Some thoughts upon the reading of Tanizaki

Tanizaki's life doubles up on itself, in the shape of the letter U. He started out as a Westernizing Young Turk -- from Tokyo, too: through which all foreign ignorance and diseases enter -- the fish rots from the head, don't you know. But he ended up as a back-to-our-(Japanese)-roots cultural conservative -- and even moved to Kyoto -- the delicious Hana no Kyoto, the cultural capital, away from the Tokyo head-rot.

How very moving, say the critics -- a Damascus like conversion. They point to Some Prefer Nettles as the inflection point. They point to the Bunraku in it as the beginning of Tanizaki's interest in Japanese traditional arts.

Too bad about the Bunraku in it, though: I could have written those bits. Why, I could have written them better: to write them better would not have been very hard.

For instance, Tanizaki's discussion of the art form (through the father-in-law's lips) proposes that puppets are to be appreciated in proportion to their life-likeness. Thus, he argues that western marionettes are inferior to Bunraku because they are not as lifelike as Bunraku. (Tanizaki must not have seen good western marionettes).

But any seasoned puppet-theater connoisseur knows that a puppet's excellence lies precisely in its puppet-likeness; that is to say, in the ways in which it explores puppethood; in all the wonderful and surprising ways, in other words, in which puppets are unlike men. Indeed, this is puppet theater's whole -- and only -- aesthetic rationale -- to be unlike the life it depicts. It would have no business existing otherwise (since live actors will always be more lifelike than puppets). Was it Grotowski? Theater which pretends to be life is not a theater, it is a pretense.

Nettles' other traditional bit -- Tanizaki's comparisons between the Osaka and Tokyo singing styles -- is mere obfuscation, too. But let us not be harsh: it is extraordinarily difficult to think about music even for those who understand something of its structure. (It may seem to the speaker to be weighty and meaningful to say, as Tanizaki does, that a certain song sounds vulgar but, in fact, what needs to be observed is that it is unusually low-pitched, for instance).

And so, while I had hoped that Nettles might be an interesting discussion of Bunraku, set, like stones in a bracelet, in any old narrative, treated as a mere excuse for taking up Bunraku, Nettles' best bits turn out -- disappointingly -- the central love story, after all. But these bits read autobiographical, and autobiographical in the worst of all autobiographical ways: they read like the autobiography of a writer whose greatest claim to interest was that -- he was one; which isn't much interest really. (How interesting is a guy who sits all day at his desk, writing?) The autobiography is dull and the character uninteresting. Sorry.

Perhaps the problem lies in Tanizaki's productivity. Perhaps he was too busy writing to have any time left to experience, learn and digest; as a result, there is not enough content in the words. Try to do less, young man, they should teach at the school of creative writing. (Do they?) "Do not try to write thirty novels in your lifetime, young man; only God and Thomas Mann could write more than one good novel in their lifetimes, and both are dead."

Why, when one studies a foreign language, it is safe to assume that one needs to do at least four hours of homework for every hour of classwork; when one writes about art, the ratio has got to be even greater: one needs to spend a year at a minimum studying an art-form before one can hope to write an intelligent page about it; if then.

I would dearly have loved to read a good novel about some traditional art of Japan, but Tanizaki's isn't it. Kawabata's Old Capital is far more successful in this regard. Perhaps because it is Kawabata's last novel: he'd had fifty years of art appreciation behind him at the time of writing. He'd done his homework.

We should be glad of Tanizaki's U-turn, of course: he spent the last 25 years of his life rewriting Genji Monogatari into modern Japanese (the tenth century classic is too archaic for anyone to read today). This is, arguably his greatest contribution to civilization. But it does him little credit that his U-turn simply tracked state policy: Tanizaki westernized when the government policy called for westernization; and he began to go "native" just as the state propaganda turned nationalist. I am not saying he was slavishly following party-line, but he certainly wasn't going against the grain. Kawabata's (and Mishima's) Japaneseness is more convincing: they embraced it against the (again) westernizing policies of the post-war state.

To me, Nettles' only convincing section was Tanizaki's discussion of how Japanese cities rapidly uglified during modernization. This isn't a Japanese phenomenon alone: cities uglify everywhere equally, as if following some universal law of nature: all corpses rot, all cities develop. Development, it seems, necessitates ugliness. (De Soto, a Peruvian economist, explains why: they grow too fast to stay pretty. He promises hope: what are today relatively pretty parts of central London were as recently as 1840 god-awful slums. Just wait 170 years, it'll get better, it might seem. Why even Tokyo might look OK by the year 2080).

It occurs to me that the longing for the past which men like Tanizaki and Kawabata experienced was perhaps not the longing for national roots or authenticity but a flight from the ugliness of development.

Why should development be ugly? Why was the past so much prettier?

One could think up a million ad hoc theories. But -- are they? Were they? Is it possible that what survives of the past comes down to us as it were through a sieve, filtered; only the good survives, the bad having been eliminated and recycled? Has the past, so to speak, been censored for us by our ancestors?

Perhaps. If so, I wish we were censoring the present more actively.

More blatant voyerism

And how about this girl, eh.

Cup with curved rim and qingbai glaze, Northern Song, 11th century, Jiangxi, or perhaps Fanchang county, Anhui, height 7.3 cm.

The word used in the business for a perfect shape like this is "finely potted"; and she is: she shows off that which is best about Chinese porcelain (thanks to the world's best kaolin): it is very pliable when soft and extremely hard once fired, making it possible to produce very thin, fine shapes.


The catalog:

Qingbai wares were made over a fairly long period of time, from the early Northern Song period to the middle of the Yuan period. Their evolution follows a trajectory familiar for many types of wares: the earliest examples are finely made and take their inspiration from already popular wares made at other kilns (...); then there is a period of growing confidence, when the potters develop and perfect their styles -- the classical period; then attention turns to maximizing profit and methods of improving production, such as upside-down firing; and, finally, quality starts to drop off and an attempt is made to cover the deficiency with extravagant decoration and novelties.

Of course, art historians of Chinese pottery are interested in this trajectory model because its automatic application helps them "date" pieces (rather dubiously, I should think); but there is something convincing about it: it may seem to fit many other art forms -- consider the trajectory of Italian painting between 1400 and 1750. There are probably important psychological and economic reasons why this should be so; it bears thinking about, does it not.

But enough theorizing. Look here: the superiority of porcelain over plastic no longer lies in color and shine; but it still lies in the feel of things (porcelain is heavy, hard and cool); and -- in texture. If you look closely at the piece you can just make out (despite my bad photography) that the color of the qingbai glaze is not as smooth to the eye as its surface is smooth to touch. Rather, if you look very closely you will see that the color looks like curdled milk: with more or less uniform-sized fat bits of white swimming in a somewhat darker shade of white. (Click to enlarge).



In this, qingbai is like Lucknawi emrboidery: white on white. (You see a fellow in a shirt and it looks kind of crumpled, like he forgot to iron it. But then you look closer and -- oh my god -- it is covered with a field of tiny flowers!) There is a moment of wonderful surprise; and the pleasure of knowing that we have seen something most will never do.

Dancing pork bellies

I don't know who Francisco Capelo is, but the man sure has taste. Wow. Taste most commensurate with his (obviously) pretty ample financial firepower, too: the show of his Chinese pottery collection at the Madre de Deus (a.k.a. Museu Nacional de Azulejo)-- that would be Mister Tile Museum to you -- is a merciless progression of take-no-prisoners masterpieces.

Through this magical forest the (very) occasional French, German or Spanish tourist marches briskly with barely the time for an occasional snapshot.

I carried away 450 photos. Here are five.

This piece is a tripod censer with a purple-splashed jun-ware glaze, Jin or Yuan dynasty, ca. 13th century, 7.3 cm high. It is also a meibutsu, having once been owned by the Moris of Hiroshima.

Look at the detail of the crackle (and, as they say on porn websites, "click to enlarge yourself"):


The mouth is a kind of blunderbuss -- it's pure pornography, really -- :


And look at this lady's stubby feet jammed into the world's pointiest stilettos:

Would not these tiny trotters make the world's most delicious pie-de-cochon?

And do be my guest, go ahead, take a prurient peek (in the privacy of your cabin) at her incredibly erotic belly (no, love, please, never lose a gram of weight, do not, I repeat, do not change a thing):

*

Jun wares -- writes the catalog learnedly, if ungrammatically -- are among the most fascinating and controversial Chinese ceramics. Unlike most greenish- or bluish glazed wares, which rely for their color on mineral oxides, it turns out to be very difficult to understand how the typical thickly-bubbled Jun glaze generates its characteristic opalescent blue color. Current theory holds that it is generated by a phenomenon called "liquid-liquid phase separation" in which glasses in the glaze separate out within other glasses during cooling. When light strikes the glaze, it is scattered by the glass-like particles in the glaze and produces the same sort of effect as when light from the sun is scattered by the atmosphere and appears blue to our eyes.

There, fellows, the girl wears the sky for a dress.

*

The Francisco Capelo of the collection is probably not this Francisco Capelo, but I rather liked the idea that he might be: "Yeah," his collection set by side with his portfolio would be telling us, "I sell this stuff because I can -- God only knows why; and also because I just don't want to keep it around the house (I mean, would you?); then I use the proceeds to buy something of universal and eternal value whose quality I could not hope to match in a thousand years. For me, it is a win-win situation."

(In financial markets, this would be termed arbitrage).

An introductory textbook in ep theory of art

Dennis Dutton does not really say anything new to me; his arguments rehash things already said by others -- Tooby and Comides, Pinker, Boyer, Dessanayake. But his book is the first presentation of evolutionary psychology theory focused entirely on the question of art; and for art lovers like you, this well may be just the introductory text you have been waiting for.

In great abbreviation, his point is that there really is such a thing as art -- a certain kind of human activity present in all peoples and all cultures, genetically inborn, which unfolds in us spontaneously because it is part of the behavioral DNA package. He speaks with a special kind of expertise (which I recognize as of my own sort): as a youth he has studied the sitar in Hyderabad; and more recently, tribal wood carving in New Guinea. Which means that he knows first-hand about art and art-experience in other cultures, something which the usual grand theorists of culture - Danto, Barthes et al. - do not.

Watch this lecture (about 1 hour) to get a better sense of the theory.

Or just read the book.

Unsinn

Last Sunday I listened to a "cultural" program on the BBC; or so its title said. As it went on, I grew more and more alarmed, eventually, as a sort of self-defense, I suppose, breaking out in loud, silly guffaws, and going into spasms -- which in turn ruined my breakfast.

The program went something like this.

Some East End gallery specializes in up and coming artists ("buy it for a penny, sell it for a pound"); some of these artists were then interviewed: one, a Pakistani, makes large installations of planes locked up in huge blocks of ice which then slowly melt under harsh lights (yeah, duuude! pass the sheesha!); the interviewer asks her: you wear a chador (‘conservative’) but you make such modern works! (She doesn’t have a damn clue, does she?)

Meanwhile at the White House the What's-their-names are assembling a collection of borrowed art; it’s all modern (i.e. post-1950) of course, and American (probably has to be), including someone’s mediation on the square (!); except a DAY-ga (American enough when you pronounce it that way); except this last is judged risque (hush: legs); but the former first lady was also cultured, we are told: she owned a de Koenig (along with hyper-realist representations of West Texas landscape). Ah, the uncultured me: who de hoeck was de Koenig?

(Ah... upon consideration, don't tell me, I don't want to know).

Then, we were told, an Algerian band in France plays an electric oud. (Lousily, as it happens). You play such a mix of traditional and modern! gushes the interviewer.

(Huh?)

*

Sorry, I don’t understand this language, though everyone around me seems to.

Here, for instance, is Florian Zeller (who?) invited to speak at a kind of book fair in Egypt (probably because no one better would go), offering the humid fruit of his precious brain-tree:

if the Islamic world generally had difficulties with the novel, it was because it was living to a large extent in an era that belonged to the period before modern times, bogged down in archaisms that were by their essence incompatible with the foundations of the novel: freedom, fantasy, complexity, the ambiguity of all truths and the suspension of moral judgement. In this respect, the novel could easily become the battle ground between two civilisations.

(Er? Has Zeller ever read any archaic poetry, either Islamic or -- European? And if so, which part of his anatomy does he use to think (and speak) about it?)

The terrible thing: he thinks this drivel actually means something; and – oh, emperor’s new clothes! -- his Egyptian colleagues believe him! How's that for conversation: you issue forth a series of grunts, pretending that you're saying something; then, in turn, they do the same, pretending their grunts are a meaningful response. It's possible to keep this up for quite some time!

How do you explain to these... village people that the language they speak –which happily interchanges modern, western, good, inevitable, free, sexually liberated, and cultured is incoherent; that it is broken; that it means nothing; that it is impossible to say or think in it anything that makes any sense at all and that by speaking it they just bury themselves in some horrendous dark hole of the mind?

But then -- what could possibly be the point of explaining?

The only thing we can do

X thinks that Barry Lyndon is visually lovely, has good costumes, landscapes and interiors, but little more than an ordinary story. Last year, Y said precisely the same thing about another old favorite of mine, Visconti's Senso.

I wonder what my friends would think constitutes an extraordinary story?

And is an extraordinary story possible? Life's not a terribly complicated business: a limited number of possible life goals (food, shelter, sex, freedom, happiness, knowledge, skill) combined with a limited number of possible relationships (parents/children, siblings/friends/allies, lovers, masters/slaves, strangers, enemies) ends up generating a rather small grid of possible plots. 6 x 7 = 42, says math. 36 says Polti. 20 says Tobias. 7 says the volunteer librarian Jessamyn West.¹

Really, the only thing we can do is tell an old story well -- beautifully, if we can, or with suspense, if we can't. The story itself cannot possibly matter, because, if you think about it, every new story you ever hear, you have heard already.

There is a kind of delightfully youthful innocence about the complaint that X tells an ordinary, old story: it is the charming expectation that new, different, surprising stories are possible.

*

PS. Here is a well written novel review, oblique to this post:

Let's see: In many key aspects, Jane Eyre rewrites Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Gaskell's North and South and Browning's Aurora Leigh rewrites Jane Eyre. One conclusion might be, therefore, that reusing plots is not in the least a problem. Of course Vergil also self-consciously rewrites Homer, and Milton both Homer and Milton (and quite a few others). Is the limited number of plots a problem, then, or an advantage — a bug or a feature?

Love in middle age orSame Old Same Old, part 1orthe main reason to love art

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I do not much like being grown up and wise, Akhila said to me over a glass of something in the deep shade of the great Bo tree: a Bo tree as huge and as silent as a Gothic church.

(A Bo tree, just think!)

"For, although my mother, now 57, says to me 'I wish I had known at your age what you know at yours', the truth is that this knowledge is -- a burden. The truth is, my old friend, that premature wisdom is... bitter.

"Yes, it is useful to know with perfect 20/20 clarity just what motivates everyone around me, and thus how to press their buttons... and thus how to manipulate them efficiently into doing what I want. It makes one effective at business... look at this house all paid off at 32, and another one... And yes, it is good to know not to expect from people anything beyond that -- one saves herself so much disappointment by not entertaining silly expectations...

"And yet, it is -- disappointing, after all, I suppose -- tiresome -- dull -- to know that people are such simple creatures; that everything in life is so -- predictable; so -- unromantic; so -- mechanical; so -- mercenary... all of it... That everyone is just like everyone else... that they are all after the same things... and that one can trust no one at all, and never ever hope for anyone to surprise us...

"When I think about it now, I realize just how much I do not like it: there is a part of me which wishes I did not know; a part of me that wishes to be mystified, wide-eyed, amazed. I want to believe life is a mystery. I want to be in love -- yes, I suppose I do want to be in love -- which is, to my mind, a feeling of giving oneself to something bigger and better than oneself... of believing in goodness and friendship and -- well -- love.

"But, of course, it is impossible; at our age we know better; we have the perfect knowledge; the 20/20 vision. Zero illusion."

*

My lady Akhila's words do not surprise me.

They, too, are predictable: it is the voice of the middle age.

I once heard Joe Campbell saying the very same thing: by the time you are forty, you know what a person is going to say before they open their mouth; you know everything; everyone you meet you have met already in a different guise... everything someone else says you have heard... you are ready for -- a whole new movie.

And, of course, this has been my experience, too: same old, same old.

And, like Akhila, I am tired and bored of it.

The difference is that Joe Campbell was 52 when he pronounced those words; and I was forty when I understood them; but Akhila is... thirty-two. How terrifying it must be to be disillusioned at her age.

At her age I was still stupid enough to fall in love -- for what will be, I certainly hope, the last time.

*

There are, I say to her, two ways to cope.

The first is not to become cynical.

Cynical, think my friends, means not believing anyone we meet; assuming absolutely the worst about them; and then merely waiting to see how right we were in our initial estimation; waiting for them to prove themselves to be just what we thought they were in the first place. At which they do not usually disappoint.

But that is not correct; that is not the true meaning of being cynical. That is merely being realistic, practical, true to the our middle-age knowledge of people and the world. The species is ugly; its members are by and large a worthless waste of time.

This is god's own truth.

It is a fact of life.

But being cynical is not about knowing it, but about agreeing to be like them.

And this we must not do. Merely because x is a louse, why should I be the same? If x fails me as a friend, why should I fail him? The world is lousy, surely; but that does not mean I should be lousy myself, too, does it now?

So my friends can count on me even if I cannot -- and do not -- count on them. They are oftentimes lice, perhaps; sometimes lice squared, even; but I -- I shall be a reliable and trustworthy friend to them.

No one will ever catch me being a louse.

*

But the second way to cope is probably the better one -- fewer concerns with interpersonal relationships and character in it, certainly fewer disappointments -- it is to take an interest in art.

Every artistic technique -- whether it is weaving, or pottery, or painting, or metalworking -- is a kind of struggle with the technological limitations of the medium; within each there are numerous histories of multigenerational research projects each directed at the attainment of a particular result. In painting this may be the struggle to represent three dimensional space on a flat surface; or to represent texture -- glistening glass, fluffy fur, stubble; in Chinese pottery such projects included the quest for the color of sangue de boeuf; or for the perfect celadon crackle. Following these research projects is intellectually fascinating; but their ends are always fresh and new: they are far removed from the usual same old same old; which is why the artists followed them in the first place, I suppose. They, too, found the endless cycle of seduction and betrayal painful and -- dull. They, too, tried to get away -- and thanks to them now we can, too -- by following them down their paths.