is it wise, or is it nothing at all?

.よ所からはさぞ此島を月見哉
yoso kara wa sazo kono shima wo tsukimi kana

elsewhere, no doubt
someone's viewing this island
this moon

issa

how many moon stories would you tell
if you told all of your moon stories?
have you watched its flirtations?
has it laid balm to your loneliness?

has it been prominent in your arts?
un chien andelou? moonstruck?
is it a symbol, or are you?
was it your only light?

HUNGER MOON

The last full moon of February
stalks the fields;
barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly,
a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position

until now, in the small hours,
across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me,
not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun
of silence.

I am alone in a vast room
where a vain woman once slept.
The moon,
in pale buckskins, crouches
on guard beside her bed.

Slowly the light wanes,
the snow will melt
and all the fences thrum
in the spring breeze
but not until that sleeper, trapped
in my body, turns and turns.

Jane Cooper

from The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed.
Copyright © 2000 by Jane Cooper.

think of everyone watching
as you do tonight.

the last midnight

during this same period, quickly approaching the last midnight of the edo era, while france was growing ever more "refined," and "classical," some very different things were happening in england, and, not unrelated, i don't think, in japan as well.

i didn't have any idea when i began this series that it would end with such elegance, such synchronicity, and probably to say 'end' is wrong anyway.

"When I am asked, 'Who was the greatest artist of all?', I reply that I can never quite decide whether to pick Turner or Hokusai. These two men were near contemporaries: born in 1760, Hokusai was 15 years older than Turner and died in 1849, just two years before him. Both men were hard at it as full-time pupils flora about seven and devoted themselves entirely to art for the whole of their long lives. Their output was prodigious: Hokusai finished more than 30,000 drawings plus more than 500 illustrated books. Turner's drawings and watercolours number more than 20,000, in addition to 900 oil paintings, many of them very large.

"Both started as urchins in huge cities, London and Edo (Tokyo), but expanded their universe to take in the whole of nature. This process of observing and recording was never-ceasing. Turner was trying to find new ways to paint mist, vapour, water eddies and wind-flung distances in his late seventies. Hokusai wrote at the age of 74, 'I produced nothing of much value before I was 70. But I am now really beginning to learn. By the time I am 110, each individual dot or line I draw will possess its own life.'" *

but there are wondrous other coincidences. take for example turner. now, remember john cozens, son of andrew? well, john was ill, and he began to see a doctor named dr. monro. monro was a great fan of cozens' paintings, and was an amateur painter himself. he soon had collected a great collection of the work of the younger cozens.

now we have already suggested, quite convincingly, i believe, that cozens the elder had gotten his hands on some of the japanese work arriving into the netherlands; dutch painting was popular in britian at that time, and we know the dutch also had japanese scrolls. it is not a far leap to assume that john had seen them as well.

dr. munro also took art students, occasionally. when he did, a major practice he'd lead them through was to copy, over and over, the cozens paintings. one of his two leading students you may not have heard of -- his name was thomas girtin. but the other, his friend and schoolmate you have. it was jmw turner.

about 6000 miles to the west, the imported artwork from holland was having a major impact. shiba kokan was a japanese painter who had gotten ahold of a dutch book on 'how to draw.' being one to tend to the rational, even scientific, he was quickly convinced that european painting was superior to that in japan and quickly sought to learn all he could. he could not read the dutch, but he could grasp the principals, such as perspective and modeling, from the book's illustrations.

"Many of the masters of ukiyo-e showed their enthusiasm for this Europeanizing trend, including the young Katsushika Hokusai, a student in Shiba Kokan's workshop."1 hokusai completed a series of "prints in the western style" just as the century turned to the 19th; with framing, perspective, and some shading/shaping, hokusai was helping to usher in the changes that would immediately follow his death.

hokusai died in 1849 and turner died in 1851. admiral perry arrived in 1853.

two men, half-a-world apart, on such similar paths, as though meeting each other in spirit just before their cultures met again in the world.

in the hokusai prints it is easy to see, once one is told, how much he has borrowed from the western styles, becoming organized, scientific, and sound. just as turner abandoning himself to the moment, losing everything, losing perspective, losing even shading, and in losing these, gaining finally his freedom to paint.

*Johnson, Paul. Spectator. (March 27, 2004)

ruskin the wounded walrus

perhaps because his father wanted him to be a poet and his mother wanted him to be a bishop in the evangelical church, john ruskin compromised and became a fire and brimstone art critic, a combination of john leonard, pauline kael and michiko kakutani in influence and breadth of reign. his word could make or break an artist, and ruskin was never one to hold his tongue.

where others critiqued turner's 'snowstorm' as a mess of 'soap suds and whitewash,' ruskin declared it one of the best depictions of the sea ever painted. when ruskin declared that after raphael, painting in england had gone off-track, an entire movement, the pre-raphaelites, was born.

though ruskin was perhaps closest to millais, reviewing his work most favorably, all of the pre-raphaelites became ruskin's family symbolically. literally, euphemia chalmers gray became his wife. this peaceful moment, however, was not to last.

whistler had begun to become close with the artists in the pre-raphaelite group himself, though whistler held no particular sway to ruskin. he, but not only he, began to introduce the japanese senses of art and design to rossetti and the crew, and it had begun to have an influence. it was early, so the profound influences upon western art were still to come, but see in this 1865 painting, 'the blue bower,' by dante gabriel rossetti, both the japanese ume in the tiles in the back, but also the japanese musical instrument. (it has further been suggested that the langourous poses and flowing gowns of the women in the paintings might have their genesis in the japanese art as well.)

though he had reputedly written of his appreciation for japanese art, when it began to 'invade his territory' ruskin began to decry it. the bitter depressions and madness that were to fully take over his later life began.

after six years of marriage, his wife divorced him due to his incurable impotence. they had never consummated the marriage. and then she married millais! ruskin began to savage millais' work in reviews (though, as he's thought to be the most popular of the pre-raphaelites, this apparently didn't have the effect ruskin might have hoped). (photo of millais and family by lewis carroll)

one wonders what it was that whistler did to him personally, though perhaps his slow yet persistent influence over artists that ruskin felt he used to 'rule' (particularly millais, whose 'eve of st agnes,' above, was said to be influenced by whistler's 'white girl') was enough. perhaps he simply did not pay 'the great man' the homage he felt he deserved.

in any case, and in spite of having declared turner a genius for many of the same characteristics, ruskin wrote in his review about whistler's 'nocturne in black and gold: the fire rocket' this:

[the "eccentricities" of such art] "are almost always in some degree forced; and their imperfections gratuitously, if not impertinently, indulged. For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face"1

whistler sued, and won in court (ruskin was too ill to attend), but he won but a farthing, leaving him bankrupt. both he and ruskin were exhausted and destroyed by the battle, ruskin abandoned to a life of manic-depression, hallucinations, and heartbreak (having fallen in love with a 10-year-old girl), whistler needing to begin his life anew, with nothing.