The Zen of aestheticism. Perfection is everywhere.

When I paw through The Book of Tea to rummage around its ideas about art, I’m following an old path.  I am dissatisfied with my culture’s answers to a vexing question – the permanence of great art, say – and am happy to discover that another culture has come up with different answers, allowing me to be differently dissatisfied.  What, actually satisfied?  Are you kidding?

Christopher Benfey did a great job of writing about this path, from both directions, Japan to Boston and Boston to Japan, in The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (2003), which features Herman Melville, Henry Adams, Lafcadio Hearn, Isabella Gardner, and, again and again, the crucial mediating figure, Kakuzo Okakura.  This is an easy book to recommend.  I guess the last part, guest starring Heidegger, gets a little heavy.

When I was in Japan a while ago, I read Okakura’s earlier book explaining Eastern literature and art to the Boston socialites, The Ideals of the East (1904).  I found it fascinating, and worrying, and enormously useful, but it is hardly as artfully written as The Book of Tea, which, amidst its miniature histories of flower arranging and tea consumption and the spread of Taoism, contains a number of sparkling passages, and a surprising amount of humor.

In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration.  We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back.  We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud. (“The Tea-Room”)

This joke is worthy of Howards End or Henry James.  Maybe it’s in Henry James somewhere.  And the aesthetic idea is serious.  Okakura’s aesthetics do not advocate simplicity, but oppose needless complexity, artistic clutter.

The tea-master’s art is, in fact, enormously complex:

The cut and color of the dress, the poise of the body, and the manner of walking could all be made expressions of artistic personality.  These were matters not to be lightly ignored, for until one has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty.  Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist, - art itself.  It was the Zen of aestheticism.  Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it. (“Tea-Masters”)

If the teapot is round, the teacups should be square.  A flower and a picture of a flower do not belong in the same ceremony.  Minute distinctions of odor, shape, color, and taste are weighted with meaning.  Thus, the necessity of a book explaining it all.  Another nice one, by the way, is Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Thousand Cranes (1952), partly about the hobbyists, or caretakers, who continue to enact the tea ceremony.

The Book of Tea ends with a description of the final tea ceremony of Rikiu, the greatest tea master:

Rikiu places the various articles before them, with the kakemono [an ancient text].  After all have expressed admiration of their beauty, Rikiu presents one of them to each of the assembled company as a souvenir.  The bowl alone he keeps.  "Never again shall this cup, polluted by the lips of misfortune, be used by man."  He speaks, and breaks the vessel into fragments.

I will let the interested reader discover the reason this is the last ceremony, the reason for the breaking of the bowl.  There is an aesthetics of creation, and an aesthetics of destruction, perfecion everywhere.

A diet of salt, vinegar, alum, and sometimes, vitriol - the impermanent beauty of the tea ceremony

If only Nathaniel Hawthorne had been familiar with Japanese aesthetics.  I suspect he would have been pleased with the Japanese understanding, the cultivation, of the impermanence of beauty.  He would have had to live another forty years to read Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906), a Japanese scholar's delicate exposition, for a select group of Boston connoisseurs, of Zen Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics, centered around the tea ceremony.

The tea ceremony is a performance, and by its nature impermanent.  The beauty of the tea ceremony remains in memory only, itself hardly permanent.  The ceramics remain, and the tea-room, to be rearranged and reused, up to a point:

Zennism, with the Buddhist theory of evanescence and its demands for the mastery of spirit over matter, recognized the house only as a temporary refuge for the body.  The body itself was but as a hut in the wilderness, a flimsy shelter made by tying together the grasses that grew around, - when these ceased to be bound together they again became resolved into the original waste.  In the tea-room fugitiveness is suggested in the thatched roof, frailty in the slender pillars, lightness in the bamboo support, apparent carelessness in the use of commonplace materials. (“The Tea-Room”)

The tea-room can be abandoned, the cup sacrificed.  The tea ceremony is an act of beauty, and a preparation for death.  Every action is meaningful in itself, and more meaningful in conjunction with some other element of the ceremony – the pot, the tea-master’s robe, the picture, the flower.

Okakura devotes a chapter to the history and art of flower-arranging:

[The flower] rests there like an enthroned prince, and the guests or disciples on entering the room will salute it with a profound bow before making their addresses to the host.  Drawings from masterpieces are made and published for the edification of amateurs. The amount of literature on the subject is quite voluminous.  When the flower fades, the master tenderly consigns it to the river or carefully buries it in the ground.  Monuments are sometimes erected to their memory. (“Flowers”)

What a wonderful, perplexing, mix of the fixed and the ephemeral.  Drawings, literature, monuments.  Monuments to a single flower!  That last detail sounds like something from a Ronald Firbank novel.  The flower arranger’s very function is to stave off the inevitable, but minutely:

He would diet you with salt, vinegar, alum, and sometimes, vitriol.  Boiling water would be poured on your feet when you seemed ready to faint.  It would be his boast that he could keep life within you for two or more weeks longer than would have been possible without his treatment.  Would you not have preferred to have been killed at once when you were first captured?  What were the crimes you must have committed during your past incarnation to warrant such punishment in this? (“Flowers”)

The “you” is the poor flower, tormented in the name of fleeting beauty.  Okakura is surprisingly funny in The Book of Tea.  More of that tomorrow.  Every culture, every aesthetic, finds some way to balance the permanent and impermanent – monumental architecture and modern dance, the play as text and the play on stage.  As a reader, I sometimes gasp at the thought of the lost plays of Sophocles or poems of Sappho, but in fact the vast bulk of books are effectively lost after a generation or two.  The technology allows the possibility of resurrection, which is reassuring.  Okakura suggests, wisely, that I instead embrace that loss.

The Book of Tea was written in English, but I should still register it at Dolce Belleza's admirable Japanese Literature Challenge, shouldn't I?

Great art is that before which we long to die.

"The inros, the netsukes, the sword-guards, and the delightful lacquer-work articles of the period, were playthings, and as such no embodiment of national fervour, in which all true art exists. Great art is that before which we long to die. But the art of the late Tokugawa period only allowed a man to dwell in the delights of fancy."

Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East (1904), Stone Bridge Press, p. 121.

Toss in, with the lacquer boxes and inros, the woodblock prints of Hiroshige, Hokusai, and others. I left out that part of the quotaton - it was a bit too wordy.

Okakura is presenting us with a Buddhist version of the sublime, art as annihilation, art as something bigger than we are, something that could crush us. That line about "national fervour" has an unpleasant odor, but it's a logical extension of the idea: Real art, great art, is important. Important!

I should try to reword Okakura's passage into its exact opposite, then adopt it as my motto. Great art is that before which we long to live. Inros and lacquer boxes, Hokusai and Hiroshige, are playthings, and embodiments of individual creativity, in which all true art exists.

The delights of fancy are exactly what I want from art. Surely there is room for more, though. This week I will try, probably indirectly, and time permitting, to challenge myself a little. Perhaps I'm too suspicious of the sublime, too sceptical of ideas. Let's think about it.

Inros, if you don't know, are Japanese lacquer medicine cases, hung at the waist by a sort of button, the netsuke. I know them from the collection on the second floor of the Chicago Field Museum, which contains nothing but wonder and delight. Cats and frogs, children and fat little monks, the rabbit in the moon - lovely things. My favorite objects in that museum, way better than Sue the T. Rex.

Okakura was the crucial link, for decades, between Japanese and American artists and intellectuals. He crossed paths with everyone. His story, very much worth knowing, is told in Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave, where Okakura appears in many chapters.

The Ideals of the East, written in English, was an influential account of Asian and Japanese art history and aesthetics, mostly traced through the international flow of ideas about Buddhism. It is probably only worth reading for people with a particular interest in Japanese aesthetics, or in the history of the exchange of ideas between the East and West.