There is a kind of planting a man does knowing he will never eat the fruit. The old man who plants a roadside tree does it; so does the teacher who will never learn where the child he taught ends up, or as what. A hand that touches the soil knowing it will not be there at the harvest. Such a hand is a little strange. Why plant what you cannot reap.
Ryoji Kaji, of Evangelion, had a hand like that. In a time when the world had half collapsed and giant Angels were falling out of the sky, he grew watermelons in a corner of the base. Watering them, checking the leaves, cupping a fruit still no bigger than a fist in his palm. When someone asked why he bothered, he turned it aside with that particular smile of his. Somebody has to look after them. Even if I’m gone, someone will water them.
He was always like that. A joke in a serious moment, a loose open shirt in a dangerous place, a lightness with everyone. And yet beneath that lightness he was doing the most dangerous work of anyone — gathering the secrets of every side while belonging to none. Walking, without stopping, toward a knowledge he knew would get him killed. For a long time this man would not come clear for me. Was he light or was he deep. Was he running away or had he seen through it all. I pulled a few books off the shelf to look at him, and each book diagnosed him differently, and oddly, the diagnoses kept sliding off him.
What He Hid Inside the Joke — Freud
Freud would have looked at that smile first. He did not take a joke for mere humor. When a man laughs in the face of what he can hardly bear, that laugh, Freud said, is a shield the ego raises so as not to be crushed by the weight of reality. He liked to cite the rogue led to the gallows who, on a Monday morning, quips, “Well, the week’s beginning nicely.” The joke is not the absence of fear; it is the last dignity the ego musters so as not to be devoured by it. Freud did not belittle this. He saw it as almost heroic. What he did note was one thing: a man who laughs that way passes alongside his real feeling instead of meeting it head-on.
Kaji’s lightness reads the same way. Wrap a thing in a joke and you can let even a fair-sized truth slip out safely — for in jest, it is well known, one may even tell the truth. Freud called this a way of bypassing the censor. When Kaji, in that loose offhand manner, slid something heavy into Misato or into Shinji, the lightness was both a technique of delivery and a wrapping that kept him from being cut.
And his walk toward death. This Freud would have drawn from somewhere deeper. He held that there is in a person a force beyond the pleasure principle — a compulsion to return, without knowing it, to the painful place, the place where the end is fixed, and tread it again. Such a person seems possessed by a demon, or pursued by a malignant fate, but in truth he is the one composing that fate. The aim of all life is death — that bleak sentence of his. Kaji’s refusal to stop when he knew it would kill him becomes, in Freud’s hand, the march of an unconscious drawn toward death. And the decisive stroke: the unconscious does not believe in its own death. Because it knows no negation, a man behaves inwardly as if he will not die, and strides into danger.
A flawless diagnosis. Kaji really does look like a man avoiding something; he really does look like a man drawn to death. And yet, when you have read the whole diagnosis through, something stays uncaught.
A Light Mask, a Heavy Shadow — Jung
Open Jung and another angle opens. Jung called the face a man presents to the world the persona — a kind of mask, made as a compromise between the self and society. He did not take the wearing of a mask to be, in itself, a sickness. On the contrary, the man who lives without a persona is plagued by endless misunderstanding and social blunder; the mask, he said, is a tool one needs in order to live. The trouble begins when the ego mistakes itself for the mask. Believe that the role you play is who you are, and the real self is repressed and sinks into the unconscious. But a man who wears the mask consciously, keeping a distance between himself and the role, handles it safely as a means of relating to the world. Kaji is plainly the latter. He was, after all, a man who knew better than anyone that he was playing the philanderer.
Jung’s real blade comes next. Extremes, he said, always arouse the suspicion of their opposite. We usually imagine a dark instinct hiding behind a spotless mask; but Jung held the reverse to be just as common. A man who deliberately wears a frivolous, careless mask — a philanderer, a joker — is often only striking a pose of wickedness, and behind it the serious, the moral side has sunk into the unconscious instead. The lighter the mask plays, the heavier the shadow grows. That behind Kaji’s looseness hid a heavy face — one that chased the truth and cared for people more earnestly than anyone — fits Jung’s scheme exactly.
But Jung has a place one must reach. His whole journey is the gathering of a scattered self toward a center. To strip off the mask, to face the shadow, to unite conscious and unconscious and arrive at the true self — that arrival Jung called individuation. Lay this measure against Kaji and the result is fixed in advance. Kaji settled in no seat, and died without ever taking off the mask. So in Jung’s scheme he becomes a man who failed to reach himself, an unfinished thing, a man who never integrated.
Here I hesitate. Nothing in Jung is wrong. Kaji truly arrived nowhere. But whether his not-arriving was a failure to arrive or a refusal to arrive — that, Jung’s map cannot tell apart. For in Jung there is no path drawn on which not-arriving could itself be a completion.
No Seat Could Hold Him Whole — Yi Je-ma
Setting the two diagnoses side by side, I saw what they shared. Both Freud and Jung were waiting for Kaji to arrive somewhere. Freud’s ego must return to itself and preserve itself; Jung’s journey ends only when the scattered pieces gather to a center. Both men’s clocks measure the hour of arrival. So Kaji, who did not arrive, looks late from either side. Either he was avoiding, or he was unfinished.
But what if Kaji’s lightness were not avoidance but something else. Carrying that suspicion, I opened Yi Je-ma’s (이제마, the nineteenth-century physician-thinker) Gyeokchigo (格致藁).
Yi Je-ma wrote that a person is fine alone, but the moment he stands in a place where he collides with another, he is pushed, without knowing it, into one role or the other. When a strong man comes near, toward taking; when a weak one comes, toward pressing down. The place itself, he says, assigns a man his part. Most cannot refuse the part. To refuse it you must keep your feet from sinking deep into any place — and that is a lonely, precarious thing.
What Kaji did was exactly that refusal. He was the government’s man and not the government’s man; NERV’s man and not NERV’s man. No seat held him whole. Yi Je-ma would have likened this to Yu Ha-hye (柳下惠, an ancient exemplar of integrity amid a corrupt court). A man standing in the very middle of where ten thousand cunnings contend, and not swept into the current. Yi Je-ma set down the secret of it in a single line: 其志强而弱 — hold the will strong, keep the self weak. Grip the force, and do not get drunk on it. Kaji’s looseness, his jokes, that lightness that lays weight nowhere — perhaps these were another name for that weakness. The moment you grow heavy you are bound to a place. You have to be light to stay afloat. The lightness Freud called avoidance, Yi Je-ma reads as a tension drawn taut so as not to be swept away. The same lightness — flight on one side, discipline on the other.
About here Zhuangzi comes to mind. In Zhuangzi too there is a man like this. An old counselor advises one who must attend a dangerous prince at his side: let the body go along with him but not be drawn in; let the mind blend with him but not show. The way of being inside without hardening. That Kaji did not flee to the mountains but kept his feet in the very thick of the mud and still did not harden — this overlaps with the old man’s words. Only, Zhuangzi’s man does so to preserve his own body. He refuses to be drawn in so as to survive the dangerous place. Kaji goes one step further. He does not survive. Un-drawn-in to the end, he nonetheless dies.
And just before dying, he opened the surface. He did not dump on them the answer he held; he set Misato and Shinji where they would find the answer themselves. To Misato he left the task of chasing the truth on her own; to Shinji, the word to do it because he himself wished to, not because anyone ordered it. This is the very place where Yi Je-ma defined love: 愛人而成立之也 — to love a person is to love him so that he stands on his own. Not to keep him at your side by tending him, but to make him stand even when you are gone. The same hand that plants a watermelon. I may not eat the fruit, but someone will; I may not give the water, but someone will.
One more thing must be marked here. Then was Kaji a man who completed everything? Yi Je-ma would not say so. The turning-back he wrote of — that half-beat of turning to oneself just before the wish to deceive crosses into act — is no terminus you reach once and have done with. It is a losing and recovering, endlessly repeated. Yi Je-ma himself, at fifty-seven, wrote that he had still not shed the wish to deceive. So Kaji did not complete something inside himself and die. Completion is not the kind of thing that ends inside one person to begin with. Only — he did not harden to the end, and he did not lock that un-hardening inside himself but let it flow out to others. The turning-back he never finished in himself, he left as an opening through which Misato and Shinji might begin it anew, each in his own place.
A Clock That Knows No Arrival
In the end Kaji was laid against three different measures, and the measures crossed one another at right angles. Freud’s measures how far one has returned to oneself; Jung’s, how far one has reached the center. On those two, Kaji is a point drifting near the origin. He touched nothing, so he falls short. But Yi Je-ma’s measure runs in another direction. It gauges not arrival but the duration of the flow. On that one, Kaji is a point that went all the way along the axis. He held to not-arriving to the end, so he ran the full course.
The same man — and one measure’s shortfall is the other’s full run. This is not a thing you can patch by adding one ruler to another. The rulers are perpendicular; they do not sum. That is why reading Kaji through Freud and Jung always left something uncaught. Not because he was lacking, but because that ruler was not the one that measures this man. A ruler for length, brought to weigh.
The two were not wrong. Their clocks are accurate. Only, they are clocks that tell the hour of arrival, and Kaji was a man who chose not to arrive. To a man living a journey of departure without arrival, a clock that tells the hour of arrival looks forever stopped. The clock is not broken; it was only a clock that measures a different time.
The watermelons left in the field were still there after he died. Who watered them, no one knows. Maybe no one did. Still, he planted them. As if it were fine that the one who reaped would not be him. That hand, touching the soil knowing it would not be there, turns out, looking back, to have been the whole of this man. Light to the end so as not to grow heavy, flowing while light, and handing the flow to others before he vanished. Not a hand that failed to arrive, but a hand that walked, all the way, a road on which there is no such thing as arrival.
