Intermission: Three-Cornered Meals?
"Going up a mountain track, I fell to thinking."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“There is no escape from this world. If, therefore, you find life hard, there is nothing to be done but settle yourself as comfortably as you can during the unpleasant times, although you may only succeed in this for short periods, and thus make life's brief span bearable.”
Before breakfast, I stood outside and looked at the earth. I barely recognised the plants as being plants, or the trees as being trees; they appeared like indistinguishable scenery to me—even up-close—despite their gold greenery and their familiar blades in the morning sunlight. But I looked to a black ant as it crawled near my left foot, and suddenly I realised a commonsensical truth: this is one world and one life altogether, and I could not realise this when I compared trees of different countries to my own, but I could see it clearly when I saw these ants, so similar to the ones of my home garden—which was thousands of miles away—and how they crawled up beside me, as if I were still home.
I felt struck by the randomness of such keys which unlock into insights like this, which you implicitly know but suddenly become raised to its attention, despite the constancy of their fact in life. It recalled to me a passage by the Japanese novelist, Soseki Natsume, which was highlighted in his English translation of his 1906 novel, The Three-Cornered World, by Alan Turney, “Putting it as a formula, I suppose you could say that an artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.”
For Soseki’s artist, there is no fear in being insensible—there is only a sensitivity. It is a great tragedy that some people could become artists, because they are born with a soul which is sensitive to the smallest of gestures, but they remain too sensibly tied to their fears, to the quotidian, to the moil of this world, and so they stop themselves at the verge of their potential; this is to say, they do not dare to indulge themselves in the small beauties which impossibly populate every moment of this world, yet which move them in almost every way.
For instance, while breakfasting in my hotel, I sat down and looked at the faces of people. I lost myself to a thought: if a face is a number of years, how many years are in this room? A thousand years? Maybe two thousand? Two thousand years of human life in this room? There are centuries in every direction, and in a room with so much time, and which if turned out, could pour out a gallon of unfilled time, how could anyone not bask in such time too? And if one could drink time, like how one sips coffee, tea or liquor, how many flavours could time hold? One could sip the flavour of one time—of one person—and sip again at another point and taste something else, like an aged wine; the combination of food and time is a very Proustian image.
But these encounters with other people are comminglings of time, a meeting of tiny empires and briefly-formed rivulets; I see a woman and I have seen her face before; I recognise her face, as if I had seen it a thousand times on a hundred different people. How many people have shared this face in time—this poignant English face, this gentle Chinese face, this elegant African face? How many years have these faces carried before? And how many more shall inherit these looks with different names? I myself have borrowed my great-grandfather’s face: at what point shall our first and ancient progenitor move to reclaim it?
“Strip off from the world all those cares and worries which make it an unpleasant place in which to live, and picture before you instead a world of graciousness. You now have music, a painting, or poetry, or sculpture.”
After lunch, I wanted to lie down in the grass, so I searched outside the hotel. Brushing my hands and feet against the heads of tufts, hither and thither, like the limbs of Stephen Dedalus in the shallow tide of Dollymount Strand in Dublin, I continued to read Soseki’s novel, which I preferred in its literal Japanese title, Grass Pillow.
At some point, a part of me wished to enclose my eyes to this public place, and fall asleep forever, or for several hours, and grow invisible to the world, like the shoots of new grass which grow indistinguishably from the earth, and become one of the hundred of thousands that make up a small field. I wished to lose myself to nature in this immanent way, and I would have sacrificed my individuality for any semblance of the peace which I felt was accorded to the lives of most grasses: hours in the sun, years in the wind, earless to their own rustling and the gentle gay dances of the trees above. I was not alone in feeling this way, or I decided that I was not, because I saw other outstretched bodies lying on the grass: yawning human beings, silent and simple on a bright summer day.
Another part of me wished to be seen. I felt that there was a significance to my desire to become grass—a hidden worth—which I had to share with others, so that they too may learn of this worth, as if it did not come naturally to most people to lie down in grass fields, unafraid of the dirt on their clothes and bugs in their hair, and by merit of my solo experience, that I could convince them to follow me by example, as if no one had ever rolled in the grass before as a child nor since. In other words, in a moment of bliss, I stretched to codify a particular vision of myself into their ideas and gazes of me—these strangers; I grew weary of the idea that I could fail to convince them, or that I would not be understood by their impenetrable eyes. At the moment my ego sought death, it wanted to scream about its nobility. Look at me! I crave death! I am exceptional because of this; therefore, follow in my footsteps and find your own death too! I am at peace and therefore not at peace and therefore I desire to be seen!
Eventually, a few bodies left the earth, and I looked closer at the people who passed by. They were dressed in many colours, different styles, hairdos, sounds and voices—each one unique, but this nothing new to say. Once again, I felt as if I were the only person to ever gaze at others, admiring their clothing, their personalities, their lives in motion, and especially in ways which they could not see themselves, and songs which they could not hear. When they looked at me, perhaps I looked ridiculous; what is more cliche than reading novels while lying in a grass field on summer days? But as much as I cried out that I silently wished to be seen—to be Othered in an objective way—I pursued myself alone in this passion, and I felt that this was the most I should allow myself: to indulge in private and concealed passions.
But this is a digression: I was alone now in the field, and the sun was pricking the back of my neck. The wind had become quiet, but the trees still quivered with unseen forces, and I lied down again and closed my eyes, and heard the pitter-patter of shoes and faraway conversations on stone, the windy turbulence of distant cars and the quiet lumen of the sun and the scent of midday grass.
I could lie here forever, I thought again, and lose myself in sleep, and dream like a plant, which is to say, to dream of nothing at all; or if plants must dream of something, then I would dream of the sun, which then emerged from the column of clouds, and suddenly filled my eyelids with light. I cannot stay here forever, I felt. I retreated to the darkness of my hotel room and fell asleep and did not dream.
“Even the poet whose thoughts have never found expression in a single verse, or the painter who possesses no colours, and has never painted so much as a single square foot of canvas, can obtain salvation, and be delivered from earthly desires and passions.”
Along evening streets, I was moved by the scents of bread and beer—by the tricks of hunger—and I rocked in a wooden chair while I waited for my order; it does not matter what I ordered. Between the stone walls and the wooden table, there was no people-watching. I did not think much and I did not read much; I sat there quietly and that was the evening.
“After twenty years of life I realised that this is a world worth living in. At twenty five I saw that, just as light and darkness are but opposite sides of the same thing, so wherever the sunlight falls it must of necessity cast a shadow. “
As the Japanese novelist, Tanizaki Junichiro wrote in his 1933 essay, In Praise Of Shadows, “I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allows at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”
For Tanizaki, these shadows were fading memories of old Japan: of the ancient world of candlelight and darkness, of murky subtleness and frigid elegance, which defined for him the Oriental spirit of both China and Japan, and more pertinently, the reflections of time and the lives of his predecessor countrymen and the literary idols of his nation. Such moments of time and its attendant darkness were faded by the introduction of Western electrical systems during the Meiji period, where shadows were obliterated in favour of bright lights and clear surfaces, against the obscurity of the Oriental world, what with its cohabitation of golden darkness and bedimmed skin.
Near the end of his essay, I felt that his shadows were his memories, his sentimental longing for a begotten time; but I also believe that he was speaking of time itself, and how it fades with the darkness of the past, and the past is always dark, even in the clearest memories of our previous lives, and this bright summer day of mine has passed too—into darkness—despite the luminosity of its sun. However, there will always be shadows of time in lieu of the lucency of the present; these three meals I had, like previous meals, have faded into darkness, and the present is too radiant for me to find them again, as they once were, as if their shadows were hidden—but not destroyed—by the presence of this new and continuous light of the oncoming future.
If shadows exist on the surface of the sun, they are overshadowed by the light their star produces, and which it wields against the dusk of space, but surely these shadows exist. A parcel of sunlight reaches Earth, and through it, the sun shares its lost shadows with us—a world of half-shadow and light—and the artist stops their day to admire such qualities, as if we were the only ones who could admire them so, and thus we have become insensible again: I can see the tiniest shadows in the most-illuminated room—the artist lives in a delusional and impossibly gorgeous world, which they grasp in tragedy, with their little arts, for the real world to become.
For artists, this gift of observation brings us the greatest and most petite joys; for human beings, this is the gentle and constant darkness in our lives, which if we care to gaze at, we might find beauty for its gloaming qualities—in the twilight of our small idols—which we caress because they are ours to keep, and these beautiful keepsakes are ones we ourselves have found in our sundry and shadow-lit worlds.
Like many artists, Tanizaki has lost his real shadow to the light and time, and yet the penumbra of his works remain, casting his silhouette as if it were a negative source of light—a dark fire against real fire—so that his shadowy world has not yet been erased. But even if his shadows were to fade completely, he would always have casted them, and this literary stake in time cannot be removed; I do not believe that we can outshine the light of oncoming time, and yet, it is sufficient that we once burned for our own shadows, and outwardly, for those who once gazed into that obscurity of us, and no matter the number of them, this is enough: to have once been gazed at beautifully, in the quiet brilliance of shadow and not light.
A work of literature is a parasol in time; a source of shade for a certain genre of shadow, against a universe of light which seeks to annihilate it; one day, everything will be overtaken by such luminescence. Nevertheless, it shades those who are currently in need of such shade, and that is enough, especially if everything will be forgotten in the final flashes of light and time. So, cast your shadows, you hare-brained artists—they are beautiful and they were never meant to overcome the light.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.