catching it by mind is like trying to catch a catfish with a gourd (josetsu)11
in still movement, in silent music, in blinding visions do we know the essence of Being?
Through Yeats we see and hear a flowering of art, a Celtic introduction to Asian Philosophy to an intensity/bodiliness that remembered and echoed Pantheistic/Mythological awareness. T/here the Flower - Hana - the Rose is forever blooming on in over and under Railway Lines .................. West Coast Canada masks like Nõ masks - symbology in simplicity - naturally emerging, revealing nature of a kokoro sensibility - kokori simplicity - kokoric? (of choir or echo) kokori? (plural)
In touch with modern dancer Michio Ito (who had seen Nõ as a child in Japan) and poet Ezra Pound (who completed Ernest Fenellosa's trans-lations of Japanese Nõ plays) and others who had attended or studied aspects of Nõ, and reading several written texts of Nõ as well as working with Ezra, Yeats was as informed as he could be without actually ever being at a performance. He chose his words well to reflect the importance of Nõ plays calling his book Certain Noble Plays of Japan. (italic texts mine) Certain - definite, exact, precise, determined ... determined plays ... distinct noble plays of Japan. Though some critics will suggest he knew little of Nõ, his books reveal he was quite knowledgeable as he speaks of the structure and the spirit of Nõ much as Zeami writes of Nõ. Eliot also reveals this artistic sensibility when he writes in Tradition and Individual Talent of significant emotion that transcends personality, as ancestors voices speak directly/certainly through us when art is of the Iki (essence).
"... Genji reveals its Japanese origins. It is loosely constructed and inconclusive, and it is strongly lyrical, especially in its treatment of nature and the fusion of man and place and season, of foreground and background. It is a happy combination, then, of what can seem "modern" and immediate to the reader from a far-distant land and century, and what must necessarily seem alien and exotic, though not in an unpleasant sense." (The Tale of Genji Intro P XV)
"In a certain reign ... " (Shikibu, 3) ... long ago ... once upon a time a story is about to be told ...
Yeats read the tale of Genji in the early 1900's. What ancient magic touched his Core? What ancient spark ignited his flame to burn ever slower ever quicker ever gentle ever strong? What ancient echoes called him homeword? Yeats loves Gonne & Language, as i too love the mythological and mythopoeic Rose & Railway. He wrote prolifically, the well of words overflowing through him onto the place of the page/stage where "place itself is that toward which there is locomotion". (Irigaray, 39)
i am taking that Nõ Train to the Truth of Being as "when separated from place, the thing feels an attraction to place as a condition of existence." (ibid)
PRESENT . . . A simple chime, that served to time The rhythm of our rowing -
FUTURE . . . (From Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There )