Kusamakura (11 page)

How might I go about expressing this state in terms of a picture? No ordinary picture could embody it, that’s quite certain. What we express with the word “picture” amounts to no more than the scene before our eyes, human figures or landscape, translated either just as it appears or through the filtering of aesthetic vision onto the surface we work on. If a flower looks like a flower, if water looks like water, and if human figures behave in the picture like humans, people consider the work of the picture done. A greater artist, however, will impart his own feelings as he depicts the phenomena and bring them to vivid life on the canvas. Such an artist endeavors to imbue the object he perceives with his own particular inspiration, and he does not feel he has created a picture unless his vision of the phenomenal world leaps from the brush as he paints. He will not venture to call a work his own if he does not feel that he has seen a certain thing in a certain way, felt in a certain way about it, and expressed that way of seeing and feeling with all due respect to the masters of his art, drawing sustenance from the old legends while nevertheless creating a work that is both utterly true and thoroughly beautiful.

These two kinds of artist may differ in their objective and subjective approach and in their depth, yet before either one touches brush to paper, he will wait for a clear stimulus from the outside world. But the subject I wish to depict is not so clear. Though I use all my powers of sensation in order to find an equivalent for it in the outer world, no form, no color, indeed no light shade or dark, no firm or delicate line, suggests itself. What I feel does not originate from outside; or if it does, it does not arise from any single scene present to my eye—I can point to no clearly visible cause for it. All that exists is a feeling. How might I express this feeling in terms of a picture? Or rather, what physical form might I borrow to embody it in a way that would make sense to others? This is the question.

In an ordinary picture, it’s sufficient to portray the object; feeling is not in question. In the second kind of picture, the object must be compatible with feeling. In the third, all that exists is the feeling, so one is forced to choose some objective phenomenon as its expressive correlative. Such an object, however, is difficult to discover and, once discovered, difficult to make coherent. And even when it is coherently conceived, it often manifests itself in a form radically different from anything found in the natural world. An ordinary person, therefore, would not perceive it as a picture. Indeed, the artist himself acknowledges that it is not a reproduction of some select part of the natural world; he deems it a success if the feeling evoked at the moment of inspiration in some way translates itself onto the canvas, imparting a certain life to the mood that lies outside the sensuous realm, which is the work’s true subject. I don’t know whether any master has ever completely succeeded in performing this difficult task. If I were to name a few works that have approached success in this way, I could point to Wen Tong’s bamboo, and the landscape painting of the Unkoku School. The scenes created by Taigado and the human figures of Buson also come to mind.
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As for Western artists, their eyes are mostly fixed on the external phenomenal world, and the vast majority have had no truck with the higher realms of noble refinement, so I have no idea how many may have been able to impart some spiritual resonance to their depiction of an object.

Unfortunately, the sort of grace and elegance that Sesshu and Buson strove to depict is very simple and rather monotonous.
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I could never approach these masters for their power of brushstroke, but the feeling behind my intended picture is more complex, and therefore difficult to summon and express within the single frame of a picture. I shift position, from chin propped on hands to leaning on folded arms on the desk before me, but still nothing dawns. I must somehow find the hues, forms, and tones that will stir in me as I paint, the sudden recognition that cries
Ah, here it is! This is myself!
I must paint with the lightning bolt of instantaneous and joyous discovery of a mother who has journeyed through all the realms of the land in search of her vanished son, never forgetting him for an instant, sleeping or waking, and then one day suddenly chances upon him at a crossroads. This is no easy task. If I can achieve it, the opinion of others will matter nothing to me. They can scorn and reject it as a painting, and I will feel no resentment. If the combination of colors I produce represents even a part of my feeling, if the play of the lines expresses even a fraction of my inner state, if the arrangement of the whole conveys a little of this sense of beauty, I will be perfectly content if the thing I draw is a cow, or a horse, or no definable creature at all. I will be content—and yet I cannot do it. I lay the sketchbook on the desk and gaze at it, deep in thought, until my eyes seem to bore right through the page before me, but still no form occurs to me.

I put down my pencil and consider. The problem lies in attempting to express such an abstract conception in the form of a picture. People are not so very different from one another after all, and no doubt someone else among them all has felt the touch of this same imaginative state and tried to express it in eternal form through one means or another. If this is the case, what means might he have used?

As soon as I pose this question, the word “music” flashes before my inner eye. Yes, of course! Music is the voice of nature, born of this kind of moment, pressed into being by its necessity. Now I realize that one should listen to and study music; unfortunately, however, I myself am quite unacquainted with this field.

I next turn my attention to the third expressive domain, that of poetry. I recall the German writer Lessing saying something to the effect that events whose occurrence depends on the passage of time constitute the realm of poetry, and pro-pounding the fundamentalist theory that poetry and painting are essentially different.
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Seen from this viewpoint, the realm I am urgently attempting to present to the world seems likely never to find its expression in poetry. Time may certainly exist in the mental state that gives me my delight, but it contains no events that develop through time. My ecstasy is not produced by A’s ending and being replaced by B, which in turn disappears for C to be born. My joy is of a thing held motionless inside the one profound moment, and the very absence of motion means that when I try to translate the experience into common language, the material I use ought not to be arranged to flow within time. As with a picture, the poem should be composed simply by arranging objects in space. But what scene ought I bring to the poem in order to depict this nebulous and insubstantial thing? Once I achieve that, the poem will succeed even if it doesn’t fit with Lessing’s theory. Talk of Homer and Virgil is irrelevant. If poetry is a suitable vehicle for expressing mood, that mood need not be portrayed through chronological events; as long as the simple spatial requirements of a picture are fulfilled, the language of the poem will be adequate to the expressive task.

But what does theory matter? I have largely forgotten the contents of Lessing’s
Laocoön,
but if I were to look thoroughly into it, I imagine I’d only become confused. Since I have failed to produce a picture, I decide at any rate to try a poem, and pressing my pencil to the page of the sketchbook I rock myself to and fro, waiting for something to emerge. I continue in this way for some time, hoping somehow to be able to move the point of my pencil from where it rests on the page, but quite without success. The experience feels rather like suddenly forgetting the name of a friend, having it on the tip of your tongue but being unable to produce it. You know that if you give up trying, the elusive name is likely to sink forever beyond reach.

Imagine you set out to mix a gruel of arrowroot. At first your chopsticks merely churn the powder and feel no resistance from the liquid. If you persevere, however, the liquid slowly grows viscous, and your hand grows heavier as it stirs. Continuing to stir without pause, you finally reach the point where you can stir no longer, and in the end the arrowroot gruel in the pan will, of its own accord, positively rush to glue itself to your chopsticks. This is precisely the process of writing a poem.

At last my lost pencil begins to find its way on the page, in fits and starts, gathering impetus as it goes, and after twenty or thirty minutes I have produced these few lines.

When I read it over, I realize it is in fact a string of images that could easily become a picture. I might as well have made it a picture in the first place, I decide. Then I wonder why a poem was easier to create than a picture. Having reached this point in my poem, the rest seems likely to follow without too much effort, but now I feel the urge to write sentiments that are impossible to transpose into a picture. After much hesitation over the possible choices, I finally produce the following:

I read it through from the beginning. It is not without merit, but it seems rather too dry and dull to really convey the exalted state I’ve just been in. While I’m at it, I decide to try another poem. Gripping my pencil, my eyes stray unconsciously toward the doorway—and at this moment the door is slid open, and I catch a sudden glimpse of a beautiful shape beyond, slipping quickly across the three feet or so of open space. Good heavens!

By the time my eyes have fully turned to take this in, the door is open and the figure is disappearing. The movement is over almost before my eyes can catch it, and the shape passes and disappears in an instant. My gaze is now riveted on the doorway, all thoughts of poetry abandoned.

Within a minute the figure re-emerges across the way. Silent and serene, the woman walks along the second-floor balcony opposite me, clad magnificently in a long-sleeved formal kimono. The pencil falls from my hand. I stare across the twelve yards or so of courtyard garden, breath held, while the lone figure appears and disappears, parading gracefully to and fro at the balcony railing as the evening spring sky, already freighted with cloud, grows gradually heavier with the promise of rain.

The woman has said not a word, nor sent so much as a glance in my direction. She walks so softly that even the sound of her own silk hem trailing behind her would not reach her ears. She is too distant for me to distinguish the details of the dyed colors in the lower half of the kimono; all I can make out is the transition, where the kimono’s basic color merges into the design below, a delicate shading reminiscent of the boundary between night and day, that boundary that she too treads.

I know not how many times this figure in her trailing kimono walks up and down the long balcony corridor nor how long she has performed this strange perambulation in her astonishing clothes. Nor have I the least idea what her intention might be. It’s a weird feeling, to watch her endlessly repeating her ritual, coming and going, appearing and disappearing in the frame of my doorway, so decorously and so silently, for reasons beyond my ken. If her action is some lament for the passing spring, why should it take such an insouciant form? And why should this nonchalant pose choose to clad itself in such finery?

Is it perhaps gold brocade that makes the obi at her waist so startle the eye as this spectral shape, this hue of the dying spring, for an instant entrancingly brightens the doorway’s dark depths? Moment by moment the gaudy brocade comes and goes, swallowed now into the blue depths of evening, into unpeopled remoteness, now returning hither through those far reaches of space. The sight is redolent of the twinkling stars of spring that sink at dawn into depths of violet sky.

At last the heavens are on the verge of opening to swallow this bright shape into the realm of darkness. There is something supernatural about the scene, the figure dressed in clothing appropriate to a vibrant life surrounded by golden screens and silver candelabras, “each instant of spring’s evening worth a wealth of gold,” willingly fading without fear or resistance from the visible world. As I gaze at her through the swiftly gathering darkness, she seems to linger serenely in one place, then tread with the one measured step, without haste, without bewilderment. If she indeed has no knowledge of the impending peril of the darkness, she is the height of innocence.

If she knows but does not feel it as a danger, she is uncanny. Loitering thus, so serene and poised, between the realms of being and nonbeing, her original dwelling must surely be that blackness, and this temporary phantom is now in the act of returning into the obscure darkness of its true home. The real nature of this figure is suggested by her kimono, whose bewildering pattern inexorably melts and disappears into inky black.

Another image: when a beautiful woman falls into lovely slumber and in the midst of this sleep draws her last breath in this world, we who watch by her pillow are stricken with grief. But if to the given pains of existence a thousand pains are added in dying, the woman herself, weary of pointless living, would feel with those who watch over her that relief from her suffering would be nothing but merciful. But how does a young child who dies easily in his sleep deserve his fate? A child drawn down to the realms of the dead in sleep has lived its precious life in a blind moment, with no preparation for death. If someone must be killed, let him first feel the absolute karmic inevitability of the fact, resign himself, and die with a prayer on his lips. If before your eyes is only the vivid fact of death, without the conditions that naturally lead to death, then you long not to chant the last rites over the dying but to cry out and summon back those feet that have already stepped halfway into the other world. Perhaps she who is slipping unaware from her mortal into her immortal sleep suffers by being called back like this, being dragged unwillingly by the chains of existence that she was in the act of severing. Be merciful, she may think, and do not call me, but let me quietly sleep. And yet we long to call.