The river is in turmoil. The rains of the last week have been exceptional and the unsettled weather produced much drama. As we were driving home the world seemed shrouded in a mantle of white gauze. Quiet, frozen, still, as we arrived and parked. The woods were dark with much brown, some fiery colour starting at the tips, black shadows and a tracery of winter stems beginning to be revealed. The mood was for staying indoors and being quiet, catching up on life, preparing for winter. Very quickly, a patch of cloud became bright white light, the mist disappeared and, out of the window, the sky started to move fast, clouds sliding past clouds, white, grey, a speck of blue, all rushing east and being engulfed by a navy blue bank just peering over the eastern horizon. The wind has got up and the roiling waters of the river, I now see, are rearing up and climbing the meadow, overcoming the sheep grazing, as the weir gives up and dives below. I look at the woods and see the pasture now illuminated, the shadows of slow moving cattle, the whipping and slashing of the tops, the hidden underbough and undergrowth sparkling and moving here and there in the shadow. Shed a little light, blow a little wind over the suppressed, forgotten surface of life and the old secrets, the old memories, the old scars... If I wait, calm will descent once more.
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I would love to persuade you to read this book. I doubt it can be done with this blog, but I will try. It means something to me. Names are a funny business: they are supposed to influence who we grow up to be. What happens when you change your name? Murakami speaks from his experience as a Japanese young man growing up in a world of holocaust survivors who tried to internalise their shame, blame themselves for the utter destruction of their world. Compare and contrast. Toru Okada, the enigmatic hero of Wind Up is a modern day messianic figure who overcomes evil at the very core of danger and malice which is the very place where he also finds angels and truth, clearly as nowhere else. My early political formation, rooted in the narrow soil of being a woman from a simple family with no wealth in a brittle country divided against itself by violence, poverty, corruption, fear and misogyny, turns out to have been a seeking for dignity. I have turned that into something more universal, more meaningful, more creative, but still the contagion of those old stories contaminates a good deal of what I do and darkens the horizon. The bird that winds the spring of the world sings its grinding song in the spring, in the sunshine, in the woods that are inhabited by good people. It remains silent in the world of violence, atrocity, exploitation and misery. The hero who makes the wind up bird sing again, in Murakami, is a young man who likes to cook simple meals and wear dodgy clothes, but who takes great care of his person. It is a hero who has many female characteristics. He reminds us of the Bush Warbler's Home, a story well known to the Japanese, which is a story about the feeling of awaré (softly despairing sorrow) which a Japanese person would feel for the female figure who disappears in silence. So what is the pull for me of this Murakami story - why would I feel identified with so much of what he decides to do? My friends talked about him as spineless and I see him as the ultimate strong believer. I see him as standing up for all the things I feel are important, and have been important for me. The wind up bird sings loudly for me nowadays and I will not have it any other way. Not because I am good but because I turn my face to the good - with great effort and determination! And I am so much richer for having found a fable to fit some of my belief into. If you have read this far, you are also ahero also. xx :-) |
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