Kusamakura

There is no avoiding suffering, rage, flailing, and weeping in the world of humankind. Heaven knows I have experienced them myself in the course of my thirty years, and I have had enough of them by now. I find it exhausting to be forced to experience these same tired stimuli yet again through a play or novel. The poetry I long for is not the kind that provokes this type of vulgar emotion. It is poetry that turns its back on earthly desires and draws onea€™s feelings for a time into a world remote from the mundane. No play, however bril iant, is free from human feelings. Rare is the novel that transcends questions of right and wrong. The characteristic of these works is their inability to leave the world behind. Particularly in Western poetry, based as it is on human affairs, even the most sublime poem can never aspire to emancipation from this vulgar realm. It is nothing but Compassion, Love, Justice, Freedoma€”such poetry never deals with anything beyond what is found in the marketplace of the everyday world. No matter how poetic it may be, its feet stay firmly on the ground; it has a permanent eye on the purse. No wonder Shel ey sighed so deeply as he listened to the skylark.

Happily, in the poetry of the Orient there are works that transcend such a state.

By my eastern hedge I pluck chrysanthemums,

Gazing serenely out at the southern hil s.1

Here we have, purely and simply, a scene in which the world of men is utterly cast aside and forgotten. Beyond that hedge there is no next-door girl peeping in; no friend is busy pursuing business deals among those hil s. Reading it, you feel that you have been washed clean of al the sweat of worldly self-interest, of profit and loss, in a transcendental release.

Seated alone in a deep bamboo grove

I pluck my lute, I hum a melody.

Nobody knows me here within this wood,

Only the bright moon comes to shine on me.2

In these few lines, the poet has constructed the space of a whole other universe. The virtues of this universe are not those of contemporary novels such as Hototogisu or Konjikiyasha. 3 They are virtues equivalent to those of a luxurious sleep that releases a mind exhausted by the world of steamships and trains, rights and duties, morals and manners.

If such restorative sleep is a necessity in this dawning twentieth century of ours, then the poetry of transcendence must be a precious thing.

Unfortunately, our poets today and their readers have al become infected by Western writers, and no more do they set off in a cheerful little boat upstream to a land of peace and tranquil ity.4 I am not a poet by profession, so my intention is not to preach the virtues of Wang Wei or Tao Yuanming to the modern world. Ita€™s just that, for myself, I find more healing for the heart in the delights of these poems than in the world of plays or dance parties. Such poetry gives me more pleasure than does Faust or Hamlet. This is precisely why I strol these spring mountains now with painting box and tripod slung on my back. I long to breathe and absorb the natural world of Yuanming and Wang Weia€™s poetry, to loiter awhile in the realm of unhuman detachment. Cal it a whim of mine.

Ia€™m a human and belong to the world of humans, of course, so for me the unhuman can last only so long, no matter how much I may enjoy it.

Yuanming too would not have spent the whole year simply gazing at the southern hil s, and I imagine Wang Wei was not a man to sleep happily without a mosquito net in that bamboo grove of his. If he had chrysanthemums to spare, Yuanming would have sold the lot to the local flower shop, and Wang Wei would have done a deal with his greengrocer over the bamboo shoots. And I am no different. No matter how I love the skylark and the mustard blossom, my desire for the unhuman doesna€™t extend to bedding down in the mountains for the night. Even up here, after al , one meets with other humans. You wil come across a fel ow with his kimono skirts tucked up at the back and a cloth draped over his head, or a girl in a red wraparound, and even an occasional long-faced horse. You may breathe in the rarefied air of this high altitude, deep among the miles of encircling cypress trees, yet it stil holds the smel of man. Indeed, the place where I am headed tonight in search of peace across these mountains is the al -too-human realm of the hot spring inn at the vil age of Nakoi.

Nevertheless, how a thing looks depends on how you see it. a€?Listen to the bel ,a€ Leonardo da Vinci told his pupils. a€?It is a single sound, but you al hear it variously.a€ A man or a woman too wil appear very different depending on your point of view. Since Ia€™ve come here to devote myself to the unhuman, this is the perspective on humans that I wil take, and it is bound to be different from the view I would have from the midst of a life lived deep in the cramped little streets of the crowded world. Very wel , granted that I cana€™t altogether escape the realm of human feelings; at least I can probably maintain the light detachment experienced by the viewer of some classic Noh drama. The Noh drama, after al , has its human feelings. There is no guarantee you wona€™t weep at a play like Shichikiochi or Sumidagawa. 5 But what we experience in these plays is the effect of three parts human feeling to seven parts art. The pleasure we gain from a Noh play springs not from any skil at presenting the raw human feelings of the everyday world but from clothing feeling a€?as it isa€ in layer upon layer of art, and in a kind of slowed serenity of deportment not to be found in the real world.

How would it be if I chose to view as actions in a Noh drama the events and people I meet with in the course of this journey? Of course I cana€™t altogether do away with human feeling, but since this journey is essential y poetic in intent, it would be good to use the a€?unhumana€ I seek to good effect and row its little boat as far upstream as possible. The southern hil s and bamboo groves of those ancient poems are of a different nature, of course; nor can I treat humans quite as I do the skylark and mustard blossom; but my ideal is to approach that state as far as possible and do al I can to view humans from its vantage point. The poet Basho after al , found elegance even in the horse peeing by his pil ow, and he composed a haiku about it.6 Let me emulate him, then, and deal with the people I meet on this journeya€”farmer, townsman, vil age clerk, old man, or old womana€”on the assumption that each is a smal component figure in a landscape scrol painting. Unlike figures in a painting, of course, they wil al be conducting their lives with a wil ful independence, but to treat them as a normal novelist woulda€”to pursue the reasons behind their individual actions, delve into their psychological workings, and go into al the ins and outs of their human entanglementsa€”would be merely vulgar.

Of course they may move about. One can view the figures in a painting as moving forms, after al . But however much they move, those figures remain confined to the flat surface. Once you conceive of them as leaping out of the painting, youa€™l find them bumping up against you, and youa€™l become ensnared in the troublesome business of self-interested interactions with them. And the more troublesome they become, the less able you are to view them aesthetical y. No, I shal aim to observe the people I meet from a lofty and transcendent perspective, and do my best to prevent any spark of human feeling from springing up between us. Thus, however animatedly they may move hither and yon, they wona€™t find it easy to make the leap across to my heart; I wil stand watching as before a picture, as they rush about inside it waving their arms. I can gaze with a calm and unflinching eye from the safe distance of three feet back. To express it another way: being free of self-interested motives, I wil be able to devote al my energy to observing their actions from the point of view of Art. With no other thought in mind, I wil