The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
I wrote briefly to a friend that I had seen this performance, and he responded:
I had heard or read the word bunraku before but didn’t know what it was. I searched You Tube and was delighted with what I found. The marionettes are quite magical but the sound is beyond magic. Listening to classical Japanese music is like walking among the redwoods in the early evening mist. There is room in the air for everything that might come along. In a way, the music is not created sound. It’s more like the result of applying a filter to the sound of nature so that certain frequencies, among the sounds that comprise the world, have been selected out at that moment. I’m not aware of any other musical tradition that evokes so convincingly the natural world without sounding forced or merely imitative.
That prompted me to write more about it:
What a marvelous description of Japanese music. That is certainly true of Zen music, shakuhachi and the very spare string accompaniment (shamisen?). But the music that went with this melodrama, which was really a kind of opera (“the sung narrative particular to bunraku,” says the program)—the text was part sung and part recited, really acted—was in large part more social and courtly (in the sense of an aristocratic court) than natural. It doesn’t say when it was written, but the Tokugawa shogunate apparently BANNED it in 1721 because it was provoking copycat love suicides (like Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) and wasn’t performed again for more than 200 years! A very ritualized, courtly kind of Buddhism, with pilgrimages and prayers and chants of “Namu Amida butsu,” in search of liberation, plays a part in the story. It’s about a prostitute (age 19) and her client (24) who really love each other and face insurmountable practical and social obstacles that drive them to despair.Despite my long acquaintance with Japanese culture, the surface of the music was very alien, agitated and atonal (Webern’s got nothing on these guys). So it took me a while to penetrate the surface and begin to comprehend that this was a human comedy as well as a tragedy. A lot of the falsetto and hysteria in the (all-male) voices was probably as satirical as it sounded: behold the pathetic obsessions of these touchingly frail humans. (The helpless passions enacted by the colorful puppets contrast starkly with the enigmatic dispassion of their black-swathed manipulators.) Subtitles were projected above the stage, and quite a lot of the goings-on were about business and money. The author, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, is called the Japanese Shakespeare, and this story was quite a lot like Romeo and Juliet, another tale about very young people, which is foolish, flowery, and even funny for much of its length, until the tragic ending. In this tale, right up to the last minute the young people are coming up with all sorts of natural reasons (e.g. breaking their families’ hearts) for not going through with it. But then they do, in a gruesome, graphic, determined way. And in a forest, away from all the noise of society—and at that point the music becomes exactly as you describe it.
Hear, Hear
Caitlin Johnstone ends an essay of exquisitely layered, aged-spirits-soaked mille-feuille political paranoia (she’s been at this a long time, and her paranoias are positively fractal) with this disclaimer, which I salute as the last word.
It’s so weird how we move through life like it’s no big deal, like “Yeah, just a toothy, fingery ape monster who consumes the life force of other organisms and excretes them out its anus walking around and looking at stuff in a universe that nobody understands, whatever.” I mean, we get THIS. This strange, shimmering, mysterious world full of flying feather beasts and air we breathe parts of into our bloodstreams and electromagnetic radiation which we process with our ocular organs, and people are still waiting around for a miracle. The miracle already happened. The miracle is here. What’s already happening currently dwarfs any miracle anyone is currently praying for by infinity orders of magnitude. And we only get a few years here. So like, I dunno, maybe let’s worry less about wrong people on the internet. By all means push for changes in this world. But never lose sight of the fact that the Really Big Deal in any given moment is not whatever change you’re trying to make, but the fact that this world is here at all, and that you get to stand up and look around in it for a while.
Whatever else happens, humanity, do pause to pull your head out of your a** and poke it out into the miracle as often as you remember.
Status and Stature
The New Caesars
[to a reader in the Czech Republic] The first task: No despair. You may feel utterly overwhelmed by the weight of the illiberal forces lined up against you. … You will not be alone in feeling this way. But don’t succumb to this sentiment. This is a path to ruin. None of us can retreat, in the coming years—as we will surely be tempted—to the politics of internal exile. … We must learn from each others’ experiences … It’s especially important for ordinary American citizens to be in personal contact with citizens of what I call the laboratory countries, countries like yours—the countries where the New Caesars are experimenting with and perfecting their techniques.
[After quoting Orwell on “Newspeak”] The shrinking of our vocabularies … has not been imposed upon us. We’ve freely and willingly contracted our own verbal skills, our own reading skills, our own sense of nuance in our language … People who care about speaking and writing precisely—people who use the full range of the English language’s rich vocabulary, people who understand language as a subtle and nuanced tool—have become despised by both the right and the left as elitists.
This is perhaps an outgrowth of our commitment to egalitarianism, in that we are hostile to aristocracy in any form. Our educated elites were once a form of aristocracy. Perhaps they suffered so intensely from the shame of being aristocrats in an egalitarian country that they adopted not only the concerns of the popular classes, but their manner of speech. …
Whatever the causes of the diminution of the American vocabulary, it has had political effects. The effects are those Newspeak was designed to have. We lack the words we need to speak precisely and accurately about our own system of governance.
Ambiance 