solstice III: the emergence into the light

the japanese winter solstice celebration includes the witnessing of the first sunrise of the new year. "According to Shinto legend, Amaterasu, the Sun goddess, hid herself in a rocky cave in heaven, causing darkness and chaos to cover the world.

She was eventually enticed to peek out by the laughter and dancing of the other gods. A mirror was used to reflect her light as she opened her door, enticing her out.

The cave was then closed off to ensure she could not return." 1







and the release of the light from the cave, the summer from winter, the birth from the womb, plays over and over.

"As she was gathering flowers with her playmates in a meadow, the earth opened and Pluto, god of the dead, appeared and carried her off to be his queen in the world below. ... Torch in hand, her sorrowing mother sought her through the wide world, and finding her not she forbade the earth to put forth its increase. So all that year not a blade of corn grew on the earth, and men would have died of hunger if Zeus had not persuaded Pluto to let Persephone go. But before he let her go Pluto made her eat the seed of a pome- granate, and thus she could not stay away from him for ever. So it was arranged that she should spend one-half of every year with her mother and the heavenly gods, and should pass the rest of the year with Pluto beneath the earth." 2

our arts mimic our bodies and ourselves, our beliefs and our visions.

something so fundamental that it shows up in out symbology on every level: the return of the sun, the birth of the son, the festival of lights.

we are here facing the solstice, the return of the light. here, even in our modern age we feel it in our bones. the is nothing so profound as the darkness growing every day, and then stopping so the light can return again. it's a rebirth.

i began to see all of the corollaries, and i see them still.

the words are different but the themes continue to repeat, over and over, in countries all over the world there are echos of each other's myths, of the cycle of birth and death.

a number of years back i reached a crisis of faith, i suppose, and read quite a few books (like 80 or so) on psychology, philosophy, biology, and religions. one night i woke up in the middle of the night and said: they're all saying the same thing! live not from fear but from love. move from the darkness into the light.

in the musical 'hair' the wrong person marches off to war. but aren't they all the wrong person? so fervently we sing again with open arms, let the sun shine in.

where are the dresses?

(i find it consistently frustrating trying to find images of gowns from a certain era. more and more are available from the twenties and the thirties, and i do love them, but there is something about this earlier era, call it aesthetic, call it glasgow-style, call it 'arts and crafts'.... whatever one calls it, i am awed by them.


yes, i've found a few to bring to this blog, but there are but a tiny few to find. where are the dresses? i've seen them in museums, occasionally, but in general they're not part of what gets put online. nor are they often illustrated in the really fairly large reference library i have here. metal, glass, ceramic, wood. but little if any textile -- mostly women's -- arts.

there are more illustrations of dresses than there are dresses.


could the difference in age alone be the reason for their invisibility? what is it about this one particular kind of embroidery that drives me wild? is it celtic in its roots? chinese/ japanese? guimard and macdonald look like they work from the same muse. some stories about glasgow here, and what a wealth was born there.)

...[A]ll costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball. Where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up. And so, were our national attire delightful in colour, and in construction simple and sincere; were dress the expression of the loveliness that it shields and of the swiftness and motion that it does not impede; did its lines break from the shoulder instead of bulging from the waist; did the inverted wineglass cease to be the ideal of form; were these things brought about, as brought about they will be, then would painting be no longer an artificial reaction against the ugliness of life, but become, as it should be, the natural expression of life's beauty.

Nor would painting merely, but all the other arts also, be the gainers by a change such as that which I propose; the gainers, I mean, through the increased atmosphere of Beauty by which the artists would be surrounded and in which they would grow up. For Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.


There is not, for instance, a single delicate line, or delightful proportion, in the dress of the Greeks, which is not echoed exquisitely in their archi- tecture. A nation arrayed in stove-pipe hats and dress- improvers might have built the Pantechnichon possibly, but the Parthenon never.

And finally, there is this to be said: Art, it is true, can never have any other claim but her own perfection, and it may be that the artist, desiring merely to contemplate and to create, is wise in not busying himself about change in others: yet wisdom is not always the best; there are times when she sinks to the level of common-sense; and from the passionate folly of those -- and there are many -- who desire that Beauty shall be confined no longer to the bric-a-brac of the collector and the dust of the museum, but shall be, as it should be, the natural and national inheritance of all,-- from this noble unwisdom, I say, who knows what new loveliness shall be given to life, and, under these more exquisite conditions, what perfect artist born? Le milieu se renouvelant, l'art se renouvelle.

Oscar Wilde

The custom of wearing concealed beauty

Japanese Embroidery is an ancient and beautiful craft. To master it requires years of study and practice. 1

It can be said that one of the characteristics of Japanese antiques and craftworks is the particularity about little things and the refined passion towards concealed beauty. The appreciation of these two points enables us to step forward into the deep sea of Japanese culture.

In this column, we would like to introduce the 'gaku-ura' (the picture on the inner lining of kimonos), which we believe is the ultimate form of Japanese obsession towards concealed beauty.
We hope our gaku-ura collectors, people who heard this term for the first time or readers who have not been interested in kimono before will find the contents interesting and helpful for your next shopping at chuu.com.

The prohibition on sumptuous clothes and the emergence of Edo dandies

The relatively peaceful Edo period (1600-1868) under the reign of Tokugawa shogunate gave rise to a unique merchant culture centered around large cities. The well off merchants began to spend money and time on leisure and cultural pursuit, even on their everyday clothes and tools. As a natural consequence, expensive sumptuous clothes prevailed.

However, the Tokugawa shogunate feared this rising merchant power and issued an edict that prohibited the wearing of rich clothes several times during the Edo period. These edicts were very detailed. For example, highly embroidered or entirely tie-dyed kimonos were banned, and later the restriction went on to even gorgeous festival dolls and elaborate hair accessories.

It is not hard to imagine that the craftsmen who made these pieces lost a great deal, but the regulations did work in a good way in a sense that it stimulated everybody's fashion consciousness. People's interest in outwards beauty shifted to the concealed aspects, beautifying areas that could not be seen from the outside. 2