With an intuitive and intellectual understanding of the Kokoro1 of the Japanese Nõ, William Butler Yeats was in Ireland at the turn of this century developing his own work of vastness expressed simply. Working with masks to reveal rather than conceal the mythopoeic and symbolic, with cloths to convey complex patterns of imaginary space-time, and with poetic text to transmit transcendent thoughts of life and living, Yeats was able to tap into and translate an ancient Kokoric Echo found in Japanese Nõ and develop a new Nõ whose waves still resonate in a contemporary world. i hope to explore Yeats' relationship with Nõ as an artistic discipline that corresponded to and echoed his own Kokoro. Basing some of my thinking around notions of Heidegger, Zeami and others, trying to develop this further along trans-cognitive lines, i will attempt to articulate that this ancient Sound is Being itself speaking through Yeats and indeed all artists whom act as finely tuned mediums of the Echological.
Being or Nature exerts itself through artists acting as conduits, where "art is not a thing, but dis-closure" of Being, and the artist is part of the process of disclosing the essence of Being (Versenyi, 93). Like wood, Yeats was prime material for Language to assert itself. The son of a painter, studied in the arts and being a poet himself, forever in unrequited love with the Rose / Maud Gonne, Yeats had it in his being to resonate with the artistry of Nõ and it's Iki2 or essence. The essence of the Flower was bound to bloom in Yeats as he was very much in love with the Rose and Mythopoeics. Since his readings and research included Heidegger and Nietzsche, the Upinshads and Buddhist literature (a large library of western and eastern poetry, philosophy and metaphysics) and ancient Celtic tales, he became adept at understanding the greater artistic, spiritual and mythological significance of the Nõ.
Yeats began blooming because the seed flowered there. He underwent a transformation when he came into contact with the essence of Nõ. It was an iki-logical echo that reverberated through the body of Yeats. He responded to the logics of mythology and theatre of synaesthesia, to it's total work aesthetic. Combining and recombining arts of myth and movement, music and silence, image and words, like the Nõ and it's Hana (Flower), Richard Wagner's Ring and Gesamkunstwerk (total art work) and Beckett's Audio Play All that Fall, Yeats' At the Hawk's Well makes one highly receptive to the essence of meanings and significance, by giving the viewer space and time to contemplate, thereby "opening the Kokoro of the audience" (Pilgrim, 1).
But what was Yeat's Guardian of the Well guardian of? Was she Guardian of the Well of Words? Was she the guardian awareness that Language needs caretaking in the house of being?3 Is the "guardian awareness (etymologically, a Wahr-nehmrung, an understanding already protecting/preserving our ontological attunement)"(Levin, 255)? Are we in service as speakers of Language, literally guardians of Language, of Being, of Truth where Truth is Being in Language, a continual becoming? Are we part of a continual realization/manifestation of Being with Language becoming through Daesin (being-in-the-world)4 in joy and pain, in those things that make us human?
PAST . . . A tale begun in other days, When summer suns were glowing -
PRESENT . . . A simple chime, that served to time The rhythm of our rowing -
FUTURE . . . (From Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There )