William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

I was there with my G-girl, 1and Katy and Jennifer tried to figure me out. On the one hand, I was interested in T-girls 2and makeup, so perhaps this G-girl might simply be my close friend from whom I was learning how to act feminine. On the other hand…

And I was trying to figure them out. This is what I saw:

Katy applied Duo eyelash glue over her natural eyebrows, since they were very black. That way she could paint foundation or other cosmetics over them, and build her T-girl eyebrows in liberty. And now indeed the eyebrows grew long and dark on the Kabuki-like face, although the brown pockmarks still remained on the sides of that male nose.

“The most time is the eye,” she said.

Elongating the eyebrows still more so that they curved down over her nose, she proudly remarked that this makeup would endure for twelve hours. Sometimes she drank too much and fell asleep with her paint on. When she woke up it was still there. It helped that she did not sweat much.

She applied a big brush around her chin and neck, contouring brown so that these male features seemed to recede. Then came the mascara, whose progress she earnestly controlled through the mirror, her mouth open, like a small girl who is surprised by what she has been told. (What did she see? The photographer Hans Bellmer writes of incidents of “congruence” when the universe seems to become “a double of the super ego.” If I were Katy, I would rather have it become a double of my id.) After that it came time for the cheek blush, brushing up and up .

The makeup box was as big as a picnic cooler, the tripartite mirror’s bulbs shining like church candles, and there was a treasury of white, silver and gold high heels heaped like jawbones on the grubby carpet as the two transvestites sat adjusting their hair.

As Nakamura Mitsue said to me about the Noh masks she carved: “When I feel some existence there I feel happy.” I remembered watching a block of wood getting first cut into faces like a diamond, then its faces smoothed away in the correct planes; that was where the art came in.

In the sixth century it was written that dharmas (objects of perceptions) “are never created or annihilated by themselves, but come into being because they are created by illusion and imagination and exist without real existence.” — If so, all the better, perhaps. Katy and Jennifer wished to go out into the world as women. If their femininity were created by illusion, then which “reality” could presume to annihilate it?

What Is a Woman?

And so what is a woman? The long history of Noh has been described as the alteration of an “entertainment enacted by a loosely defined occupation into a classical art performed by a closed profession dominated by a select elite.” Meanwhile, in various cultures at varying times, the tale of femininity expresses the exact reverse: The select elite, biological females, makes room for the loosely defined occupations of those who call themselves female.

And once again I wonder about the possible genderlessness of the soul, whose most appropriate reification might then be that ancient Hungarian figurine whose shape was of an erection with testicles but whose glans was a woman’s face and whose long neck bore hard-nippled little breasts almost halfway down; the scrotum was a woman’s buttocks. — I want to reject this androgynous conception and until now always did, having been socialized into a conception of maleness which in part defined itself as the antipode to that exotic, desirable thing called femininity. — To be sure, what I want makes small difference. Herewith, my prejudices. They will seem absurd far sooner than I can suppose, and it embarrasses me a trifle to lay them out even now. But reticence is cowardice, and irony would be fatal to any discussion of beauty; so all that remains to me is sincerity:

I resist the idea that the soul is genderless; I want my soul to be masculine and a woman’s to be feminine. It may be that I do not love myself; accordingly, to the extent that a woman might partake of my nature I would find her less perfect. — And why would I want her to be perfect? (Well, why do I watch Noh plays?) Shortly before his suicide in 1942, Stefan Zweig, born in Vienna before the end of the nineteeth century, looks back upon the sartorial expressions of gender in what he calls the world of yesterday — the hats, beards and stiff collars of the men, the corsets, bell-skirts and towering hair of the women — with astonishment, disgust and pity, the latter especially for the women, whom prudery confined in ignorance, timidity, unhealthiness and, worst of all, “pitiful” dependency. But he continues: “By this unnatural differentiation in external habits the inner tension between the poles, the erotic, was necessarily strengthened.” And so it might be equally likely that selfishness, not self-loathing, impels my obedience to the notion of a gender abyss. Or am I simply a thoroughly conditioned product of my own world of yesterday?

In any event, I desire a feminine grace to remain uncontaminated by masculinity. And I refuse to relinquish the beauty and nobility of attachment. I would rather be an anguished ghost.

It may well be, in spite of my own Zeami-esque prescription at the end of “What Is Grace?”, that a woman’s grace actually prevents me from seeing who she is. But the grace of the women I already know derives from their voice and their scents, the way they sleep beside me, the way that in quarrels they hurt me and are hurt by me.

The Buddhist subtexts of Noh assert that because desire can never be satisfied, I should discipline myself into renouncing desire. A sense of freedom may well steal upon me when I die, and all my love will fade gratefully away with the rest of my consciousness. But the suffering that feminine grace inflicts on me by the very virtue of my impossible craving to drink it in, why is that bad or wrong? And when the flower, be it false or true, scatters its petals in the dirt, should I turn away from it on that account? Like so many shites , I would rather defy time.

In about 1793 we find the renowned Yoshiwara geisha Tomimoto Toyohina (she is a natori , meaning that she is sufficiently skilled to have received a name), posing between the teashop beauty Naniwaya Kita and a certain rice cake store proprietor’s eldest daughter, Takashima Chobei, 1who happened to be one of the two most popular beauties of the time. I admit that since then their funeral-smoke has blackened the leaves of trees now long dead, but Utamaro made a woodblock print of them, and it remains ours to dream over. I pore over the image, and experience joy, so why not keep this book safe from as many pyres as I can?

What is a woman, if not an ukiyo-e courtesan or teahouse beauty performing femininity by means of a face in repose, a cheek which refuses to widen like a ko-omote ’s, tiny pale vermilion lips parted in both directions, every aspect of her stylized through understatement? Does she in fact require the overstated narrowing from waist to legs of a Chalandrian type Cycladic figurine — flat, with nipples and arms in relief, and the pubic hair-dots pecked out?

In Kyoto at a certain Takigi-Noh performance graced by a very slow, mellow, sad style of singing, different from anything I had heard up to then, I saw a stately firelit woman slowly rotating by supernatural power. She was so lovely, half dreaming. Black-and-green tree-darknesses and forests of bamboo drumbeats kept rising around her, her eyeslits of female darkness sometimes drooping as if with sadness while she gazed down through me. Presently the flute blew, and she slowly outstretched her golden sleeve, then locked the fingers of both hands together, slowly, slowly, so that each flame had time to alter its shape an infinity of times. Her kimono was patterned with might have been boulders and gem-crystals (how can I say for sure? She was far away from me, up high on the stage on that summer’s night). How did she accomplish her womanliness? Was it the way that her sleeves spread, her fan opened like fingers, the flames strained toward her alien glossy face, and her vermilion skirts hung down? Half a decade later I remain happily haunted by that tranquilly changing face, the fan pointing up at the smoke which passed through the trees, the sleeves sweeping apart decisively yet slowly, the white face often in the midst of a dark space between foliage even as fire played sunnily on the kimono — and again I need to tell you that that mask seemed so far away in this night that it could almost be a rocket ship — why not? It had a crew, the wide-eyed, kneeling chorus; and Ground Control handlers such as the man who crept deftly in to hand up a prop or straighten a robe; all the while, the mask continued to sing. Who was this woman? What was she? How could I tell you?