Kusamakura

  In this state of mind, it strikes me that my barber is a fine subject for a picture or a poem, so I remain squatting there companionably, chatting about this and that, long past the time I should have left. Then suddenly a little priest’s shaved head slips in between the shop curtains.

  “Excuse me, could you do me a shave?” he says, and in he comes. He’s a very jolly-looking little priest, in a white cotton gown with a padded rope belt and a black priest’s robe of coarse gauze draped over it.

  “Ryōnen! How’s it going? I’ll bet the abbot told you off the other day for dawdling, huh?”

  “Not a bit of it. He gave me a pat on the back.”

  “Pat on the back because you went off on an errand and managed to pull out a fish while you were at it, huh?”

  “He said he was pleased I’d given myself such a good time; it goes to show I’m wiser than my years.”

  “No wonder yer head’s all swelled up like that. Just look at those lumps. Dreadful business to shave such a badly behaved noggin. Well, I’ll let you off this time. But you just mold it into better shape before you bring it here again.”

  “If I have to remold it to suit you, it’s easier to take it to a better barber.”

  The barber laughs. “Head’s shaped funny, but you sure got a quick tongue.”

  “As for you, your hands are hopeless at shaving, but they sure know how to lift a sake cup.”

  “Whaddya mean ‘hopeless at shaving,’ goddamn you!”

  “I didn’t say it, the abbot did. No need to lose your cool. Come on now, act your age.”

  “Hrrmph. No joke—isn’t that right, mister?”

  “What?”

  “These priest types, they all live the easy life perched up there in their temples. No wonder their tongues get so quick off the mark. Even this young feller, he’s forever shootin’ his mouth off—oops, head to the side a bit—to the side, I said, dammit—I’ll give ya a cut if ya don’t do as yer told, got that? There’ll be blood, I’m warnin’ ya.”

  “Hey, that hurts! Don’t be so rough!”

  “This is nothin’. How ya goin’ to be a priest if ya can’t put up with a bit of pain, huh?”

  “I’m already a priest.”

  “Yer not the real thing yet. Speakin’ of which, why did that Taian die? Tell me.”

  “But Taian’s not dead.”

  “Not dead? Fancy that. I was sure he died.”

  “He turned over a new leaf after all that happened, and he went off to Daibaiji temple up in Rikuzen, to throw himself into his practice. He’ll have reached enlightenment by now, I should think. It’s a fine thing.”

  “What’s fine about it? Never heard of no Buddhist teaching that says it’s fine to do a flit like he did. You just look out, ya hear me? Don’t you go makin’ a fool of yerself with a woman. Speakin’ of women, that loony goes visiting the abbot, does she?”

  “I haven’t heard of any loony woman.”

  “Get it through that thick bald skull, come on. Does she go or doesn’t she?”

  “No loony goes to visit, but Shioda’s daughter certainly does.”

  “The abbot can pray all he likes, there’s no curin’ that one. That ex-husband of hers has cursed her.”

  “She’s a fine woman. The abbot has a lot of praise for her.”

  “Well, it beats me. Everything’s topsy-turvy once you’re up in that temple of yours. Whatever he says, a loony’s a loony—right, that’s yer head done. Off you go quick smart, and get yerself a scolding from the abbot.”

  “No, I’d rather take my time about it and get a pat on the back instead.”

  “Do as you like, you impudent twerp.”

  “Pah! You’re a shit-ass!”

  “What did you say?”

  But the freshly shaved head has already ducked through the shop curtains and is out in the spring breeze.

  CHAPTER 6

  It is evening. I settle at the desk, all the doors opened wide.

  Not only are there few people in this inn, but the building itself is relatively spacious, so that here in my room, separated as it is by winding corridors from the realm of human intercourse where those few dwell, not a sound comes to disturb my contemplations. And today all is quieter still. The master of the house, his daughter, and the male and female servants seem to have all departed and left me here alone—departed not to some ordinary place but to the land of mists perhaps, or to the realm of clouds. Or perhaps cloud and water have moved closer, so that their little boat drifts unawares upon a sea so calm that the hand is too languid to reach for the tiller, then floats off and away until the white sail seems to become one with water and cloud, until at last even the sail itself must scarcely know how it might differ from them—perhaps it is to this distant realm that they have all departed. Or perhaps they have suddenly disappeared into the depths of the spring, their mortal bodies now transformed to spirit mists there in the vast reaches between heaven and earth, too insubstantial to be visible any longer even to the microscope’s powerful eye. Or they have become skylarks, singing all day the delights of the mustard blossom’s gold, and now, as the light fades, soaring to where the evening’s deep violet trails its hues. Or perhaps as gadflies they have lengthened the long day with their labors, failing at the last to sip from the last flower’s center its sweet accumulated dew, and now they sleep a scented sleep, pillowed beneath some tumbled camellia blossom. Whatever may be the case, it certainly is quiet.

  The spring breeze that wafts emptily through the vacant house comes neither to gratify those who welcome it nor to spite those who would bar it. No, it is the spirit of the impartial universe, which comes of its own whim, and of its own whim departs again. Were my heart, as I sit here, chin cupped in propped palm, as empty as the room around me, the spring breeze would surely blow unbidden clean through it as well.

  Knowing that it is the earth that we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust. The reputation we grasp at, the glory that we seize, is surely like the honey that the cunning bee will seem sweetly to brew only to leave his sting within it as he flies. What we call pleasure in fact contains all suffering, since it arises from attachment. Only thanks to the existence of the poet and the painter are we able to imbibe the essence of this dualistic world, to taste the purity of its very bones and marrow. The artist feasts on mists, he sips the dew, appraising this hue and assessing that, and he does not lament the moment of death. The delight of artists lies not in attachment to objects but in taking the object into the self, becoming one with it. Once he has become the object, no space can be found on this vast earth of ours where he might stand firmly as himself. He has cast off the dust of the sullied self and become a traveler clad in tattered robes, drinking down the infinities of pure mountain winds.

  It’s not because I wish to put on superior airs to browbeat those who are tainted with the marketplace that I thus strive to imagine this realm. My only intention is to tell the happy news of the salvation that lies there and to beckon those who have ears to hear. The fact of the matter is that the realms of poetry and art are already amply present in each one of us. Our years may pass unheeded until we find ourselves in groaning decrepitude, but when we turn to recollect our life and enumerate the vicissitudes of our history and experience, then surely we will be able to call up with delight some moment when we have forgotten our sullied selves, a moment that lingers still, just as even a rotting corpse will yet emit a faint glow. Anyone who cannot do so cannot call his life worth living.

  Yet the joys of the poet do not lie simply in immersing oneself in some moment, and becoming one with some particular object. At times one
may become the petal of a flower or a pair of butterflies, or again like Wordsworth one may let one’s heart be tossed in the blessed breeze as a crowd of daffodils. But there are also times when the ineffable beauty around one, some presence one can scarcely grasp, mysteriously masters the heart. One person will speak of being brushed by the shimmering winds of heaven and earth. Another will say he hears in his soul the harmonies of nature’s ethereal harp. Yet another may describe lingering in some incomprehensible and inexplicable realm without boundary or limit, or wandering in the misty far reaches of the world. People may describe it as they will. Into just such a state of mind have I fallen as I sit here at my desk, spellbound and with a vacant gaze.

  Clearly I am thinking about nothing. I am most certainly looking at nothing. Since nothing is present to my consciousness to beguile me with its color and movement, I have not become one with anything. Yet I am in motion: motion neither within the world nor outside it—simply motion. Neither motion as flower, nor as bird, nor motion in relation to another human, just ecstatic motion.

  If I were pressed to explain, I would want to say that my heart is moving with the spring. Or that some spirit—compounded of all the colors of spring, its breezes, its various elements, and its many voices, condensed, kneaded together into a magic potion that is then dissolved into an elixir in the realm of the immortals and condensed to a vapor in the warmth of Shangri-la’s sunlight—such a spirit has slipped in, unbeknownst to me, through my pores and has saturated my heart. Normally some stimulant provokes a sense of oneness, and this is why the experience is enjoyable. But in this experience of mine I can’t say what I’ve merged with, so it entirely lacks a specific stimulant. For this very reason, however, it produces a fathomless and inexpressible pleasure. I’m not speaking of some superficial and boisterous elation, waves tossed in the abstracted mind by a pummeling wind. No, rather my state is like a vast ocean that moves between one far continent and another above invisible depths of ocean floor. It lacks the vigor that this image suggests—but that is all to the good, for where great energy arises, a hidden fear of the time when that energy consumes itself and comes to an end is always present. In normal circumstances there is no such fear. And in my present, even more tenuous state, I am not only far removed from all such sorrow at the thought of a dwindling of sustaining energy, I am indeed quite freed from the everyday condition of man, in which the heart knows judgment of good and bad, right and wrong. I say that my state is “tenuous” only in the sense that it is ungraspable, not to suggest that it is unduly feeble. Poetic expressions such as “sated with tranquillity” or “sunk in a halcyon calm” perhaps most fully and finely express such a state of mind.

  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.1 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. 2 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.3 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.