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New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics
Lady Kasa 730s “deep in the mountains sedges grow among the rocks with deep roots - the bond between our hearts I can never forget”
in a fine haiku little might be stated, but much suggested
wabi - the beauty of poverty in a tea ceremony sabi - lonely beauty in haiku yugen - mystery and depth, primarily in no theater
- fujiwara no ietaka for those who wait, only for flowers show them a spring of grass amid the snow in a mountain village
haiku and flamenco - 5 7 5 for haiku tanka 5-7-5-7-7 the optimal view of the moon - heighten by cloud covering or a tree. same with allure of distant mountains covered with mist and fog
In Heian courtship - there is a preference for hidden things again. The courtship ritual, the lady is situated inside a room adjacent to an open veranda with a shade or curtain drawn in-between. The arrangement gives a glimpse of the lady’s many layered komono peeking out beneath the curtain, a climpse that is sufficient to display her tastes and pique his interest. Participation of imagination is required to complete the experience.
The aesthetics of imperfection, desolation and agedness advocates transforming what would normally be a disappointing experience, such viewing the obscured moon, into a positive experience. Is it simply to exercise one’s imagination more?
borrowed scenery - shakkei, a garden concept where design takes advantage of what the site and materials have to offer, such as a mountain in the distance.
A philosophic grounding for japanese aesthetics Zen state - mushin “no mind, the mind without a mind, the flowering mind”
Language cannot put into words all that is felt and this true even in respect to ordinary love between human beings. We look for ways to express our love, and yet the expression is never complete and never completely adequate.
“one has come to see, with increasing clarity, the beauty that has been underfoot from the beginning, including heretofore unseen ‘something more’ has always been unseen yet quietly present as the sustaining undergarment of reality: the formless nothingness of Zen”
Cloud, Mist, Shadow, Shakuhachi yugen - there is no color in the sky, nor any sound - though we can give no definite reason for that, we are moved to tears. “gold-flecked lacquerware that set out in night, reflects the wavering candlelight”
“this shadowy scene permits free exercise of the imagination in picturing the scarlet leaves… far better than to see them spread out in dazzling clarity before our eyes”
Authority in Taste Hume - beauty was result of experience in education, men of taste assess worth. Kant - beauty and worth lay in the art.
Beauty as Ecstasy in the Aesthetics of Nishida and Schopenhauer Beauty as self-forgetting, an act of losing oneself in an aesthethic experience of art and nature
| Something so beautiful you instantly forget it, overcame by ecstasy - or/ something so beautiful it becomes indelible in the mind, distracting like an afterimage of the sun or a light in your eye
“A great man who is not only aloof from external matters but is also completely divorced from any thought of self-interest, reaches the point where everything in life gives a sense of beauty… there for if you want to obtain and authetic sense of beauty, you must confront things in a state of pure muga (no self, no ego)”
Schopenhauer - highest good in life is self-effacement and denial of he will, true will-lessness, which alone stills and silences forever the craving of the will. temporary ecstasy - occasional moment of will-less and selfless disintereseted aesthetic contemplation in beautiful art and nature eternal ecstasy - complete negation of the individual will by ascetism, moral transition from egoism to altruism (egoless compassion), and ultimately through resignation in an exalted state of holiness.
According to Schopenhauer, the artistic genius has an ability to sustain ecstatic state of disinterested will-less aesthetic contemplation of beauty in art and nature for a longer duration than normal.
Mise en Sen in No theater Mise en scene refers to the deployment of all aspects of the production that are intentionally shown to the audience.
The appreciative paradox of Japanese gardens Coleman: Suppose we are in the country. We might ask someone who is with us to look at the hills and valleys aesthetically, but never critically… Only if man’s efforts are mingled with the products of nature do we speak of criticism or juding or judgets. The critic supposes that the objects could have been otherwise and that as it is it is because someone designated them to be so. The design rests upon teh artist’s judgement, and just judgement can be good or bad, faulty or sure.
Savoring tastes - appreciating food in japan
The particular sense of satistfaction after eating a good japanese dinner is rarely accompanied by the feeling of overfullness - perhaps because the savoring of the visual and tactile encourages the eater to eat more slowly.
Whereas the western meal is a mostly linear affair, served in three or more courses, in the japanese case several smaller dishes are served at once, which affords the eater the freedom to compose an aesthetic experience of greater complexity.
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro - I know fewer greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth… with lacquerware there is a beauty in the moment between removing the lid and lfiting the bowl up to the mouth when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its color hardly differing from the bowl itself. What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapor rises from within forming droplets on the rim and teh fragrance carried upon the vapor brings a delicate anticipation.
“Western languages appear to lack an appropriate term for the action of picking up and holding items of food with chopsticks” (pinch, too aggressive - grasp, too forceful, caress or embrace, too soft). By contrast to Barthes the knife and fork, cut pierce and mutilate… chopsticks never violate the foodstuff, either they gradually unravel it (in the case of vegetables) or they prod it into separate pieces (in the case of fish) thereby recovering natural fissures of the substance.
Thought
chopsticks Bites Also with chopsticks you must sustain an action, whatever you will call it - the pinch that keeps the foot held. Not like a fork of a spoon where you skewer and the instrument does the work. Eat a pea with a chopstick, and notice this.
An idiotic take:
chopsticks are harder to use (ergo worse..) Still, my family members claim that they prefer chopsticks when we go to Asian restaurants but cant argue why. I think they are just being pretentious because they think using chopsticks makes them worldy, and I think that is the case for everyone who chooses chopsticks when a fork is available.
Thought
Sense on chopsticks limiting how much food you can grab in one go as a flaw:
Forks you can fit way more per bite. It’s almost as though people are shoveling food in your mouth. People often take the biggest bite they can. With chopsticks there is a natural limit to the size of the bite you can take. Sure you can eat quickly an a lot but it takes more chopstick bites to eat the same amount of food.
On Japanese glutonous rice - it is at once cohesive and detachable, its substantial destination is the fragment, the clump the volatile conglomerate… it constitutes in the picture of compact whiteness, granular let friable; what comes to the table, dense and stuck together, comes undone at a touch of the chopsticks, though without ever scattering, as if division occurred only to produce another irreducible cohesion.
Nishitani Kenji was in Europe and returns to have rice “the joy of eating rice, constitutes of the soil pass into the rice and thence the body”
The highest point of Japanese cuisine is called kaiseki ryori which is said to be derived from the food originally served with the tea ceremony. Kaiseki consists of beautifully arranged and carefully orchestrated series of small dishes. It is served at a pace that allows for successive overlapping of dishes, textures and temperatures.
What is crucial here is we pay attention to what we are doing, and that we tend to those people and things with which we interact.
“Traditional craftsmen sometimes talk about becoming freinds with their tools, and this is a sensible idea for a well sharpened knife” | my relationship with my tools, a reverence for my computer, a server a keyboard. A website
Marial Arts Not-Thinking “fushiryo” - unsentiment like wood or stone, is a cognitive state inm which the individual is not thinking at all. There is no subject-object distinction.
Nagi Kafu and Aesthetics of Urban Strolling The stroll constitutes an intimate engagement with the affective dimensions of urban space. It signifies no goal, or particular destination to be reached. Free from the modern life (preoccupied with financial gain) once can wander through the city’s overlooked and forgotten places.
Modernization of Edo-Tokyo can be characterized as a transition from a city of water (mizu no myako) to a city of land (riku no miyako). With this came fundamental shifts in the perception and representation of the city.
On foot one is free to wander, to deviate from tracks, lines and major thoroughfares to which other forms of transportation are obliged to adhere. Walking around a space affords contemplation; impressions are not rushed or scattered, but rather focused and prolonged.
Cool-Kawaii Aesthetics and New World Modernity
At the moment, the act of blending in gives a particular kind of power and when “standing out means being put on the no-fly list for 10 years” the idea of disappearing has become cool.
| Disappearing is cool, but it’s self defeating. You become unknown. It requires discovery, which if you are laying low, is a participatory action with the finder.
Kawaii - means “which can be loved” Indirect Empowerment - paradoxically both cool and kawaii empower their bearers because they have decided to partially give away power. For coolness, this strategy is part of the its intrinsic concept: to accumulate power is never cool. Kawaii as a play with its apparent weakness follows similar lines.
In value-oriented discriptions of cool, the term is still conceived of as a desperate masculine attempt at gaining respect from a hostile society through willful alienation from the society.
Basho and the Art of Eternal Now
OKU NO HOSOMICHI - Nobuyuki Yuasa Translation | I myself have been tempted for too long by the cloud-moving wind - filled with a strong desire to wander.
Nature is in constant motion and human lives are short, but art may capture and preserve the fleeting moments so that they may live on beyond the lfie and times of the artist. Art, unlike nature, is the keeper of the timeless human experience.
Basho spent the last years of his life in a semi-continuous journey, traveling from one famous site celebrated by the ancient intinerant poets to another.
Is there something unique to the japanese language that it is uniquely suited for. Perhaps haiku, for instance, something that is hardly translatable into another language. It contains beauty that would only be possible in japanese language. To put it on a grander scale of things, haiku expresses the unique way of japanese viewing the world and thinking and as the world consists in apprehending the infinite within teh realities of the daily life.
Haiku here is to capture the “timeless” reality in the midst of daily experience.
A brush, Morita writes, is not merely an object in the world, not just an instrument that people make and use, and not eeven an extension of the artist or the artist’s body. It is also something that gives the artist her existence.
Thought
My concept of the sky looking like brush strokes, the brush strokes looking like the sky. So perfectly suited. Why not paint with chains, the features of the stroke resemble and articulate the sky as the human eye sees it. It is suited for the task. But you can paint with links of chain dipped in ink.
Rothko: I”m only interested in expressing basic human emotions… The people who weep before my picture are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them, and if you are you say are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point
Thought
(Imagine a world where only Rothko chapel pictures exist, and then seeing a simple child’s drawing of a flower) - the feeling of emptiness comes through the paintings, and it is striking because I feel a loss of what should be there, what could of been there but instead there is just blankness and vague gestures