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

Who is this inside the box? Wyeth must have “known” what he had made, but he lacked the noun to describe it. “Taking the lids off the boxes… they had the odor of the girl, they had the whole — I knew they were not just pretty pictures.”

She remains on her side of the abyss, her paintings relentlessly immobile and two-dimensional — understated, in short; fascinating and inexhaustible.

“THE GROWTH AND DEPTH OF MY EMOTION”

Noh actors and Inoue School geishas repeat that they strive to feel nothing when performing their roles. Zeami insists that the Perfect Fluency “has no connection… with the actor’s conscious artistic intentions or with any outward manifestation of those intentions.” Meanwhile, here is Andrew Wyeth: “To me, it is simply the question of whether or not I can find the thing that expresses the way I feel at a particular time about my own life and my own emotion. The only thing that I want to search for is the growth and depth of my emotion toward a given object.”

Perhaps defensively, he remarked to Thomas Hoving that the Helga pictures were “too real for some people. You have to feel deeply to do this kind of thing.”

For years I hoped to meet Andrew Wyeth to ask him how deep into the earth his emotion was growing, toward what; but as I finished this book, at the beginning of 2009, he was freshly dead, his feeling’s constellation of image-object as motionless as a lord’s retainers in an old Kabuki play. Helga Testorf, so I imagine, gazes down into the place where he has gone. She sees it better than I. When the shite of “Izutsu” stares down into the well, when Zeami envisions snow in a silver bowl, and when Suzuka-san meets her own snow-white geisha face in the makeup mirror, are their visions somehow equivalent?

In Kanazawa I have looked down at the Ishakawon Gate, discovering snow on the roofs, the forest silver behind it, as if I have lost myself in an old Genji Picture-Scroll. Ishakawon’s gangling walls, gabled roofs, complex of ponds and walks invite enumeration, however unsuccessful such a procedure might be. In “Farm Road” it would be impossible, unless one so far misconstrued coherence as to inspect Wyeth’s brush-strokes through a hand lens.

Had I been lucky enough to meet Andrew Wyeth, what holes under the tree-roots might he have shown me? One visitor from 1965 perceived the artist’s identity to be “fluid and fluctuating… You can feel it changing and altering in a constant play while you talk to him. This makes you think you have got behind the mask, but when you leave you don’t know whether you have.”

What then; where then? If on a summer’s night in Kyoto you watch the mask just when the actor turns away from the torchlight, will you learn where the face goes?

And when Mr. Umewaka dances Yoroboshi at Yasukuni Shrine, his mask grows dreamily downturned, inward-turned into a true blind face; then when he raises the mask it seems startled, attentive to some distant sound. Slowly he swirls his almost closed fan before him as he turns. A gash of light catches on his chin like a tear. He turns, more tear-light kissing his mask just under his blind eye; then a circlet of light crowns his forehead. Presently the fan comes before his face, becomes a knife-edge, then slowly cleaves the air. Later he will fling out his sleeve, collapsing when the voices slow. Then the waki comes to face him, but Yoroboshi stares at the ground. The waki spreads his golden fan in what I can only inanely describe as “a very dignified gesture,” after which absolute silence follows. Mr. Umewaka at a wide remove from the waki glides down the bridge, with time itself breaking between them.

Does Helga see what the blind man did? If I could succeed in seeing through darkness, would my vision be one certain and secret thing, or could it be any number of things? When a Noh actor or geisha considers nothingness, what if anything lies beyond this, glowing like a jewel within the earth?

Noh’s overt answer to this might recapitulate the Genjo Koan of 1231: “ The individual self striving to realize all things is delusion; all things striving to realize the individual self is awakening. Those who awake to delusion are Buddhas, while those who are deluded about awakening are humanity.” But this is not what I wish to believe. I want to kiss the mask, and when I put my lips against its wooden emptiness, I want to feel a woman’s tongue in my mouth.

And when aestheticians refer to the slow rising of a Noh actor’s hand as “the gateway to something beyond… a symbol not of any one object or conception but of an eternal region, an eternal silence,” I can never avoid wondering whether they have been tricked by the Emperor’s nakedness. But when I experience the yugen of the geisha, or of “Farm Road,” or when the woman I love slowly raises her hand to her hair, then I do believe that there is something beyond.

To look at something far away, the Noh actor shades his eyes, and the cognoscenti know. When he outstretches his sleeve with his fan angled outward, the fan becomes a cup; he is scooping up water. But when Helga gestures, what does it mean? Does grace without allusiveness fall into its own category?

“It’s not just anybody lying there. It’s that momentary thing — something you’ll never see again…” — Genji might have felt something of this sort when Murasaki died. And so it is anybody, and everybody, and all of us who have existed on one or the other side of an alluring mask. I cannot tell you what Helga sees when she stares down into the earth; but I imagine that I can when I am in Kanazawa, at the point of passing through the many stone arches of an ancient castle gate.

Snatches of a Play

On the grounds of old Nagoya Castle, attended by fountain and moat, the rainbow curtain tucks itself up and a heavy figure in turquoise glides out, on its shoulders a bundle of white, in its hands a basket. It stops almost onstage and turns to face another figure, a sprite garbed in the colors of earth, whose hands rest at its breast, the foregrounded sleeve falling below in a long earthern triangle from elbow and wrist. Its face is a honey-colored wig and a Noh mask of something staring and old. This entity begins to chant, and the drums, flute and chorus accompany its song, not a word of which I understand. Then it and the figure in turquoise begin to sing loudly and resonantly to one another from across the bridge.

I could remind you of the functions of the two figures who enter from the little stage door, crossing the mirror-board to kneel at the rear, partially occluding the pine tree. I could explain the plot to you, pretending that even if Mr. Umewaka had refrained from summarizing it for me at the end I would have comprehended the Emperor’s command. If I had educated myself more during my interviews with mask-carvers I surely could have dissected for you the illusion by means of which the sprite’s gape becomes more and more thoughtful when seen from the side. The chanting and music speeds up and deepens, the flute shudders. Only the sprite moves, and he finally lays down his wand, removes a fan; then throughout a long bout of chanting, he stays still, the light glistening on his level mask, and faces the golden envoy across the stage. Never mind who is the Willow Tree Water Goddess. This performance being mediated by my untrained, incoherent perceptions, I can only serve you up with bits of things. I remember a kimono’s white and silver arrows, and a mask thatched with hair and offering us all its gruesomely grimacing wooden lips. Why does the crown have flames on it? The advances and retreats of this being, its dim movements especially, which are as delicately exquisite as horses in an Assyrian hunting relief, its creeping, twirling and stamping, the waving of its fan, the fact that on the bridge it casts a sleeve over its crown and the way its head flickers with ghastly liveliness, have all been choreographed; but even if I were no longer an ape in a cage, and could tell you the significance of each step and syllable, I still could not peer within “the gateway to something beyond”; in fact, I might remain farther away from it, like a darkroom technician whose very skill prevents him from composing interesting photographs. At least, so I reassure myself.