however fallible: by way of an introduction

“Let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”  (Kakuzo Okakura)

The Beautiful Foolishness of Things is about simple things (joy is always simple). It has a gentle way of unfolding, its twofold vision entwined into a subtle contemplation of what is at the heart of what, essentially, is not, a gaze whose decisive sign seems to be, above all, the tenderness. The subject who becomes and the things which are met through tenderness, at a point that reveals their same, intimate nature: the vulnerability, ephemerality of being, always on the threshold of fading away. Our prayer for tenderness: the photograph, that one ‘takes’ of the world, an aggressive grasp of what faces us as ‘the other’, the word which is bound to reify—can they become a caress, as light as breath?

This is Her way. The Foolishness tells Her myth. A gaze which doesn’t imprison or impose its presence upon the world, but quietly awaits for presence to manifest itself as grace. A gentle withdrawal into the in-between, which, to paraphrase Dogen, shouldn’t be simply confused with nonbeing or forcefully asserted as being.

I had my fears, at the beginning, that Michael’s words and my images would fail to speak together—that ‘mitsprechen‘, wherein the voices become one, without sacrificing their own nature. I have wondered why this hasn’t happened, why, on the contrary, their speaking-together flows so effortlessly. This lies, perhaps—I have tried to answer— in the specific nature of what each ‘foolishness’ represents, and which could be called, if I am allowed to invent such a word, a photo-waka. I don’t mean that Michael’s poem is a waka illustrating the image, but rather that photograph and poem combine to form a peculiar kind of waka. In what follows, I will try to explain what I mean by this. If the Japanese poetry discussion is based on a series of essays I will indicate in the notes, the thoughts on photography are merely my naive… how to call them? musings which have no intention whatsoever to say something true or meaningful about photography in general: it is only my way of living photography as a path of spiritual experience, as a form of contemplation.

Waka is a classical form of Japanese poetry which relies on brevity (31 syllables) to articulate, in a single unit, a specific form of subjective consciousness which is, in fact, fundamental to all types of Japanese arts (representing, at the same time, a spiritual way, or path (geido). The essence of these arts is that they are centred on reaching an alignment, a perfect correspondence among the state of mind of the subject, the material used by a specific art and its expression (words, flowers) and nature. When this particular configuration is established, there emerges something which transcends it: a sudden experience allowing the subject to become aware, in Buddhist terms, of the ultimate Reality, the void pervading all being—the absence in presence, the emptiness in fullness, the discontinuity in the whole.

The ultimate source of creativity for the waka poet is what the Japanese call ‘kokoro‘—which could be understood as ‘pre-phenomenal mind’ or ‘awareness’, a state of subjectivity which can be neither grasped by cognitive activity nor articulated in any linguistic-psychological way. Toyo Izutsu writes: “As the mental concentration of the poet reaches the uttermost, out of the absolute serenity of his creative subjectivity showing no sign of vacillating this way and that—there, naturally and efortlessly, emerge, in spite of himself, poems.”

As far as I understand it, this is also the case with Michael’s process of creation, co-extensive with his Buddhist practice of contemplation, which allows – however not by intentionally seeking or forcing it to appear—the spontaneous manifestation of thoughts/words (omoi, kotoba) and feelings (yojo) from that all-pervading yet never phenomenologically articulated Self-Awareness. But, and I see here the first fundamental similarity between the two types of creation, isn’t photography born in exactly the same way (at least that kind of photography which fascinates me, the opposite of the conceptual approach): an intense yet effortless concentration of body and mind, which have overcome their duality, and thereby become the empty ground – empty exactly through or within the utmost fullness of being—allowing for that instant of revelation to take place, for something to emerge which transcends the photographer’s self and becomes the expression of reality itself? What happens in that moment is a kind of spontaneous ‘casting off body and mind’, to use Dogen’s famous phrase ‘shinjin datsuraku‘, experience which lies at the heart of the Japanese Buddhist contemplation. And the amazing thing in the case of photography is that the distinctions between hand-eye/tool (camera) are similarly abolished for that shortest instant of time. Everything melts into one gaze, one act of absolute concentration of creative energy.

Exactly as in the case of the waka poet, “vacillating this way and that”, or the mind taking the lead and obscuring the non-dualistic awareness which becomes manifest, leads to failure. One has to be totally present there, absorbed into that moment and act, one has to become the presence itself. That single moment when one pushes the button, that release of the shutter which reveals the fundamental discontinuity of the world inside the flow lies beyond conceptualization and, as such, cannot be explained but only approached as a ‘living experience’ – the same way Zen stresses the fact that one has to undergo the same spiritual experience expressed in a koan, for example, and not merely try to ‘understand’ it on a discoursive level.

The idea of discontinuity leads to another important similarity between waka and a photograph, in this interpretation which perceives them as living spiritual realities and not merely as dead objects, products of the intellect. Let’s take the waka first. Toyo Izutsu sees its specificity in its ‘field’-structure: its extreme linguistic condensation allows the poem to constitute an a-temporal unity in which every part is perceived simultanuously and a multitude of meanings reverberates at the same time, at every point of the ‘field’, ‘bringing into being a global view of the Whole’. Thus waka can be seen to represent a spatial expanse in which time, as implied in every succession of words articulated in a syntactic flow, is annihilated and the semantic content is given as a whole, at once. In this way, it may seem, waka tries to transcend the very nature of the material it is made of, since language manifests itself as a linear succession of words which can unfold their meaning only in a temporal sequence.

Yet what the waka-poet aims at, struggling with this intrinsic limitation of language, is given freely and naturally in photography. If time is annihilated in waka, time is held still in a photograph, suspended, and the different parts of the image are perceived instantly, as a whole. In a way, the photograph could also be understood as a non-sequential ‘field’ whose unity is grasped instantly, beyond the linguistic activity of the subject. Usually, the photograph is analyzed in terms of the past, a dead and frozen time which captures, in a way mummifies reality: from Barthes’s ‘that-has-been’, a footprint or a death mask, to Sontag’s “way of imprisoning reality, of making it stand still” or Hutcheon’s “all photographs are by definition representations of the past.” But if time is made to stand still, then subjectivity can thus break from the normal flow and find itself in an eternal ‘now’, experience the essence of time as time-being, or being-time (uji), as Dogen describes it—simultanously flow and eternal moment (an analogy would be, perhaps, the Einsteinian wave/particle nature of light). The past hours are absorbed in the I, they may “seem to be elsewhere but are actually in the absolute, eternal now.” Each particular moment of time embodies simultanously all the time-being of the world.

But speaking in terms of processuality, what actually interests me here: in that ‘now’ which seems to suspend time, the absolute of the moment when the button is pushed, there takes place an encounter between the creative consciousness and the world, which produces—or better—lets emerge a new reality, by its own accord. In that act, as I experience it, a hidden reality reveals itself, which is neither a merely mechanical copy of the world as it is, nor the expression of the human subjectivity, but something which incorporates and transcends both and embodies the time-being of both self and world.

When I said that I considered each separate foolishness to be a waka, I was referring exactly to this correlation between self and world, between spiritual realities and natural ones, which is the characteristic of Japanese Zen poetry. Because self and nature share the same essence, the Buddhahood, the nature references in the poem are meant to actualize “a state of subjective consciousness.” As I see it, my photographs showing things and events of nature play the same role which the images drawn from nature play in classical waka: Michael’s poems almost never contain nature-descriptive instances, but blend with the image to articulate a poetic-linguistic-visual field which sustains the contemplation of Reality.

For me, the Foolishness represents the living experience that only lightness and grace can offer a way out of suffering. And if I personally fail, there are others who don’t. There is hope. As Makoto Ueda puts it: 

“Life is constant suffering for those who have not attained enlightenment; it is something to flee from for those who long for the life of a recluse. But those who have returned to the earthly world after attaining a high stage of enlightenment can look at life with a smile, for they are part of that life. Knowing what life ultimately is, they can take suffering with a detached light-hearted attitude—with lightness.”

with the tiniest,
most subtle of gestures,
or even with none,
all was accomplished.

***

Two banal water bottles, hanging on a string, in front of countless windows: such an encounter is implausible, if not genuinely absurd, and yet everything combines so well, that one is led to believe that nothing can be more natural, that this is the way things are, or, even more, should be. Beauty emerges.

Here, everything happens instantly, that very moment in which the line between the invisible and the visible becomes fluid and goes right through us, returning us to that which we truly are, the middle-ground between being and nothing. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘chiasme‘. I remember the simple story of my Japanese pottery Master, who told me one quiet afternoon, “I will rest when my hands have created the mu-ku-yu bowl.” Mu-ku-yu, a word he coined himself, mu (void) ku (emptiness) yu (existence): the unity of being and non-being. In these photo-waka Michael allows mu-ku-yu to reveal itself, in the glimpse of a second, the time of a butterfly wings’ flicker.