"Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing." '
- Ruth Ozeki
A Tale for the Time Being
(Page 315)
I can't say i came away from A Tale for the Time Being with any quantifiable amount of love.
Sure, i cared about the characters and how their stories played out but once i'd finished the last page of Ruth and Nao's tale, i put the book down and didn't think of it again.
In fact i went straight to sleep.
This isn't a sign of a bad book.
It's wonderfully written.
Especially as half the narrative is told in the form of a diary, which from what i can gather from reading over the years isn't a style of writing that is easy to convey with that much needed air of authenticity.
Of course i know the diary was fabricated for Ozeki's story but it read like something a 16 year old girl would in fact write.
You can instantly tell when a diary seems false.
The same way that in television the act of inebriation is almost universally impossible to play validly but when performed by a talented actor/actress it cannot be faulted and the performance benefits exponentially.
Ruth Ozeki wrote Nao's diary like a beautiful drunk and it held the story together seamlessly.
And yet...
Sometimes a wonderful story just doesn't click with a certain type of person or even more simply, the state of mind they're currently in.
My family adores Brideshead Revisited.
I loathed every second of it.
To be fair, i think this is probably a failing on my part.
But this is a universally loved book and i hated it.
And i really mean hated it.
I can't even remember the number of times i wanted to launch it out my window, Pat People's style.
Does that mean there's something wrong with me?
Probably not but it's certainly not a failure on the book's behalf.
And as much as i didn't hate A Tale, i didn't love it either.
We just didn't click.
I wasn't Nao's kind of Time Being but maybe you are?
The story did however present me with a much needed little exercise:
I love sleep.
It's awesome but getting to sleep isn't always my forte and the last few weeks have been a real suckfest of pre-sleep migraines, uncomfortable neck positions that have resulted in a pulled tendon at the junction between my neck and shoulder - oh boy, did that suck - and many hours battling with my brain because when it cannot sleep, it takes it upon itself to torture my fragile ego.
My body's an idiot.
But whilst reading A Tale, Nao spoke of an act of Zen meditation performed by Buddhists called Zazen, which for the past few days has alleviated the stress of falling asleep:
'INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN
First of all, you have to sit down, which you're probably doing already doing. The traditional way is to sit on a zafu cushion on the floor with you lets crossed, but you can sit on a chair if you want to. The important thing is just to have good posture and not to slouch or lean on anything.
Now you can put your hands in your lap and kind of stack them up, so that the back of your left hand is on the palm of your right hand, and your thumb tips come around and meet on top, making a little round circle. The place where your thumbs touch should line up with your bellybutton. Jiko says this way of holding your hands is called hokkai jo-in (cosmic mudra), and it symbolizes the whole cosmic universe, which you are holding on your lap like a great big beautiful egg.
Next you just relax and hold really still and concentrate on your breathing. You don't have to make a big deal about it. It's not like you're thinking about breathing, but you're not not thinking about it either. It's kind of like when you're sitting on the beach and watching the waves lapping up on the sand or some little kids you don't know playing in the distance. You're just noticing everything that's going on both inside you and outside you, including your breathing and the kids and the waves and the sand. And that's basically it.
It sounds pretty simple, but when I first tried to do it, I got totally distracted by all my crazy thoughts and obsessions, and then my body started to itch and it felt like there were millipedes crawling all over me. When I explained this to Jiko, she told me to count my breaths like this:
Breathe in, breathe out...one.
Breathe in, breathe out...two.
She said I should count like that up to ten, and when I got to ten, I could start over again at one.'*
I don't perform Zazen but i do employ the same breathing technique.
It's stupidly simple but that method of breathing just...works.
...
And i just jinxed myself.
Idiot.
*(Page 181-182)
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