Part 7
Now, first of all, to speak of Color! We note that the Japanese artist has reduced his palette to a limited number of general and predetermined tones. He understands that the beauty of a color resides less in its intrinsic quality than in its implicit accord with contrasted tones. And because of the unmodified blending of two values laid on in equal quantities, he repairs the omission of the many intermediate shades by the vivacity that he gives to the juxtaposition of the essential notes; calmly indicating one repetition or two. He knows that the value of a tone results more from its position than from its intensity; master of keys, he transposes them as he will. Furthermore, as color is nothing less than the particular homage that all visible things render to the universal light, everything fitly takes its place within the frame through the power of color, in accord with the theme that the artist has chosen.
But now the roving eye remains fixed; and, instead of contemplating, it interrogates. Color is the passion of matter; it signalizes the participation of each object in the common source of glory. Design expresses the energy proper to each being; his action, his rhythm, his postures. The one makes manifest his relations to space, the other fixes his movement in time. One gives the form, the other gives the sense. And as the Japanese, careless of relief, paints only by contour and mass, the chief characteristic of his design is a schematic stroke. While the tones are in contrast, the lines are in unity; and while the painting is a harmony, the design is an idea; and if the interpretation of this idea comes in a flash of recognition, complete and instantaneous, the design has a satisfactory abstract significance and expresses the idea in all its purity, just as well as might a word made of letters. Each form, each movement, each group furnishes its hieroglyph.
I understand this when I revel among these bundles of Japanese prints. At Shidzuoka, among the ex-votos of the temple, I have seen many admirable examples of this art. A warrior leaps from the vermilion wood like a frantic exclamation. This prancing or kicking thing is no longer the picture of a horse, but the symbol of his revolt against bondage; a sort of reversed figure 6, equipped with a mane and tail, represents his repose in the grass. Embraces, battles, landscapes, crowds, fitted into a small space, resemble the designs on seals. This man bursts into laughter; and, falling, he no longer seems a man, but immediately becomes his own character in writing.
With horrible and careless crudity, the French or English construct barbarous barracks; pitiless toward the earth they disfigure, concerned only with their expansion, seizing upon all possible space with their eyes, if not with their hands. They exploit a view as they would a waterfall. The Oriental knows enough to flee from vast landscapes, where multifold aspects and divergent lines do not lend themselves to that exquisite co-ordination between the eye and the view which alone makes a sojourn possible for him. His home is not open to all the winds. Choosing a retreat in some peaceful valley, his care is to achieve a perfect location where his view composes so harmonious a landscape that it is impossible to imagine seeing it otherwise. His eyes furnish him with all the elements of happiness, and he replaces furniture with open windows. Inside, the art of the painter, ingeniously tracing his visions upon a fictitiously transparent window, multiplies the imaginary openings. In the ancient imperial palace that I visited, its magnificent and movable treasures had been carried away, and there remained only the pictorial decorations arranged in a black room,--the familiar visions of its august inhabitant.
The paper dwelling is composed of successive apartments, divided by partitions which slide on moldings. A single theme of decoration has been chosen for each of the series, and it is introduced by screens similar to the wings of a theater. I can prolong or shorten my contemplation at will. I am less the spectator of the painter than his host; each subject is expressed by a choice in harmony with the tone of the paper, a color representing the opposite end of the gamut. It is so at Gosho. An indigo and cream motif suffices for the room called “Freshness and Purity,” seeming all filled with sky and water. But at Nijo the imperial habitation is done in gold alone. Emerging from the matting-covered rafters, painted life-size, crowns of the pine-tree extend their grotesque boughs along the sunlit walls. The Prince, upon his seat, saw only great bands of tawny fire; and his sensation was of floating on the evening sky with awful sunset fires beneath him.
At Shidzuoka, at the time of Rinzainji, I saw a landscape made of colored dust. They had put it under glass, for fear that a breath would blow it away.
Before the golden Buddha in the leaves, time is measured by the burning of a little candle; and in the depth of this ravine, by the dripping of a triple fountain.
Swept away, overthrown in the chaos and turmoil of the incomprehensible sea, lost in the churning abyss, mortal man with all his strength clutches at something that may prove solid in his grasp. That is why he accords the permanence of wood, metal, or stone to the human figure, and makes it the object of his devotion and his prayer. Besides their common names, he gives proper names to the forces of nature; and, by means of a concrete image which symbolizes them like a syllable, still mysteriously conscious in his abasement of the superior authority of the Word, he calls upon it in his necessities. Thus, like a child who constructs the history of his doll from everything around him, humanity in its memories unites all that it discovers with all that it dreams, and so composes the romance of mythology.
Here beside me is this poor little old woman, who makes her salutation by striking her hands carefully together before a colossal female statue, in whose bosom an ancient prince, when led by a toothache and a dream to honor the skull of an ancestor, inserted the worn sphere after finding it wedged by the jawbone in the roots of a willow. At my right and at my left, all the length of the dark cavern, the three thousand golden Kwannon, each one resembling the others in the embellishment of arms that frame it, are aligned in rows of a hundred, in ranks fifteen deep. A ray of sunlight flickers over this barrier built of goddesses. Seeking the reason for uniformity in this multitude, and from what bulb all these identical stalks have sprung, I find that the worshiper here doubtless wishes a wider sounding-board for his prayers, and imagines that in multiplying the object of his entreaty he increases its efficacy.
But not for long did the sages rest their eyes on the eyes of these crude likenesses. Having perceived the unity of all things, they found the basis of their philosophy in that fact. Though each individual were transitory and capricious, the richness of the common fund remained inexhaustible. No need that Man should apply his hatchet to the tree, or his cleaver to the rock; in the grain of millet and the egg, alike in the immobility and the convulsions of sun and sea, he found the same principle of plastic energy; and the earth sufficed for the construction of its own idols. Further, admitting that the whole is formed of homogeneous parts; if, to better pursue their analysis, the Sages turned it back upon themselves, they discovered that the fugitive, blameworthy, unjustifiable thing in them was the fact of their presence in the world,--and that the element in them which was free of space and limitless of duration was the very conception they had formed of this contingent character.
If a diabolical fraud had not led them astray at that point, they might have recognized in the harmony of this principle of independent existence (with its main idea common to all and its expression so varied) a faith similar to that in the Word, which implies a vow--the voluntary restitution of breath to its divine Source. For every creature, born of the impression of Divine Unity upon indeterminate matter, is the very acknowledgment that he makes to his Creator, and the expression of the nothingness from which he has been drawn. This is the living, breathing rhythm of the world; where Man, dowered with consciousness and language, has been instituted their priest, to make dedication and offering of them,--and, of his own nothingness united to essential grace, to make a filial gift of himself, through love’s most intimate choice.
But these blind eyes refused to recognize unconditional being; and to him whom they call Buddha was it given to perfect the Pagan blasphemy. To return to this comparison of the Word; from the moment that they ignored the object of the discourse, its order and sequence escaped them entirely, and nothing remained but the ravings of delirium. But a horror of that which is not the Absolute is essential to man; and to escape the frightful circle of your vanity, Buddha, you have not hesitated to embrace Nothingness! For instead of explaining all things by their final end, he searched in himself for their intrinsic principle; and, finding there only nothingness, his doctrine teaches this monstrous communion.
This is the method; that the Sage,--having banished successively from his mind the ideas of form and of space, and the very idea of an idea,--arrives finally at Nothingness, and so enters into Nirvana. And people are awed by this revelation! As for me, I find that to the idea of Nothingness they have added that of Enjoyment. This seems to me the last and most Satanic mystery; the silence of a creature intrenched in its final refusal, the incestuous quietude of a soul seated on its integral difference!
THE SEDENTARY
I live in a corner of the highest story of a square and spacious building. I have placed my bed in the embrasure of the window; and when the evening, like the bride of a god, silently mounts her couch, I lie at full length with my face turned toward the night. From time to time, lifting an eyelid heavy as if in death, my sight has swum in a rose-colored glow. But at this hour, emerging with a long sigh from a sleep as heavy as Adam’s, I awaken to a vision of gold. The light tissue of the mosquito netting waves under an ineffable breeze. Here is light purged of heat; and I twist slowly in the delicious coolness. If I put out my bare arm, it seems to me fitting to plunge it to the shoulder in the consistency of this glory, to sink my hand searchingly into the fountain of eternity, as tremulous as its source. I see the magnificent lake of light spread with an irresistible intensity in a sky that is like a concave and liquid basin the color of mulberry leaves. Only the face of the sun, and its insupportable fires, only the mortal thrust of its rays, can drive me from my bed. I foresee that I shall have to pass the day in fasting and detachment. What water will be pure enough to quench my thirst, to satisfy my heart? From what manner of fruit shall I strip the skin with a golden knife?
But when the sun has reached the zenith, followed by the sea as is a shepherd, and by the races of mankind arising in successive multitudes,--it is noon, and everything that occupies a dimension in space is enveloped by the soul of a fire whiter than lightning. The world is effaced and the seals of the furnace broken; all things have vanished in the heart of this new deluge. I have closed all the windows. Prisoner of the light, I take up the journal of my captivity. And now, with my hand on the paper, I write by the same impulse that moves the silkworm, who spins its thread of the leaf that it devours. Sometimes I stroll through the darkened room, through the dining-room or the parlor; or for a moment I rest my hand on the cover of the organ, in this bare space whose center the work-table fills, standing intrepid and alone. Surrounded by these white streaks that mark the fissures in my prison, I develop the thought of holocaust. Ah, if it is enviable to dissolve in a flaming embrace, swept away upon a whirlwind with vehement breath,--how much more beautiful the torture of a spirit devoured by light!
And, when the afternoon is filled with this burning softness, by which the evening is preceded, like the sentiment of paternal love; having purified my body and my mind, I remount to the highest room. Seizing an inexhaustible book, I pursue there the study of Being, the definition of person and substance, of qualities and possibilities.
Between two rows of houses, the glimpse of a river terminates my street; the enormous silver current smokes, and great ships with white sails move across the splendid gap with a smooth and superb grace. I see before me the very River of Life whose image I borrowed when a child, to discourse of Morality. But today, stubborn swimmer though I am, I no longer cherish any hope of landing flat on my face among the reeds in the slime of the other bank, under the salutation of the palms, in a silence interrupted only by the cry of a parrot. Although the shrill cascade invites me, drumming upon the gravel behind the fleshy foliage of the magnolia; although the fabulous boughs are bending beneath their weight of myrobalans and of pomegranates; I will think of them no more--turning my glance to a more angelic science, to this mystic garden which is offered for my enjoyment and my recreation!
THE EARTH VIEWED FROM THE SEA
Arriving from the horizon, our ship is confronted by the wharf of the Earth; and the continent, emerging, spreads its immense architecture out before us. In the morning distinguished by one great star, as I mount the gangway the earth’s blue apparition appears before my eyes. To defend the sun against the pursuit of the restless ocean, this continent has established the deep-set solidity of its ramparts. Their breaches open into a happy countryside.
For a long time in the full daylight we follow the frontier of another world. Carried along by the trade-winds, our ship veers and rebounds upon the resilient abyss to which it confides its whole weight. I am caught up to the Azure, I am stuck there like a cask. Captive of the infinite, suspended at the intersection of sky and water, I see below me all the somber Earth laid out like a chart--the whole world, humble and enormous! My separation from it is irrevocable. All things are far from me, and only sight connects me with them. It will never again be vouch-safed me to set my foot on the solid earth, to construct with my hands a dwelling of wood and stone, to eat in peace food cooked at the domestic fire. Soon we will turn our prow toward the shoreless sea; and, under an immense spread of sail, our advance into the midst of eternity will be shown only by our signal lights.
SALUTATION
And again I am permitted to salute this land similar to Gessen and Canaan. Tonight, as our ship tossed in the wheat-colored moonlight, at the entrance to the river, what a sign the Dog-Star was to me, low beyond the sea; the golden watchman at the foot of a stretch of stars, glowing splendor at the far horizon! These flowing waters having led us into the heart of the countryside, I disembark, and on my road I see below me the image of the round sun repeated in the fields, ruddy in the green rice.
It is neither cold, nor too warm. All nature has the warmth of my body. How the feeble cry of these crickets touches me! At this end of the season, in this testamentary moment, the union of the sky and the earth (less sacramental today than it is amorous) consummates the matrimonial solemnity.
O cruel destiny! Is repose always apart from me? Is there no peace for the heart of man? A spirit born for one only joy can pardon no delay. Absolute possession some day will not dry my tears! No joy of mine will be sufficient to make reparation for the bitterness of this grief.
And I will salute this earth; not only with a frivolous jet of intricate phrases, but with the sudden discovery in me of an immense discourse circling the foot of the mountain like that sea of wheat crossed by a triple river. Like that plain and its roads, I fill the space between the mountains. With both eyes lifted toward the eternal mountains, I salute the venerable body of the earth. Through the air I no longer see its mere semblance, but its very flank, the gigantic assemblage of its limbs. O borders of the slope all about me! It is through you that we receive the waters of the sky, and you are the recipients of the Offering!
This damp morning, at the turn of the road between the tomb and the tree, I saw the somber and enormous hill barred at the foot by the flashing line of a river, which stood out like a stream of milk in the light of noon.
Like a body sinking through water of its own weight, during these four motionless hours I have been advancing to the heart of the light, feeling a divine resistance. I am holding myself erect in perfectly white air. While I cast no shadow, I am celebrating the orgy of the maturity of day.
No longer, under the sudden brilliance of a greedy sun, does the earth burst into violent flowering. Lustral moment! A continual breath blows to us from between the Orient and the North. The opulent harvest, the trees weighed down with their burdens, stir ceaselessly under the soft irresistible wind. The fruits of the great earth are stirred in the purifying splendor. The sky is no longer high above us; brought low, it submerges and damps us. I, a new Hylas (like one who watches fishes below him suspended in watery spaces) see through this milkiness, this silver wherein I am drowned, a dazzling white bird with a pink throat flash into sight and lose itself in a brilliance that my eye cannot sustain.
The whole day does not exhaust my salutation. At the somber hour,--when the wedding procession, armed with flaming torches, conducts the bridal carriage through the forest of orange trees, with all my being I lift applause and acclamation toward the red Sign I see upraised above the wild circle of flaming mountains.
I salute the threshold, the material evidence of Hope, the recompense of man uncompromised; I lift my hands toward this exposition of the color of life! Autumnal triumph, the foliage above my head is thick with little oranges! But once again my gaze, which has been uplifted toward Death from infancy, must return to mankind; like the singer who, with parted lips, waits to carry on his part--his heart lost in the beat of the music, his eye on his score.
THE HANGING HOUSE
By a subterranean stairway I descend to the hanging house. Just as the swallow fashions her shelter with patience, between the planks and the rafter, and the seagull glues her nest like a pannier to the rock; so, by a system of clamps, bolts, and girders driven into the stone, the wooden box that I inhabit is solidly attached to the arch of an enormous porch hollowed in the mountain itself. A trap-door arranged in the floor connects me with the world; by means of it on both these days, letting my little basket drop at the end of a cord, I have drawn it up filled with a little rice, some roasted pistachio nuts, and vegetables pickled in brine. In a corner of the formidable masonry, like a trophy made of Medusa’s tresses, hangs a fountain whose inexhaustible lament is carried away in a whirlpool. I draw up the water I need by means of a cord knotted in open meshes, and the smoke of my cooking mingles with the spray of the cascade.
The torrent is lost among the Palms, and I see below me the crowns of the great trees from which they draw sacerdotal perfumes. And, as a shattering of crystal is enough to disturb the night, all the keyboard of the earth is awakened by this neutral, hollow jingling of rain on that deep flint.
I see in the monstrous niche where I am ensconced the very tympanum of the massive mountain, like an ear hollowed in the temporal rock. And, collecting all my attention, bending all my joints, I will attempt to hear, above the murmur of leaves and birds, those sounds which this enormous and secret pavilion undoubtedly gives access to: the oscillations of the universal waters, the shifting of geological strata, the groans of the hurtling earth under an effort contrary to gravitation.
Once a year the moon rises at my left above this escarpment, cutting the shadows at the height of my waist on so exact a level that, with ever so little more delicacy and precaution, I could float a plate of copper upon it. But I like best the last step of the stairway, which descends into the void. Many times I have awakened from meditation, bathed in the dews of the night like a rose-bush; or, in the comfortable afternoon, I have appeared to throw handfuls of dry letches like little red bells to the monkeys perched below me on the furthest branches.
THE SPRING
The crow, adjusting one eye on me as the clock-maker does on his watch, would see me, a precise, miniature person--a cane like a dart between my fingers--advancing by the straight footpath, moving briskly along.
The country, between the mountains that enclose it, is as flat as the bottom of a frying-pan. To right and left the work of harvesting goes on; they shear the earth as if it were a sheep. I dispute the width of the path, and my place on it, with an uninterrupted file of workers; those who are going to the fields, spade at belt; those who are returning, bending like scales under the weight of double baskets whose form is at once round and square, joining the symbols of the earth and the sky.
I walk a long time; the open air is as close as a room, the sky is somber, and the long columns of stagnant smoke are stationary like the remains of some barbaric pyre. I leave the shorn rice-fields and the harvest-fields of slime; and, little by little, I mount the narrowing gorge. Useless reeds succeed the fields of sugar-cane; and three times, with shoes in hands, I cross the rapid waters gathered into the current of a river. I have undertaken to find the source of one of these streams that feed the river, here, where it arises in the heart of a five-gorged valley. The ascent becomes more difficult as the thread of the cascade extends. I leave beneath me the last field of potatoes, and, all at once, I have entered into a wood like that which on Parnassus served for the assembly of the Muses! All about me the tea-plants lift their distorted shoots and their dry, somber foliage,--so high that my stretched hand cannot reach it. Charming retreat! Quaint and mysterious shadow, enameled with a perpetual flowering! A delicate perfume, which seems to survive rather than emanate, flatters the nostril while recreating the spirit. And in a hollow I discover the spring! Like grain out of a furious hopper the water from beneath the earth bursts forth, leaping and bubbling. Impurities are absorbed. Only that which is pure, untainted at the source, leaps out. Born of the roseate sky (gathered in what profound matrix!) the virgin water, with living force, pours from the opening like a cry. Happy those from whom a new word bursts with violence! May my mouth be supplied forever like this spring,--which, sustained by a perpetual, solitary renewal, cares not that it must serve for the works of Man,--for those lowlands where, spreading wide and inundating the tilth, it will nourish the vast, stagnant harvest-fields.
THE TIDE AT NOON
When the time comes that he can sail no longer, the mariner makes his home near the sea; and when it moans he rises to watch, unable to sleep longer; like a nurse who hears a little child complain in the night.
I do likewise, and, by the living virtue of the sea in my blood, my mind communicates with the movement of the waters as does a city by its secret drains.