meditations

I grew up disappearing into a body. Then several. I want to tell you what happened to me.

“(…)Many Japanese writers prize a quality of indecision in the structure of their work. And something too logical, too symmetrical is successfully avoided when writers ignore the suppositions of the questions asked of them. It is then not the assumptions of the writer’s controlling mind that are followed but, as the Japanese phrase it, the brush itself. Zuihitsu, the Japanese word we might translate as “essay,” implies just that—following the brush, allowing it to lead. The structure is the multiplicity of strokes that make up the aesthetic quality, one which they imply and which we infer.(…) what we would call Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.(…) the aesthetician Yanagi Sotetsu has written: “It is this beauty with its inner implications that is referred to as shibui. It is not a beauty displayed before the viewer by its creator … viewers must seek out the beauty for themselves. As our taste grows more refined we will necessarily arrive at the beauty that is shibui.”

“But no single map of the emotions is available here. Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling (mignumi) and desire melts the limbs (lusimeles, cf. Sappho fr. 130). Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded. The god who melts limbs proceeds to break the lover as would a foe on the epic battlefield.”

To heal a wound you need to stop touching it.