tang dynasty times

shanghai--and the lady from shu (bedhaya hagoromo)

Just back from Shanghai, it was part dream journey (臥遊) and part time travel (タイムスリップ)--            →　like this.

It was also a trip down memory lane.

On the plane on the way over, I sat next to a Lady from the Kingdom of Shu (蜀國). The women of Shu have always been renown for their beauty, and she was no different with her flawless pale skin (like moonlight), beautiful eyes and feather robes of exqusite shu brocade (蜀锦).

Her name was Hagoromo.

And, Hagoromo never stopped talking (and it was a 14 hour flight!) Luckily, women from the city of angels can also be quite chatty...

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Named after her feather robe (羽衣), the noh play, Hagoromo, is thought to be one of the earliest noh plays. The story of a moon goddess descended to earth; a fisherman comes across her exquisite feather robe hanging from a pinetree (maybe she was bathing in the sea?). So entranced by the robe is he that he seeks to take it home with him. Before he can get very far, however, the beautiful goddess appears before him and tells him that without her robe, she cannot return to heaven. The fisherman is, of course, swayed by her obvious agitation and agrees to return it-- if only she will dance for him. She agrees, but then the man begins to waiver. Won't she ignore her part of the bargain as soon as she gets her feather robe back...?

                    But she tells him: “Doubt is for mortals. In heaven, there is no deceit.”  

Ezra Pound was also fascinated by Hagoromo, the moon goddess. He wrote his version of the play after the great Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa's widow had provided him with a translation. William Butler Yeats then wrote the introduction. Pound produced the play in 1916, but would re-visit it again many years later when he was jailed in Pisa. Imprisoned for treason, he was only allowed access to a few books in his cell. And this play of his own creation was one of them. He would write in his Pisan Cantos:

and the nymph of the Hagoromo came to me, as a corona of angels one day were clouds banked on Taishan or in glory of sunset and tovarish blessed without

He was a crackpot and poet to the dictator and yet one can only marvel at the incredible number of allusions--from Homer to Zeami-- in the Pisan cantos; seemingly all dredged up from memory, with notes scribbled on toilet paper!

Was it cultural theft or cultural exchange?

Scholars will argue but for me, I somehow understand his life-long fascination and appropriation of Hagoromo (among a million other images and imaginings in which he would delight). As one of the earliest plays in the noh theater repertoire, this play illuminates the relation noh had to the God dance. In this way, noh theater has always reminded me of the spiritually transportive qualities of Javanese dance--especially the story of Hagoromo. This feeling is also part, I suppose, of my own personal narrative as it was Javanese dance that was the start of my story; a story that began in Java and ending in Tokyo was then told last week in Shanghai. Like I said, it was a walk down memory lane.

Anyway, by chance, I stumbled upon this amazing youtube video (below) of Rick Emmert (whom I am a huge fan) performing Hagoromo to Javanese gamelan with Javanese dancers. The collaborative dance is so unusual not just because of its Javanese-Japanese collaboration but also it is the Javanese dancers who wear the masks and Rick (the shite) is mask-less. The chanting is classical Javanese court style and yet... I would say it is the noh play that really creates the mood and atmosphere of this.

I only wish I could have been there.  

                                                                                                    蜀男へ

The Noh play Hagoromo    ♥　 Hagoromo Photo Story

 

 

dante sighs (and a medieval theory of 氣)

 

Remember when Dante sighed?

Out to buy figs, young Dante was in a rush to get to the market. As he walked, he imagined the smell of Sicilian lemons; of sweet sugar from Egypt; of perfumed vinegars and syrups made from grapes.  Cherries, endives, oranges, spicy sausage; dried fruit, figs, dried fish, mint, orange blossoms and roses---cumin, peppers and of course Laura's saffron. Just thinking about the perfume of these things caused him to quicken his pace. And, turning the corner to the lively street that followed the great River Arno, he spotted her. Beatrice. It had been precisely nine years since the first time he had caught glimpse of her, at a time when they had both still been only children. But he recognized her in an instant.

And as a thousand birds took flight in his heart, the man stood there barely breathing. Time stopped. Breath quickened and he let out an amorous sigh (溜息→感嘆).

Too quickly, however, Beatrice's friend, with whom she had been walking arm-in-arm, urged her to continue walking. And so Dante's Lady walks away. Likened to Jesus' epiphany as he walked through the streets of Jerusalem, blessings are dispensed in her wake. And in this way, sighing deeply he knew he would never be the same again.

It was a sigh--make no mistake about it--that originated in the Body of Beatrice. For the vision of her created a

...sweetness to the heart

and

A suave spirit full of love

That straight to the soul,

Saying:  “Sigh”  (Tanto Gentile)

 

Seeing the world anew→ La Vita Nuova.

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In an article from last year in the New York Review of Books,  Robert Harrison, reviews Slavitt's new translation of La Vita Nuova.

Saved by the Vision of Beatrice, he says,

What appears to the eyes then becomes spiritualized and, as spirit, enters the onlooker's inner being, inspiring the soul to emit a sigh. From this sigh of inspiration--this culminating intake and exhalation of breath--the poem we are reading is born.

 

氣象.

Nowadays we think of mood, spirit, dreams, love and behavior in terms of internal psychological states of being. But in medieval times, things were different, I think. Love and the spirits (其鬼不神), human destiny and the destiny of cities (the spirit of cities)--- all these things were inter-twined via shared moods and a "breathing and porous Medieval human heart.

Francois Jullien talking about daoist physiology brings up "breath phenomenon 氣象" and says that through one's in-haling and ex-haling, one breathes in landscape, atmosphere and social context and breathes out character, heart and correct behavior. It is not unlike a Confucian scholar whose meticulous actions-- perfectly attuned to the situation-- are guided by a Confucian sensibility, or sensitive negotiating of shared mood. It is the explanation for everything from falling in love, charisma and the heart's fascination to correct deportment and the Rites.

The ancients--East and West-- told us that it was the heart/mind (心）that mattered. The seat of spiritual power, it was equated with life itself. Thinking too much, they warned, will only give you a headache, and this fact was backed up by the finest research of Medieval physicians and theologians. Aristotelian philosophy had imparted to the Medievals that the heart was hot and dry-- often times burning hot; and that intelligence, emotion, passion and sensations all originated there, in that heat. Ibn Arabi further refined this by adding that, if the mind thinks (考）, the heart imagines （思・想）.

We find ourselves, therefore, back in a time when heart and imagination took center stage.

In addition to its heat, the Medieval heart was also believed to be extremely porous--something which inextricably connected inner with outer (and outer and inner). Heather Webb explains it thus:

 It was thought that the air we breathed mixed with the blood in our hearts to form generative spirits that, sent back into the world, connected us to one another and to the greater circulating universe. According to the Aristotelian and Aquinian theory, the heart should imperfectly mimic the circulations of the heavens"

Through our breath, then, and our persistently beating hearts, we are connected to those around us and to the turning of the universe itself. (and yes, the heart does not make checklists).

To speak in daoist terms, our hero-pilgrim Dante Alighieri walks through a landscape. Florence is engulfed in shared sighs as the Lover sees his beloved- and in that moment, Dante breathes her in deeply in to his heart. Then, ex-haling in a sigh, the world is forever changed. Our man goes with the flow. He sighs and a poem is born.

In a dream later that night, The God of Love (恋神) commands Dante: 'Vide Cor Meum': Look upon your heart. 

It all happens in the heart and like that of the ancient daoists, Dante's world was one largely un-interested in Nirvana or Enlightenment-- or any other project which saw our human lives as a resource to be shaped, utilized, improved and perfected. People didn't really seek to be the "best me they could be." Nor did they go to elaborate lengths to avoid pain. For those in Dante's world, one needn't empty oneself or seek to detach oneself from emotions as their world was not a world of independent self-enclosed brains. Dwelling in a world that itself was bleeding and wounded (wounded Christ heart), poets and philosophers considered that the best one could do was to bravely and vigiliantly, shape one's self around the recognition of necessity and keep an open heart-- a generous heart (Sacred Heart).

And from out of one's own heart's wounds art can be created; in sighs we are inspired and in dreams and visions we are re-born ～into la vita nuova and la dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life.)

 Recommended: Alain Badiou: A Life in Writing

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A classic word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence (to sigh 溜息→感嘆 ): "to sigh for the bodily presence": the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace 色 in that melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels--Barthes

cities are smells

Cities are smells: Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons. Paris is the smell of fresh bread, cheese, and derivations of enchantment. Damascus is the smell of jasmine and dried fruit. Tunis is the smell of night musk and salt. Rabat is the smell of henna, incense, and honey. A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that resembles another smell. A panting, nostalgic smell that guides you, like a worn tourist map, to the smell of the original place.  --Mahmoud Darwish 

Anyone who has ever taken the bridge across the water to Venice, knows that cities (no matter how close in proximity they might be to each other) have their own distinct and discrete smells. Venice smells swampy and sweaty and you notice it the minute you arrive; Bali is overwhelmingly like heavenly frangipani and temple incense; Hue like fish sauce and lotus, Saigon like warm bread and coffee (and I think it smells like spies too)-- each has their own beautiful colors and culture; their own spirit and fragrances. And, cityscapes –like landscapes—become the particular atmosphere to which those who live in these particular places become attuned. It is this spirit which enables people to say that great cities are all more than just the sum total of their parts.

Think, for example, about how the citizens of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic war begged the Romans to spare their city:

            Spare the city which has done you no harm, but, if you please, kill us, whom you have ordered to move away. In this way you will seem to vent your wrath upon men, not upon temples, gods, tombs and an innocent city (Appian’s Roman History)

Cities do seem to be about so much more than the people who live there. And maybe this is why we become greatly attached to certain landscapes and cities in the same way we do to certain people.

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I've been trying out a new perfume line called the Scent of Departure. There are about a dozen fragrances and so far, I've tried Budapest, Vienna, Tokyo, LA, and Denpasar. 

And Tokyo is

 A treasure in the midst of invigorating citrus splashes wrapped in a green stem. The Shinjuku Gyoen leads you to an endless field of lotus, freesias and ozonic peonies, creating a light and fresh heart. Meiji Jingu and Asakusa Shrines trail with white musk, a lasting impression of Japan.

It is lemon, bergamot, green stem; and lotus flower, freesia, ozonique flowers, peony with white Musk.

Hmmmm....

For me, Tokyo could never be citrus--nor could it ever be freesias or white musk. It is first and always the sweet smell of tatami in summer. It is also the smell of rice vinegar (sushi rice) and miso. Those two smells are always first for me. Tokyo is also osthmanthus flowers in October and plum blossoms in February--sometime tachibana in early summer. It is the sweet smell of water boiling in an iron tea kettle; it is the winter months in tea ceremony: the smell of powdered green tea that unfolds in the small tea room and the warmth of the boiling water, in an iron brazier. It is expensive incense-- resins and aloeswood. For me, for so long it also smelled like home.   

Here are 50 reasons why Tokyo is the best city in the world (I agree).

Image by eBoy

 

city of transience (東京物語）

A city known for its earthquakes and fires, Tokyo --says British scholar Paul Waley-- is the city of perpetual destroy and rebuild.

Wasn't it also the city Godzilla terrorized again and again?

Even way back when, Edo was called the "city of fires." Famously referred to as Edo no hana (the “flowers of Edo;” from 火事と喧嘩は江戸の花); people suggested that the all too frequent fires of the city resembled “the autumn leaves.”

From fires to earthquakes, a vulnerability to natural (and man-made) disasters remains one of the most enduring tropes or moods of the city. Just recently, in fact, The Guardian had an article which quoted Tokyo University researchers as predicting a 50% chance of Tokyo being struck by a major earthquake in the next four years. They predict about 10,000 fatalities.

飛花落葉

This historical fact has become the way the city imagines itself and given this narrative of the city, it is probably not surprising that the people of Tokyo are known for their celebration of transience and pleasure (pleasure in the face of vulnerability).

浮世

The floating world: to float (浮) signifies sadness in the face of life’s many hardships and pain. From the Heian period it has been used as a metaphor for the suffering of our world. It later became associated with the Buddhist notion of “this transient world” (無常や仮の世) .

In China, I think the term is more traditionally associated with a life of retreat from the world. Alex Kerr mentions the old Chinese novel called 「浮生六記録」"Six Records of a Floating Life," which is a romantic true story of an impoverished scholar and his beloved wife Yun who lived in early 19th century Suzhou. Although poor they tried to live a life of elegance with nature and poetry in a little cottage. This is not unlike Tao Yuanming’s ideal of plucking  chrysanthemums by the eastern fence (採菊東籬下) or Lady Li’s sobriquet: "the inhabitant who is easily contented" (易安居士). See here.

In Edo, though, this notion was turned on its head. Rather than seeing it in the pessimistic light of Buddhist philosophy, transience was held up as liberating: “If this moment is all we have, we had better live and love with gusto!” And, so in Edo, the floating world took on the meaning of love affairs and play→遊 For me, this will always be the "spirit of Tokyo."

Natsumi Hayashi Levitates 浮遊！！

Below, my favorite scene from Tokyo Monogatari.