With you it is flower time
As you sit in the Council Hall
‘Neath a curtain of brocade.
Beneath the verse, the powerful former lover has added: How does the stanza end?
The poem is one written by a revered poet, Po Chu-I, while he was in exile. Sending a Chinese poem to a woman should make no sense — a woman wasn’t supposed to know Chinese, the language of politics and high poetry. (The Pillow Book is written in Japanese, the common language.) Tadanobu has set a sort of trap for Shonagon. For her to demonstrate her knowledge of Chinese would be unfeminine. Either she can appear to be ignorant — and Tadanobu knows she takes pride in her intelligence — or she can respond, knowingly, in Chinese, which would reveal her at once to have a weak Chinese script and also to being vulgarly open about the fact that she was versed in Chinese at all.
Shonagon takes a piece of charcoal from the fire and uses it to write, in Japanese, in “the woman’s hand,” at the bottom of Tadanobu’s note:
Who would come to visit
This grass-thatched hut of mine?
The words are the closing lines from another poem written by another poet, also in exile, but it is a poem written in Japanese. In contrast to the Council Hall and brocade, the grass-thatched hut is a humble setting; Japanese, as opposed to Chinese, is the humble language; the charcoal is more humble than ink; the question is a more submissive form than the statement; the addressee shows herself to be none of the things the addresser suggests in the initial stanza, in fact the opposite; but the display of wit and learning, at once veiled and visible, is a display of the one kind of power Shonagon has; knowing how to obscure that power passably, in an elegant humility — is its own further show of virtuosity. Also the note, in content, is a simple invitation of love.
“How can one break from a woman like that?” a friend says to Tadanobu.
Within a day, all of the Emperor’s gentlemen have Shonagon’s response written on their fans. Shonagon becomes not only the confection of choice, but also a kind of legend at court. For her small witticism, her tiny act. But it’s along a web of such small elegances that Shonagon survives, since she is not beautiful, and not noble, and soon enough not young either. Every week she is more at risk of being sent away, and even her own intelligence, which is what saves her, also makes her vulnerable. She can’t stand the sight of her reflection, or the sight of other women in decline, and that revulsion also fuels her work. “I cannot stand a woman who wears sleeves of unequal width,” she says. And “When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home… I am filled with scorn.” As a samurai’s judgment of a ronin makes psychological sense as someone catching sight of themselves in a lower state, Shonagon is never more rough than on figures who resemble her. In her list of “unsuitable things” she notes: “A woman who is well past her youth is pregnant and walks along panting.” Another passage describes a visit from a beggar nun who is asking for offerings from the altar — asking, basically, for food. Shonagon and the other court women are amused by the beggar nun, who dances and sings, but they are also repelled by her clothing and manners, which are repeatedly described as disgusting. The ladies prepare a package of food for the beggar nun, and then complain that she keeps coming around; we hear that the beggar’s voice is curiously refined; the fate of the beggar nun could easily be that of the women then at court, though this is never said. Instead, the beggar nun passage switches abruptly into a lengthy anecdote about all sorts of hopes and bets among the court ladies as to which mound of snow made in the castle courtyard will last the longest; none of the court ladies wins; Shonagon prepares a poem about the last of the snow; the empress has the snow swept away, ruining the game; Shonagon is more devastated by this than seems to make sense; but the empress has treated her court ladies in the same indulgent then indifferent way that the court ladies treated the beggar nun; Shonagon juxtaposes the scenes so that we see each person, even the empress, slipping in power, clinging to the tiny entertainments they can offer, their only currency. Taste culture helplessly tells another story.
Screens
The resolution is that the baby will have no relationship to screens — no iPhones, no iPads, no televisions, none of whatever it is that’s out there. “You have to get her a video machine,” my mother said, referring to her understanding of what technology might be out there. “You need to get her some programming, maybe in French,” my brother said. When I was young there was a desperate imperative to get computers into schools. Nowadays I read of studies that show that laptops given to children in rural African villages have ruined students’ education, the kids’ grades fall, the kids drop out. Another day I read that children who have a lot of “screen time” experience schematic diagrams of corners differently than children with little or no screen time. The implications of alternative ways of understanding diagrams of corners is obscure to me, but it seems important nevertheless. Maybe even paramount. I also read that children who cease to use screens for a time as short as one week make more eye contact and score better on tests of reading emotions on the faces of others. Sure, “studies” is usually just another word for mildly evidenced nonsense, but there they are. I myself spent eight or nine hours a day as a child watching television, mostly reruns of sitcoms. Though I am not a completely empty soul, I do feel that I could be improved upon. My child will not have screens, I decide. Not for a long time. Yet somehow, by the time she is one year old, my daughter can play music, page through photos, and call long distance on my iObject. This development happens off-screen.
iPhone footage
iPhone footage of the puma has the unfortunate quality of making it seem as if the puma has passed away and the watcher, me, is condemned to replaying the same scene again and again and again. The more banal the scene, the more intense this effect. Footage of her crawling across a room to pick up a toy skateboard and then eat a piece of strawberry — a heartrending seven-second loop. I imagine this has to do with some sort of intensified sensation of time passing, brought about by being in touch with the illusion of time standing still. Or with boredom, or hostility, or love. But I discover that the affective qualities of loops are different for the puma. When she watches the same footage again and again and again she looks like someone who has been given access to a holy book and is not afraid of the messages it bears.
Lots of writers have children
Sometimes those children write memoirs. It is rare that the memoirs are happy memoirs. This may say more about the nature of memoirs than the nature of being the child of a writer. (Whether being the child of a writer is really any worse than being the child of an accountant professor grocer realtor regulator will remain difficult to say since selection bias — children of writers more likely to write — makes memoirs, in relation to this question, a more than usually problematic dataset.) There is a certain consistency of complaint, I have noticed, among these memoirs: the child comes to show something to the writer-parent, who is writing in a room at home during the daytime hours, and the writer-parent says to the child, I can’t right now, I’m working. There are also often descriptions of the looming, hostile, uncompromising door of the home office. Apparently it is very troubling for children to see their parents working, at least doing the kind of work that does not make itself visibly obvious, even if the total hours of work, and thus parental unavailability, are equal (or more likely substantially less) than the working hours of a parent simply leaving the house, to go, say, to an office, where the equally mysterious work of “office work” is, in the child’s imagination, if they are interested in the imagining, done. Presumably these doors are simply the wrong doors on which to be knocking. I have consistently had a difficult time believing these memoirs, not that one has to believe memoirs, or that belief is what memoirs are there for. But the door seems like an obvious screen door. But screen for what?