Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Chained
“The Dolls’, the film by Takeshi Kitano, perhaps is my favourite Japanese film. Red and White Seasons of rope, of love - which is either beautiful, or cruel. Or both.
I sought for the way out of this mirror realm,
touching things, later their shadows
and saying farewell to the north and the south.
My peace is yours, oh Lord.
Though I have no peace.
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5 comments:
Hi, Olia. Thanks for the clip. I think it's cruel and 'dark', but not beautiful to me. Okay, it may appeal to an aesthetic sense of beauty in some way; but I can't quite bring myself to conceive it as beautiful as a whole.
Hi, Gene. I tried to post a comment to your journal yesterday but I was not successful. I did know what to think…
I love Japanese Aesthetics of perceiving things in wabi-sabi, jugen, karumi… and there are other principles of beautiful things, those ones, which are not completed yet… (As much as I remember they were given at the first time by Fujiwara no Teika in An anthology of a Hundred poems by a Hundred Poets).
The ideals of beauty through vabi-sabi take the same place in Japanese Art as the ideals of the Ancient Greece masterpieces for the whole European Art.
How is wabi sabi a spiritual path?
I've been thinking a lot about that, thinking about enlightenment and awakening, and what they mean in relation to wabi sabi. The idea of satori or kensho of enlightenment, a sudden appreciation for the way things are, is pretty close to a haiku moment--those times when you see things and you have an awareness you didn't have before. And that's spiritual.
From http://www.beliefnet.com/story/176/story_17661_1.html
I remember I had namely such deep sense of spiritual awareness after seeing this film, that let me understand and bring myself to conceive the beauty of the ‘dark’ things …. Richard Powell came to the conclusion that: “The true comprehension of wabi sabi came through the awareness of three simple things: nothing is eternal, nothing is ended and nothing is perfect”. And speaking of apprehending beauty I feel I can put my finger on it in "The Dolls" Stealing Beauty... through all things... Its not an ambivalence, but Ukiyo-e, maybe?
I would be very happy to listen more from you about your ideals of beauty. Mono no aware?
Schrader: "In Japanese art there is a concept of mono no aware, sweet sadness, the pleasure of endings, of autumn and seeing a dying leaf."
Sokurov: "For Russia, sweet sadness and pleasant farewells are not possible. On the contrary, in the Russian sense of elegy, it's a deep vertical feeling, not a delighting one. It gets you deeply, sharply, painfully. It's massive."
Conversation between Paul Schrader and Alexander Sokurov
:)
From http://www.freewebs.com/botzbornsteinarticles/
Olia
P. S. Perhaps you know this book? I have not read it but knowing some articles of the author Leonard Koren I can guess it opened the way to the Eastern culture for the Americans.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1880656124/002-9476947-0510443?v=glance/Beliefnet
Wabi (侘: literally, disappointment) is an aesthetic frame of mind which draws, for a sense of aesthetic satisfaction, on a sense of incompleteness or poverty of things around us. With this frame of mind you may feel a certain sense of beauty even in tragic or solitary life. Sabi (寂: literally, tranquility) has to do with serenity and peace of mind. It is an aesthetic frame of mind which reveals profound richness amid tranquility and emptiness.
A synthesis of these two frames of mind seems to have some relevance to Satori or enlightenment of Zen Buddhism. Japanese, Chinese, or Korean aesthetics is molded by it, though each culture may have a difference name for it. I personally believe that Wabi Sabi aesthetics is also tinged with a sense of masochism. Schrader’s oxymoron, ‘sweet sadness’, may be understood within that frame, and I think that Sokurov may be wrong in saying that ‘sweet sadness’ has no place in Russian sensibility. I can certainly feel it in Turgenev to begin with, and in Tolstoy, and others. . .
I do not know Leonard Koren, and I’m not knowledgeable in things Japanese. It’s just that I don’t like Japanese culture in general even though I like some of their writers and animated films by Hayao Miyazaki. One may be able to get a sense of Wabi Sabi moment in Japanese movies as well.
YIC/Gene
nice blog.
xx
Thank you.. yours is very pretty too.
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