before break dancing

from THE TALES OF ISE (Ise Monogatari)

In the past, there was a prince known as Prince Koretaka. He had a palace at a place called Minase, on the far side of Yamazaki. Every year when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, he went to that palace. On those occasions he always took along a person who was the director of the right imperial stables. It was long ago and I have forgotten his name.

Not enthusiastic about hunting, they just drank saké continuously and turned to composing poems in Japanese. The cherry blossoms at the Nagisa residence in Katano, where they often hunted, were especially beautiful. They dismounted under the trees, and breaking off blossoms to decorate themselves, everyone, of high, middle, and low rank, composed poems. The director of the stables composed this:

If only this world
were without cherry blossoms
then would our hearts
be at ease
in springtime.

Another person composed this:

It is because they fall soon
that the cherry blossoms
are so admired.
What can stay long
in this fleeting world?

When they left the trees to return to Minase, it already was dark. The prince's attendants came from the fields with servants bringing the saké. Seeking out a good place to drink it, they came to a place called Amanokawa. The director of the stables gave the prince a cup of saké. The prince said, “When you hand me the cup, compose a poem on coming to the banks of Amanokawa after hunting at Katano.” The director of the stables composed this and handed it to him:

I've spent the day hunting
and now will seek lodging
from the Weaver Maid
for I have come
to the River of Heaven.

The prince recited this over and over but could not come up with a response. Ki no Aritsune was attending the prince. He responded:

She who waits patiently
for a lord who comes
but once a year
will not, I am sure,
lodge any other.

They went back to Minase, and the prince entered his palace. They drank and conversed until deep in the night, and then the prince prepared to sleep, somewhat drunk. As the moon of the eleventh day of the month began to sink behind the mountains, the director of the stables composed this:

How can the moon
hide itself
before we are satisfied?
I wish the mountain rim would flee
so the moon might stay in view.

In place of the prince, Ki no Aritsune replied:

I wish the peaks
one and all
might be leveled:
if there were no mountain rims
the moon would not hide.

Narihira (Ariwara no Narihira) (825–80)

translation by Lewis Cook and Jamie Newhard

the poplar did it

i have finally figured everything out, the reason for the differences in japanese writing and art and that of the west. it's the trees.

i'm looking at these book covers, the ceramics, the prints and paintings, in this movement we call japonisme, and i see a pattern; you see it too. it's kind of amazing and overwhelming if you have never come across this before.

and beautiful. and when we look at it we see 'japonisme.' the outlines, the simplicity, the blocks of color, the asymmetry, the focus on nature....

some pottery firms featured this style to a greater degree than others. though grueby manufactured many styles of ceramics, this 'through the woods' view, perhaps these tiles were their signature.

but then.... you look at japanese images and the trees are all wiggly! does that mean your understanding of japonisme is all wrong??! where then does the inspiration come from?

not that the japanese don't have their verticals. there's always bamboo.

in fact, japan does have some straight trees.

and they have a strong artistic tradition of vertical counterpoint to diagonal.

but in general, you see trees in japanese prints, and you do not see straight trees. in western ones, you do. i was probing my mind as to a possibility for this discrepancy when suddenly it was so clear.

japan's trees are wiggly. western trees are straight. (i'm talking pines in particular, but not exclusively.) and is it so difficult to imagine that the nature sur- rounding the human will inform all communications of that human? our letterforms are straight; theirs is not. linear v non-linear. does this very simply describe it all?

send in the clowns

CLOWNS: speakers of the truth; trickster -- creator of the world; defenders against the evil spirits.

i've looked at clowns from both sides now
from fools to frights and still somehow
it's clowns illusions i recall --
i really don't know clowns at all.

What kind of fool am I
Who never fell in love
It seems that I'm the only one
that I have been thinking of

What kind of man is this?
An empty shell--
A lonely cell in which
an empty heart must dwell

What kind of lips are these
That lied with every kiss
That whispered empty words of love
that left me alone like this

Why can't I fall in love
Like any other man
And maybe then I'll know
what kind of fool I am.

What kind of clown am I?
What do I know of life?
Why can't I cast away the mask of play
and live my life?

Why can't I fall in love
Till I don't give a damn
And maybe then
I'll know what kind of fool I am

Anthony Newley •

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

nightsoil

JAPAN

It was a miniature country once
To my imagination;
Home of the Short,
And also the academy of stunts
Where acrobats are taught
The famous secrets of the trade:
To cycle in the big parade
While spinning plates
upon their parasols,
Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,
Or tossing seven balls
In Most Celestial Order round and round.

A child's quick sense of the ingenious stamped
All their invention:
toys I used to get
At Christmastime,
or the peculiar, cramped
Look of their alphabet.
Fragile and easily destroyed,
Those little boats of celluloid
Driven by camphor around the bathroom sink,
And delicate the folded paper prize
Which, dropped into a drink
Of water, grew up right before your eyes.

Now when we reached them it was with a sense
Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains
Like mating weasels;
our Intelligence
Said: The Black Dragon reigns
Secretly under yellow skin,
Deeper than dyes of atabrine
And deadlier. The War Department said:
Remember you are Americans; forsake
The wounded and the dead
At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.

And yet they bowed us in
with ceremony,
Told us what brands of Sake
were the best,
Explained their agriculture
in a phony
Dialect of the West,
Meant vaguely to be understood
As a shy sign of brotherhood
In the old human bondage to the facts
Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,
Signaling tiny pacts
With their antennae, they would wave their hands.

At last we came to see them not as glib
Walkers of tightropes, worshipers of carp,
Nor yet a species out of Adam's rib
Meant to preserve its warp
In Cain's own image. They had learned
That their tough eye-born goddess burned
Adoring fingers. They were very poor.
The holy mountain was not moved to speak.
Wind at the paper door
Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.

Human endeavor clumsily betrays
Humanity. Their excrement served in this;
For, planting rice in water, they would raise
Schistosomiasis
Japonica, that enters through
The pores into the avenue
And orbit of the blood, where it may foil
The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.
This fruit of their nightsoil
Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.

Now the quaint early
image of Japan
That was so charming
to me as a child
Seems like a bright
design upon a fan,
Of water rushing wild
On rocks that can be folded up,
A river which the wrist can stop
With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks
And silk of what had been a fan before,
And like such winning tricks,
It shall be buried in excelsior.

Anthony Hecht

Copyright © Anthony Hecht

(On leaving Germany, he spent some time in Japan, generating news copy to portray the occupying American forces in a favorable manner. “It was quite shameless, hypocritical work,” he said, “and therefore perfectly consistent with everything I had ever known about the Army.” ) 1

[with thanks to 'anonymous' who mentioned this poem]

the blossom flies

we have spoken earlier of the echoing, in the birth of japonisme, of nature's related forms. of course this recognition didn't start in the west:

in around 1400, moritake arakida wrote:

The fallen blossom
flies back to its branch:
A butterfly. 1

in 1820, issa wrote:

.遠山が目玉にうつるとんぼ哉
tôyama ga medama ni utsuru tombo kana

the distant mountain
reflected in his eyes...
dragonfly

david lanoue writes: Issa sees a vast mountain (or mountains) miniaturized in the tiny bubble-eyes of the dragonfly.

Just as his English contemporary, William Blake, glimpsed a universe in a grain of sand, Issa perceives the great in the small: a mountain in the twin mirrors of an insect's mirror eyes.

The power of this image cannot be fully explained; with it, the poet coaxes the reader into a deep contemplation of the nature, and interconnectedness, of all things.

also from 1820 is issa's:

.蜻蛉も紅葉の真ねや竜田川
tombô mo momiji no mane ya tatsuta-gawa

a dragonfly copies
the red leaves...
Tatsuta River 2

more recently, in 1919, amy lowell wrote:

Is it a dragonfly or a maple leaf
That settles softly down upon the water?

one western artist was known to take most deeply to heart the teachings of the japanese. his name was lucien gaillard. as was written about him during his lifetime, "Lucien Gaillard is ever on the look-out for that which is fresh and novel. As gold-worker and jeweller he has been fore- most among the most resolute supporters of the modern decorative art.

At first the jewels he produced were somewhat complicated and distorted, but now he has attained to greater wisdom and greater simplicity, this evolution being the result of serious and patient study of the Japanese masters.

He has been at great pains also to recover the secret of the marvellous oxidations on the bronzes of the Far East, and he has succeeded therein. He has lately shown some hair-pins and small-combs thoroughly characteristic of his present manner." 3

in her book on gems and jewelry, marilena mosco says, "Lucien Gaillard, who exhibited for the first time in 1902, was the most "Japanese" of the Parisian jewelers.

"Monsieur Lucien Gaillard has always been seduced by the art of the Japanese and is highly interested in the mystery of their work. One of his merits is the instantaneous legibility: clear, sharp and the pureness, of his designs.

Copying faithfully the shapes and lines of Nature, synthesizing them but not falsifying them, he achieves in his creations a sober simplicity." 4

full of grace

HOUSE SPARROWS

for Joe and U. T. Summers

Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class
Of traveler, nor that rarified tax bracket,
These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts
Under our eaves,
nesting in withered grass,
Wormless but hopeful,
and now their voice enacts
Forsythian spring with primavernal racket.

Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray
Of doggedness, of mist, magnolia bark.
Salt of the earth, they are;
the common clay;
Meek emigres come over on the Ark
In steerage from the
Old Country of the Drowned
To settle down along Long Island Sound,

Flatbush, Weehawken,
our brownstone tenements,
Wherever the local idiom is Cheep.
Savers of string, meticulous and mild,
They are given to nervous flight,
the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste
of the exiled.

Like all the poor, their safety
lies in numbers
And hardihood and anonymity
In a world of dripping browns and
duns and umbers.
They have inherited the lower sky,
Their Lake of Constants,
their blue modality
That they are borne upon
and battered by.

Those little shin-bones,
hollow at the core,
Emaciate finger-joints,
those fleshless wrists,
Wrapped in a wrinkled, loose, rice-paper skin,
As though the harvests of earth had never been,
Where have we seen such
frailty before?
In pictures of Biafra and Auschwitz.

Yet here they are,
these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful,
full of the grace
Of cheerfulness,
who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence
of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of "Summers, Summers, Summers."

Anthony Hecht

Copyright © Anthony Hecht

Copyright © 2009 Ploughshares