“[…] it’s not like this is happening now, right?”
Deep breath. It’s 9 degrees outside in Newcastle tonight but feels easily sub-zero in my room. I’ve got three candles burning, a lamp and fairy lights on, a hot water on my lap and I’m underneath my dressing gown and a blanket. At lunchtime today I got back from a really nice trip home which I predict hasn’t entirely helped my settle in here but I had a lovely weekend seeing family and friends. My third week of living here started 0n Saturday and I’ve only had one seminar in each of my modules so there’s not much to report. But, I read Ruth Ozeki’s incredible A Tale for the Time Being last week and it stuck around in my head.
There’s a lot going on in Ozeki’s Tale. A huge lot – see: America post 9/11 and Y2k, contemporaneity, memory, reading, climate change, technology, lost time, Buddhism, boundaries of the present and future, Morton’s hyper-object, authorial intention… it goes on. It’s overwhelming in the first 100 pages or so; Ozeki throws The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Heidegger, Proust, Japanese brothels and centenary Buddhist grandmothers at you without slowing the brakes. But, in the context of readership, doesn’t that feel like our contemporary moment? Bound to the past, fearful of the future, uncomfortable with and struggling to define the present? It’s something the novel’s enduringly self-conscious of – the question of time. Everyone in my seminar was very, very clever. They were tabling grand and abstract ideas and readings with real confidence, drawing on all sorts of theories and other relevant texts to really ‘wow’ the tutor. I sat in the middle of everybody with, I thought, nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation and not confident enough to go out on a limb. Feeling like I wasn’t good enough to be in the room, to be honest. It’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen but it seems to have happened without me noticing because I can’t feel out anyone to level with. Everyone in the room seemed incredibly desperate to peacock their literary prowess, prove their place. It got tiresome about as quickly as I became intimidated. Never did I think I’d see the day I’d miss the pin-drop silence of the tutorials at Liverpool, when one willing soul would tentatively offer up some general analysis for the tutor to latch onto and expand on for us all. Ah!
To the surprise of …… no one last night I caught myself having watched three YouTube videos on Imposter Syndrome. I only heard of it about a year ago and now here I am living it good and proper!! The TedEd video references greats like Maya Angelou and Einstein as sufferers. All I thought was, at least they’ve reason to know what they’re feeling isn’t the truth. There’s a comment on the video that made me laugh that said something like, “I wonder how many people think they have Imposter Syndrome when really they’re just shit at what they do.” But despite obviously not being and Angelou or an Einstein, I did identify that feeling of “fraudulence” – I’ve somehow cheated my way into one of the best English schools in the country because I feel my “ideas and skills aren’t worthy of others’ attention” (Elizabeth Cox).
This has all culminated in the past few days with my anxiety bubbling up again. Not into full-blown panic attacks, but intense and irrational worry that wakes me up in the middle of the night. I described it the other day, awake at 3am, as feeling suspended in the middle of the sea or in deep space with nothing to cling onto and nothing to stop you for a few seconds. And then it stops. I am feeling so overwhelmed by these huge current changes in my life and the contrast between the freezing cold unfamiliarity of this house and the warm comfort of my home. I’m scared of the feelings and of the fear – scared it’ll swallow me up again and I’ll go bad. It’s really unhealthy and if I’m not careful I’ll probably will another bad episode into existence. So, I have to try and stay positive and keep chipping away and focussing on myself. It doesn’t matter what others are doing.
I’ve blown wildly off-course but I’ll return to Ozeki. Like she writes – “it’s not like this is happening now” – I’ve not had a breakdown, so don’t have one. The relationship that mental health has with time is something I’ve found interesting for a while now. For some, past events haunt them now and detrimentally alter their mental health. For others, like me, they’re constantly worried so much about the future and all the planes of possible realities (mostly bad) that they don’t live mindfully in the present. In Ozeki’s book, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on the shore of an island off British Columbia and winds up in the hands of her narrator, another Ruth. Inside the lunchbox is the diary of sixteen-year-old Nao Yasutani who contemplates suicide from a French maid café in Japan. Her father, a previous tech engineer in Silicon Valley, has moved the family back to his homeland where Nao is ostracised, bullied and eventually, ignored completely. A few summers after the dot-com bubble burst, Nao is sent to live with her Buddhist nun great-grandmother, through whom she learns the story of her great-uncle Haruki #1, a kamikaze pilot who supposedly died in a suicide mission in WWII. His watch and his letters are also in the lunchbox. All of this happens before the huge Japan Tsunami of 2011, but the lunchbox washes up post-tsunami, and Ruth desperately seeks to know if Nao is safe.
To cut a long story short, it seems in the end that Nao, or now, isn’t safe. Ruth elides her own contemporary existence as an isolated reader of the diary and a long-suffering novelist with the realities of a sixteen-year-old girl from over ten years ago. She savours the story, pacing her reading so as not to eat it all up in one go. She makes a night’s reading into what appears to become a weeks-long epic, which leads her on a voyage of research and detective work. The boundaries and outlines of Ruth’s contemporaneity become blurred and flimsy. The novel’s chapters flit between Ruth/Nao/Ruth/Nao/Ruth/Nao until ultimately it feels like these pages are Ruth, Now. At the moment in the diary’s ‘story’ when Nao is contemplating suicide, a storm forms around Ruth and the couple’s cat goes missing. When the words seem to disappear from the final pages of the diary, Ruth dreams up an ending and imagines herself into the world of a decade past and the words reappear. The most earth-shattering moment for me was when Ruth’s husband Oliver, in a reply to Ruth’s urgent concern and worry for a teenaged Nao, lays out the realistic timeline for her and reminds us, too, that if she is still alive Nao would be over twenty-six currently. Ruth writes that the ground shifted, and a shift happens too in the text at this point. Ozeki has played with time so artfully that we’re almost disappointed that we’ll never hear of Nao’s outcome. An online article on the Female “I”, possibly by an older Nao, disappears from the internet as soon as Ruth finds it. Leads vanish and Ruth is left facing her own isolated existence away from her heartland, New York. She’s been so busy trying to ‘catch’, as Ozeki calls it, “the eternal now” or an eternalised Nao by trying to multiply a moment she has lost her own sense of time. Ozeki writes, “it was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history” – Ruth is entirely unmoored and outside-of-time completely. She’s living the opposite of Old Jiko’s zazen which is “to enter time completely”. Her existence is irreparably different to Nao’s despite her attempts to marry the two.
It is ultimately a very jarring and dislocating novel, but wonderfully rich and paced and thought-provoking. It raises questions of control over one’s own time and finitude. Is some mindful breathing the step in the door to a being-in-time completely? Ozeki never really answers, because meditation is a means for itself and nothing else – no future goal in sight. All I know for certain is that Nao was happiest away from the straight lines and architecture of Japan, in the temple with her great-grandmother and the stories of her ancestors. But isn’t this a clearly-defined interest in the past, whilst practising being present? It gets confusing very quickly. Imagine me, then, in the seminar with people a lot more articulate than I on these themes.
Like a few films I’ve watched recently, A Tale for the Time Being made me feel something which is priceless in art. It was paired in the seminar with Don Delillo’s clinical and (I believe) impenetrable Zero K. Other than being interested in time I saw very few points of comparison to be made about the few but I’m not going to dwell on it any longer. It was really enjoyable and immersive. It reminded me, amidst all the noise and self-doubt and confusion, why I chose to study English.
hbiswriting 