tea & reverie

Quote of the Day

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:22:13 GMT

From Studies in Prose and Verse (1908) by Arthur Symons.

A man who goes through a day without some fine emotion has wasted his day, whatever he has gained by it. And it is so easy to go through day after day, busily and agreeably, without ever really living for a single instant. Art begins when a man wishes to immortalise the most vivid moment he has ever lived. Life has already, to one not an artist, become art in that moment. And the making of one’s life into art is after all the first duty and privilege of every man. It is to escape from material reality into whatever form of ecstasy is our own form of spiritual existence.

Quote of the Day

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:02:12 GMT

From Painting in the Far East (1908) by Laurence Binyon.

Flowers, Moon, Snow; these three beauties of earth and air have a peculiar glory and consecration in the art of the Far East. A Japanese friend of mine told me that when he was in Paris he woke one morning to find that snow had fallen in the night. As a matter of course, he took his way to the Bois de Boulogne to admire the beauty of the snow upon the trees. What was his astonishment when, with his friend, another Japanese, he arrived in the Bois, to find it totally solitary and deserted! The two companions paid their vows to beauty in the whiteness and the stillness, and at last beheld in the distance two other figures approaching. They were comforted. “We are not quite alone,” they said to themselves. There were at least two other “just men” in that city of the indifferent and the blind. The figures drew nearer. They also were Japanese! We in Europe are not blind to the beauty of the snow “And the radiant shapes of frost,” but certainly we are far from having that kind of religious feeling which prompts the Japanese to go out and contemplate its freshly fallen splendour. We do not regard it as visible manifestation of beauty, the apparition of a power from the unseen, at whose coming it behoves them to be present. I am not sure that we are not more conscious of the inconveniences of a snowfall than of its loveliness.

Quote of the Day, Winter

Quote of the Day

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:46:10 GMT

From The Vision of Asia (1933) by L. Cranmer-Byng:

The gift of the Chinese nation at its zenith to the future was the gift of vitality through art. Its interpreters were interpreters of life and not of theory about life. They were citizens of this world, and as administrators, magistrates and even soldiers they played the part of men in public affairs. But the life from which they drew their power of evoking life, of calling the dreaming forces of Nature from their enchanted sleep, remains hidden from the eyes of the world. It is not for Art to reveal its Whence; the secret of its magic belongs to religion. Yet those who care to go deeper into the sources of human inspiration may find something to guide them in the following passage taken from an ancient Taoist text: ‘The essence of the perfect Tao is solitude and silence; the highest point of the perfect Tao, its further pole, is secrecy and silence; there, where is neither sight nor sound, where the spirit is centered in absolute peace; where, sans effort from within or movement from without, calm complete and perfect purity are Kings; where the spiritual essence dies not and dims not; where thought irradiates to its fullest splendour and the hidden life puts forth its flowers; where I—the strength within, close-shrined from all externals, all apprehensive, compact of wisdom and intimate power—know how to guard the self of self and secure the harmony of all my being.’

Aesthetics, Daoism, Quote of the Day

One Perfect Day

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:22:59 GMT

There are times in my life when I wish I could live a more bohemian existence in a large city, where I would have access to museums, cultural events, and Whole Foods. But on a day like today, when I have a view like this outside my back door, I always want to stay right where I am:

God’s World, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,–Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,–let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Autumn

Dharana for the Month

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:10:22 GMT

106. I am existing. This is mine. This is this. O Beloved, even in such know illimitably.

Vijnana Bhairava

Dharana for the Month

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:24:54 GMT

16. In the beginning and gradual refinement of the sound of any letter, awake.

Vijnana Bhairava

Spectra

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:00:40 GMT

Recently, thanks to Algabal, I discovered a wickedly delicious volume of poetry called Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, written by Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, and published in 1916. Spectra was a literary hoax which fooled just about everyone who mattered in literary America of 1916, up to and including Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters and William Carlos Williams. The book is fabulous nonsense from beginning to end. It begins with a gasbag manifesto explaining how the spectrist “movement” was supposed to be about the colors of the spectrum and and how they produce “spectres”, or something like that. Then you get to the poetry, which contain a howler in practically every line. Bynner used the pseudonym of Emanuel Morgan, while Ficke was Anne Knish. Further details of the hoax are online here.

I have long admired Bynner’s work–he produced a wonderful translation of Chinese poetry, The Jade Mountain (1929), and an excellent version of the Tao Te Ching: The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu (1944). Ficke is not as well known but deserves to be. Google Book Search has some of Bynner early work online here, and Ficke’s here. Spectra was their only joint effort and deserves to be rediscovered.

Particularly at the present time. One of the most interesting aspects of Spectra is the remarkable similarity of the spoof poems to what passes for “serious” poetry here in the 21st century. Study the pomposity, the flights of inanity, the disconnectedness, and the pretentiousness on display in Spectra, and behold, you will discover identical crap everywhere in cutting edge contemporary poetry—especially the stuff on display at The Page. Sometimes, whenever I am feeling sufficiently masochistic, I try to search through the prestige offerings at this prestige site, but what I always seem to discover are nice little doohickeys like this, which starts off:

Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

in a language nobody understands in the least —

There is no duck.

But the dog, all upholstered in white plush —
the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

Years and years — that’s how much time passes.
All in a dream. But the duck —
no one knows what happened to that.

Witter and Arthur, where are you when we need you? Why doesn’t someone write spoofs of the prize winning doggerel being tossed about these days? Well, maybe one day it will actually happen. So ye of the fancy MFA degrees: beware! beware! There really is a duck! With my own eyes I have seen the duck! One of these days the duck is going to stomp out all of academe’s lethally boring postmodern vacuousness, and then you will be seen for the frauds that you are!

Spectra is now available at my website here. Read and enjoy. As for me, whenever I want my poetry fix, looks like I’ll have to stick with the fin-de-siècle, or the Romantics, or the Elizabethans, and or maybe even with old Epicurean fogies like Virgil, Horace, and Lucretius.

American Literature

Moon Festival

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 11:23:25 GMT

My favorite holiday is that of the Oriental Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, which is occurring in a few days on September 15. The Moon Festival has been celebrated in Asian countries for at least 3,000 years. In September of each year the moon comes closest to the earth, which makes it the brightest and most beautiful lunar spectacle of the year. If you’re the sort of person who is always trying to find ways to bring beauty into your life, you need to make some time in your life to commune with the moon.

I always celebrate my lunar festival with a nice pot of tea (Lapsang Souchong for me this year), and some treats. Traditionally at their Moon Festivals the Chinese would consume mooncakes made with sugar, egg yolks and lard, which sound about as delectable as boiled suet pudding. Here in the 21st century we could do with something a little less stolid. This year I’m planning on frozen peach yogurt (homemade of course), along with the tea. All of which will be a perfect accompaniment to the anticipated lunar enchantment. And the enchantment is what matters. You can never get enough of the moon. If you are the sort of person who never bothers to notice the moon, or meditate
with the moon, or absorb the moon’s energies into your being, you have my sympathy. You don’t know what you’re missing. Contemplation of the moon’s enchanted glow can give us one of the most sublime sensations we can experience in our lives.

But is that supposed to matter? What the heck are you supposed to get out of this, anyway? Some kind of stupendous mystical revelation from all that moonlight getting shoved into your eyes? Well, British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins believed that if you look at something with enough careful attention, you will sense that it is gazing back. Said he: "What you look hard at seems to look hard at you." Good mystical visionary that Hopkins was, he would have been able to tell is whether or not something non-human was actually gazing back at him.

All of which means that if you actually do make some time in your life to
gaze at the moon with care and attention, then …

Moon

Flying from Star to Star

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:26:38 GMT

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one book that I am always continually rereading. One of the most famous statements in the whole seven volume saga comes in Chapter 2 of The Captive:

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

This quotation pretty much sums up one of the most important themes of the book: the narrator's growth in aesthetic sensitivity. As the novel unfolds we see the narrator responding to art, to music, to literature, with ever increasing intelligence. Proust gives us portraits of three spiritual masters in his book: Elstir the painter, Vinteuil the composer, and Bergotte the writer. The narrator's encounters with their genius enriches his life and ultimately leads to the triumphant conclusion of the novel, when he realizes that great art can not only allow him to escape the constraints of space and time, but give spiritual meaning to his life.

I always learn something new whenever I reread Proust, but for a long time I have struggled with this essential idea, namely seeing the universe through the eyes of another. We can, of course, look at a painting of a great master, or listen to some magnificent music, but how are we supposed to get inside the mind of the artist or the composer who created it? You can spend hours listening to Debussy (one of the models for Vinteuil), but how would this give you any kind of insight into his spiritual vision? There seemed to be some kind of secret to the trick which I wasn't picking up on. Critical works on Proust were of little or no help. I dutifully slogged my way through books like Alain de Botton's utterly frivolous How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), but was usually left at a loss.

All this changed several weeks ago when I discovered Jan Walsh Hokenson's Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics. French Literature, 1867-2000 (2004). This book has proved to be the most illuminating work of literary criticism which I have read in many years. Hokenson examines the liberating effect that Japanese art had on French culture starting in the middle of the 19th century. We have all heard the story about how the discovery of lost texts and art from classical antiquity stimulated the burst of artistic creativity which we now call the Renaissance. What is less known is how the the discovery of Japanese ways of interpreting the world provoked an equally profound stimulus to western culture in the late 19th century. American, British and French artists and writers were all astonished, amazed, and inspired when they discovered Japanese art.

Unlike China or India, Japan had been pretty much unknown territory until the middle of the 19th century. While people in the west had long admired Chinese aesthetic techniques, no one had ever had any solid knowledge of Japanese art until their woodblock prints began to make their way to the rest of the world, most especially the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. The effect of these prints was electrifying on the visual artists of the day, suffering as they were under the heavy hand of an exhausted academic tradition. The prints' bold ink drawings, flat vibrant colors, lively diagonals, and images of clarity and simplicity, simply knocked everybody's heads off. The artists who were most greatly impacted by these prints are now the ones whom we consider to be among the greatest of their time, such as Whistler, Monet, and van Gogh.

But French writers were also profoundly stirred by Japanese art. Hokenson shows how writers like the Goncourt Brothers fashioned whole novels (such as their Manette Salomon (1886), around Japanese ways of seeing. Emile Zola was also deeply impressed by this radical new way of interpreting the world. His La curée (1871) is basically an extended meditation on the need for a new way to see. The heroine of this book comes to grief partially because she cannot perceive her circumstances with any kind of clarity, the kind to be found when you can look upon the world through the eyes of a Japanese master. Zola's later book, L'oeuvre (1886), concerns an artist who is unable to live up to his potential, mainly because he does not learn the lessons that the revolutionary new Japanese aesthetics provide. Zola understood something which his characters do not: Japanese aesthetics can provide you with a whole new way of being in the world.

Hokenson's chapter on Proust is the most enlightening in the book. Indeed, this chapter is probably the single most brilliant piece of Proustian criticism I have ever read. It finally answered some of my most basic questions about the book's thematic unity. Hokenson shows us that Proust had been as powerfully impressed by Japanese aesthetics as had Zola, Monet and Debussy. Indeed, the famous opening scene of the novel, when the narrator receives a metaphysical earthquake as he sips a very ordinary cup of tea, is framed in terms of a Japanese work of art:

And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

Well, there it is, a Japanese reference which I had never really noticed before, even though I had read this passage many times. Hokenson goes on to show us how Japanese references, Japanese aesthetics, Japanese ways of seeing are emphasized through the rest of the saga. The long drawn-out aesthetic apprenticeship of the narrator is at bottom quite simple: it is a way to attain the "Japanese way of seeing", which Hokenson summarizes as "(a) a non-European relation to nature, (b) imaginative activity in the mind, and (c) evanescence and fugitive impressions in art." It is an aesthetics of "simplicity, suggestion, indeterminacy, and impersonality".

Time and again throughout the novel, Hokenson shows us that Japanese aesthetics are emphasized at critical points in the story. What is interesting is that these aesthetics provide a way out of the emotional pain which the narrator is constantly experiencing. The novel progresses almost unrelentingly through constant disappointment and unhappiness, not only of the narrator but of the other principal characters, such as Charles Swann. Unlike Swann, however, the narrator ultimately does find an escape from his distress, thanks to his slowly acquired Japanese way of seeing. Not just seeing, mind you, but creating (the 3,000 page novel, after all, can be summarized as man drinks tea and writes book). Artistic creation is ultimately presented as the novel's greatest value, as it provides the narrator with the greatest joy and happiness he has ever known.

Hokenson also states: "The emphasis [in Japanese art] is no longer on resplendence but on simplicity, purity of line and form, spare vivid contrasting colors, delicacy of method, and suggestion of unstated essence ... The artwork therefore entails, radically requires, two moments in time, the moment of creation and the moment of affective recreation." This last is also very important. The greatest value of Japanese art is the way it stimulates the viewer's imagination: "the artist's economy of means and radical simplification operate suggestively to provoke, in the viewer, an affective experience—comparable to the artist's at the moment of creation—and an imaginative completion (of the image, locus, motion) in the mind." This is why Japanese art is so powerful. You are no longer a passive spectator being bludgeoned by academicians but an active co-creator, along with the artist, of what is being depicted. When you respond to a work of art like this, you are then able to enter into "a new order of reality."

Hokenson has many other brilliant insights in her book, both about Proust and other French writers, too many of which to be summarized here. But here I must confess that I found the second half of the book, when she discusses 20th century writers, to be weak. The first author she talks about after Proust is Paul Claudel, whom I had never read. I immediately went in search of his more well-known works but found them to be dated, superficial and pretentious (sample sentence: "London is a city composed of body parts.") Hokenson also gives us a detailed account of Roland Barthes' Oriental peregrinations, but she never quite seems to realize that he is coming across as a ridiculous poseur (probably because he actually was a ridiculous poseur). Her discussion of the two celebrated Marguerites (Yourcenar and Duras) is more insightful but will be appreciated only by those who like their fiction bland and humorless. As for me, I gave up on their kind of "literary" fiction a long time ago.

Nevertheless, Hokenson's insights into Proust have caused a major shift in my own life and have deepened my appreciation of his masterpiece. If you want to find a whole new way of being in the world, if you really do want to fly from star to star, all you need to do is start practicing the Japanese way of seeing. Keep your mind receptive and calm. Strive to maintain your clarity of vision. Pay careful attention to the natural world, most especially its color and light and space. When you encounter a work of art, take time not just to perceive it, but to recreate it within your own being. And--best of all--start studying the old Japanese masters who started the fuss in the first place. This is easy enough to do these days, thanks to the internet. Hokusai's prints can be found here, and Hiroshige's here.

Welcome

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:14:32 GMT

Here you will find a record of the literary, aesthetic, and philosophical adventures of an overworked and underpaid secretary living in a small Midwestern town.