The Flower Thief
More haibuns after Mishima
The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is “in him” and not between him and the world that the experience arises.
— Martin Buber, I and Thou
i.
Watch as an ugly adolescence blossoms into a tormented adulthood. Tormented as in aspirational. DISTANCE = SUFFERING. The stutterer grasps for something extrinsic and self-evident: beauty. Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.1 His Life, standing before beauty, resembles a temple during war: something perfect but no less expectant of bombs. At any second, on any day, everything could be obliterated. Fire unifies unalike things into absolute state of non-existence. This is its appeal. The sole solace for a boy without beauty is the eradication of superior structures. One grows resentful, constantly encountering that which he may never possess. One grows inversely, inward toward a private retreat. Silence—a vapor, action an oil, progress a ruin. Oh, he plots,
the only distance
worth closing—between Life and
the beauty it lacks.
ii.
To survive the lull of his lectures, the stutterer plays with pairing words in his head: FATHER = MORTALITY. SUPERIOR = PERVERSION. MILK = MYSTERY. Then he is called upon to explain, under Zen logic, the human compulsion for bloodshed. Beauty, he starts to say, and then, Nihility.2 He stutters on the words, every syllable they impose on him. Void- Void- Void- The class chortles him to silence. Silence—a small solace for the stutterer. He’s grateful for any brief relief from the effort of summoning sound to parlay perspective. How often the tongue will not comply. The throat, the thorax. The tortured camphor tree he hides inside, seeking the oil that cannot be administered until extracted and vaporized from out of him. Oh, he writes,
to conquer the harsh
distance of beauty. Oh, to
become emptiness.
iii.
Friendship is an endless debt with oppressive interest. Every exchange latches onto emotion, which attaches to stakes, which collapses to compensation, should it come down to it. The stutterer has forgone friends for this very reason, at least until recently. Even the strongest solipsist meets his match with the heavyweight of emptiness and the irrefutable urge to be witnessed. Such weight and such witnessing, such weaknesses. So he befriends a clubfoot. The two are bound by a blundered grace—each word releasing a broken metronome, each step resembling a demi-plié against gravity. Their debts racks up instantly; they play hooky and fritter, trick girls to their tenderness, lie in tandem, comply with each other’s coercions. But among the misdeeds they entreat one another to, the most fatal takes the form of a floral arrangement. The clubfoot’s instructions are simple: procure two iris buds and some calamus from the garden behind the temple. The stutterer, who owes him this much, retrieves and delivers the stalks within a night, knowing it is sacrilege to pillage from the sacred property. Oh, he thinks,
this is what friendship
costs—good judgement impaired by
false obligations.
iv.
The boy watches his father die and becomes a stutterer. The stutterer tramples a girl and becomes a teenager. The teenager goes to school and becomes a punk. The punk cuts a flower and becomes a thief. The thief finds his place in displacement and becomes a monk. The monk buys sweets and ladies’ time from the Red Light district and becomes a secret. The secret grows and becomes a rose. The rose continues to gush blossoms until it wilts and becomes a point. The point reaches for blood and becomes a man. The man reaches for beauty, but fails to ever capture it and becomes a stutterer again. The stutterer seeks redemption from a Life without beauty and becomes a pyromaniac. Oh, he says,
everything gold
reminds me of what I am
not able to know.
v.
Wars end. Temples burn. Mothers return to motherlessness. Milk fills whichever mouth needs it, and students graduate to another stage of subordination (Life itself). Some outpace everything by way of removal. Silence. Observing from an alternate angle—not high, but sideways. This is narrative. This is history written by the hand of a pyromaniac, who finds an irresistible need to reorder the world through its demolishing. The stutterer flutters at the start of his sentence, but knows the answer nonetheless. EMPTINESS = ONENESS. If he had never encountered beauty in the first place, the torment of its withholding would have never caused him to suffer. He wishes to invert the course of history and retrieve an innocence that can only exist amidst an ignorance of beauty, to reverse blossoms to their initial buds. But true wisdom is non-retractable, so he returns to the garden behind the temple with matchbox. Oh, he confesses,
I’m sorry, cattails
and chrysanthemums, for you
are too far from me.
Choi, Don Mee. Hardly War. Wave Books, 2019.
Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Knopf, 1959.