Today we bring you a selection of conversations from the Portland Book Festival. Dave Miller spoke with Ruth Ozeki about her latest novel “The Book of Form and Emptiness.” We also listen back to a conversation from last year’s book festival between OPB’s Anna Griffin and Jill Lepore, author of “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel speaks about grief, and climate change, and consumerism, and mental illness, and the nature of reality itself. And I don’t mean the book describes those things, I mean, it actually talks about them. The book itself is a character in this big, exuberant, generous novel. The book follows the story of Benny, a young boy grieving the death of his father, and Annabelle, his mother, who was dealing with grief in her own way. And it’s about books, and the ideas they share with us and with each other. In this novel, books are characters that take they/them pronouns. I talked to Ruth Ozeki about her novel as part of last month’s Portland Book Festival, put on by Literary Arts. I asked her why books use plural pronouns.
Ruth Ozeki: I have this sense that books sort form a rhizomatic network underground, and that they all talk to each other. And so this is why I thought that the books should actually go by either the we pronoun, or they should go by they/them.
Miller: So, I’m literally surrounded by books right now. There are a couple behind me, but there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands around me right now. If the metaphor is like underground mushrooms talking to each other, what are the books around me saying to each other?
Ozeki: It’s hard to know what books are saying to each other. I think you have to listen in a particular way. And this is why I thought that setting the story in a public library would be… because the main character, Benny, the protagonist of the story, is a boy who’s very sensitive to voices. He hears the voices of objects speaking to him. And of course, books are objects that speak to us. And so, this idea that books communicate, they form this kind of rhizomatic network, and all books are in conversation with each other, I certainly feel that way when I’m writing. I feel that somehow, even if I’m not doing it consciously, that all of the books that I’ve ever read are somehow informing whatever it is that’s coming out of my mind at the time.
Miller: Let’s talk about libraries. This new novel in a lot of ways reads like a kind of love letter to libraries. There’s one big central library in an unnamed, clearly Pacific Northwest-y city. There are forest fires, there are homeless encampments. You don’t say that it’s Portland or Seattle or Vancouver, but I feel like that. And the library, it’s a safe haven. It’s a place of mystery, and power, and possibility. What have libraries meant to you over the course of your life?
Ozeki: Oh my gosh. Yeah, they were all of those things and more. When I was a little girl, I didn’t do a whole lot with my parents. This was sort of back in the days, my parents anyway didn’t play with me, you know? But my mom used to take me to the public library all the time. And she would leave me in the basement, which is where the children’s book section was. And the librarians, I just thought they were the most enviable people in the world. They had all of those books, and they were willing to talk to you about their books. Even better, they were willing to lend you their books. And this was just kind of magical to me.
Later on too, I just kept having these experiences at libraries. I remember in college, I worked at the school library. Back then, there were these little anti-theft strips that were inserted in the bindings of the books.
Miller: They probably still have them.
Ozeki: They probably still have them. And that was my job. I remember I had this kind of trolley that I would move along, and I would sit on the trolley and read the books. And I probably barely made it through a row a day, but some for some reason, maybe it was because it was a university library, nobody complained.
I was trying to write, myself, and so I was very sort of attuned to this idea of facing the blank page, and all of the anxiety and stuff that arises when you think that you want to write a book. And it occurred to me then too that every book that was in that library probably represented hundreds and hundreds of hours put in by the author, and represented the same kind of torment and suffering that I was going through trying to write my little short stories. And that was really overwhelming to me too. But it was also very heartening somehow. It was very encouraging, because I thought, “Well, if they can do it, so can I.”
And then the third thing I’ll talk about is just this idea of serendipity, browsability. When you’re in a library that has real stacks and real books on the shelves, and you’re just walking up and down the aisles, the stacks, there’s a kind of serendipity that can occur, when a book will just catch your eye, and you’ll take it off the shelf and you’ll start to read it, and then another book will do the same just a few feet down. And then the juxtaposition of the two books. This is what I mean about books talking to each other, they sort of generate another idea, and then that turns into a story. And so, the way that books kind of come together, crash into each other, ideas start to talk to each other, that to me has always been a real source of inspiration. And it’s something I think that as libraries decrease the amount of the numbers of books, as they deaccession books, and decrease the number of books that are actually in the stacks, we lose some of that. And certainly we lose itm I think, when we go online.
Miller: Can you describe the physical place called the “Bindery,” which is in the bottom of this central library that’s central to the novel?
Ozeki: So, I have to say you were right about this kind of blurring of location. And when I was writing this fictional library, I was drawing on memories of the Vancouver public library where I spent an enormous number of hours doing the research for my first couple of novels. That was back in the day when we actually went to a library to do research.
When I was at the Vancouver public library, I think I was doing an event there, One Book, One Vancouver or something, that was sponsored by the library. And they took me on a tour through the entire library, and also kind of deep into the bowels of the library, into the basement area where there was a bindery, a public bindery that was being closed down at that time. I think, if memory serves me correctly, it was the last public bindery in North America. And it was being closed down. And library patrons and staff were very upset about this, because the idea that periodicals, for example, were no longer going to be bound, that they were all going to be available online. People really felt that this was a shame that we were losing this, the kind of activity of you know, these bound bound books.
And so I took a tour through this bindery. And it was amazing, these big antique beautiful board cutters, and the Singer sewing machines, these industrial sewing machines that the folios were stitched with. Reams of paper. And then glue, the smell was very intense, the bookbinding glue. It was very intense, and very beautiful. And to my mind, it was a very magical place. It was a place where words were bound, and turned into books, these objects that speak to us. It was just very magical to me.
Miller: This gets to the way you use it in the book. You took that tour 20 years ago? How long ago was that?
Ozeki: Well, I think that must have been in about 2004 or 2005 perhaps?
Miller: That’s one more great wrinkle about this, that you store that away, and then 17 years later, it’s a part of a book. It’s in your brain, and eventually comes out.
But so this idea of being bound, one of things I loved about that is the way you use that as both a metaphor and as a very literal thing. The sense I get, what the book says, is that all stories, before they’re bound, they exist in a very different way. And then being bound turns them into a book. What is that act for you?
Ozeki: Well, the sense that I have, and I suppose it’s because as a writer this is what I do… it relates to what I was saying earlier about serendipity, and ideas kind of constellating, coming together, and sort of gathering some kind of coherence and momentum, and then turning into a story. And that’s kind of what writing feels like to me. There’s this little piece of information, this kind of sense impression of being down in the basement of the Vancouver public library in this old closed bindery that was kind of dusty. There was this whole sort of sense memory of that. But then that colliding with other memories of, for example, in this case, Marie Kondo, the clutter clearing consultant. Those two elements crashing together. But then, somehow Walter, Benjamin gets into the mix, and a little bit of Borges moves in, and it just starts to constellate. And what emerges from there is a story, a book, hopefully, emerges.
Miller: It did in your case. So books; I want to start there because they have a central place in the novel, but you explore objects, and our relationships to objects of all kinds: spoons, and windows, and a clarinet, and clothing. How would you describe your own relationship to physical objects?
Ozeki: Mmm… fraught in a word. I started thinking a lot about objects, really, in the last years of my parents’ lives. They were both born in 1914, they grew up during the Great Depression. They were very very thrifty people, they never threw anything away. They weren’t hoarders, because it was, it wasn’t a kind of mess at all. It was very carefully preserved. But for example, a piece of plastic wrap, you would never just throw it away, you would wash it, and then dry it, and then fold it, and then reuse it. Same thing with aluminum foil, you’d wash it, and then smooth it out, fold it up and reuse it.
And then too, my mother was Japanese, and so she had inherited a lot of the things from her parents. And so I grew up with all of these really amazing objects from Japan that made no sense to me. They were sort of exotic, strange things. I knew that maybe they had a use, or maybe they didn’t, but in any case they were very beautiful and strange to me. And I loved to play with them. I remember one thing in particular, a box of rocks, beautiful agates, that had been sliced through and then polished so that you could see the colors in these slices of rock. And I used to love to play with these when I was a child. And then it turns out that these were rocks that my grandfather had collected when he was in the internment camp in New Mexico, and they had rock polishing equipment there. And so this was his hobby, to find rocks in the desert and cut them and polish them.
Now this was an example of objects that I grew up with when I was little. I had no idea what they were. And then, much much later, my mother just happened to mention, just kind of “by the way, this is the story inside these rocks.” And so, when my parents died, it was left to me as an only child to clean up and get rid of all of the things in their house. And I remember thinking, they’re all of these things, and all of these things have stories inside them. But the people who could tell me the stories are no longer here. And I remember just really wishing the objects could speak, and feeling like if they could just speak to me, then I would know.
Miller: It’s interesting, I guess that’s the exact opposite of the problem that - problem is maybe the wrong word, which shows how normative a lot of our thinking about voices coming into our heads is, but wishing objects would speak, it’s the opposite of what your main character, Benny, deals with. He wishes that everything around you would stop speaking.
Ozeki: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But his mother, Annabelle, everything has a voice for her too. And she wants it. She sees the vitality, she sees the stories and everything. And so she has that same kind of desire for a story, I think.
Miller: How did you then end up dealing with all of this stuff, much of which felt significant, but you weren’t sure necessarily what the story was, and it was connected to your family, but now it was on your shoulders?
Ozeki: Yes. And now a lot of it is in my basement. It continues to follow me around.
I think part of the problem for me is that, as a writer, I really rely on the materiality of these things. It wouldn’t be the same if I took pictures of them. I wouldn’t really be able to sort of sense the physical presence of them. Even just letters, for example. I have lots of letters from my father’s side of the family, and I just can’t quite bring myself to throw them out, because I just keep thinking everyone’s dead. It’s not like these letters really mean anything, but at the same time, just reading them from time to time puts me in touch with a certain time period, and a certain kind of a felt sense of what life was like back then. He grew up in Wisconsin and it’s just a strong sense of what life was like. So I think that the physical aura of objects is very powerful.
Miller: One of the things that your book demands, or at least invites us to do, is to consider the lives of objects as their own sentient beings. When I was reading this book, I was thinking back to the interview that you and I did back in 2014 for your last novel, and a story you had told us. The story was about when your mother who had Alzheimer’s was living with you, and you told us that she, all her life, had been an avid shopper. She loved to shop. And later in her life, you would take her to the town dump, where there was a free shop. And every week, or some time period, she would look around and you remind her that everything was free. She was very excited. She would take stuff home. And then at a certain point, when the closet would get full, you would secretly take stuff, take it back to the free shop and then the cycle would repeat.
And when you told that story, I thought about it from the human perspective. It’s about a daughter’s love, and it’s about loss. And it’s also funny. You sort of laugh and cry a little bit, at least when I sort of think about it. But I’m wondering how you think about that story from the object’s perspective?
Ozeki: Yeah, right? I mean, it’s kind of like a boomerang effect. The objects kept going around and around and around. It was always very funny to me, because I would sneak the objects out from the bottom of a pile of sweaters or something and bring them back to the free store. This was on the island in Desolation Sound, so there weren’t really stores there, this was what we had for a store. And I’d sneak them back to the free store, give them back, and then my mother would find the exact same ones all over again, right? She was always attracted to the same thing. And I don’t know, if I were the object, I would probably be happy. It’s like “Oh look, she’s back, and now I get to go back with her.”
Miller: Do you think that treating objects in our lives with respect, with some kind of reverence that acknowledges their beingness, do you think that changes us as people?
Ozeki: Oh that’s a great question. Um… yes. I have never thought about this before, but now that you’ve asked that question, my immediate sense is yes it does. I think that one of the problems that we face now is that we have too much stuff, and the cost of producing all of this stuff, especially producing things that have obsolescence built into them, it’s a feature, not a bug, is a problem. Environmentally, the cost of this is tremendous. And so it seems to me that if we can learn to appreciate objects and treat them with more respect, and build them, design them with more longevity, we’d all be a lot better off.
I mean, I have to admit that I’m kind of prejudiced here, because being raised by a Japanese mother, and especially a Japanese mother who was so fastidious about saving things, there’s a cultural tradition, or sort of tendency in Japan to treat objects with more respect. Traditionally, this was always so. And this is something I think that Marie Kondo has really tapped into in her bid for global domination in the clutter clearing world. And so when she talks about, you have a pair of socks, and they’ve worn themselves out literally, they’ve worn themselves out keeping your feet warm. What do you do? Do you just throw them out? Or do you just take a little bit of extra time, to look at the socks and to feel a little bit of gratitude, and then throw them out?
This reminded me of something that used to happen, and I think it still does actually. Back in the olden days when, say for example, a sewing needle was made by hand, so it was a very precious object. And so you had a sewing needle or you had pins, and you would use them, and then they would eventually break. And when they broke, you wouldn’t just throw them out, you would save them until a certain day of the year, when the local shrine would hold a kind of memorial service for broken pins and needles. And so you take your broken pins and needles on that day to the shrine, and on the altar, there would be a block of tofu. And so you very carefully take your pins and needles, broken pins and needles, and put them in the tofu so that they would have a soft resting place. And then at the end of the day, a kind of memorial ceremony would be held, and you can express your gratitude, and then the pins and needles would be sent into their next life.
There’s something very beautiful about this. There’s no point to it necessarily, but it’s a very beautiful expression of appreciation and gratitude. And, I think too, in Japan, there was always a sense that pins and needles are sharp, they’re pointy, they can hurt you. So you don’t want to piss them off right at the end of their lives. And so, there’s a little bit of insurance built into this. So I think it’s covering bases both ways.
Miller: I’ve been racking my brain to try to imagine what the contemporary version of that would be in our planned obsolescence society. What we should do with the USB cords that don’t fit any of our current stuff because now there’s USB 18.2, or the things they plug into. It wouldn’t seem meaningful to stick those cords in tofu. But maybe the fact that there is no answer shows how far we’ve gone in terms of our current global society, in terms of our stuff.
Ozeki: I mean, I think Europe is a little bit ahead of us in this regard, because I’m pretty sure, don’t quote me on this, but I’ve heard that some countries are really pushing manufacturers to not be so proprietary about their design. And I think that would be helpful.
Miller: The name of your new novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness. What is emptiness?
Ozeki: Yeah, emptiness. It sounds very empty, doesn’t it? It sounds kind of bleak. But in this case, it’s specifically referring to a Buddhist idea, a Buddhist philosophical element. The translation is not great into English, because emptiness does have this sense of void of nothingness. But the Buddhist understanding of emptiness is different. And the way that I like to sort of explain it or to think about it is, if you imagine an ocean, a vast ocean, that’s so big that you can’t even see the shores, that’s emptiness. And then the planet turns and the moon tugs on the tides and the winds start to work on the water. And from this ocean, a little wave pops up. And it’s got a little white head and it’s kind of looking around, and it’s like going, “Wow, look at me, I’m really something! I’m a wave, and I’m bigger than everybody else around here!” And this is really great. And then of course, the planet turns, and the moon tugs, and the tides shift, and the little wave starts to sink back into the ocean. And it’s like “Oh no, help!” Its form, going back into emptiness.
And so the relationship between form and emptiness, I think, encompasses several Buddhist ideas. One of them is the idea of impermanence. The wave is not a permanent thing. It’s not a permanent self. It’s a form that emerges and then recedes. So impermanence being one of them, another one is this idea of “no self.” That there’s no such thing as an independent self, that we all exist only in relationship to each other. And so this idea in Buddhism, we talk about it as dependent co-arising, or inter-being is another way of talking about it. The idea that the wave only exists in the context of the ocean, because of the ocean, and vice versa. And so that applies to everything, it applies not just to waves and oceans, but it applies to us. It applies to trees. It applies to everything. Power cables.
Miller: In your acknowledgments at the end of the book, you use a great phrase to describe one of the central phenomena that you explore in the book, which is one character, and others as well but especially one character, hearing voices, especially of things that nobody else is hearing. And you don’t call this delusional, you don’t call it psychosis. You use the term “unshared experiences.” What does that phrase mean to you?
Ozeki: Well, in the case of hearing voices, it means hearing something that other people don’t hear. I’ll give you an example, when my dad died, just like Benny in the book, this was actually an experience that I shared with the protagonist of the book. When my dad died, for about a year after he died, I used to hear his voice. I’d always be doing something kind of fairly random and ordinary, like folding the laundry or washing the dishes, or maybe just kind of moving in and out of sleep. And I would hear him clear his throat. And it was always behind me on the right hand side. I’d hear him clear his throat and then say my name. And every time this happened, I’d look around, expecting to see him, and he wouldn’t be there. And then I would remember, oh right, he’s dead. And again, those feelings of grief and loss would come back.
But it was such a brief thing that I didn’t really make anything of it. But, it was an experience that I had. I heard his voice with my ears, as if he were right there. Maybe he was, I don’t know. I couldn’t see him, but I definitely heard his voice. After about a year, I stopped having those experiences, and I kind of forgot about it. But then I started thinking too about, very often when I’m talking about writing fiction, I find myself saying things like “fictional characters come to me as voices.” And I remember once, I was doing an event,. and somebody in the audience asked me about that, asked me if I meant, did I actually hear the voices as if with my ear, as if they were outside my head? Or was it more kind of an internal experience of hearing them, almost with my mind? And so it turned out that this audience member, his son heard voices, and the voices were very harsh and very cruel, and it was a problem for him. So we had a talk about it. I explained that, for me, when I talk about hearing fictional voices, it’s a more internal experience.
Miller: Internal meaning you get the sense you feel like they’re coming from inside of you, as opposed to coming from… I guess I’m wondering what internal means? It seems like that gets to the crux of the challenge here.
Ozeki: It’s like I’m hearing them with my mind. It’s like I’m hearing the voice with my mind, not like with my ear outside, but with my mind. So for example, suddenly I’ll hear, with my mind, a character say, “Hi, my name is Now, and I’m a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is-” and then she goes on. And so it’s a kind of experience of hearing those words, those words come to me somehow. And that’s an unshared experience. That’s an unshared experience just like hearing my dad’s voice was an unshared experience.
I can’t explain where these voices come from. Thank goodness I live in a culture where hearing the voices of a fictional character speaking to me, or sort of imagining a fictional world is not looked at as a pathology. I can imagine a culture where it would be.
But thank goodness I live in a culture where, in fact, it’s looked at as kind of beneficial, a good thing. But in the same way, in other cultures, for example, hearing the voice of God, or hearing the voice of animals, or hearing the voice of objects, gives you tremendous powers. It’s not looked at as a pathology. It’s just that in our culture, we have a very narrow bandwidth of what we call normal. And so it seems to me that, just because a person is hearing voices, doesn’t mean that they’re sick. It just means that our definition of normal doesn’t encompass them. And when you think about it, I mean Joan of Arc heard voices, right? And I mean it’s true, she was burned at the stake. But Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, the fathers of modern psychology, wrote about the voices that they heard. Mahatma Gandhi heard voices. There are a lot of people who hear voices, and it’s not a problem. So it strikes me as odd that it should be automatically pathologized, and often medicated. That’s kind of what I was thinking about.
Miller: What is the difference in your eyes between hearing voices and thinking?
Ozeki: I think there’s so many different ways of hearing voices. So I think I would first need to differentiate between those. There was the way that I heard my dad’s voice. There’s the way that I hear the voices of my characters. And then there’s conscious thinking. And I know that when I’m writing I try to find a place that is underneath conscious thought. I try to sort of drop down into a more unconscious place, the place of dreams, for example. I try to, as much as possible, certainly for the first draft anyway, sort of ask my conscious mind, my thinking mind, to move to the side and make room for this other kind of awareness. I do this because, for me, I think fiction writing is very dreamlike. And when I consciously start to manipulate my characters, and I start having like these great ideas about what a character should do and what a character should feel, it gets in the way. My aim there, I think, is to quiet my thinking mind, and allow for this other sensory impression to emerge. So I think that that’s, that’s one way of answering it.
Ozeki: And then somehow I’m also thinking about the instruction that Dōgen Zenji, the founder of the lineage of Zen that I practice, and his instruction for meditation, which was “Think not thinking.” How do you think, not thinking? “Non-thinking,” that’s a kind of rough English translation. But I think that also kind of speaks to what you’re getting at. The idea when you’re meditating is to relax the muscle of your mind, and allow thoughts to come and go, but not to grab onto them, which is what I think thinking is more like. Thinking is about having a thought, and then grabbing onto it, whereas what I try to do when I write and certainly when I meditate is the opposite of that, it’s kind of like relaxing the hand of the mind, and allowing the thoughts to come and go.
Miller; let’s bring in some questions from our audience. Patricia asked, “could you talk a bit about the hoarding that plays such a significant role in your latest book?”
Ozeki: This was something that I think, being raised by parents who never threw anything away, it was interesting to me, it was disturbing to me too, because I had to clean it all out. But I can also see that, for all of the reasons that I spoke of earlier, I understand it. Because of the way I was raised, I understand the pull that objects have. Annabelle, in the book, Benny’s mother, has this attachment to objects. She collects things. I understand the appeal that that objects have, that certain objects have. And I think Annabelle in particular, she didn’t want to get rid of Kenji, her husband’s clothing after her husband was killed, because his aura, his essence, was still somehow woven into the fabric, and she couldn’t bring herself to just throw them away. She had collections of things, she engaged in a lot of retail therapy. She was really struggling.
These are things that I understand. And I think, because of the experiences I had with my parents objects, I try to be careful about this, because I could imagine it becoming a problem. I do try to be careful about it, but it is certainly something that I’m very aware of. I’m interested in the relationship that we have to objects, and the way that, Annabelle in particular, but I feel this too, a sense that objects have a certain kind of vitality, right? A certain kind of vibrancy to them. I’m sensitive to that, as Annabelle was.
Miller: Here’s a big question for you. What has brought you joy lately?
Ozeki: Oh, wow! Well, this is bringing me joy, talking to you Dave, is bringing me joy.
Well, I have to say, finishing the book has brought me a lot of joy. I remember at first, when I was first starting to publish, going out on book tour and doing these kinds of things was a source of tremendous anxiety for me. And there’s still a little bit of anxiety. But recently I think I’ve changed somehow. I love meeting readers and talking to readers, and even though we can’t do it unfortunately in person, still the opportunity to connect does bring me a lot of joy. It’s also very wonderful to have finished a book, and to have it sort of move on and move out into the world. So that also helps.
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