It seems to me that the ‘gay science’ for Serafini is linguistics. (Especially as regards the written word; whereas the spoken word still conjures up some anguish for him, as we see it dripping from lips like a blackish mush, or being extracted with fishing rods from an open mouth.) The written word is alive too (you just have to prick it with a hatpin to see it start to bleed), but it enjoys its autonomy and physicality, it can become three-dimensional, polychrome, can rise up from the page hanging on to balloons, or drop on to it in parachutes. There are words that, in order to stay attached to the page, have to be sewn on to it, the thread passing through the loops in those letters that have spaces in them. And if you look at the writing with a lens, the thin sliver of ink turns out to be permeated with a thick flow of meaning: like a motorway, like a swarming crowd, like a river brimming with fish.
In the end (and this is the last illustration of the Codex) the fate of all writing is to collapse into dust, and also all that remains of the writing hand is its skeleton. Lines and words detach themselves from the page, start to crumble, and from the little piles of dust suddenly the little rainbow-coloured beings spring out and start to jump. The vital principle of all the metamorphoses and all the alphabets starts its cycle again.
[1982]
IV
THE SHAPE OF TIME
Japan
The Old Woman in the Purple Kimono
I am waiting for the train from Tokyo to Kyoto. On the station platform in Tokyo there are signs showing the exact spot where the doors of each carriage will be when the train stops. The seats have all been pre-booked and even before the train arrives the passengers are all at their right places, queuing between the white lines that hive off so many little queues at right angles to the tracks.
Agitation, confusion, irritation all seem to be absent from Japanese stations. Those who are departing arrange themselves as though on a chessboard where all the moves have been dictated in advance. And those arriving are conveyed in flows of compact, solid, continuous humanity which pour down escalators that leave no space for disorder: every day millions of people go by train from home to work in the endless space that is Tokyo.
Amongst the departing passengers in their queues I notice an elderly lady in a rich, pale-purple kimono, surrounded by younger members of her family, male and female, all looking respectful and anxious for her. The farewells of families at stations are like scenes from another age, especially in an age like ours, which is full of constant comings and goings, so much so that commuter movements constitute the norm. In airports the ritual of farewells and greetings which define the journey as something exceptional can still provide material for a study of emotional behaviour in the various countries of the world, but railway stations are becoming more and more the realm of lonely crowds where nobody accompanies anyone else. All the more so for a train like this, which is only going as far as Kyoto, three hours away.
New to the country, I am still at the stage where everything I see has a value precisely because I don’t know what value to give it. All it would need would be for me to stay a while in Japan and undoubtedly I too would find it normal that people should greet each other with a series of deep bows, even at the station; that many women, especially the older ones, wear a kimono with a lavish bow at the back which forms a slight hump under their overcoat and that they walk with tiny trotting steps of their white-socked feet. When everything finds an order and a place in my mind then I will start not to find anything worthy of note, not to see any more what I am seeing. Because seeing means perceiving differences, and as soon as differences all become uniform in what is predictable and everyday, our gaze simply runs over a smooth surface devoid of anything to catch hold of. Travelling does not help us much in understanding (I’ve known this for a while; I did not need to come to the Far East to convince myself that this was true) but it does serve to reactivate for a second the use of our eyes, the visual reading of the world.
The old lady has taken her place in the carriage alongside a young girl about twenty years old, and now they are exchanging elaborate bows with those they have left on the station platform. The girl is pretty, smiling, wearing over her kimono a kind of bright tunic, made of light fabric, which could be a housecoat, an apron. Whatever it is, she conveys a homely air, perhaps solely because of the way she is making the older woman’s seat into a cosy corner, taking out of her luggage baskets, flasks, books, magazines, sweets—all the things that make a journey comfortable. This girl has nothing Western about her; she is an apparition from another age (who knows which?), with her hair-style and her laughing, fresh, gentle look. On the other hand, as far as the older woman is concerned, those few Western or rather American elements—glasses with a silver frame, the bluish perm straight from the hairdresser’s—which sit on top of the traditional costume provide a clear snapshot of modern Japan.
The carriage has many spare seats, and the girl, instead of sitting next to the woman, has sat down in the row of seats in front of her and is popping up over the back of the seat to serve her food: a sandwich in a small straw basket. (Western food in a traditional Japanese container, this time—the opposite of what one usually sees in the frequent snacks on the run that the Japanese like: for instance, during the endless performances of Kabuki theatre the audience opens crackling cellophane containers and uses chopsticks to extract mouthfuls of white rice and raw fish.)
What is the relationship between the girl and the woman? A niece, a maid, a lady-in-waiting? She is always on the move, coming and going, chattering with total spontaneity: now she’s coming back from the restaurant-car, carrying a fresh drink. And the woman? It seems as if she is owed everything, she constantly has her nose in the air. It is at times like this that one feels the difference between two cultures, when one does not know how to define what one sees, the gestures and behaviours, when one is not able to tell what is usual and what is individual in them, what is normal and what is unusual. Even if tomorrow I were to try to ask a Japanese person willing to listen: ‘I saw two people like this and this. Who might they be? What is their social or family relationship?’, I would find it difficult to make my curiosity understood, or get appropriate answers, and in any case every definition of a role would require the explanation of the context in which that role is found, it would lead to new questions and so on.
Outside the window an endless suburb rolls past. I glance at the headline in the Japan Times, an English-language daily. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the coronation of the Japanese Emperor, and the government has declared a solemn celebration. There have been many polemics about the appropriateness of such a ceremony: the left is against it; protest demonstrations are planned; there are fears of a terrorist attack. For some days now the police have been guarding every crossroads in Tokyo; the nationalist associations’ vans, blaring out military songs, have been criss-crossing the city, which is bedecked with flags.
That morning, during my taxi-ride from the hotel, Tokyo was full of lines of policemen, holding their riot-shields and long truncheons. In an empty lot about a hundred young people were sitting on the ground amidst their red flags, underneath a booming loudspeaker: this was clearly one of the protest meetings that had been organized across the city.
(Quick impressions of my first days in Tokyo. This is a city that is all elevated highways, flyovers, monorail trains, junctions, queues of traffic moving slowly on different levels, underpasses, underground pedestrian tunnels: a metropolis where everything can happen at the same time, as though in dimensions that do not communicate with, and are indifferent to, each other. Every event is circumscribed, constituting an order on its own, which is marked off and then enclosed in the surrounding orderliness. In t
he rainy evening atmosphere a strike demonstration goes by, channelled into one of the lanes on the road: it stops at a traffic light, then starts off again at green, keeping time with the sounds of the whistles, carrying totally identical red flags, preceded and followed by a squad of policemen, as though in parenthesis, while the traffic continues to go by in the other lanes. Everybody stares in front of themselves, never to the side.)
The Japan Times has interviewed about fifty Japanese celebrities (mostly artists and people from the world of sport) on their feelings about the Emperor and about the celebrations. As far as the festivities are concerned, many are indifferent or doubtful; on his person and the institution opinions vary from unconditional reverence (especially amongst the older interviewees) to still emotional memories of when they first heard the voice of this being who had up until then been invisible and unapproachable (when he announced Japan’s surrender on the radio, a month after the atomic bombs), to perplexity at such a long reign on a throne that is purely symbolic. (The Emperor is something more and something less than a constitutional monarch: according to the constitution he is the ‘symbol of the state and of the unity of the people’ but he lacks any power or function.) ‘About half of these fifty years of rule have involved wars and invasions,’ is the memory of one elderly writer, who says he is against the celebrations while still maintaining his respect for the person and the institution.
(That evening, the television shows the images from the day in Tokyo, which are very clear even for those who do not understand the words of the commentator. In a series of rapid shots the ‘serpent’ of demonstrators snakes by, swaying with their heads held low; the police advance with riot-shields and truncheons raised; there are police charges, a melee, a hail of kicks against someone crouching on the ground; then longer sequences of celebrations: children with flowers, little flags, lanterns. In a huge hall the tiny Emperor, dressed in tails, reads out his speech, his bespectacled eyes running through the lines from top to bottom; the Empress is seated beside him, in a light-coloured dress and hat. In his speech—according to the headlines in next day’s paper—the Emperor declares himself sorry for the victims of the Second World War.)
In the first days in a new country one makes the effort to establish links between everything one sees. In the train my attention is divided between reading the comments on the Emperor and observing the old, impassive lady, being treated with due reverence and respect in the middle of a train full of businessmen who sit with their paperwork on their knees: budgets, estimates or blueprints for machines and buildings.
In Japan invisible distances are more powerful than visible ones. In Tokyo a central street runs alongside the canal which surrounds the green area of the imperial palaces. The endless traffic-jam laps against this boundary, beyond which everything is silence. The gates of the gardens open to the crowds just twice a year, but the whole year round groups of pilgrims get off coaches and head off on foot following a tour-guide with a little flag along the walls up to the gates of the Square of the Double Bridge, where they have their group photograph taken. This is the final frontier that common mortals are allowed to reach on normal days; beyond begins the rulers’ residence, which is like an area beyond the bounds of the earth. I went there too, like the diligent tourist I am, but it was impossible to see anything at all: guards on duty, a twin-arched bridge over the canal, amidst the weeping willows.
The young girl has now sat down beside the woman, and is talking and laughing. The woman stays silent and stern-faced, does not reply, does not turn round, stares straight in front of her. The girl continues to chatter cheerfully, gently, as though hopping from one subject to another, improvising some lines of talk or trying out some jokes, putting into practice an art of conversation that is well defined and discreet, a rule of behaviour that is second nature to her and spontaneous, almost as if she were performing musical variations on a keyboard. And the old woman? Silent, serious, dour. She is not necessarily not listening: but it is as if she were sitting by the radio, receiving a communication that did not require any reply on her part.
In short, this old woman is ghastly and unpleasant! She is arrogant and selfish! A monster! Even those who, like me, try to abstain from formulating opinions on what they are not sure of understanding can be subject to sudden outbursts of anger. So at this point I am seething inside against the old woman who seems to me to be the embodiment of something terribly unfair. Just who does she think she is? How can she claim to deserve so much attention? My resentment towards the woman’s arrogance increases along with my admiration for the girl’s grace and happiness and civil attitude—qualities which are for me equally mysterious—and I feel that the way they are spurned is unforgivable.
If I consider the matter more carefully, it is a complex and mixed state of mind that is nagging away at me at this stage. There is certainly the urge to rebel aroused by my solidarity with the young against the crushing authority of the old, with the downtrodden against the privilege of lords and masters. There is all this, certainly. But perhaps there is also something else: a hint of envy, a rage that stems from my somehow identifying with the position of the old woman, the desire to tell her through clenched teeth: ‘Don’t you know, you fool, that where we come from, in the West, it will never again be possible for anyone to be waited on as you have been? Don’t you know that in the West no old person will ever be treated with so much devotion by the young?’
Actually it is only by representing the conflict as something happening inside myself that I can have any hope of penetrating the secret, of deciphering it. But is that really the case? What do I know of life in this country? I have never been inside a Japanese house, and this is the first time (and it will be the last) during my trip that I have had the chance to glimpse something like a scene from domestic life.
The thin doors of the traditional Japanese house might seem to slide apart like curtains opening on a stage that holds no secrets. But actually this is not the case: this is a world where inside and outside are separated by a psychological barrier that is difficult to cross. The proof of this is in their pictorial representations. It was in the West, in the fourteenth century, that painters solved once and for all the problem of representing interiors in a way that seems obvious to us today, in other words by abolishing one wall and showing the room opened up like a stage scene. But a couple of centuries earlier Japanese painters of the twelfth century had found another system, less direct but more complete, of exploring visually the interior space while respecting its separation from the outside: they abolished the roof.
In the painted hand-scrolls that illustrate the manuscripts of the refined Court literature of the Heian period, the style known as fukinuki-yatai (which means precisely that, ‘house without roof’) shows us stylized characters, with no depth, in an oblique geometrical perspective of partitions, door-frames, walls that are only as high as screens. This allows us to see what is going on at the same time in various rooms.
Every time I happen to glance over the seat-back that separates me from the two women, the scene changes: now it is the old woman who is talking, in a patient, measured fashion. That’s it: there now seems to be a perfect understanding between the two.
A few days previously, in a Tokyo museum, I had stopped to look at some of the very elegant rolls that illustrate the diary and novel of the exquisite Murasaki. Now the presence of the young woman with her full smile and the gentle and composed poses she makes with her neck, shoulders and arms, like a character from Murasaki in the midst of a world of harshness, makes this interior of the electric train seem like one of those roofless houses that reveal and at the same time conceal views from a secret life on a painted hand-scroll.
The Obverse of the Sublime
In November the maple trees’ leaves turn a scarlet red, which is the dominant note of the autumn landscape in Japan, standing out against the dark green background of the conifers and against the various shades of tawny, rust and yellow of the rest of the foliage. But it is not with an act of outrageous chromatic arrogance that the maples impose themselves on one’s view: if the eye is drawn towards them as though lured by a musical motif, it is because of the lightness of their starry leaves, which seem suspended around their thin branches, the leaves all horizontal, without depth, yearning to expand and at the same time not to clutter the transparency of the air.
The leaves of the ginkgo tree are yellow, a very sharp and luminous yellow, and they fall like rain from the highest branches like flower petals: infinite numbers of little leaves the shape of fans, a constant light rain that turns the surface of the little lake yellow.
The guide is explaining in Japanese the history of the Sento imperial palace to a group of visitors: it was built in the seventeenth century for the ex-Emperors in a period when both voluntary and forced abdications were frequent, as all power was in the hands of the generals. The imperial villas of Kyoto can be visited only with a special permit which has to be applied for in writing. For foreigners the waiting time for the permit can be just a few days, but for the Japanese themselves it takes at least six months, and to have visited these historically famous places is a piece of good fortune that does not come everyone’s way. Every person hoping to make a visit is summoned on a certain date, and is assigned to a group which a guide will lead along the prescribed itinerary, stopping at prearranged points for explanations in Japanese or English, depending on the make-up of the group. I know too little about the dynastic history of Japan to benefit from the guide’s talks; I expect to profit more from the moments of pause, from small deviations from the group’s itinerary, from people and details I come across by chance.
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