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

Why Helga is beautiful, whom we are meant to think of when we see a certain pregnant Cycladic marble with a nose like a knife, pointed breasts and a wide flat pubis; why I am bewitched by this geisha’s perfect white face which glows in the darkness as softly as a paper lamp (who is she to me? I think of the Jungian concept of the anima, the projection of the feminine within me, but that can’t be much of it, because she is alien ), to these questions the eternal beyondness of understatement gives some answer, to be sure, but if I knew more I could know more. In the Nara National Museum there is an eighth-century scroll of the Flower Garland Sutra: silver-dust characters evenly spaced on night-blue paper; call it a celestial blueprint. I “appreciate its beauty.” But I cannot read it. There is too much in this world for me to know. As the shite says in the madwoman play “Miidera” (literal translation): “Thinking heart is saddened.”

What is grace? The lap drummer cries out; the three golden fans slowly flash.

An Epitaph for Radha’s Grace

And because femininity has no one true face, because it is modish, living, and hence at every moment ageing, because my loving or lustful or worshipful gaze must itself die, because my male attraction to the female is attachment, which even if it could last would eventually (whether or not I believe it) become torment, it is good for me to think again and again on Zeami’s third highest level of beauty: “ The art of the flower of tranquility. Piling up snow in a silver bowl.” The Sanskrit poet Jayadeva celebrates Radha’s liquidly moving doe eyes, her black braid, her red berry-lips and perfectly circular breasts; her earlobe is the bowstring of desire and fragrance comes from her lotus mouth. Where is Radha now? The grace of a woman is a snow image; and then the sun comes out from faraway Silla, and there is only water in the silver bowl.

Ono No Komachi in Traditional Noh Plays

In Hokusai’s sketch, high-eyebrowed Komachi stands in a regal bow-like arc of kimono and haughtiness. So many men seek her — unimaginable the future when she will be expelled from the palace! This artist also portrays her in old age, clutching a disk whose upper rim bursts into leaf. And in the ninth of his illustrations to the renowned Hundred Poets anthology, in the midst of late spring, an old crone in a pale blue kimono and a red obi grips a cane, her white fist wilting down from its sagging red sleeve; and there she leans, staring at a cherry tree’s cloud-white blossoms, which do indeed resemble two-dimensional, multi-lobed clouds clinging to the tree’s crooked red arms and fingers. We see her only from the rear. Facing her, and looking at her either not at all or else only out of the corner of his eye, one of Hokusai’s typical balding, wry-faced workers sweeps the white path; white blossoms cling to the red bristles of his broom. The poem accompanying this image may be her most famous, the one that puns on rain and senescence; it begins: Hana no iro wa / Utsuri ni keri na… — “The flower’s color / has already gone…”

We have looked in on Zeami writing almost obsessively about the various ages in a Noh actor’s life, always emphasizing what he should aspire to create. At the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, when both voice and carriage have matured even as the body continues to be youthful, “this is a very dangerous moment for him. This flower is not the true flower… Due to his inexperience, he does not realize that this premature flower will fade soon. He must ponder this fact over and over again.”

In his effort to explain the meaning of “elegance beyond maturity,” Zeami quotes this proverb:

The flower of a lover’s mind

Is one that may fade at any moment

Without his being aware,

Like cherry blossoms

Ready to fall.

Noh most assuredly conveys the flower’s readiness to fall, all the more so now than in Zeami’s time, when the art’s various stylizations were not yet bygone; indeed, Zeami asserted that even Noh itself is transient, decaying; its hana declines each century. (Proust: “Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.”) And so the cherry blossoms come blowing down. — Are they the true or the false? The lovely girl has an old man’s feet. And Komachi’s poems about her bygone beauty are beautiful as she herself beneath poetry’s mask no longer is. “The flower’s color / has already gone…” Accordingly, what could be more suitable than a cycle of Noh plays about her?

Once upon a time, a transgender woman decided that her desire for other transgender women was most often stimulated by their eyes, in which she read “endless strength and inconsolable sadness; I see a woman who was made to feel shame for her desires and yet had the courage to pursue them anyway.”

And the magnetism of young Komachi, on stage one reenacts it by means of a courtier who chants out his longing to kiss the vermilion lips of a waka-onna with another man inside. This hidden man possesses the true flower, the ease in rigidity of which a geisha who has reached greatness, for instance Kofumi-san, expresses: how could she, living statue, even tire, much less age?

But another cherry petal falls. The solid inkiness of a certain seventeenth-century zo-onna ’s hair has begun to flake off above the parting. Here and there, the forehead shows age spots. Within that melon-seed face, all is not roundness; the corners of the eyes narrow into the lance-point, and the dark red lips make almost a hexagonal crystal bifurcated by a slit of black teeth. The girl seems to be regarding me from the midst of her own breathless joy — or does she perhaps express the inward-turned wonder which I have seen from time to time on the faces of corpses? Who is she? Suddenly she seems to be the moon. Those flecks and abrasions and freckles which four hundred years have placed upon her brow, they could be the mottlings of the lunar face which are so lovely to me on full moon nights.

MASK SUBSTITUTIONS

A Japanese Emperor once said: “The most important accomplishment for a beautiful woman is to be able to write poetry.” Indeed, this beautiful woman (born in about 820 or 830) was one of the Six Immortals. The literary scholar Donald Keene considers her “possibly the sincerest poet of her epoch.” I know her only in translation, of course, but to me sincerity seems as peculiar an ascription for Komachi as it would be for the slow rotation through stage-darkness of an ivory Noh mask with diagonal eyebrows; for her poems are as multiply allusive as Noh texts. Trickster of the pivot-words called kakekotoba , whose functions and effects I cannot appropriately convey to you, voice of changeability, empress of paradoxes, she performs her femininity with the understated brevity of her time. In one verse, the darkness which prohibits her lover from finding her accordingly illuminates her breast with desperate fire. Is this indeed sincerity, or simply truth? Another poem, more bitter, refers to the way a man’s deceitful flower, in other words his heart, can change without fading; he represents himself as unaltered, and pretends fidelity, when in fact he no longer loves the woman. Perhaps these lines were composed in torment; or for all we know Komachi crafted them in utter coolness, under the exigencies of some extemporaneous palace competition. Either way, they express a sadly eternal aspect of this floating world.