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

The proverb goes that it is better to love than to be loved; perhaps I am lucky to be an ape in a cage.

The withholding of a thing invests it with desirability; to the extent that it grows (or remains) opaque to the gaze, resistant to the will, it draws us toward itself. In his unfinished essay on the poetry of Chinese ideograms, Fenollosa asserts that “poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words,” and again, “poetic thought works by suggestion, crowding maximum meaning into the single phrase pregnant, charged, and luminous from within.” In part (one hopes), this luminosity is accomplished through brilliant selections and arrangements of words, multiple under-kimonos, makeup; but the metonymic compulsion placed upon that single phrase, the representation of Genji’s dying wife by means of a folded robe on the Noh stage, or that hint of red on the sole of the woman’s high heels, requiring it to do duty for a dozen other phrases any of which could have served equally or nearly as well, catalyzes the impregnation and the charging of the thing. Hence the tale of the tea-master Sen no Rikyu, who at around the turn of the seventeenth century built a garden on a hill overlooking the waves; within the garden hedges utterly shut out the world, but at the entrance, above the stone water-basin where guests bent to purify themselves, a hole had been bored through the hedge; there and only there one could spy the sea.

In around 1794 we see one of Utamaro’s yuujo fanning herself. Her hair is tied back with the string called motoyui , and she wears a red slip, white underwear and a thin black summer garment. Her ankle entices us through the black dress.

Do such procedures best teach me to appreciate ankles and ocean views? Mr. Mikata once said to me (and I wish I understood him completely; the enigmatic quality of the word “capacity” surely derives from my interpreter’s choice of words): “The right capacity is where you can see with your eyes and then you can hear with your voice. If you need light to see, then you cannot really appreciate the depth of Noh.” — His sentiment felt strange to me, since under such conditions I could not possibly distinguish a ko-omote from a waka-onna , but by that very token it increased the understatement, bringing the Noh farther beyond perception and discrimination, so that it might as well have been infinite. Could it be that if I subjected myself stringently and sincerely to such conditions, I would learn to recognize those two masks at a glance? Would it improve my aesthetic sense? Or would I merely accomplish my own Rathian disenfranchisement? Is it the Emperor’s new clothes?

But as this book so frequently and perhaps wearisomely repeats, understatement need not accomplish itself only through reduction; stylization will also serve its turn, as in, for instance, the simplified visages of the ladies and their courtiers in the Genji Picture-Scrolls, or Utamaro’s round-cheeked white geisha faces standing out from yellowish mica grounds, their stiff black hair-waves bristling with golden hairpicks, some of which sport floral decorations; the red lips and black eyes are always tiny in the plump white features; they preen themselves or bow snowily over love-letters; their expressions are nearly identical, like the lines used to compose them: the nose is two curves, each eye a pointed-cornered ellipse, the mouth two simple droplet-shapes joined on the pointed side.

Again, please consider the way that Matisse’s drawings of women offer a combination of spontaneity and economy, a right breast, for instance, being represented by an arc akin to a backward L, with the nipple a tick inscribed in a tight little circle; the woman’s face is often no more than a wide U, closed at the top by a few squiggles of hair, and within, the brows and nose generally receive one line apiece, the mouth two or three, like each eye. A woman stands nude, clasping her wrists in a curvy arch above her head. Her contours twist smoothly and simply down. These few lines are so carefree, yet so convincing in their placement, that the woman, sleek and rounded, has been caught forever in an instant of her moving grace. Another woman wears a necklace, her bowed head almost classically Greek; Matisse has not troubled to connect her left shoulder to her neck, and it makes no difference. A woman’s face is half-smiling at me, her lips full, her eyes squinting sleepily and sensually; counting the earring, hair-ribbon, necklace and all, this drawing cannot comprise more than twenty-five lines. And here a wide-hipped woman sprawls on her side, her uppermost thigh an inviting white blankness, with a pretty little pubic squiggle for a decoration; it reminds me of her sister’s hair-ribbon. What is grace? A naked woman plays beside a bowl of goldfish. A woman on her knees arches her back and stretches, with her face not more than a single line; her genitals, made of line-twirls and a few cross-hatches, are the least blank part of this drawing, which is not saying much; for Matisse’s women, like atoms, consist primarily of empty space. Another woman touches herself above the right breast, staring at me seriously and perhaps a trifle sadly. Who can rival her complexion, which is smooth white paper? I close the book, and all these women seem to hover before me on my bed’s white sheets, in a single understated assemblage of black line. I glimpse them as I would the ocean through that hedge-hole in Sen no Rikyu’s garden.

But what if I could teach myself to see and understand more than I have ever done so far? Might I not want to roll back Chun’e’s curtain of mist in order to admire every last scarlet leaf? Why not strive to perceive the thing unwithheld, the naked thing? (Matisse’s nudes are not naked; they conceal their pores.) Again, if the goal is to embrace the ineffable, would not a greater goal be to render it effable? If this is impossible, is it because there is a divine principle which cannot be bound or limited by human expression, or simply because nobody has yet figured out how to do it? Must my perceptions remain ever slightly faded, like the colors of Edo silk?

For some reason, most women on Earth wear clothes in my presence. Am I disenfranchised, then? (Sade insisted that true social freedom would occur only when all of us had complete access to each other’s bodies at all times. And an Egyptian papyrus advises: “The waste of a woman is in not knowing her carnally.”)

Understatement is as smooth as an onnagata’s skin when it is seen from a distance. Would I persevere in my appreciation if I saw his face up close?

An enthusiastic scholar of corsetry advises us:

The ‘fetish-object’ in the history of courtly love is a surrogate, and decreases in value as the loved one is present or appears more attainable. Similarly, the true tight-lacing fetishist does not wish to possess (or masturbate with) the corset itself, but to apply it possessively upon the beloved, so that it, his desire and her body become one… The fetish-object serves both as a symbol of union and a symbolic obstacle.

“You want a relationship without boundaries,” a sweetheart once complained, and I proudly assented. I resist the notion that either the fetish-object or the utterly accessible lover must decline in value. I wish to believe that if the beautiful object of my desire revealed itself or herself to me unstintingly, perpetually, any resulting failure of my appreciation would result from my own imperfections of love, concentration, etcetera. But in the British Museum there is a Babylonian clay plaque from circa 1800 B.C., catalogued as the Queen of the Night; and this roundfaced, necklaced, highbreasted, nude goddess, whose pupilless eyes offer me the hollow darknesses of mask-holes and whose taloned feet rest upon a pair of reclining lions, raises both her hands to me, holding ringed scepters; she wears a headdress shaped like pairs of bull’s horns and her wings flare out to her thighs; and she is all pale clay on clay, so that I am drawn into a realm almost as flat, despite its three-dimensionality, as it is erotic. Her lions goggle at me, and so do the two owls who bookmark them. I would not hesitate to call her pure, ethereal. But the Museum has digitally reconstructed her as she must have been when she was painted; and striking as those hues certainly are, they define and thereby limit her; what stylized her before I now experience as crudity, or, more precisely, the shallow color which Mr. Otsuka warned against.