My Dinner With Andre

Last night I watched My Dinner with Andre on my laptop. I hadn't seen it in 43 years. I remember seeing it the first time at the Seven Gables theater in Seattle shortly after its release in October, 1981, and how galvanized I was when I left the theater. I felt 50 pounds lighter, as if I’d had a burden lifted by a remarkably gifted therapist. The steady flow of perceptions and ideas about contemporary life were expressed with such eloquence and passion that I was only dimly aware of the quail they were eating. It’s only now that I even noticed there had been no comment about the food. How good it was, how disappointing it was, how well-cooked it was. Nothing. Not a word. Though I do remember Wallace Shawn remarking at how small the quail were when they first arrived at the table, causing a look of chagrin in the waiter’s craggy old face. As soon as the brief interlude of their dinner arriving at the table was over the conversation resumed its former intensity and the food became an afterthought. Everything was about personal discovery in a society that had grown stale and anesthetized. These were things I’d been struggling with, artificiality, robotic behavior, shallowness, banality, vapidity, and a deep alienation. It was exhilarating to hear these issues articulated with such ardent cogency.

I was 34 years old in 1981 and working for a mail service. This had not been my ambition in life. It’s where you find yourself when you haven’t been looking, when you haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing evolution of your life and how stalled and stagnant it had become by comparison to the anticipated successes graduation from college was supposed to obtain. My degree was in English. I had the kind of resumé that induced laughter in employment bureaus. The job, which was a good one, it paid reasonably well and had good benefits, was part-time. I continued to write, as I always had, but never submitting anything. One too many rejections and the illusions I fostered would burst in a fall of hapless confetti. And so I procrastinated, stuffed my work in a drawer feeling partially satisfied I’d achieved something and was growing as an artist and went to movies and bars and drank Rabelaisian quantities of whiskey and ale. When I wasn’t working, of course. The routine of work was helpful in certain ways, apart from the salary; it helped structure my life and kept me from falling over the edge into total chaos.

I was also married at the time, though that was due to end in a few years.

My frame of mind had taken a very dark turn in 1980. In November, Ronald Reagan had been elected president and in December, John Lennon was murdered, shot in the back four times by a deranged fan in the 72^nd Street entrance to the Dakota apartment building. These events stood as emblems, as signs, as reflections of the zeitgeist. The neoliberal economics that came with Reagan, essentially a juggernaut of free market capitalism that was quick to inject its poison into mainstream culture, and the emergence of a new technology: computers. I knew then that one of the early victims of information technology would be books. Literature. An appreciation of the written word and the provocation and preservation of critical thinking. Pretty much everything I valued most deeply and had devoted my life to was increasingly threatened by forces and behaviors I hadn’t fully understood as yet, or learned how to adapt or avoid. Avoidance, I would soon find, was impossible. The new monster was omnipresent. Adaptation came in the form of a Wild Turkey and Courvoisier and deep immersions in Dada and Marcel Duchamp.

My Dinner With Andre opens with Wallace Shawn walking down a seedy Manhattan street dressed in a knee-length trench coat giving an inner dialogue prompted by his upcoming dinner with Andre. The life of a playwright is tough, he hadn’t sold any plays recently, his agent wasn’t calling with acting jobs, and bills were amassing; how was he going to pay them? There’s a bit of biography: he grew up wealthy on the Upper East Side, lived like an aristocrat, all he thought about was art and music, and here he was now, age 36, on his way to have dinner with a man he’d been avoiding, a valued colleague in the theater, a former theater director named André. Wally sounded just like me, hapless, worried and frustrated. I liked him immediately.

André turns out to be charming and charismatic, genuinely affable and happy to see his old friend. He’s older, and seems wealthy. This is implied by the restaurant he’s chosen to have dinner with his friend, a pretty posh place with impeccably dressed and distinguished waiters. I’d forgotten this. I’d somehow remembered the dinner taking place in a bistro, a dimly lit bohemian atmosphere, a time warp of the 60s in 80s Manhattan. This was due to the camera being so closely focused on their table and facial expressions. You forget how big the restaurant actually is. The restaurant was modeled on the Café des Artistes, a New York restaurant on the Upper West Side that had been a favorite of the upscale bohemia since 1917. It closed in late August, 2009. The restaurant where the movie was filmed was, in fact, at the then-vacant Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia.

The movie kicks into high gear about mid-way in. This is where Wally delivers an astonishing speech, in a response to a story André told about his mother’s dying, and looking like a survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau, and how a specialist put a spin of positivity on her health based solely on his observation of a problematic arm, and said she was coming along wonderfully, “psychically killing us by taking us into a dream world where we become confused and frightened,” and the inability of his friends to express themselves honestly and warmly about the death of his mother. Instead, they told jokes that prevented him from expressing his true feelings. Wally responds to this with great warmth and sincerity: “I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality, I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because, if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way, you can sort of turn on the automatic pilot. You know, just the way your mother's doctor had on his automatic pilot when he went in, and he looked at the arm, and he totally failed to perceive anything else.”

I find these revelations especially pertinent now. Conversations – real flesh and blood conversations – are rare these days. Most of my social life occurs on a social media or social networking service. Pixels. Comments. Virtual friends. Some may actually be friends, but I very rarely see them. The people I interact with in this highly controlled and illusory realm of technology seem pretty nice, and I wish I could have actual conversations with them. Because when I do have an actual conversation, the actuality of what is said can be stunning. A lot depends on the people with whom you’re talking. Some people simply won’t allow too much sincerity, too open a dialogue, too personal a conversation. Emotions have become awkward again, the way they were in the 50s.

The real problem is one of fear and intolerance. People, when they’re overwhelmed by too much stimulus, too many new developments in their environment, become highly anxious and unsure of what’s real and what’s not real. They adhere to a consensus no matter how detached from reality it may be because a consensus is comfortable, stable, and preserves the status quo. The status quo is like your favorite armchair, a chair so comfortable that it mollifies you like morphine. Anything that threatens that chair is evil and must be destroyed. Canceled. Quarantined. Killed.

One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism, said Hannah Arendt, is a cynical willingness to believe in propaganda. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world,” she observed, “the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Something to think about next time we get together with friends over dinner.

Orchid Show

Yesterday we visited the conservatory at Volunteer Park to see the orchid show. It felt good to step into the warmth. I like conservatories, there’s something enchanting about a glass house full of tropical plants. As soon as you enter you’re enveloped in a spell of primal sensation, fascinating shapes and subtle hues, weird organs and big veined leaves. The orchids were mounted on a table at the center of the room. The first to catch my attention was Comparettia speciosa, tiny heart-shaped flowers of vivid tangerine. A comical looking Rossioglossum Rawdon Jester shot propeller-like petals into the space, as if being an orchid were intrinsically funny. Orchids are notoriously complicated. That’s what makes them funny. Proust never the left the house without an orchid in his lapel. He knew. Complication is funny, and strangely erotic, like the Sphinx Moth with its long proboscis for pollinating the white flowers of Hell’s Love.

An elderly man with his gray hair in a ponytail stood by the table answering questions. He had a badge that said “Ask Me About Orchids.” He was quite erudite on the subject. We asked him how to pollinate an orchid and he said pour yourself a glass of wine and get a toothpick. He did a good job fielding the kind of questions a fussy exotic flower like the orchid inspires, how should orchids be watered, what’s the best potting material, how do I get my orchid to rebloom, how to repot an orchid, is it true Confucius used to keep orchids in his room for inspiration for his writing, what does Theophrastus have to say on the subject of orchids? Is being a Druid the answer to existence? I fell under the spell of a Paphiopedilum henryanum. It answered in silence.

Orchids have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Their entire existence seems to be focused on pollination. Ways to lure insects into their various traps and pollinium. Bucket orchids have a modified labellum that forms a bucket that traps male euglossine bees. Ellanthus and Isochilus orchids attract hummingbirds with a rich nectar of sugars and amino acids. The bee orchid has a large lip-shaped petal that resembles a female bee. The warty hammer orchid of Western Australia produces a chemical scent that mimics the pheromone of a sexually receptive female thynnine wasp. What strange intelligence moves through these things? How do they figure these things out? Science does not think, said Heidegger. He was a real pistil, that guy.

Orchis italica, commonly known as the naked man orchid or the Italian orchid, is a species of orchid native to the Mediterranean. Orchis bohemia resembles a poet living in obscurity in the south of France. Orchis Julianus resembles a Romanian filmmaker. The venerable Orchis wiseass has a unique strategy for luring young women into its purview and squirting them with lemonade. They say the right kind of orchid can bring so much beauty into your home that the entire substrate of reality begins to creak and stubbornly approve the vague proposals we bring into the realm of the epiphyte. Live with an orchid and live with universals in your tea. Intuitions about your skull. Attracting pollinators. Philosophers whose eyes blur with divine pollinations.

 

From The Bureau Of Delectable Implosions

Newborn sirloin. Geodesic syllabus. Liquidated scratch fathom. Guidelines masticated into haiku banshee tongs.

Listen to the obloquy primrose. Carmine executive bluish from being obvious. Cardiovascular canister of stereophonic tackle.

Tacky geriatrics. Round twinges at the turpentine cinema. Corduroy gas. Tottering obstetrics under a utensil tree.

Eternal palm as pink as scrabble. Supposedly cubes. Blasted into curls. Change the infantry. Kitchen phenomena seeking ambulatory spinach.

Bolt gourd someday snowing. Position fricassee. Chlorophyll disciples in full vulgarity.

The shipwrecked house ruined my welcome and became a hot bucket of squalor.

Chlorinated bombard fission abruptly enclosed in the skull.

Complementary euphemisms perched on a rod of sticky generality.

Geometric gems goofy as coagulation.

Scrubby terrain with a crust of understanding.

I own nothing but a page of animals, some of which can jump through the light.

Others are more circular.

They belch colors that thrust themselves into the water.

Nowhere salami before any deductions create ovals in the mouth.

Niceties in a tub of protons. Remembrance system chattering thwarts. Crowbar twirling in commas. Carpentry blazing with Monday. A little sweet negligence from the bureau of delectable implosions. And a squab. And a squabble. And a waterway of capricious inclinations.

  

Absurdity And Suicide

Some few years before my brother passed away from a sudden illness, he began an immersion in the work of Albert Camus. He asked me, during a phone conversation, if I knew anything about Camus, or if I thought of him as absurd, as an absurdist. I told him I knew very little. He wasn’t my cup of tea. I vaguely remembered reading Camus in junior college as an assignment but little else. The image that came to mind was of a solitary man brooding on his mother. I thought the writing was dreary and mundane and didn’t pursue it. When I thought of the absurd in art and literature figures like Harpo Marx came to mind, and Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett, Groucho Marx and Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco and The Goon Show. Silliness, outrageousness, maniacal hijinks. I didn’t see Camus as an absurdist, I saw him as a worldly cynic with a Gauloises in his mouth and a fatalistic glint in his eyes. The Humphrey Bogart of the French existentialists.

My brother was right. I googled absurdism and Albert Camus and received a truckload of information on the subject, beginning with the AI Overview: Albert Camus was a French philosopher and Nobel Prize laureate who is known for his contributions to the philosophy of absurdism. His philosophy of absurdism is based on the idea that the universe is irrational and meaningless, and that humans should embrace this absurdity and find meaning in life.

It goes to the heart of what my brother was struggling with at the time, which I can’t possibly know in its entirety, its multiplexities and thorny conundrums, but based on some of the events we both mutually coped with, I know a lot of his malaise was linked to the collapse and disintegration of just about everything, freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the Bill of Rights, the constitution, the rampant criminality and corruption in government, the endless wars, the many frustrations and heartbreaks caused by an insanely inefficient and predatory healthcare system, the day-to-day grind of asphyxiating routine, the stresses of traffic and humiliations of work, the incivility of people and their buried rage. Things you can’t talk about in polite society anymore. Hence, I really looked forward to the conversations with my brother, which usually took place on his birthday. I was also quite embarrassed about my ignorance on the subject of absurdism, especially since I was the lit guy and my brother had a contempt for eggheads.

It was Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus that most captivated my brother. It articulated his attitude toward life, an attitude he’d begun questioning, siphoning, and battling, wrestling à la Jacob and the angel – or was that God? – in an effort to find a fulfilling answer, or a liberating nullity. He was embroiled in a confrontation with life, a soulful interrogation, a candid exploration outside the purviews of superficial therapies designed to put you back to work, bring you back into the fold to become a functioning member of a baldly toxic society. I wish I could’ve been of bigger help to him. My take on the absurd seemed clownish and self-indulgent matched against heavyweights like Kierkegaard and Camus. I used humor to accept and sometimes celebrate the irrationalities of contemporary life, the bizarre cruelties and arbitrary misfortunes. I didn’t get low and dirty and mess with the greasy mechanics of the human condition. That conversation with my brother left me with a sense of inadequacy, an intellectual popinjay.

I had to remind myself, that if it weren’t for the fool, I’d never be able to make it through King Lear. The final absurdity of the play is survivable because of the fool’s lunatic language. I began to see a link between the dada absurdity of Dali and the dark, nihilistic absurdity of Camus. For Camus it was all about endlessly and repeatedly pushing a boulder to the top of a hill only to see it come rolling down again, the whole cycle repeating itself ad nauseum. Just like real life: get up, get dressed, go to work. Get up, get dressed, go to work. Ad nauseum.

Meaning doesn’t come in a cereal box. You have to build it yourself. Dream it. Conceive it. Construct it. Give it a trial run. Superimpose its diaphanous beauty over the ugliness of our industrial world. Look for significance between the cracks, between the rules, over there in the margins, the ditch at the side of the road, where the rabbit disappeared down a deep hole.

The first thing I discovered about Camus is that the writing was a lot more beautiful than I’d remembered, probing, unflinching, intellectually honest. And also quite elegant.

The Myth of Sisyphus begins with a core statement: “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy… I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”

The phrase “the meaning of life” generally triggers a great deal of laughter in today’s world. It’s considered to be hilariously sophomoric, a futile endeavor, not worth the time, what really matters to most people is making money. Money has meaning. Everything hinges on that. Bank accounts. Credit cards. Real estate. Investments. Asset management. Compound interest. Life is peripheral. Life without money means you set up a tent on the sidewalk. You’re kicked to the curb. Literally. Everyone loves that word: literally. Words without metaphor or allegory. Words in their most basic sense. No fooling around. No verbal flourishes. Leave that to the poets and weirdos. What people mostly value now is either brute survival, or what kind of yacht to buy.

Camus doesn’t promote suicide. He argues against it on the principle that suicide is a rejection of freedom. Does the absurd dictate death? No. Of course not. “For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.” Hamlet – that tortured soul who delivers one of the most beautiful speeches of all time on the subject of suicide, “to be or not to be” – emphasizes this point in the simplest of terms: “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” I would argue with Hamlet on this point, and ask him if this formula applied to the murder of his father. I don’t know what his answer would be, but I’m sure it’d be terrific.

Life can, occasionally, feel pretty good, even to the most impoverished. There’s that, though it is somewhat beside the point. Because mostly life is painful. The acquisition of food and shelter require daily vigilance and struggle. People get sick. Loved ones die. For a few, there are buffers. It helps considerably to be rich. Food and shelter are never a problem. Healthcare isn’t a problem. The rich are mostly assholes, for reasons that escape me, but the deadening routine of a job isn’t a contributing factor. There was a time in my life when money became easily available, and the usual anxieties were greatly diminished. I was euphoric and kind and nice to people. Even in heavy traffic. So I don’t get it. Why are rich people such assholes? You’d think they’d be as compassionate and jolly as the fat-bellied Buddhas they like to put in their gardens.

That’s a question for another occasion. Being poor doesn’t exclude the possibility of feeling meaningful and fulfilled. Thoreau found serenity and richness in a small cabin in the woods. Buddhists are constantly reminding us of the miseries of attachment. Everyone, rich or poor, will have an encounter with the absurdity of our existence. The poor can be assholes, too. “Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them…this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.” Giving things a name is a means to achieving some measure of agency in this world. The language we choose to describe and expand our experience is a powerful stimulant and unifying force. “Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.”

“Things are established by a unity, and ideas and feelings are made into concrete reality through the power of a unifying self,” writes Nishida Kitarō in An Inquiry Into The Good. “The unifying power called the self is an expression of the unifying power of reality; it is an eternal unchanging power. Our self is therefore felt to be always creative, free, and infinitely active.”

 

Nietzsche's Mustache

In the fall of 1888, Friedrich went for long walks in and around Turin, Italy. He was returning to his modest apartment when he felt the corners of his mouth curl up as if pulled by a string. He was enraptured, and could not stop smiling. His laughter, too, had become uncontrollable. Is it any wonder that a man this intense, this erratic, this volatile should have an extravagant forest of hair between the bottom of his nose & the frontier of his upper lip? “My face was making continual grimaces in order to try to control my extreme pleasure,” he wrote in a letter, “including, for 10 minutes, the grimace of tears.” One night, perhaps due to the noise, he was discovered in his room naked, playing the piano, and dancing. His entire being shook with tremors of music, the raptures of the void, as if spirited by some inner demon, or mustache.

Aphorism 381 in Book IV of Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, reads as follows: We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent and as such he will be treated.

So there’s that. If you’re a male of the species, there is that option. But a lot of animals go further, and employ various modes of camouflage. A giraffe melts into vegetation. The Baron Caterpillar of Southeast Asia is indistinguishable from the leaves of the mango and cashew trees on which it feeds. A Blue-crowned parrot vanishes into the verdant rain forests of Belize. My preference is to wear cardigans and jeans and disappear into walls, most of which are imaginary, and drip with hairy succulents. The perpetual look of stunned amazement puts everyone at ease, as they believe themselves to be the cause of my astonishment. The reality is something different. It always is. Sometimes it resembles a continuum curve, and sometimes it’s you and I, hapless as poor Tom running naked on the heath in a thunderstorm, camouflaged as reality.

You can think of a skull as a round dome with the stuff of dream in it, like the string of a kite, or a circus in your pants. I bring it up now because it’s stucco, and the horses are restless. A feeling of increased power is natural after robbing a jeweler. But not this constant French skepticism, however exquisite it may be. I have in my hand that something you may be interested in. It’s only a pen, but if you work hard toward maintaining a dream, the passions running against the paper will fold themselves into yaks and pull the stars with them all the way to Kathmandu.

The interior of my skull is opaque today. I forgot what it was I was going to ask. I had a question concerning Nietzsche’s uncanny reoccurrence as a barber in downtown Memphis. I remember now. It was when he slipped on a contradiction & fell into a catastrophe. Changed his mind about everything. Even his mustache seemed to say have a nice day. One is best punished for one’s virtues, he laughed. But really, when it comes down to it, one’s tonsorial preference should indicate a mood of alleviation, acquittal, and a reliance on geometrical principles. I didn’t want a crewcut. But he gave me one anyway. Like I said. The interior of my skull is opaque today.

Should I grow a mustache? Would a mustache help? Why not a beard? A long one, à la ZZ Top. And a funky hat with an ostrich feather. It’s why I plucked a plume, and began writing. Times when I have my shoulder to the grass I like to think about sidewalks. The flesh of fish under gloomy circumstances can permeate an entire sentence if you let it. Let it what? Let it walk forward on its letters and shake like a package filled with a storm on somebody’s porch. I’ve seen sentences do that. Turn into palm trees on South Pacific islands. Or camouflage themselves as welcoming fragrances of sage during a time the clocks forgot, and morning slid over the grass. 

  

Singing Into Amber

Singing into amber during a metamorphosis may cause sudden rashes and outbursts of joy. Beauty becomes an immersive experience and shakes its suppositions out of the reach of children. It rattles astronomy until the universe shivers in its nudity. Death comes into contact with the maximum dosage of life and rains dextrose over most of Iowa. It’s an empty sophistication to organize the verdure of anything beyond the call of beauty. Therefore, explode. Arrange yourself in giant collisions. Button a birch with speculation. Feel yourself among the many competing theories of David Bowie. Take a long hot shower. Consider the lily. If a single atom can emit Chicago, why not exist in multiple states simultaneously, and order pizza?   

You ask what is the color of freedom. I’m next to demonstrating it crawling towards the bump under the bistro. It’s never what you think it is, is it? Grieve its loss among the elves accelerating this narrative by nerve and raw elation. We’re ephemera in the house of the rising sun. Sometimes it takes a stunning necklace to think about syntax in addition to quinine. If you have some participles to spare, reach inside yourself with a little inclemency and pull the hands. I’ll let you know when we reach the end of the universe. You’ll see a vacancy sign and a purgatory. You have the power to change the world. But the bed requires a quarter if you want it to vibrate. A great soothing light will announce its presence in your shed. Or head. When is the head a shed, and when is the head a utensil? When it’s on live TV, & when it’s a dense molecular cloud.

Gleefully, I stood on the sand crackling with hieroglyphics. My plan to play confusedly with the cream failed to divert the conversation. It only amplified the sound of the surf as it flowed into punctuations of sand. How can you trust what you cannot control? My body, in particular, was a problem for me: its inability to remain within itself, its subordination to the eccentric demands of needs. It wanted food, flesh, voluptuous amusements and volumes of De Materia Medica with golden spines and beautiful illustrations. How does one go about appeasing the cries and shouts of the body? Indeed, my body began to go off the rails. I couldn’t keep up with the mania of its appetites. I’m not against desire. I just want to corral it a little. Lasso it. Study it. And let it go.

I never doubted my existence. The problem lies elsewhere. We remain incapable of possessing our existence. That’s one problem. Mortality is another. Our lives are continually slipping away. It’s a pretty big problem. It’s much more appealing to forget the whole thing and ride against the wind. Spend an entire afternoon sipping absinthe at a Paris bistro. These are what are called fantasies, and create swirls of lovely improbability in the mind. The roar of the crowd as you reach a high soprano C. Old friends returned from the dead. It is by courtesy and sheer carnality that our quarrels with existence defer to the textures of the moment. And thereby hangs a sock.

 

Happy Accidents

We walked down to see a demonstration of Japanese calligraphy yesterday afternoon at the A/NT Gallery in the Seattle Center. We arrived early and had some time at our disposal to wander around and enjoy the artwork. My first feeling was one of total illiteracy.

I get greedy. I want to take in all the beauty, everything it has to offer. But here I was stymied. I was confronting a language I didn’t know and a discipline of which I knew very little, but felt profoundly fascinated by it. There was a time in my life when I developed a mania for writing haiku. I got pretty good at it, but felt strongly that if I wanted to continue in this artform I would need to learn Japanese. Haiku never looks completely right in the English alphabet. Our alphabet doesn’t have the same lively aspect as Japanese characters. It looks stark, pragmatic as a car battery. Japanese kanji resemble leaves and birds and the gaiety of cherry blossom. It does service in the realm of linguistic expression as well as in the realm of beauty.

It’s deeply frustrating to look at a piece of Japanese calligraphy and not be able to read what it says. Which is stupid. Because I’m missing a wonderful opportunity. Since I have no knowledge of Japanese, I have the opportunity to appreciate the discipline strictly as a visual art, not as an exhibition of signs that refer to something else. You’d think nothing could be easier. But it’s not. I find it strangely difficult to focus on these signs simply as gracefully rendered forms, lines and squiggles and splatters and dots, invigorated entities of black ink on white paper. I know they’re signs. I know they mean something. I know that hidden in their magic is a mountain, a frog, a water lily, or a dragon whose ancient eyes can see into you. The frustration is like staring at a safe that you know is filled with priceless jewels, but you don’t know the combination. It’s hard to stand there and admire the craftsmanship and quality of the safe. I want what’s inside. Or should I say on the other side, where the snow falls, the dragons fly, & stars twinkle in the void.

Fortunately, R brought her smartphone, which allowed her to access a QR code, which provided a translation. Here, for example, is a poem from one of the pieces:

Spent the night at a temple in the haze.
The moon illuminated the ship at night, the monk came back.
Clouds rising at dawn, it was like a dragon had appeared.

There was a shadow of the trees in the middle of the river.
I heard the sound of the temple bell.

 

The demonstration began with a quiz. A spritely, charismatic woman dressed all in black and speaking only Japanese began drawing rudimentary kanji on white sheets of paper. She held the first one up and asked – with the help of a translator - if anyone in the crowd might want to guess what it was. R thought it might be an island. The woman seemed amused. But it wasn't an island. It was an eye. Another simple drawing consisted of a line with a small indeterminate shape above suspended in space. I thought it might be a horizon line with an asteroid floating above. Asteroid seemed a bit farfetched so I remained mute. The correct answer was 'above.' It wasn't a depiction of things, asteroid or flying saucer. It was a depiction of spatial relation, a preposition. The woman turned the paper upside down. We all said "now it's below."

During this activity, a 12- or 13-year-old girl sitting to the woman’s immediate right steadily ground an ink-stick on a small slab or ink stone which also contained a shallow pool of water. The woman thanked the young girl, and emphasized the importance of using alertness and vigor to rub the ink stick on the ink stone as the ink liquefies. A vigorous immersion in the process will enhance the quality of the ink while the action of grinding helps settle the mind and prepare a suitable degree of focus for the creative moment. She then demonstrated a wrong way to do it, which she expressed by lowering her head and leaning slackly on the table while slowly and indifferently moving the ink stick in languorous circles. It was quite comical.

The quiz segued into the main demonstration. A man in his sixties, completely bald and wearing a dark robe and smiling jubilantly entered the space and began making some elementary shapes. He invited a young man standing nearby to try some of the shapes – tiny circles around a small oval – which the young man obliged, somewhat timidly, to do. The old man gleefully smiled, dipped his brush, and began another composition, making vigorous, graceful movements with the brush, modulating its pressure and angle while ink trailed behind in differing shades of black, some thick and assertive and others diaphanous and wispy, like veils of calligraphic inflection.

The old man reached to his side and pulled out a book full of kanji. He remarked on the blocklike form of the characters. They were rigid, and lacked expression. None of the characters showed anger, or hunger, or delight, or volatility. Calligraphy offered a way to awaken their expressive nature.

With the help of some assistants, the old man spread a large sheet of white paper on the floor and asked everyone to step in closer. I moved in closer and got down on my knees so I wouldn't be blocking anyone's view. It felt good to get a little rest from standing. The man got out his set of brushes and with a few brisk, spontaneous strokes and dabs created a branch constellated with blossom. The branch looked like a real branch. It had the same squiggly irregularities and quirky certainty of a branch reaching into space for dollops of sunshine. It was more than a work of representation, it was the spirit of creativity itself. This was a discipline that seemed to call for spontaneity and a shrewd appreciation of imperfection, a welcoming spirit toward happy accidents. He accompanied his drawing with a poem that celebrated the beauty of the mountains surrounding the city, the pleasures of travel tinctured with a yearning for home, which he did his best to describe, given the awkwardness of two languages, and using a tongue instead of a brush.