BY ITSUSHI KAWASE
Once upon a time, Monogatari was silently living in the depth of darkness. Holding back its breath and words in the excessive density and depth of the darkness, Monogatari lay lurking with its shoulders hunched. One day, it saw something rise before its eyes. It was a ghostly-looking, faint light. As an outline became visible little by little, it turned out to be a white rectangle. A soft light. A space dimly lit. Astounded, awe-struck, and puzzled, Monogatari approached the light in fear.
The light slowly defined the form of Monogatari, and its entire body began pulsing as it breathed deeply. Groaning under its breath, it touched its own body with its long fingers to feel itself and try to understand what was happening and who it had become.
Liberated from the enormous weight of darkness, Monogatari walked further ahead, driven by an unknown joy gushing from inside. Bathing in and feeling the light, it whirled around in circles, as if confirming the sensation with its entire body, expelling meaningless kotoba (words) like a baby just learning how to speak. This was how the world was created.
Up above, a pure white sky extended infinitely. In the white sky, there were neither winds nor clouds. The sky however was in fact not completely white. As an emotional storm of thoughts raged, there was a glaring light that spun around and around into a spiral and a flooding of noise, all about to hit Monogatari.
Swiftly dodging them, Monogatari quickly tried to think thoughts before thoughts existed, before being eaten by these noises and light.
In the sky, a multitude of images were bred, welling up one after another and making sounds like boiling water, stopping the flow of time and melting down any lines that would shape Monogatari.
Monogatari took a deep breath and kept on walking. Then rain began to fall. Monogatari walked further in the rain. Or oppositely, the rain may have walked in Monogatari. The rain hit Monogatari hard. Its body became punctured with innumerable tiny holes, and through the holes, the Earth began to breathe.
Every time the Earth’s breath went through Monogatari, it hissed. As the hissing sound reached the sky, it rained even more. Having been hit by rain for a long period of time, the body of Monogatari broke into pieces and dispersed all over the world. Monogatari split into a multitude of Monogataris.
One day, one of these Monogataris heard the voice of God. It did not know whether the voice came from outside or spilled out from the inside. Whichever the case, this Monogatari tried to transmit the voice of God to the other Monogataris. The voice of God that the Monogatari described was too fragmental and incoherent to make any sense, sounding like a groan or a cry at times and a sneeze or cough at other times. However, the Monogatari still desperately strived to transmit the voice of God through songs, kotoba, dances, and endless banquets. It tried to narrate what God had said using simple kotoba. But it never succeeded in this task. The translation of the voice of God always ended up with unpleasant results that often created things like politics and hierarchy.
As this went on, chaotic times arrived. Monogataris came to fight against each other and speak ill of one another. Each of them forgot what the appropriate distance between itself and the world should be, and failed to take correct distances between each other. Some of them lost their voices and kotoba and so became self-abandoned in despair. Several Monogataris went on a trip seeking for a new horizon. Although they occasionally got lost, they traveled across several seas and deserts, and through mountains without any purpose, swirling around and around in the sky. On their way, most of them found homes in various places and settled there in various forms.
One of the Monogataris settled in the sky, stretching its form and taking the shape of a long rod. Another turned into a beautiful sphere that shined radiantly. This sphere had servants in the form of golden pillars and always had secret conversations with them about the birth and the end of the universe.
Another Monogatari became a pumpkin by the seaside. When the winds lulled and waves calmed down, the pumpkin would talk to fish about the memory of its days in the darkness, in the form of colorful sonnets.
Another Monogatari became the roaring sound of waterfalls.
Others became various beings including an elephant installed in a public bath and a transparent staircase leading toward a Shinto shrine that linked the sky and the earth. Some developed cities underground or under the sea to advance civilization, while others became museums created to pray for their own glory, or monetary economies. Or ants that ate national borders. These ants eventually ate themselves to extinguish their existence.
The nectar of camellia, the scent of the lotus flower, the smile of the Statue of Liberty――each one took a shape often emitting a dim light, like a firefly, as it thought fondly of the heavy darkness that used to surround it.
Still, some of the Monogataris did not give up on their journey, refusing to take any specific form and continuing to walk, run, sail, and fly……Regardless how, it was as if continuous movement or advancement forward was their true form or raison d’être.
There were some that floated adrift among the waves for an unfathomably long period of time. One of them reached land and turned into a gigantic rock, staying there and waiting for something without knowing what it was waiting for. There was no border between the earth, the sky, and the sea. And again, a tremendously long, long time passed.
All of a sudden St. Yared started uttering the following hymn.
I will not ask when and where you came from. Instead, I will only listen to your silent and solemn gaze. Birds fly around you and bless you. Building their nest above your head, they can lead a peaceful life beside you. Overwhelmed by your dignity, people try to give meaning to you, pray to you, and make you a monument. Right after that, however, as birds and people disappear and the development of history stops, drifting around you is an undefined time before time existed.
Gusty winds and waves will hit you and the sun’s beams will burn your skin and erode your body. But still, your solemn gaze will stare at the world. The world? It is neither a system that human beings can make, nor a small flat area, but an endless expanse of time before time existed, and a sound before people’s prayers defined you. I will not ask you when and where you came from. I will just listen to your silent and solemn gaze. Your silent and solemn gaze.
In the direction where the clouds head, and where the winds are rooted, is a place brimming with a warm darkness and a scent that smells of nostalgia.
There, a multitude of Monogataris still lies sleeping in silence. Now as a long, long, soft beam of light streams through, the stories of Monogatari are about to be told again.
*The Japanese word monogatari refers to a story or narrative.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 7 JULY 2022
