Rengetsu

An expert on Francisco Goya recently claimed that much of his accepted work was actually painted by helpers, pointing out, perhaps unnecessarily, that the value of an object collapses when it turns out to be by an assistant. ‘Artists in the shadow of a great master (can) illustrate his imagery, his style, his handling of paint, but the work is not infused with the unique individuality and strength of the original creator’, she said. This latter statement is rather more debatable than the first, and when I read it I was reminded of other ways of looking at the issue of authenticity, and of how I began to learn something about the work of the well-known Japanese poet, potter and calligrapher, Otagaki Rengetsu.

Some time ago, while browsing among  Japanese ceramics on an auction site, I came across a small jar that caught my eye. Coarsely made, one side was covered with a thick black glaze; the other was left raw, incised with an unidentified poem. The auction description said that the piece was old, but that it wasn’t made by Otagaki Rengetsu, whose style it resembled. It sold for far more than the estimate. A few weeks later it reappeared, so I deduced that either the buyer hadn’t paid or had returned it. The jar didn’t sell at the second attempt, but on the third time of asking it did, at a fraction of the price realised on the first occasion. This interested me, both because I liked the jar very much and because I couldn’t quite understand what was going on.

I began to do a little research on Rengetsu, and I soon discovered that she was a nun who had lived and worked near Kyoto during the second half of the 19th century.  Even to my untrained eye, I could see that the style and quality of the ceramics attributed to her varied dramatically, as did their value, but it seemed almost impossible to be sure what was authentic and - as often is the case with Japanese ceramics - what was ‘good’ and what was ‘indifferent’. As I kept on looking, regularly asking for information from dealers and sellers, occasionally buying small pieces, I slowly began to grasp what was going on. I found that there are many modern copies of her work, most of them tributes to Rengetsu’s  style and sensibility. There are also copies made in her own lifetime, collaborations with other ceramicists and assistants,  pieces made by assistants (who, with her permission, continued to sign their work with her name after her death), and , of course, her own productions, which range from quick and careless to the considered and accomplished.  Rengetsu lived until she was elderly, working constantly at her poetry, ceramics, calligraphy, and painting, and it is conjectured that she made about 50,000 pieces during her lifetime, so their quality is naturally inconsistent. Although one is fairly soon able to distinguish what are probably her best works from the rest, it is prudent to assume that there is almost always an element of ambiguity in attributions, and that it is appropriate to accept this in the same spirit as an appreciation of Japanese ‘kintsugi’, the gold-lacquered repairs that add to the beauty of so many broken or fractured pots. The contrast between refinement and haste, grace and ugliness, ubiquity and scarceness - all these oppositions are part of the appeal of Rengetsu’s work.

 Rengetsu, a Buddhist name that can be translated as ‘Lotus Moon’, was the daughter of a courtesan and a nobleman.  Adopted as a child by the Otagaki family, she was taught martial arts, literature, calligraphy, dancing, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony. Reputed to have been unusually beautiful, she married twice and had several children, all of whom died young. Following the death of her second husband Rengetsu became a Buddhist nun, kept moving home, and in old age settled permanently in a small tea hut in the grounds of a temple in Kyoto. After her ordination it became necessary to earn her own living,  so she took up pottery, deciding to produce inexpensive pieces that would be inscribed with her own ‘waka’ poetry.  It has been said that during Rengetsu’s lifetime they became so popular that most households in Kyoto owned examples of her work.

On her own admission, Rengetsu’s ceramics are rough and unskilled, but her poetry and calligraphy are sensitive and eloquent. The pots were made in the spirit of ‘wabi sabi’, a Japanese concept of beauty that alludes to the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete; in contrast, her calligraphy, which is found on scrolls, ‘tanzaku’, and paintings, is elegant, supple and strong. She wrote in ‘hiragana’, an old script rarely employed or understood today, which in the past was customarily used by women and less commonly by men. Similarly, although Rengetsu made cups and bottles for drinking ‘sake’, as well as utensils for the ‘chanoyu’ tea ceremony, most of her ceramics were intended for ‘sencha’, a less ceremonial version of tea drinking, again most often enjoyed by women. Her poems are traditional, self-effacing,  and full of feeling.

Living deep in the mountains
I’ve grown fond of the
solitary sound of the pines,
On days when the wind does not blow
How lonely it is!

I imagine, although this may be fanciful, that Rengetsu’s later years may have had something in common with those of the elderly Japanese woman in A Humble Life, a film by the Russian director, Alexander Sokurov. Umeno Matshueshi  lives alone in an old house in the mountains of Nara, spending her time in silence and equanimity, eating frugally, tending the fire, sewing, and praying. The camera observes her intently, juxtaposing interior mages of the wooden house, chilly and barely lit, with outside views of the garden, clouds, streams, and forest.  At the end of the film the old woman recites her own ‘haiku’ poems about loneliness and loss. A Humble Life is beautiful and dreamlike, its elegiac mood close in tone to the first section of Sokurov’s extraordinary Spiritual Voices: From the Diaries of War, a prolonged visual meditation on a melancholic snowy landscape, overlaid with murmured reflections on the deaths of Mozart and his mother. The film ends, more than five hours later, with brooding views of a dark mountain range on the Afghan border, where bored and anxious Russian soldiers are preparing to return home.


https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/28/goya-paintings-many-not-work-of-spanish-master-studio-assistants
http://rengetsu.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01I7ul0iL8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXJm3qyjVrc

Proserpina

I came across an online clip of a song, ‘Proserpina’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIFsm4PQnU),  almost certainly filmed on someone’s mobile phone, that I found unexpectedly touching, and I sent a link to a friend who I thought might enjoy it. She replied straight away, saying that it was both wonderful and very emotional. I was sufficiently intrigued to try to discover just why it had that effect on us, and presumably on many other people too. Part of the answer to that question is clear. ‘Proserpina’ was the last and poignant song written by the Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle before she died in 2010. It tells the story of the Roman goddess who was abducted by Pluto and taken to the underworld, and how her mother, Ceres, laments her disappearance and walks the earth looking for her. Proserpina eventually returns, but only temporarily, establishing a cycle that has mythically been associated with the reappearance of verdant spring after the desolation of winter. The song’s melody is plaintive and full of yearning, and ever since Kate McGarrigle’s death it has been used as a kind of anthem by her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Often performed at the end of concerts and frequently accompanied by family members and close friends, it is a moving testament to her memory, and my own response to it, having long liked their music and once having spent a little time with Kate and her sister Anna, is warmly melancholic.

The somewhat rough and ragged nature of the video clip, as well as the performance itself, add to their emotional authenticity. It is affecting to see Kate’s children, sisters, ex-husband, and various close friends (including Emmylou Harris) sharing a spirit of communal celebration, and their overwhelming tenderness does much to heighten the power of the moment. You sense their love and vulnerability, and how these qualities are communicated to each other and the audience. Above all, you feel the performers’ connectedness, their oneness, and how they belong together; as a viewer, however distanced, you somehow became a small part of that encounter.

This feeling of oneness and connection is not normally considered an aesthetic experience, although it is common enough at artistic events, especially when they’re musical, but  it is often found at other communal gatherings, both big and small. This was confirmed by some  internet exploration, which quickly revealed that the phenomenon is well known and called kama muta, a Sanskrit phrase that has been loosely defined as a ‘sudden experience of oneness - of love, belonging, or union - with an individual person, family, team, nation, cosmos, or God’. According to one website I visited, the immediate effects of kama muta may include a warm sensation in the chest, tears in the eyes, a lump in your throat, irregular or deep breathing, and - especially afterwards - a sense of exhilaration. Overall, the emotion is intense and comforting, and most of us will recognise it.

The term kama muta is usually translated as ‘moved by love’, and although that is fairly accurate, it is rarely added that kama is a word for sensuous ‘desire’ or ‘longing’, and often, more specifically, for sexual desire. Some academic writers are aware of this ambiguity, but nonetheless continue to use the term to describe the feeling that is generally agreed to be caused by ‘a sudden intensification of communal sharing’. It is also widely suggested that this is a universal emotion, common to people in diverse and different cultures, and there seems to be no reason to suppose otherwise. Rarely is it mentioned, however, that kama muta can easily be aroused by emotional manipulation, both benign, as in the case of deliberate sentimentality or exaggerated emotionalism, and corrosive, as can sometimes be experienced at gatherings that generate a pleasant feeling of solidarity at the expense of other people.

The concept of kama muta may perhaps be useful to identify a certain kind of agreeable social experience, but it is less helpful when applied to aesthetics. To continue within an Indian context, the aesthetic experience of 'oneness' is more fully and accurately defined by the theory of rasa. The Sanskrit word  generally means ‘taste’, ‘essence’, or ‘flavour’, but in aesthetics it goes beyond that and often refers to the feelings of joy and transcendence that an audience feels when absorbed and moved by a work of art. Impossible to define adequately, rasa functions by arousing dominant emotions such as passion, laughter, sorrow, anger, compassion, fear, and wonder, and then transmuting them into aesthetic pleasure or delight. In a spiritual context the idea is taken even further. For example, according to the philosopher Shankara, rasa refers to a form of bliss that arises within oneself and does not depend on material things; it is spiritual, subjective, and intrinsic to our being. It is also related to the emotional form of religious worship known as bhakti. Although the experience of rasa is open and common to us all, it does not, on the other hand, especially emphasize shared feelings.       

Returning, then, to the experience of the clip of ‘Proserpina’, it is probably fair to say that its effect is caused by a combination of gratifying kama muta and, to a lesser extent, the aesthetic enjoyment of rasa. This may not be how the performers or most of their audience would think of the song or its effect, but it is one way of considering them without diminishing their satisfying impact.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Cudn4goNo
http://kamamutalab.org/about/
https://escholarship.org/content/qt4zv550pt/qt4zv550pt.pdf
https://www.routledge.com/Kama-Muta-Discovering-the-Connecting-Emotion-1st-Edition/Fiske/p/book/9780367220945