Sensitivity to Setting

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
In Praise of Shadows
Translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker

On lacquer

First one coat...

And I realized then that only in dim half-light is the true beauty of Japanese lacquerware revealed. The rooms at the Waranjiya are about nine feet square, the size of a comfortable little tearoom, and the alcove pillars and ceilings glow with a faint smoky luster, dark even in the light of the lamp. But in the still dimmer light of the candle stand, as I gazed at the trays and bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I discovered in the gloss of this lacquerware a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond, a beauty I had not before seen. It had not been mere chance, I realized that our ancestors, having discovered lacquer, had conceived such a fondness for objects finished in it.

Then another...

Sometimes a superb piece of black lacquerware, decorated perhaps with flecks of silver and gold — a box or a desk or a set of shelves — will seem to me unsettlingly garish and altogether vulgar. But render pitch black the void in which they stand, and light them not with the rays of the sun or electricity but rather a single lantern or candle: suddenly those garish objects turn somber, refined, dignified. Artisans of old, when they finished their works in lacquer and decorated them in sparkling patterns, must surely have had in mind dark rooms and sought to turn to good effect what feeble light there was. Their extravagant use of gold, too, I should imagine, came of understanding how it gleams forth from out of the darkness and reflects the lamplight.

... prose as carefully built up layer by layer as the objects it describes.

And so for day 2385
24.06.2013

Before the Painting: After the Event

It is a long poetic sequence dedicated to Monique Van Genderen. It is

       Feeling panicky about going on so long I show
this to Steve in draft form. "So this is your 9/11 poem?"

To be fair there is no description of the tone of the question. It is sandwiched with other material between a meditation on cravings and substitutes and some sharp remarks on the offensiveness of thinking about your looks.

From Section VII

when cravings come, and will not stand for
substitutes. I get them for seeing art, not virtually
but in person. Online your paintings lose their gloss
to become as flat as these words, which can't even
manage to dent the page or bump along the fingers.
I cannot recall the feeling I get when looking
at art I love. I must return to face it. To stand
before it. to feel its effect. Like the longing for a food
you cannot reproduce. The patty melt, for example,

From Section IV

       the late sixties and early seventies flipped
everything around. They banned the hats and gloves
once used to hide aged pates and liver spots,
exposing adults as the affronts they are to the illusion of
eternal youth. The Southern Californian sidewalks
swarm with the surgically altered, dressed like children
twenty-four seven in brightly colored clothes,
walking ads for corporate aestheticism
masquerading as personal taste. Here in New England
it is an offense to God to think about our looks.
Try it and winter—Protestantism's greatest ally—
will take you down a notch

What these snippets fail to convey is the sprawl which reminds one of the conversational-descriptive style of James Schuyler. Pages and pages later, you want to go back and begin the walk through all over again. Return to face it.

"Coastal"
The Open Secret
Jennifer Moxley

And so for day 2351
21.05.2013