The Lake

[* There seems to be a problem with blogger on iPad. There are five more recent posts should appear, including an entry about libraries called tomb entomb. The post below should be titled "The Lake." Trying to fixx... *]

A few days after fall had made itself official, we went to the lake. C had to participate in a retreat about two hours out of town. I went with him. I packed a swimsuit, wishful summer thinking. We drove straight into Autumnland. Specifically, we were lakeside, in the Poconos, stationed at an old rambling mansion deep in the woods. The temperature outside read a cool 55F. I swam anyways. The water, someone promised, was warmer than the air! It wasn’t. It was cool, it was silken, it had rained and the water was opaque. I treaded water near the dock, I floated on my back, swam a little back and forth, trying to warm up. The water was prismatic, hypnotic. Only one other person sat on the dock beside me and it was so quiet that you could hear a fish break surface. My splashing rang out, clarion.

Given a choice of landscape, I might choose lakeside. There is something magnetic about a body of water set on some mountainside, ringed in wood, its surface mirroring the sky. The quiet of a lake is like the quiet of nowhere else. The view is dynamic, wind rippling water's surface, light turned on running currents while the utter quietness tells you that all is still. Lakes have a magic that no other landscape possesses. They are mysterious, their contents hidden in spite of the nakedness of water and sky.

I recently read Yasunari Kawabata’s slim and beautiful book, The Lake. The book follows Gimpei, a middle-aged man on his excursions through Japan and his meditations on the women he stalks: a young girl employee of the public baths; beautiful, sad, Miyako, kept by an older, impotent man; the young students Hisako and Mizuno; and Gimpei’s girl-cousin, the object of his adolescent lust. The origin of Gimpei’s perversions may lie in the death of his father, which occurred brutally, lakeside. The narrative moves between daydream, memory and real-time so that Gimpei’s actions (however shocking) are never a complete surprise. Gimpei may be the most unforgettably evil character that I have encountered. On the surface, he appears an average man. His malevolence is special because it is so natural to him; he does not try to be cruel, he is cruel. His misinterpretations of others veer suddenly an often into violence. And the agony that he suffers in the aftermath of every botched action is one that we understand as readers because we see that he is unable to grasp the roots of his psychosis. He doesn't understand why he is alone.

Kawabata’s writing is spare, distilling each character into a set of actions that spells tragedy. Gimpei, the main character, is the most tragic of all – romantic in his memories (perversely so) and forever lost to mainstream society. Gimpei is unforgettable because he is so opaque, his actions so wrong, his psychology so confused. He is horrifying because his actions however alien are understandable. He is indolent and impulsive, always surprised that his actions produce consequences that seem obvious to everyone else. Locked in cycle, he sinks deeper into confusion, self-loathing and cruelty. He is only reliable as a narrator when he describes trivial details about his physicality (a blister on his foot).

A lake is a manageable space, different from the tempers of an ocean, the single course of a river. Even when lake waters are clear, it's hard to see bottom. I jumped in trusting that nothing fantastic would carry me away. Nits of worry -- am I doing enough work? contributing enough? -- sank to the lake floor, invisible. Perhaps I felt affinity for Gimpei because I have been living mostly in my mind these days, freelancing, inventing reason for myself to push on. I see how things could go awry, living in a climate of your own invention. Criminal action, in Gimpei's case. Less concrete risk in mine. And I can see why physicality means so much to Gimpei. Lakeside, there is special reward in focusing on what is most visible: light on water, sky and wood.