Letters to Memory Page 7
And as to Kay’s apparent moaning and indecision about the men in her life, he responded with irritation, Kay, clear your cobwebs away, and chafes at Kay’s sentimental cliché about the coming someday of a beautiful dawn, retorting that that will be when, one foot in the grave, you suddenly find wisdom . . . I don’t intend to wait that long.
Then, suddenly in November, John’s golf game improved; he reports technically breaking 90 and
just the other day—I find the gal—as cool as a cucumber—put my ring on—say she is giving up smoking—and when I told her that I told my supt. that I really wanted to get married at the first of year and him to perform the ceremony—she said “Let’s plan on that.” Well, that was also the first evening that she ate like a horse, and talked of everything just as she felt it and as things came to her mind, and she then went to sleep on my shoulder on the way home. That night—I was the speechless—stuttering guy—because the sudden change of affairs caught me unprepared and all my persuasive designing words were unnecessary and irrelevant . . . all of a sudden I put on all the brakes—and had a scared sense of responsibility; because as you know—I have inferiority complexes—regards stature, money, and general kind providing-ways regards those whose love I take for granted; and immediately I’ve been dogged with a question “can I make her fully happy in the way she might expect it”—because my life and vocation is no picnic or bed of roses . . . Mating love is a most interesting game. Let me tell you: when a gal decides decisively and with all her heart and soul—for an unknown future—that’s what makes a guy humble and it will give him an incentive to climb the stars—to justify her faith.
There remain no letters to or from Asako, though I try to imagine they existed. I can’t believe John didn’t write the same long-winded stuff to Asako, but maybe he knew better. If he did write, those letters were long ago destroyed; Asako had no interest or nostalgia in keeping records or memorabilia. She was unobtrusive, unpretentious, and reserved. John was the storyteller, garrulous, funny, and always entertaining. When John retold the story of their year long precarious engagement, usually over dinner with guests and strangers, Asako always pressed her lips together tightly and suppressed embarrassed laughter. She never protested or told her side of the story. The story was about John’s pursuit, disappointment, and love, but also about Asako’s reticence and what seemed over the years to solidify into their opposing personalities: spontaneous and constrained, idealist and pragmatist, romantic and realist. It was a story with its own sort of truth, the bonding of two sides of a coin, the merging of a couple whose differences would finally care for the other and accomplish that adventure of growth, almost as John’s theory of love had predicted. I wouldn’t say it was easy. In fact, it never quite made sense to me, except that one always thought to bring the surprise of the rose bouquet and the other remembered to pick the flowers and to pay for it.
Years after John died, and just before her eighty-eighth birthday, I asked Asako about this old story. What was that story about keeping Dad’s ring for an entire year?
Asako looked at me indignantly. She would finally have the last word. Do you know how he proposed to me? This is what he said: “Come live with me in poverty.”
Vyasa, you would have preferred reference to the Ramayana, but like the Iliad, the Mahabharata is about war, and sadly it is war and its aftermath that here haunts my family. What can an ancient epic about war and, furthermore, civil war and fratricide, say about a modern war? Well, first of all, you will remind me that no killing war is civil and that all wars are between brothers. Like the Trojan War, in the end, the battlefield is strewn with the dead bodies of heroes and presumably everyone else who came to get a bit role in the epic, all one hundred Kaurava brothers plus one defecting Pandava brother and all the born and unborn progeny of the Pandavas. On the one side, no Kaurava is left to rule, and on the other, no future Pandava. In eighteen days, six million people die. It doesn’t matter if the Pandava brothers are all, like Achilles, the biological (if that’s possible) sons of gods, or if their grandfather is the poet telling the story. Excuse me just one moment while I stop the narrative to have sex with two of my beautiful female characters. Oh, that felt good. But during sex with the old poet, this sister cringes her eyes shut, and that sister, though wide-eyed, turns deathly pale. The resulting sons cannot be perfect: Dhritarashtra, father of the Kauravas, is born blind; Pandu, father of the Pandavas, is born white and—okay this is confusing—impotent. Let that be a lesson; never insult the author. Or perhaps it does matter that it is the poet’s story to tell, that it is the poet’s progeny whose great gifts and great faults sow this tale of greed, exile, and destruction, and therefore the poet’s responsibility is to offer wisdom in exchange.
Oh but what wisdom, you shake your head. What was the scribe Ganesha thinking, dipping his great tusk into ink and scribbling this tome. Parts of this read like the great original manual for martial arts instruction. If the warrior’s heart turns bitter or dry, the fight will be lost. But even the great martial art teachers, Drona and Bhishma, go down in action. Drona gets tricked by false news of the death of his son (who happens to have the same name as a dead elephant); thereafter his head is cut off. And Bhishma, confronted by a woman warrior, refuses to fight, is pierced by a thousand arrows, and lies like a porcupine for the next fifty days, giving his dying and sacred wisdom, such as women are the root of all evil but also righteousness and pleasure. You have to admit, there are some other great bloody moments: Jayadratha causing the death of Arjuna’s son, and, in retaliation and with the help of a solar eclipse, Arjuna severing Jayadratha’s head with one bold arrow and sending it like a cannonball into the lap of his meditating father. This is an example of how a curse can return to its owner. Then there is Bhima, who crushes his cousin Duhsasana with his great mace, ripping open the man’s chest and drinking his blood and then comparing it to mother’s milk, all this in revenge for Duhsasana having dragged wife Draupadi by the hair and attempting to strip her sari from her lovely body. This is, you say, tantamount to rape. Then Draupadi, who since this shameful incident fourteen years ago hasn’t tied up her hair, washes her dark tresses in the same blood.
Finally there is Krishna: blue incarnation of Vishnu and chariot driver for the great archer Arjuna. Like the Iliad’s narrative pause to describe the great panoply of civilized life welded into Achilles’s shield of war, similarly, the Mahabharata interjects a moment of great hesitation: Arjuna, on the cusp of battle, falters. For eighteen chapters and seven hundred verses, Arjuna slumps back in his chariot and has a crisis of conscience. If I start this battle, I will have to kill my brothers. Why indeed do we fight?
This is, after all, the Bhagavad Gita. Even though Mohandas K. Gandhi admitted in his autobiography that he was introduced to the Gita by his British Theosophist and Transcendentalist friends, as he becomes the Mahatma, he confirms the book’s wisdom. Krishna urges Arjuna into action—there is individual duty to one’s talents and purpose in life, and, it should also be pointed out, to one’s class or caste in life. Arjuna was born to act, to be the archer and to fight. Actions are tied to actors for reasons that are beyond our knowing. One man’s calling may be another man’s sin, but he cannot impose bad will or karma on himself if he acts without desire, passion, or self-concern. He must kill with detachment. This is his duty to God, for it is God who wields justice. Action is his path to freedom. Victory and defeat are the same. Birth and death are illusion.
Whew. But wait. A foolish personal thought: did it matter that Asako, cool as a cucumber after months of indecision, put on John’s ring and took the plunge? Does it matter that that is why I am even here writing this? It’s hard to theorize away my birth, especially since I rather enjoy being here. Years later in Hiroshima around 1972, I’d have tea and pecan pie with Mary MacMillan. The pecan pie was very special, made with difficulty in Japan, a place with no ovens and no molasses and no Kentucky bourbon, although I doubt any bourbon was in the pie. The pecans had been s
ent to Mary Mac from her home on the Louisiana delta. She’d come from a long way away to leave the Jim Crow South. During the war she’d taught high school at Topaz, and then she left for Hiroshima and served the Methodist mission there for the next thirty-five years, witnessing the aftermath of the atomic bomb and caring for children of the hibakusha. She expressed to me her great respect and love for John and confessed rather matter-of-factly that she always wanted to marry him. She drawled like the southerner she was, Oh of course he met your wonderful mother Asako, and I was so happy for them. And, well, here you are. Now that I think about this, I wondered what Mary Mac had been thinking in the day, about a common mission to God’s purposes, about making John happy because certainly such a man deserved happiness, or perhaps it was due to Mary Mac’s romantic interest. I was too young to ask such stuff. Mary Mac had taken instead a monastic path, matching her actions to her ideals.
Mary Mac accompanied me on the requisite tour of Hiroshima, to the Atomic Dome, to Sadako Sasaki’s bronze statue laced in chains of paper cranes, and finally to the old Peace Memorial Museum. At the door of the museum, Mary Mac said, I have been in there many times, and you must see it for yourself, perhaps by yourself. I will wait here for you outside.
Inside those dark rooms was hell’s terror made real. A city and its people rendered to an expanse of black ash. Charred and melted flesh, clothing turned instantly to shreds, cloth patterns welded onto skin. Masses of disfigured, naked dying people moving ghostly toward water, collapsing, floating in black rivers. Metal artifacts—tricycles and lunch pails—transformed into twisted, corroded rubbish. Stopped watches and empty silhouettes of human forms cast onto concrete, the living originals turned to vapor.
Mary Mac waited for me at the door. I walked out into the sunny humidity of a haunted Hiroshima. We did not speak. There was nothing to say. By chance or perhaps inevitably, life chooses you.
Two years previous, I had seen a play at the Los Angeles Mark Taper Forum entitled In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. I have a vague memory of a chain-smoking genius who confronts the demons of his great scientific intelligence and talents and that singular accomplishment of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. What is frequently written about Oppenheimer was his interest in Sanskrit and translation of the Bhagavad Gita. It is said that the Trinity test in the Jornada del Muerto desert was named not after the Christian trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but after the Hindu trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—Creator, Preserver, Destroyer—and that as that first iconic mushroom cloud burst into Earth’s atmosphere, these passages awoke in Oppenheimer’s mind: If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.
Vyasa, if you stop a battle for seven hundred verses, maybe the reader should take note. Why can’t peace intervene? Why is it that we are eager to get on with the action? Why are we headed inevitably for disaster? Why can’t we hold the imagination of violence as a story in our minds so that we can live the value of its lessons in peace and reconciliation? But these are not Arjuna’s questions to Krishna; they are mine to the storyteller. I do not know the answers, only that both, the great leader of ahimsa and the scientist builder of the atomic bomb, read and used these seven hundred verses to find solace and meaning for their actions.
You have said that for the Hindu the world begins with sound. Thus it is possible that poetry creates and re-creates the world as the ripple of a single pebble thrown into water, the beat of a drum, a bell chime. But you have also said that all art is political, made in polis or community. Poetry is not innocent but has consequences. Twenty-five centuries later, there it is, still rattling around.
In the postwar years in Oakland, until he left with Asako for Los Angeles, John’s passing comments in his letters show that he had hoped to get an appointment with Howard Thurman and his multiracial interdenominational project at the Fellowship for All People’s Church in San Francisco. There remains no formal paperwork or correspondence about his application, and the Japanese Methodist Conference—a segregated unit within the larger Methodist Church—may not have been willing to part with John’s services. From time to time John preached or attended services at the Fellowship Church, and Howard Thurman continued to be a friend and mentor. On January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was killed; on the following Sunday morning, February 1, Howard Thurman offered from the Fellowship pulpit his memory of meeting and conversing with Gandhi in 1936. John took notes which he then typed into a narrative to be passed on to Alma Gloeckler and others.
Thurman recounted meeting with Gandhi at daybreak for exactly three and a half hours, under a large bungalow tent in Bardoli, Gujarat, following four hours’ travel from Bombay:
Never in my life have I been a part of that kind of examination: persistent, pragmatic questions about American Negroes, about the course of slavery, and how we had survived it . . . voting rights, lynching, discrimination, public school education, the churches, and how they functioned. His questions covered the entire sweep of our experience in American society . . . One of the things that puzzled him was why the slaves did not become Moslems. “Because,” said he, “the Moslem religion is the only religion in the world in which no lines are drawn from within the religious fellowship . . . This is not true in Christianity, it isn’t true in Buddhism or Hinduism. If you had become Moslem, then even though you were a slave, in the faith you would be equal to your master.”
As their conversation closed, Sue Thurman asked if Gandhi would come to America as the guest of Afro-Americans, to which he answered that he would first have to win the struggle in India before he could make other helpful contributions. However, Howard writes: Before we left he said that with a clear perception it could be through the Afro-American that the unadulterated message of nonviolence would be delivered to all men everywhere.
When I met Alma Gloeckler, as I said, who was around the age of one hundred years, she had a particular gift she wanted me to have. It was a black-and-white photograph of a group of people taken on a hillside garden somewhere in Oakland. The photographer had almost chopped the heads from the frame, privileging the foreground’s ivy draping over volcanic rock, but somehow, what Alma called our group is all there. Their inscribed names have begun to fade from the back of the photo, the script confounding exact spelling:
Gerry Cambridge
Alma Gloeckler with Baby Judy Utsumi
Kay Yamashita
behind is Petrofae Cambridge
Daisy Froderburg Funderley
Rev John Yamashita
Wayne Amerson
Bernice Cofer
Mary Ann Utsumi
Bill Utsumi
Laura Kennedy Robbin
E. J. Kashiwase
Miye Kashiwase
Alma repeated that this was our group. Every weekend we would meet and discuss things and make a plan. And then we would go, for example, to a restaurant that hadn’t been behaving very nicely, and we would all sit down and order our meal.
I nodded without understanding, but Alma was patient and insistent. Oh, those were difficult times. You have no idea. People didn’t want to see the Japanese back. They were very mean and hostile. We had to do something.
So you all went as a group.
Yes, we were all mixed up, so they had to serve us.
You did a sit-in?
Yes! she exclaimed with enthusiasm. We did direct action!
She pressed the photograph into my hands along with a VHS documentary tape about the life of Bayard Rustin. Bayard, she nodded, he was one of us. In 1942, Rustin traveled for the Fellowship of Reconciliation to civilian public-service camps as well as to assembly centers and concentration camps to support the internees and to rally folks out of bitterness toward activism. In a short report dated October 15, 1942, to John Swomley, Rustin wrote: When I arrived at Manzanar the F.O.R. group had already arranged a car and I set out immediately and toured for six hour
s . . . This was a great experience and I shall turn in a complete report of several pages on conditions in the camp . . . By the end of the war, Rustin himself would be imprisoned as a conscientious objector who refused any civil participation or pacifist support of the war.
I date the photo to around 1947, when Kay would have had a summer visit to Oakland. In April of the same year, Bayard Rustin set out with fifteen fellow travelers on his Journey of Reconciliation, an interstate bus ride through the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky to test the abolishment of Jim Crow, and sixteen years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. would write from a Birmingham jail.
My folks came home to a divided community of those who had said yes-yes and those who had said no-no and everyone in between. There was an unspoken partition and bitter heartache, still felt to this day, but everyone was in the same boat generally—hated, feared, shamed, still considered the enemy that had been conquered, whose people had killed our Americans. John did not bemoan those years of exile but encountered a larger world and meaning that might never again place him particularly in any one place or home. After so much wandering, I am directed to this unanchored but planetary place of his heart. And Alma wanted me to know something about what it takes to live a hundred years: survival, as you will say, is about the connections between us. For a brief and forgotten moment in 1947, reconciliation met in the contrapuntal. The names are inscribed but the people forgotten, the photograph fading evidence, and the story but a ripple in time.
Dear Vyasa:
I am fascinated by how Homer, Ishi, and you “read,” as thinkers and teachers. There is something to say about this, but I cannot quite figure it out now. There is your personal scholarship, the odd encounter with a text that is supposedly written to address this scholarship but, as I now see and admit, misses the mark; but then, there is anyway your humility and generosity in response; well, the teacher in all of you. And there is, finally, my incapacity to really know your thinking, to know the thinking of any reader.