Chapter 9: I’m Right Here

At the station exit, people press against people as they surge out. Outside, those meeting the train stand on tiptoe, necks craned, searching face after face. A phone rings; it is answered; the other end asks: Where are you? And this end, waving, shouts: I’m right here! I’m right here! The one in red!

“I’m right here” is a very ordinary sentence. But what it says is not ordinary at all: I am here, so I am not there.

Being doesn’t wait for anything: not for me to take my place, not for me to qualify, not for me to understand. Said for long enough, it sounds as if being were boundlessly large, everywhere, waiting on nothing. But the same one time of being has another side as well, there at the same time as this side: every time of being carries a “not” of its own. Being here, it is not there; being this one, it is not that one; it cannot get inside another; one day it will not be. These “not”s, one by one, are all real.

Start with the nearest one: I can only be here.

In their hearts people often refuse to accept this.

Someone sits in an office, the sky very blue outside the window, and thinks: if only I could be at the seaside right now. Someone far from home, unable to get back for the New Year, watches the family gathered round the table on a video call and feels hollow inside: if only I could be there at the same time. Someone has many things he wants to do—read, travel, be with his children, do his work well—but a day has only so many hours, a person only one body, and doing this means not doing that. He often thinks: if only I could split into several.

There is another refusal, a little deeper. Someone falls ill with a very rare disease; the doctor says not one person in ten thousand gets it. Lying in the hospital bed he asks himself over and over: Why me? Why me of all people? With so many people in the world, why should this land on me?

Someone was born in a very poor place and suffered a great deal as a child; grown up, he sees others born with everything, and inside there is a sentence too: Why should they? Why was I born into this family and not that one?

These refusals assume the same thing: I was never meant to be only here.

As if a person could originally be anywhere, could be anyone, only somehow, by someone, he had been stuffed into this body, this family, this year, this illness, shut in here with no way out. “I can only be here” is a lack, a limit, an injustice. Truly good being would be everywhere, would be everything, able to do anything, merged with all, shut in nowhere.

What is “being here,” really?

The word zai has never stood bare. When people speak, they always say where: at home, on the way, on the table, in the heart. There is no being that is not somewhere. To say “zai” is to land in a place, a time, a thing going on: this room, this afternoon, this talk.

This place is not an empty box waiting for things to be put in. It is how this one time of being spreads out.

You hold a stone in your hand. It is a bit heavy, a bit cold; one side worn round by water, the other with a ridge that presses into the palm. Where is that heaviness? Not only in the stone, nor only in the hand, but where stone and hand meet: put it on the table, and the heaviness presses on the tabletop; pick it up, and the heaviness returns to the wrist. The coldness too: hold it a while, and the stone is less cold, the palm less warm; you give me a little warmth, I give you a little cold, back and forth. This stone being here is a whole occasion struck out together by it and this hand, this afternoon, the air in this room.

Being is always in an occasion like this. An occasion has a beginning and an end: the stone is put down, and this occasion is over, and another, of stone and tabletop, begins. Occasion follows occasion, one overlapping another, and none is “the whole occasion” holding all the others inside it.

So “being here” is being in this occasion. This occasion has these things, these meetings, this time; it cannot at the same time be another.

Now look at that “not.”

Detective stories often have this scene: a man under suspicion produces something: at nine that night I was eating in a restaurant thirty kilometers away; the owner knows me, and the bill has the time on it. This is called an alibi. Why does it work? Because a person cannot be in two places at once. That he was in the restaurant that night proves he was not at the scene.

If a person could be everywhere at once, he could prove nothing. No one could find him, no one could bear witness for him, and nothing he did would have a place to land. “I can only be here,” at that moment, saved him.

This matters far more than it looks. Precisely because a person can only be here, what he does has an address: it was done here, not elsewhere; this time, not some other time. Precisely because he can only be here, a person can be found, called to, waited for. The one meeting the train can spot the red coat at a glance because the red coat is only here, not elsewhere. If a person were everywhere, no one could find him, call to him, or bear witness for him.

“I can only be here” is not a lack in being. It is where this time of being lands, and also where others can find it.

Now “being this one, it is not that one.”

Close your eyes and have someone quietly swap the stone in your hand for another. You know at once: it’s been swapped. The heaviness is different, the coldness is different, the ridge is not where it was. What is in your hand was never “a stone”; it was this stone.

What makes this one this one? The handiest answer: its features—weight, color, edges, grain—together are unlike any other.

Imagine two stones made exactly alike, indistinguishable down to the finest measurement, like two bottles from a factory. Are they then one and the same? No. One is bought and taken away, one gathers dust in the warehouse; one breaks in transport, breaks in its own way. Features can be exactly alike; being never repeats.

“This one” is not a string of features put together. Features can all be stated: weighs about five ounces, grey, with a ridge; these words could be said to a thousand stones at once. “This one” can’t be stated; you can only point at it: it, here, now, pressing on my palm. It is one of a kind because it occupies this one time of being; there cannot be a second of this time of being.

People are like this too. Many in the world share your name, many share your birthday, many look like you, do the same work, have the same temper. But no one is you. Not because you have some feature others lack, but because the one time of being you occupy—this body, in this year, in this place, this whole way it has come—happens only once.

And the one who asks “why me?”

This question often carries a kind of vertigo: with so many people in the world, why look out through these eyes of all eyes, why be born in this year, this family, why have this illness? As if one could have been anyone, but was allotted this one, like drawing lots and getting a bad lot.

How does this question get asked? It first imagines an “I” that has not yet landed anywhere, standing outside all lives, waiting in a queue to be allotted; and then asks: why was I allotted this lot?

That “I” waiting in the queue can’t be found. There is no one who comes before this time of being and stands outside picking lots. It is this time of being, here, that brought forth this person who can ask “why me?” The question has no answer, because the one drawing lots it asks about was never there.

This is not to say the illness is not hard, or the poverty. The hardship is real, not a bit of it can be made light of; the illness will be treated, the poverty will be changed, and these are real too. Only the layer of grievance pressed on top of “why me of all people”—as if one had been singled out, treated unfairly, as if there had been a better lot one might have drawn—that layer has nowhere to land. No one picked, and no one treated anyone unfairly. This time is just this time.

Let this layer be said through. In “why me” two things are hidden: a me and a fate. As if I were one thing and fate another, put onto me like clothes that don’t fit. But look for the one wearing the clothes, and you can’t find him; what you find is only this time: born in this year, grown up in this family, with this illness on the body, having come this whole way. This time is you, one-to-one. It is not that you were allotted this illness; it is that this place now shows itself as someone ill, and that is you. It is not that you were born into a poor family; it is that this time shows itself as a child of a poor family, and that is you. Draw another lot, and what you drew would not be you, but another place, another time; there is no you that could walk out of this time and stand in another. So “why should it be me” finds no one to ask: “why should it” first needs someone standing outside who could have been otherwise. With no such someone, there is no one treated unfairly; there is only this time, wholly itself.

When the vertigo passes, what remains is a very deep certainty: it is this place. Nothing else to swap it for, and no need to swap.

Since one can only be here, and is this one, is a person then shut in? Shut inside this skin, cut off from everything outside?

Touch the back of your hand. That is the edge: inside the skin, me; outside it, air, the table, other people.

With an edge, it is easy to go one step further: the edge is a wall. Inside the wall is me, outside the wall is the rest; I stand by myself, depend on no one, owe no one.

But the skin has never for a moment shut anyone in. A cold wind blows, and it knows first; the sun shines, and it is first to warm; someone takes your hand, and what they first touch is this layer of skin. The most “edge” part of the body is exactly the part that touches the outside most. Look at breathing too: breathe in, and air that was in the room a moment ago is now in the lungs; breathe out, and what was just in the body is in the room again. The bowl of rice eaten at noon was in a paddy field the year before last and today has become fingers. This edge is always letting things in and letting things out; it has never been closed.

The edge is always changing too. As a child you grew several inches a year, and the edge moved out several inches; hair cut off was yourself yesterday and lies on the floor today; skin renews itself layer by layer, and the old layer becomes, without your noticing, the dust in the room. The edge is not a line drawn once; it is the outermost layer, always changing.

The edge is not a wall; the edge is where things touch. A person and a stone touch, one meeting another: heaviness pressing on the hand, coldness passing through the palm, one hand holding another. Sometimes the edge is clear, like this layer of skin; sometimes blurred, like the edge of mist, the edge of a cloud, spreading until it can’t be told. The clear is being, and the blurred is being too. Only, where things touch, there is always this side and that side. The edge does not stop anyone from touching; the edge is where the touching is.

Once the edge is no longer seen as a wall, people easily slide to the other extreme: if there is no wall, then it is all one; I and all things were one body to begin with, and differences are false.

Many have had such moments: lying in an open field at night looking at the stars, looking so long you can’t tell whether you are looking at the stars or the stars at you; or holding someone you love very much, so tightly it is as if there were no longer two. That moment is real; something really has gone: that feeling of being cut off. When the moment passes, the stars are still one by one, bright and dim; the person held will still say something completely unexpected the next day.

What was real in that moment was “not cut off”; to call it “one” is to go a step too far. “One” says: the edge is false, underneath there is only one thing, and sooner or later differences must be taken back and dissolved. “Not cut off” says: the edge is real, only it was never a wall; the two sides are always touching, exchanging, bound up with each other.

Not two, but not one. Not two: you cannot find two things cut off from each other, each sealed in itself; stone and hand are always touching, person and air always exchanging. Not one: they have not, for all that, melted into a lump; the stone is still the stone, the hand still the hand, this one still this one.

People have always thought there were only two roads: either sealed off, or melted into one. There is a third, and it is the one people have been walking all along: two truly different beings, edge against edge, with something happening between them.

A choir is like this. Some sing high, some low, some voices bright, some full, and layered together they make a sound no single person could sing. If everyone sang the same note, the same pitch, the same timbre, there would be no harmony, only one note, a bit louder. Harmony is beautiful because every voice is still itself, and at the same moment all are listening to the others.

Here one thing must be made clear.

Earlier it was said that the “I” is the voice being speaks in this place, and every “I” is one time of being. That is right. But turned around, it is wrong: being is not only “I.”

This place can say “I.” But the pot of flowers on the windowsill doesn’t, the stone at the foot of the wall doesn’t, the cat downstairs doesn’t, the cloud in the sky doesn’t. They are just as much here, in their own place: the flowers in the pot, the stone at the wall, the cat downstairs, the cloud in the sky. They too can only be here, not there; they too are this one, not that one; they too have their edges, always touching other things.

A stone presses on only a small patch of ground all its life. It can’t move, can’t walk; rained on for decades, sun-scorched for decades, it stays in that one place. Not for a moment does it feel shut in, nor for a moment has it wished to be everywhere. It is there, so it is there; the rain falls on it, moss slowly climbs its shady side, and at noon a lizard lies on its sun-warmed side. This place of its is never for a moment empty.

Two leaves grow on the same twig, the same green, the same veins, the same facing toward the light. But they are not one leaf. One has a hole bitten by an insect, one hasn’t; one yellows first, falls first, one hangs on until nearly winter. Neither of them has ever asked “why me?”

A tree is here; once it puts down roots, it is here for life. Its “here” is very large: the roots reach down, several meters underground, tangling with the roots of the tree beside it; the leaves reach up, catching sunlight, rain, wind; fallen leaves rot at its feet and become its own soil. It can only be here, but its here is always touching things far away.

These beings can all only be here, are all this one; not one of them feels it as an injustice. “I can only be here” is an injustice because in the human heart there is a me who “could have been everywhere.” That me has never once been found; and so “I can only be here” is only being here: full, solid, a place never for a moment empty.

People and stones, leaves, trees are the same in this. A person is one time of being, in this place; a stone is one time of being, in that place. No place is more being. What a person has more than a stone is that he can say “I’m right here,” can wave, can be spotted at a glance at the station exit. This is the good of this place called a person; but this good is not a ticket of admission to being.

The man waving at the station was found in the end. The one meeting him squeezed through, took his suitcase, and said: Finally, there you are.

The two of them walked one behind the other toward the car park, past a stall selling roast sweet potatoes, and the smell came at them all at once.