor family and abandoned on the porch of a dry-goods seller in Kyoto. She is raised ignorant of her past until, by the benevolence of a Shinto god, she is suddenly reunited with her twin sister, Nieko. Their connection is a brief one and is constrained by formality and distance of social position. Nevertheless, a young man who had been romantically interested in Chieko finds himself turning his attentions to her twin. Nieko believes that this affection is an attempt to possess in some way the first woman to whom he owed his affections, it having become clear to him that his interest was likely to end in failure.
The plot is a relatively simple one, and in his typical fashion, Kawabata leaves much implied and unsaid that in the hands of other artists might have been the primary object of the reader’s eye. Yet in this simplicity, one is brought to the contemplation of Chieko’s life as a connection of elements largely unseen and beyond herself of which she has been for most of her existence entirely ignorant and that prove to operate outside of her. Her identity, which her foster parents, although not raising her to believe herself their natural daughter, had always left obscure, is suddenly revealed as a story extending itself beyond the confines of her hometown, involving a twin, almost another self, existing under radically different circumstances and yet bearing the imprint of Chiekos’s being and, conversely, having placed her own imprint upon Chieko.
Like many of the major points of the plot, these connections were hidden but implied, shaping the whole that is just out of reach of any individual’s grasp. When they begin to come to light, they pull the characters along in new trajectories, even to the point of one man’s shifting his attention from Cheiko herself to her double in an attempt to remain within the sphere of her extended being. Chiekos’s identity reveals itself as multiform, made up of facets hidden and yet efficacious, a reality that, rather than being carried and sustained by the individual, is more properly understood as that which carries her, that which leads along the finite and largely ignorant subject.
Such themes are even more prevalent in Thousand Cranes. The story follows a young man named Kikuju as he navigates between the two mistresses of his deceased father. The one is constantly attempting to set him up with what she considers to be marriage-eligible young women. The other, Mrs. Ota, appears at a tear ceremony that Kikuji attends, and the two begin a brief affair that is terminated by the suicide of Mrs. Ota. In sleeping with his father’s former mistress, Kikuji is repeating the patterns of his father, continuing the life of the deceased in a tangible way, and it is relatively clear that Mrs. Ota’s attraction to him is based on her seeing the father in the son. Despite the awareness of the transgression that they have committed, neither of the two lovers feel able to escape from the pattern of fate that has taken over them; they are trapped in the causality left behind by the dead. After Mrs. Ota’s suicide, Kikuji begins an affair with her daughter, and it is revealed that pushing the two together was secretly part of Mrs. Ota’s intention in taking her own life. This affair, it is strongly implied, culminates in the daughter partaking of the unhappy fate of her mother.
The tea ceremony and its associated paraphernalia of bowls, teapots, whisks, and profound ritual form the backdrop of the entire novel. It is a ritual pattern that pulses from the beginning to the end—and from long before the beginning to long after the final pages. The drinking bowls of Kikuji’s father and Mrs. Ota, which had been passed down through generations over hundreds of years, become Kikuji’s possession, and he and Mrs. Ota’s daughter drink from them, partaking of the now-disappeared lives that still live through the ceramics and in the two youths who sip from them. A small stain, deep as blood, sits upon the rim of Mrs. Ota’s bowl, the small mark of her own addition to the ceaseless chain of causality that runs through time, shaping the fates of the protagonists. Sitting before the bowls of their respective parents, Fumiko and Kikuji seem to behold the souls of the dead, themselves only the small part of a larger thread that weaves throughout their lives, shaping their tragedy:
The tea bowls, three or four hundred years old, were sound and healthy, and they called up no morbid thoughts. Life seemed to stretch tout over them, however, in a way that was almost sensual.
Seeing his father and Fumiko’s mother in the bowls, Kikuji felt that they had raised two beautiful ghosts and placed them side by side.
The tea bowls were here, present, and the present reality of Kikuji and Fumiko, facing across the bowls, seemed immaculate too.
Kikuji remarks that “when you see the bowl, you forget the defects of the old owner. Father’s life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.” The two talk briefly, and looming over them is the inexorable pattern, the life greater than any particular life, as ancient as the tea ceremony: “Death waiting at your feet,” Fumiko says. “I’m frightened. I’ve tried so many things. I’ve tried thinking that with death itself at my feet I can’t be forever held by Mother’s death.”
“When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself,” Kikuji responds.
Finally, the two succumb to the influence of their parents; Fumiko remarks, “Mother won’t let me go,” just before Kikuji embraces her.1
The lives of the two protagonists are revealed as brief flashes in a pattern that precedes them and that will in all likelihood live on after their deaths. Call it the seeds of karma or the tapestry of fate, their own natures are shaped and formed by the events of their ancestors, who live on in their own lives. So it is with all of us, although one may hope that we escape such tragedies. No one is isolated, no one can escape the circumstances of history, of ancestry, of the ghosts that live always through and in us. These relationships may be beneficial or destructive, weaker or stronger, but they inevitably shape us. The movements of the tea ceremony persist, catching generations in their identity. Even the ceramics of the ceremony persist long beyond the individuals, who must drink from the same cups as their ancestors, leaving only small marks that will continue after them.
Considering such things, it is difficult not to conclude that the human person is a nexus of relationships rather than an isolated essentiality. This is not to deny the possibility of freedom or of breaking to some extent from the fatedness of relations to the past or to present circumstance, but only to recognize that we do not define ourselves but are ever dependent upon a teeming multitude of others. Indeed, it is questionable to what extent we can talk about individuals at all without presupposing the entirety of the cosmos, the whole shaking symphony of the world from beginning to end, of which each plays but a single interval in a score that transcends his or her comprehension. We are, as Augustine would say, like words within a poem the whole of which we cannot know.
This ought, I believe, to be a humbling realization. Our own self-sufficiency is an illusion of the frailest sort. There is no I without the other, there is no existence without the all, and in recognizing this, one must recognize that there are in truth no barriers between things. All partake of the same life, make up the same whole, live within and through one another. We breath the air of our forebears and those who will come after us. We live the lives of our loved ones and they live ours. In the presence of a friend we stand not upon an abyss across which we must reach but in the face of our own self, our own life.
One can, moreover, take this yet further by considering the theological dimension of this insight, for which all things are ultimately born from the creative intentions of God. In the unity of God, his creative will is not divided among a multitude of individuals, and it is only in thinking that we can speak about multiple intentions, multiple logoi (as Maximus call them). In willing the creation of the world, God wills a vast unity, a single body of interrelatedness; the logoi are in the Logos, as Maximus says. Gregory of Nyssa touches upon this in describing the “two creations” of humanity in Genesis. The first represents the singular intention of God to create the anthrōpos, the “human being” that exists as a single body of interconnected humanity in the eternal councils of God. The second represents the concrete coming into being in time of Adam and Eve, who represent merely the first two members of this whole humanity preordained from eternity and destined to grow its limbs through the vagaries of time until the whole has been born and may be drawn into the inexorable ends of God’s creative will. In his primordial will, God, because one, does not create discrete individuals through multiple, divisible intentions, but a whole of which each individual is a part.
Within this scheme, to divide the human from the rest of creation is just as nonsensical as to divide humanity among its members. The creation itself is a single body, a reflection of the divine being, born and living in unity. As Origen stated, the whole cosmos is a “huge and immense animal, which is kept together by the power and reason of God as by one soul.”2 We lose sight of this at our own peril, for to lose sight of the other is ultimately to lose ourselves. To rest indifferent to the fates and sufferings of others, to animals, to the earth, is to live a delusion of isolationism. No man is an island, as the proverb goes, but a cell in the vast cosmic body, or the momentary eddy of a stream, or better yet, the curve of a bowl’s edge in the dance of the tea ceremony.
Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1969), 140-142.
De Principiies 2.1.3
It is telling when, no matter how scriptural, patristic, or “traditional” an individual or church claim to be, this point is lost on them. Well written.