Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

Chapter 20. A Curtain of Mist

Understatement and Concealment

You use nice color,” the mask carver Mr. Otsuka had said, “and then on top of it you put something else to make it look more subdued, so it doesn’t look too shallow. After fifty or a hundred years, if you’ve used something unsubtle, it’s really going to show; it’ll start looking worse and worse.” Thus again the ancient aesthetic of Chun’e with his “autumn hills half-concealed by a curtain of mist” — not to mention the secret teachings of Zeami, which are in and of themselves, so some have said, no more important than the fact that they are secret. — What if I simply can’t understand them? I remember Mr. Umewaka telling me that he prohibited his apprentices from perusing those treatises during their first years of study, since “unless you master Noh to some extent, you interpret the instructions incorrectly.” Moreover, I confess that whenever I decline to track the numbers and paths of telltale hair-strands, a waka-onna, fushikizo and manbi seen all together can scarcely be distinguished from each other; perhaps their mouth-darknesses vary a trifle, but it could also be the angle at which I view each one. And on a certain afternoon of shining black rivers in Snow Country, when the train rushed me through a blizzard, I lost track of the various watercourses, and occasionally even wondered what I was seeing — an experience also offered by the dreamy, blurry translucency of Renoir nudes, in which everything reveals itself only through a very thin membrane, the light puddling and gently oozing, the pastel flesh modeled, not reticulated as a gum bichromate print would be, but simply melded, blurred. — Why shouldn’t it be? Don’t makeup artists so often blend powder eyeshadow with blush? — In this spirit, Zeami alludes to snow in a silver bowl.

And in self-defense, the reliably sour Eric C. Rath refers to the unfathomableness of “Okina” and of those secret manuscripts as “empowering interpreters with expertise while facilitating the disenfranchisement of those who could not claim to possess such intimate knowledge.” — I accordingly wonder: Is disenfranchisement necessarily a bad thing? The wall which disenfranchises me from a full view of the garden behind it, the lingerie (or ballroom gown) which prohibits much, but by no means all, of my gaze’s access to the woman who performs femininity within it, these two cases produce respectively, as we know, the beauty of miekakure and likewise of iki: allure softened and hidden, like the metonymic gestures of a multiply wrapped dancing geisha. The fact that I will never fully understand “Okina” makes it all the more haunting to me. — “Okina is not a pine tree spirit,” replied a Noh expert to my first attempt at definition. “Just what Okina represents is as much a theological problem as a literary one. Some people claim he is the Sun, and there are Buddhist connections as well. I’d stay away from this one if I were you.”

The proverb goes that it is better to love than to be loved; perhaps I am lucky to be an ape in a cage.

The withholding of a thing invests it with desirability; to the extent that it grows (or remains) opaque to the gaze, resistant to the will, it draws us toward itself. In his unfinished essay on the poetry of Chinese ideograms, Fenollosa asserts that “poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words,” and again, “poetic thought works by suggestion, crowding maximum meaning into the single phrase pregnant, charged, and luminous from within.” In part (one hopes), this luminosity is accomplished through brilliant selections and arrangements of words, multiple under-kimonos, makeup; but the metonymic compulsion placed upon that single phrase, the representation of Genji’s dying wife by means of a folded robe on the Noh stage, or that hint of red on the sole of the woman’s high heels, requiring it to do duty for a dozen other phrases any of which could have served equally or nearly as well, catalyzes the impregnation and the charging of the thing. Hence the tale of the tea-master Sen no Rikyu, who at around the turn of the seventeenth century built a garden on a hill overlooking the waves; within the garden hedges utterly shut out the world, but at the entrance, above the stone water-basin where guests bent to purify themselves, a hole had been bored through the hedge; there and only there one could spy the sea.

In around 1794 we see one of Utamaro’s yuujo fanning herself. Her hair is tied back with the string called motoyui, and she wears a red slip, white underwear and a thin black summer garment. Her ankle entices us through the black dress.

Do such procedures best teach me to appreciate ankles and ocean views? Mr. Mikata once said to me (and I wish I understood him completely; the enigmatic quality of the word “capacity” surely derives from my interpreter’s choice of words): “The right capacity is where you can see with your eyes and then you can hear with your voice. If you need light to see, then you cannot really appreciate the depth of Noh.” — His sentiment felt strange to me, since under such conditions I could not possibly distinguish a ko-omote from a waka-onna, but by that very token it increased the understatement, bringing the Noh farther beyond perception and discrimination, so that it might as well have been infinite. Could it be that if I subjected myself stringently and sincerely to such conditions, I would learn to recognize those two masks at a glance? Would it improve my aesthetic sense? Or would I merely accomplish my own Rathian disenfranchisement? Is it the Emperor’s new clothes?

But as this book so frequently and perhaps wearisomely repeats, understatement need not accomplish itself only through reduction; stylization will also serve its turn, as in, for instance, the simplified visages of the ladies and their courtiers in the Genji Picture-Scrolls, or Utamaro’s round-cheeked white geisha faces standing out from yellowish mica grounds, their stiff black hair-waves bristling with golden hairpicks, some of which sport floral decorations; the red lips and black eyes are always tiny in the plump white features; they preen themselves or bow snowily over love-letters; their expressions are nearly identical, like the lines used to compose them: the nose is two curves, each eye a pointed-cornered ellipse, the mouth two simple droplet-shapes joined on the pointed side.

Again, please consider the way that Matisse’s drawings of women offer a combination of spontaneity and economy, a right breast, for instance, being represented by an arc akin to a backward L, with the nipple a tick inscribed in a tight little circle; the woman’s face is often no more than a wide U, closed at the top by a few squiggles of hair, and within, the brows and nose generally receive one line apiece, the mouth two or three, like each eye. A woman stands nude, clasping her wrists in a curvy arch above her head. Her contours twist smoothly and simply down. These few lines are so carefree, yet so convincing in their placement, that the woman, sleek and rounded, has been caught forever in an instant of her moving grace. Another woman wears a necklace, her bowed head almost classically Greek; Matisse has not troubled to connect her left shoulder to her neck, and it makes no difference. A woman’s face is half-smiling at me, her lips full, her eyes squinting sleepily and sensually; counting the earring, hair-ribbon, necklace and all, this drawing cannot comprise more than twenty-five lines. And here a wide-hipped woman sprawls on her side, her uppermost thigh an inviting white blankness, with a pretty little pubic squiggle for a decoration; it reminds me of her sister’s hair-ribbon. What is grace? A naked woman plays beside a bowl of goldfish. A woman on her knees arches her back and stretches, with her face not more than a single line; her genitals, made of line-twirls and a few cross-hatches, are the least blank part of this drawing, which is not saying much; for Matisse’s women, like atoms, consist primarily of empty space. Another woman touches herself above the right breast, staring at me seriously and perhaps a trifle sadly. Who can rival her complexion, which is smooth white paper? I close the book, and all these women seem to hover before me on my bed’s white sheets, in a single understated assemblage of black line. I glimpse them as I would the ocean through that hedge-hole in Sen no Rikyu’s garden.

But what if I could teach myself to see and understand more than I have ever done so far? Might I not want to roll back Chun’e’s curtain of mist in order to admire every last scarlet leaf? Why not strive to perceive the thing unwithheld, the naked thing? (Matisse’s nudes are not naked; they conceal their pores.) Again, if the goal is to embrace the ineffable, would not a greater goal be to render it effable? If this is impossible, is it because there is a divine principle which cannot be bound or limited by human expression, or simply because nobody has yet figured out how to do it? Must my perceptions remain ever slightly faded, like the colors of Edo silk?

For some reason, most women on Earth wear clothes in my presence. Am I disenfranchised, then? (Sade insisted that true social freedom would occur only when all of us had complete access to each other’s bodies at all times. And an Egyptian papyrus advises: “The waste of a woman is in not knowing her carnally.”)

Understatement is as smooth as an onnagata’s skin when it is seen from a distance. Would I persevere in my appreciation if I saw his face up close?

An enthusiastic scholar of corsetry advises us:

The ‘fetish-object’ in the history of courtly love is a surrogate, and decreases in value as the loved one is present or appears more attainable. Similarly, the true tight-lacing fetishist does not wish to possess (or masturbate with) the corset itself, but to apply it possessively upon the beloved, so that it, his desire and her body become one… The fetish-object serves both as a symbol of union and a symbolic obstacle.

“You want a relationship without boundaries,” a sweetheart once complained, and I proudly assented. I resist the notion that either the fetish-object or the utterly accessible lover must decline in value. I wish to believe that if the beautiful object of my desire revealed itself or herself to me unstintingly, perpetually, any resulting failure of my appreciation would result from my own imperfections of love, concentration, etcetera. But in the British Museum there is a Babylonian clay plaque from circa 1800 B.C., catalogued as the Queen of the Night; and this roundfaced, necklaced, highbreasted, nude goddess, whose pupilless eyes offer me the hollow darknesses of mask-holes and whose taloned feet rest upon a pair of reclining lions, raises both her hands to me, holding ringed scepters; she wears a headdress shaped like pairs of bull’s horns and her wings flare out to her thighs; and she is all pale clay on clay, so that I am drawn into a realm almost as flat, despite its three-dimensionality, as it is erotic. Her lions goggle at me, and so do the two owls who bookmark them. I would not hesitate to call her pure, ethereal. But the Museum has digitally reconstructed her as she must have been when she was painted; and striking as those hues certainly are, they define and thereby limit her; what stylized her before I now experience as crudity, or, more precisely, the shallow color which Mr. Otsuka warned against.

Or again, understated clothing and breast forms sometimes protect the male bodies of transgender women from being recognized.¹ Is this treachery or something else?

A transgender woman writes: “The one thing that women share is that we are all perceived as women and treated accordingly… the most important differences between women and men in our society are the different meanings that we place onto one another’s bodies.” — Since a Noh woman is more likely than not to be a man, what gender does that make her? The brilliant black zebra-stripes of a Kabuki geisha’s kimono, the delicious clatter of her clogs upon the wooden stage, they titillate my belief — in what? And since I who watch the performance and am allured, knowing all the while that between her legs she has what I have, does that mean simply, as I used to believe, that the mask, costume, acting and choreography achieve — as of course they do — such artistic perfection that their beauty itself allures me? What is her story or any other to me at all?

In Mr. Otsuka’s studio, orange-cinnabar pigment gets softened with oyster shell into a flesh-blush on a Noh mask for “Dojoji.” Is that understatement or actuality?

Actuality reifies itself within those Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic figurines which archaeologists jocularly call “Venuses”: faceless, grossly breasted and buttocked, incised with what deserves to be called by that frank Anglo-Saxon word, a cunt; what is hidden here, what understated? — Only the individuality of any woman. — My intimacy with my own body, and with the bodies of women I have loved, allows me to feel an instant comprehension of these stylized miniatures, which must in part be spurious, since their context is conjectural, their fecundity idealized, sometimes beyond the final extremes of human femininity; all the same, there is no longer any wall between me and the garden; the cunt is here. The slit between Venus’s thighs is as bright as the lips upon a geisha’s white-painted face. Miekakure and iki are in the eye of the beholder; I could for instance project my longings upon the Venuses’ haunting facelessness; but there is a sharp distinction, nearly an opposition, between a Venus and Yuya. It is the same distinction that one can make between Proust and Kawabata, David and Rothko, laws and mores, exposition and suggestion.

The American fashion magazines of my time create their own partial Venuses. Their approach is to employ something vibrant, often gaudy, new, more often than not unsubdued, hence, so Mr. Otsuka would say, “shallow.” — Is it or isn’t it? Is a Venus-slit vulgar or revelatory? — Only you can say. In any event, here is Allure magazine: “In punchy shades of purple, green and blue, eyeliner shifts out of neutral and into high gear.” The reason that Allure’s projection of femininity remains not entirely Venusian is that, after all the glaring lipstick and dramatic eyeshadow, the skin itself remains; and what woman does not wish to conceal her pores, lines and blemishes beneath a curtain of mist? Yukiko spent most of her effort with me attempting to achieve precisely this objective on my face. — Chun’e’s autumn hills would still look pretty without the mist; my face would not. Keats’s famous assertion that truth equals beauty is valid only some of the time. — The onnagata conceals his hands, the Noh actor masks himself, the geisha whitens her face, for much the same reason. Sometimes the wall conceals a garden’s blightedness — another reason that disenfranchisement may be cause for gratitude.

But when I start down this path, I remember with pain the man who declined to see unpainted geishas because “I don’t want to know their tricks; I don’t want to know their sad stories.”² Understatement is evil when it facilitates our dismissal of the suffering of those who are beautiful. To take pleasure in the bound feet of a Chinese concubine might have been permissible; why make her feel that her years of agony had been in vain? But to take pleasure without respecting that agony, never!

On the Noh stage, Matsukaze and her sister-ghost Murasame mime dipping sea-brine, gracefully. “Although they are peasants,” a scholar writes, “they embody the refinement of a centuries-old courtly aesthetic…” And so our gaze is pleased. How would it be if they truly had to dip brine all their lives and afterward?

Mist lies on the autumn hills. That can mean so many things.

Chapter 21. In the Forest

An Apology

And because understatement is so enigmatic a quantity (understating even itself), I propose to seek it in ever widening hunting-swathes, beginning in ancient Scandinavia.

Chapter 22. Sun-Bright Like Swords

The Beauty of Valkyries

The genius of the sagas and Eddas lies almost entirely in their action. Feminine beauty is represented not, as in English poetry, through comparison and description, nor, as in Noh, through a controlled neutrality of stylized demeanor; in both of those cases, Beauty dances before us as a reified Subject; whereas in Norse poetry and prose, Beauty reveals herself through her effects on her objects. My Anglo-American heritage happens to be expository, and from this point of view, both Japanese and Norse wordcraft is understated, all the more so to me since I can evaluate them only through the smoked glass of translation. This befits my situation. An astronomer dares to gaze upon the sun only through a filter of almost leaden opacity. And in The Saga of the Volsungs we find this sentence: “They saw a large band of shield-maidens,” meaning Valkyries; “it was like looking into a fire.” Great beauty can be unbearable to look upon.

HER MAGICAL WHITE ARMS

Begin with the most fundamental and alien of all Norse literary artifacts, the Elder Edda. This group of poems stands richer by far in descriptions of men, battles, weather and ships than of women. Consider the Lay of Volund, whose eponymous hero marries a Valkyrie; it is on her restlessness that the action turns. Who is she? Well, we are informed that she comes of “fair southron maids.” What constitutes her hold on him? After all, “for the white-armed woman he waited long.” We learn nothing else about her appearance, but this whiteness of her arms gets mentioned twice. Her beauty is less directly manifested by means of the loveliness of the seven hundred ornaments he forges in hopes of winning her home; these in turn express their own irresistibility through the misfortunes they cause: Volund will be kidnapped and maimed for their sake.

Taking all the Elder Eddas together, the lovely Norsewoman,¹ and presumably her various supernatural sisters, is slender, and snow-white or sun-bright like a sword. Indeed, it is through her whiteness that she is most often reified. Why might that be so? The white-painted figure on a Greek terra cotta vessel is somebody dead. The white-skinned Scandinavian lady, I suppose, has simply avoided outdoor labor. At any rate, in this category her fair brow and breast get singled out, as does her neck. Surprisingly, her eyes and lips never get described at all. (In erotic ukiyo-e prints the revealed bodies of women tend to be whiter than the pinkish-beige bodies of the men who are penetrating them. In American fashion magazines, the advertisements often depict a woman with very very white skin, white teeth, eyes of muted brilliance — for instance, bluish-grey — hair which does not unduly contrast with the skin — blonde, or reddish, or very pale brunette — but then red, red lips!) She is ornamented with gold or silver — very likely arm-rings such as Volund made. She may wear a blue shirt, or a brooch. Contradicting a twentieth-century “zoologist’s portrait, celebrating women as they appear in the real world,” which asserts that “the arms are the least erotic part of the female body,” her most notable claim to beauty is her arms, for in the Eddas they receive more frequent mention — eleven times in total² — than any other feminine attribute. Usually (seven times) the female arm is simply white, twice it is soft, once shining and once gleaming. This last, which occurs in “Skírnismál,” renders eerie praise to the giant-maiden Gerth, whose “arms did gleam,” so that “their glamor filled all the sea and the air.” (In the Younger Edda’s retelling, “when she lifted her arms and opened the door…, light was shed from her arms over both sea and sky, and all worlds were made bright by her.”) The kiss takes a prominent place in my own culture’s erotic and romantic narratives, and this must be one reason why Hollywood actresses (like geishas) so often accentuate the redness and moistness of their lips. I suppose that the embrace plays an equivalent role in Eddic poetry; hence the female arm’s irresistible powers of beguilement. Odin himself warns: “In a witch’s arms beware of sleeping, / linking thy limbs with hers” because she will bewitch a man into isolation and sorrow. The same point gets made in the Lay of Svipdag, which is essentially a love tale. The glamor of its heroine, Mengloth, gets expressed most of all by the eerie journey required to claim her, with the necessity to call up the hero’s dead mother in her grave for protective witchcraft, the wall of flame around the heroine, then the happy outcome, like a jewel of gold glowing all the more in darkness. Like Volund’s wife, Mengloth is twice described as soft-armed. As for the hero’s stepmother who forced him to undertake the adventure, how did she gain her ability to rule him? This anti-heroine, who is evidently as dangerous as the ghost of a Christian woman, is presented to us as “the crafty woman / in her arms who folded my father.” It is as if the father were helpless.

So much is the female associated with her white arms that when Loki, who is insulting everyone in Valhalla, arrives at the goddesss Ithun, he cannot forbear from pro forma praise of her most lovely feature: “for thy shining arms on the shoulders lay / of thy brother’s banesman.”

THE POWER OF THEIR BECKONING

To be sure, fair-browed Brynhild, white-armed Guthrún and the various other swan-white ladies become as de-individualized and stylized as Lady Murasaki’s blackhaired Japanese beauties. But the power of feminine beauty grows all the more uncanny for its mechanistic invariability. The Valkyrie Sigrdrífa counsels her hero-bridegroom: “Though fair women, / and brow-white, sit on bench: / let the silver-dight one not steal thy sleep.” What about them is so dangerously alluring? Doubtless their white foreheads and silver rings contribute. But it may be the stylized invitation itself that comprises the thrilling peril. In the Greenlandish Lay of Atli, a doomed warrior’s wife, vainly counseling him not to accept the invitation of the man who will kill him, relates the following dream: “Methought in the darkness came dead women hitherward… beckoned and bade thee… to their benches forthwith.” Who knows whether in death they remain fair and brow-white? The wife fears the power of their beckoning just the same.

Indeed, the beauty of a Norsewoman can be likened to a sort of doom inflicted upon the men who suddenly find themselves in love or in lust with her.³ In The Saga of the Volsungs, a certain Sinfjotli simply “saw a lovely woman and strongly desired to have her.” That suffices. In Eyrbyggja Saga, two berserks are lured into a rage and consequent fatal exhaustion by the mockingly silent presence of a woman described only as “gold-adorned.” We know that she is dressed in her best and lifts her head high. We know her name, which is Asdis. That is all. And yet this saga, like so many others, does not withhold detailed descriptions of the second most beautiful category in the world, namely, weapons such as the sword of Steinthor whose silver hilt shines and whose grip is wound around with gold-threaded silver wire. Why then should gold-adorned Asdis remain a cipher, unless such was the saga writer’s choice? The eponymous hero of the thirteenth-century “Ivar’s Story” breaks his heart over a woman named Oddny Jonsdottir, and although his grief and its remedy — receiving permission to talk about Oddny day after day with the King of Norway — comprise the point of the tale, Oddny herself is not described in any way. It is as if she were an earthquake. Among the romantic motifs in Norse myths and fairytales we encounter love instantaneously induced through sight of the beloved in a picture or magic mirror, love caused by a glimpse of an unknown princess’s hair, and, of course, the love that comes from seeing a woman’s white arms. If I could see Oddny in a magic mirror, could I resist her? Would the shining of her arms suffice to enthrall me forever, or would I need a glimpse of her magic hair? In The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, a warrior-poet sings his subjection to Helga the Fair: “The woman was born to bring war / between men…”⁴ He praises her as “the ring-land’s light-Valkyrie,” meaning “the land’s rings’ goddess,” which signifies simply and hauntingly woman. All this seems in keeping with the appearance of the old Scandinavian figurines of Valkyries or disir: longhaired, silhouetted from the side, almost blank of facial features, stylized, nearly inhuman.

“THEN I WISH ALL MY LUCK ON TO YOUR HEADS”

What is doom? One summer in Iceland, a man named Hrapp rows out to the narrative, which rides and rocks on the verge of departing for Norway, and he asks to be carried into future chapters. How many unknown characters inhabit the darkness that frames everything we can see in this present instant of our lives? As he so often does, the saga writer withholds description of Hrapp here; our impression gets conveyed entirely through dialogue. “I suspect,” says the captain, “that whoever takes you aboard will have cause to regret it.” All the same, Hrapp gets his way. Cheating the captain out of payment for his passage, he next requests to be taken into the household of Gudbrand of the Dales, whose daughter he will seduce, impregnate and abandon, whose son he will murder, and whose temple to the gods he will pillage and burn. Upon meeting him, Gudbrand remarks, “You don’t look like a man of good luck.” And indeed, Hrapp soon finds it prudent to get out of Norway. “Save me, good people,” he cries to the Njalssons, “for the earl is after my life.” Helgi Njalsson replies: “It strikes me that you are a bringer of ill luck. It would be wiser to have nothing to do with you.” “Then I wish all my luck on to your heads,” says Hrapp, and in due course, there it goes.

The lesson read in this is that once Killer-Hrapp darkens anyone’s door, there remains no right way to deal with him. Ungrateful, violent, treacherous, he will abuse a kindness as well as avenge a rejection. Killing him outright will merely ensure a different doom. The heroes and heroines of Norse sagas express a cool, brave indifference to each and all such prospects. If one must die, then so be it. Enduring what cannot be helped need not equal submission to it. And in The Saga of Grettir the Strong, when the outlawed hero’s mother takes final leave of him and his brother, her admonition, whose gloom can certainly not be denied, offers a residuum of proud comfort: “There you go, my two sons, and your deaths will be the saddest of all, but no one can avoid what is ordained. I will never see either of you again. Meet the same fate.”

But what if there were some way to avoid doom? In the sagas we also often find a strong shrewd man of moderation, who succeeds, if only temporarily, in containing the violence of his neighbors. Even Grettir has friends, whose support, alas, erodes page by page. Olaf the Peacock in Laxdaela Saga declines to act against his son’s killer, who happens to be his foster son, and the eponymous protagonist of Njal’s Saga continually acts to limit hostilities and make settlements between people. When Hrapp’s bad luck begins to assault his sons, Njal counsels them: “You should let it be understood that you intend to take action only if you are provoked. But if you had asked for my advice at the very beginning, you would never have raised the matter at all, and so you would never have compromised yourselves.” This is truly the voice of rational restraint. All the same, Njal’s very next words run: “But now you are already committed to a trying situation; humiliations will be heaped upon you, until you have no alternative but to cut through your difficulties with weapons.” And so we descend back to inevitable doom. Olaf the Peacock, who bears advantages of person, deeds, wealth and lineage, does persuade all parties to the feud to settle, however grudgingly, but after his death, the constrained inevitable bursts its fetters just as the Fenris Wolf will do come the end of the world. As for Njal, wise, moderate and careful though he is, even second-sighted, from the very first we find him, like all the others, a hostage to friendship and kinship. He enters the saga by counseling underhanded tactics in a dubious third party lawsuit. He does not initiate this process; nor does the friend who comes to him; nor can either of them derive any good from winning it — on the contrary. No matter. Njal cannot escape getting enmeshed in matters which he knows full well are dangerous. His doom is to be burned alive in his house with his wife and sons.

Who sent Hrapp to ensnare us? Where lay Grettir’s fault? On the one hand, Grettir’s cruel and sullen nature manifests itself even in childhood, when he flays his father’s mare alive; but then, like the late-starting youngest son in many a fairytale, he begins to accomplish great things, and goes far down on the road to renown until he does the good deed of killing the bloated black monster called Glam, who curses him with outlawry and ill fortune. “And this curse I lay on you: my eyes will always be before your sight and this will make it difficult to be alone. And this will lead to your death.” What is the morality of providence? Can we give a hero any more credit for being lucky than we can a woman for being beautiful? In The Saga of the Volsungs, when Odin appears at a battle that his former favorite King Sigmund has been winning, and raises his spear against him, Sigmund’s sword breaks. “Then the tide of battle turned, for King Sigmund’s luck was now gone.” The expression “favored of fortune” fails in this context. It is one thing when an Old Testament figure transgresses the will of the divine, and then his fortune, or that of his descendants, turns evil. But as Odin himself reminds us in the Eddic poem “Hávamál,” the doom of every living thing is to die; no virtue of any mortal is immortal, excepting only renown. Therefore, no matter how hard we try to escape our doom, there will always be other men of rage and violence ready to be drawn into the saga; and even if Hrapp could somehow be avoided, slain or appeased, then Odin must come forth from the darkness with his spear aimed at us.

The grim suspense of Njal’s Saga does not abate on rereading, because understatement creates its own homeopathic richness of effect, and one never tires of seeing how one laconically described episode gives rise to another. Doom’s patterns surpass so much other richness that doom grows beautiful in and of itself. The conflict between the dictates of common sense, or even peacefulness, and one’s duty to participate in kinship and therefore to protect the clan by avenging their deaths, or to defend one’s lonely honor from sudden assault, simply cannot be reconciled. Such triumphs of self-laceration must surely be universal. Far away from the saga lands, and contemporaneous with the sagas themselves, in the Ashikaga era of Japan, we find in the equally understated Noh play “Kagekiyo” the conflict between the necessity to fight for one’s lord in a battle not at all of one’s own making, and the Buddhist dictates of nonviolence. But Japanese understatements of doom seem to me to partake more of resigned sadness than their Norse equivalents. I would be the last to deny the horrifying beauty of a yase-onna, Dojoji or hannya mask; but against these we must set the sad and ecstatic tranquilities of ever so many others. Doom is a frequent result in Japanese literature; it is rarely a cause. In The Tale of the Heike, when it comes time to decapitate an eight-year-old son of the defeated side, his wet nurse holds him in her arms, weeping. The chief executioner, after weeping himself, says to her: “Your little lord cannot escape this by any means.” Then he orders the swordsman: “Execute him at once!” Why did the child have to die? Why did the Heike fall from power in the first place? They were arrogant, we are told in the very beginning of the tale; but even if they had been otherwise, it would have made no difference, because of the theme of this great work, as of so many others, is evanescence. But while the Heike family’s doom may prefigure itself through its own sinister tokens and omens, the doom of a Norse saga protagonist is more actively baleful and threatening. The prophecy of doom, personified sometimes in a doom-bringer such as Hrapp, sometimes in a far-seeing, unwilling kinsman as occurs in Laxdaela Saga and The Saga of the Volsungs, cannot be withstood. Our doom itself, says Odin, cannot die. And in the sagas as in our life, it comes in equal part to the good and the wicked. In Eyrbyggja Saga the witch Katla saves her son from vengeance three times, magicking him first into her distaff, then her goat, then her pet hog, but on the fourth occasion the men are accompanied by the rival witch Geirrid, who throws a sealskin bag over Katla’s head, and this time the son is found and hanged, the mother stoned to death. As her enemies approach for this final fatal encounter, Katla remarks that a strange feeling has come over her. This feeling must have been similar to Sigmund’s when Odin broke his sword. The saga informs us that no one feels sorry over the killings of Katla and Odd, but I myself cannot forbear from pity for people who, however uncanny they might be, share my fate.

Doom will find a way in. Doom will strike us all down. But six and seven hundred years after they were written into life, Sigurth, Grettir, Egil, Njal and the beautiful Gudrid of Laxdaela Saga live within my brain. Although their renown, like that of the sagas themselves, and of the earth, the sun and all things, must someday dwindle, within the cross-referential metatext of the sagas together, these people remain as changelessly bright as gold in a barrow’s hoard. Njal has outlived his doom triumphantly; his triumph grows all the greater in that he foresaw it and made it his own. The Norse virtue of steadfastness, which in a Noh protagonist would be a sad symptom of illusion and attachment, remains gloriously eternal in him. When Egil Skalagrimsson’s brother Thorolf agrees to be separated from him when fighting a battle for King Athelstan, Egil says, “Have it your way, but it’s a decision I’ll live long to regret.” Thorolf lives yet in Egil’s verses; Egil himself, that brutal, brave, merciless, enduring, vicious, brilliant word-smith, I cannot dismiss from my horrified regard.

HILDIGUNN’S GIFT

The voice of doom is often a woman’s. In Njal’s Saga, the lovely, vindictive Hallgerd orders her share of murders, and when her beleaguered husband’s bowstring gets slashed by one of his enemies, she refuses to give him two locks of her hair in substitute, remarking: “I shall now remind you of the slap you once gave me.” “To each his own way of earning fame,” Gunnar replies, and in due course his foes bring him down. Njal’s wife Bergthora, who will die bravely beside him, feeds revenge’s maw nearly as often. In the sagas, women often assault their kinsmen with the grisly relics of murdered men; and Njal’s Saga sports a typical case: When the powerful chieftain Flosi dines with her, the widowed Hildigunn opens a chest and withdraws a cloak. “She threw the cloak around his shoulders, and the clotted blood rained all over him. ‘This is the cloak you gave to Hoskuld, Flosi,’ she said, ‘and now I give it back to you.’ ” Flosi calls her a monster. All the same, he cannot then refrain from avenging Hoskuld; and so, in spite of the efforts of many goodhearted arbitrators, Njal and his sons are doomed to burning.

Norse femininity, like Norse masculinity, can certainly be notable for its aggressiveness. In the Elder Edda, Brynhild and Guthrún are both murderesses; the latter is called by one commentator “demonic.” A demonic Japanese heroine would find no rest, but golden-clad Guthrún maintains to the end a grim joy in her vengeance. When she calls her little sons to her side in the bedchamber, they submit to her power even while remarking, much in Gunnar’s style, that she will not enhance her reputation by what she is about to do to them. In her next marriage, she sends a new crop of sons to kill and die. They set off, remarking that she will soon be sorry. They are right. Meanwhile, her will is inevitable.

“THE QUEENLY WOMAN”

The power of the Norse feminine is great not only because it can rule others, but also because it can rule itself. Guthrún may know quite well that she will be sorry when her sons are dead. Alternatively, she may be effective at ignoring or denying it. All the same, she never flinches from harming herself and those she loves in order to carry through her purpose. Neither did Brynhild, when after inciting Sigurth’s murder she stabbed herself and commanded that she be burned beside him on his pyre. Self-possessed to the last, she doled out gold to her bondsmaids, offering more if they would die with her. To her unloved husband she remarked: “Thy brow-white wife awaiteth death.” She calculated, foresaw and defyingly accepted.

When Sigrún the Valkyrie⁵ enters the funeral mound of her husband Helgi, she says that she is as eager to be with him “as Othin’s hawks” are “hungry for meat, / when war they scent and warm corpses, / and dew besprent the daylight see.” Having elaborated his pallor and ghastly wounds, she prepares a bed and lies down with her darling. I stand in awe of her brave and ferocious love. In my imagination, the rank darkness of the barrow is illuminated only by her forehead, in whose reflected light shine her golden arm-rings as she slips them off one by one. The dead man praises her as “woman sun-bright” and describes her as “Hogni’s white-armed daughter… the queenly woman.” Then comes that night-long embrace between living and dead, supernatural and human, female and male, beauty and horror, which Sigrún’s love alone saves from ghastliness. Who can she be to me, but every woman I have ever loved? Before cockcrow he goes to Valhalla and returns no more; she soon dies of grief. But they had already lived and died once before; it may well be that their love will be reborn eternally — a tormenting thought in Japanese Noh drama, but to Helgi and Sigrún surely their most luminous hope. As I said, a preeminent Norse virtue for both genders alike is ruthless steadfastness. No wonder that the phrase “sun-bright” is reserved not for beautiful women alone; they and swords can both shine like suns.

A LADY’S SLEEVE

What if the beauty of women were no more than a simplified, stylized fetish made up of a very few characteristics? I refuse to believe this, but I may be outnumbered. “The nape of the neck is the glamor spot in kimono,” advises a modern Japanese publication. (What might the Norse glamor spot be? White arms, of course.”⁶ For Kenneth Clark, historian of the Western nude, the glamor spot appears to be the relative distance between the lower breast and the navel. If this is called one unit, then the ideal classical female body, in artistic representation, at least, will likewise measure one unit between the breasts and one unit from the navel to the separation between the legs. In Gothic art, all these figures will remain the same except for the breast-navel distance, which doubles. Clark makes no secret of his feelings about that alteration, writing: “The basic pattern of the female body is still an oval, surmounted by two spheres; but the oval has grown incredibly long, the spheres have grown distressingly small.” Of course actual female bodies vary dramatically, and a promiscuous lover such as myself cannot but pity someone such as Clark, whose feminine ideal incarnates itself in a relatively rare number of women.⁷ All the same, I cannot but wish him well when he undertakes “that search for finality of form which, on our definition, is the basis of the nude.” Who would not want to know exactly what beauty is? What does a ko-omote Noh mask have in common with a great-breasted, great-buttocked prehistoric fertility goddess such as the Venus of Wurttemberg? To me both are beautiful, erotic. Were I to do as Clark did, and choose one over the other, I would be proclaiming that finality of form has been determined to my satisfaction, when in fact I do not wish my search ever to end. Here the beauties of understatement take me into their affectionate embrace. Among her list of elegant things, Sei Shonagon in her Pillow Book includes a counterpart to a Valkyrie’s sun-white arm: the sleeve of an Imperial concubine-to-be’s lady in waiting, deliberately shown to a messenger. She is on the right track, but why couldn’t it be any woman’s sleeve? I like another of her fancies better: Two lovers grow so well acquainted with each other’s particularities that his knock and her sleeve-rustling are mutually identifiable. Meanwhile, I remain free to imagine their faces and dispositions as I will.

The old Norse tales and poems afford me the same pleasure.⁸ Thanks to narrative genius, understatement and subtly chosen discriminations, their formulaic epithets of female loveliness escape vacuity. Rarely individuated descriptions of women do creep in, like serpents in a treasure-cave; I remember Thorgunna of Eyrbyggja Saga, who was “a massive woman, tall, broad-built, and getting very stout. She had dark eyebrows and narrow eyes, and beautiful chestnut hair.” In Egil’s Saga, the eponymous, famous and infamous hero’s daughter Thorgerd is introduced to us as “a fine-looking woman, very tall, intelligent, and proud, but usually rather quiet.” But then we return to the indistinguishable flock of white-armed ones.

In kennings and love poems a woman is customarily the goddess, tree, land, or Valkyrie of the bed,⁹ of nice clothes, of mead, or most often of gold and silver. Whereas the potent man is called ring-breaker, meaning apportioner and generous giver of treasure, the worthy woman, although she too is generous, is somewhat more likely to express her relationship to these beautiful things by adorning and being adorned by them. The blonde beauty of gold, so appropriate to Norse women, demonstrates that she is powerful, cherished, or both. She becomes land of gold, or more elaborately land of the serpent’s bed. Among the Younger Edda’s recommended kennings for women, we find dealer of gold, and flood-fire-keeping Sif, which latter can be parsed into “gold-keeping goddess of the golden hair.” Indeed, Sif’s hair is real gold, for in one of his many acts of meanness Loki stole the hair she was born with, so Thor made him replace it with something better. (One kenning for gold: “Sif’s hair.” Another: “Freya’s tears.” The latter goddess is said to weep tears of red gold.) Generally speaking, the Younger Edda advises, a woman may be referred to “by all female adornment, gold and jewels, ale or wine or other drink that she serves or gives.” Thus the lovely Oddny Isle-Candle gets praised by her poet-lover as “the elegant arm-goddess,” or goddess of the hand-fire, hand-fire of course being golden finger-rings. (Poorer women must content themselves with arm-ice, or silver.) Helga the Fair is called “the fresh-faced goddess of the serpent’s day,” which is to say of gold, whose radiance is the only sun the “land-fish” sees as it slithers deep in dead men’s treasure-barrows. Her lover boasts: “I played on the headlands of the forearm’s fire / with that land-fish’s bed-land,” meaning that he toyed with or caressed the gold-ringed fingers of her gold-ringed arm.

Laxdaela Saga, whose bloody plot owes much to the irresistible attractiveness of certain women, leaves them in a more enigmatic invisibility than the faces of the hooded Norns who were engraved on the Franks Casket. The subtlety of the narrative is such that a single adjective inevitably portends the future: “Jorunn was a good-looking, imperious woman of exceptional intelligence; she was considered the best match in all the Westfjords.” Upon her marriage, the spouses “got on well together, but they were usually rather reserved with one another.” No wonder that the husband gets a concubine. “The one sitting at the edge of the tent caught his eye; she was shabbily dressed, but Hoskuld thought her beautiful, from what he could see.” What the saga writer considers relevant is not the particulars of her beauty, but simply that she was beautiful. I remember seeing in a performance of Kojiro’s “Ataka” a fairly young boy in beige, maybe nine, on the very edge of the Noh stage,¹⁰ standing straight in that eerie immobility from which a sweeping gesture is even more dramatic; it is precisely this method that the Norse tales and poems employ, not least in their portrayal of women. The radiant one waits within the text, understating herself until the time comes for her to make her next gloriously fatal movement. It is her beauty which empowers her to alter the lives of mine. It is thanks to temporarily availing attempts to mitigate effects of the rivalry between her and Jorunn (both of whom are exquisitely realized as characters; one knows them through what they say and do), that the central tragedy gets prepared.

As for the saga’s femme fatale, Gudrun, “she was the loveliest woman in Iceland at that time,¹¹ and also the most intelligent,” which commits what Hemingway considered the cardinal sin of telling instead of describing. What does she look like? Her face must be the face of beautiful doom, as brightly hidden to the gaze as the sun’s disk. I’m more than willing to suppose that rings of red gold adorned her white arms. Seid, the magic art somehow related to females, with which Freya seems to have been associated, is nearly unknown to us; likewise the workings of Gudrun’s magic. Her true love and victim, Kjartan, gets a good two sentences of description; we are informed of the colors of certain horses; Gudrun for her part is a disir figurine. The only detail we ever learn of her looks and gestures is that when her third husband’s murderer wipes his bloody spear on the sash around her pregnant belly, she smiles.¹² The child inside her will take vengeance in due course.

IN THE SERPENT’S BED

As Odin says, we are all doomed to die. Doom’s strides are as long as Sleipnir’s eight legs on an ancient picture-stone — but I prefer to reify doom as Hallgerd, the vengefully irresistible heroine of Njal’s Saga. “She was very tall, which earned her the nickname Long-legs, and her lovely hair was now so long that it could veil her entire body.” Ketilrid Holmkellsdaughter of Viglund’s Saga, who is “blessed with beauteous hair” and a “fair white brow,” enthralls her own Viking-poet, who praises “the bright lady’s nature, like a swan swimming.” She dooms him to love her forever. And in the old tales and lays, and in every magic mirror and unexpected darknesses of the world, the white arms of half-known women prepare to ensnare me in ambushes of overpowering glamor. It is not so that they are all alike; they are sisters merely in their blinding brightness.

The white-armed woman holds sway over her gold-adorned hall. She adorns herself in kennings which dazzle my wearied eyes. My bedazzlement is my failure. (Sometimes when I see Noh actors from the back, their strangely flat beetleness, the way their arms can outstretch and freeze; or when I lose my way amidst the music of the chorus in brown plaid kimonos in front of that pine tree, staring straight ahead, then I forget that movement of striped kimono sleeves will extend into wings and grasp something supernaturally black. The real world is stylized into slow neutrality here; for the sake of what will come, it must be so. The boy’s pure high voice answers the man who kneels down on the polished floor. In the audience, old couples are following along character by character in well-thumbed or immaculate books. I envy their knowledge. This is the lesson I must take to heart: A perception of monotony is the result either of ignorance or a failure of attention. That may not always be true; sometimes the performer fails; if this book reads monotonously to you the failure may well be mine; but it is in my interest always to make the grandest assumptions about whatever offers itself before me. This boy in his robe and conical hat, he has what Zeami calls the false flower of his youth; let it be his youth, then, not his talent, that I reverence; or rather let it be his youth as tightly controlled by the play and by his training. They adjust his hat for him; they give him a bamboo staff taller than he is. A scowling man in a tapering black hat and a kimono of black, white and gold haunts the stage. Between periods of immobility and silence a sudden shimmering noise beats from a triangle of outstretched hands; I glimpse the child, then get overwhelmed by a line of elaborately identical kimono’d men all pivoting at once.) If I truly wish to see the loveliness of a bygone Norsewoman, then I must gaze at her with all my might, until my eyes burn out. Within their seeming sameness, what do the kennings mean?

The phrase “bright goddess of the serpent’s bed” makes me think on Sigrún in Helgi’s howe; perhaps the snakes are already crawling across the corpse she holds in her arms, brightly alone in the treasure-strewn darkness. If I were brave enough, I would be the one in there with her. I am sometimes ready to lay myself down in the serpent’s bed, believing as I do that love of a woman is the most glorious doom that can befall a man.

Chapter 23. Passing Light

Andrew Wyeth’s Helga Pictures

Helga Testorf, or her painted semblance, gazes down into the dark earth. An ominous grove almost silhouettes itself upon the high horizon. The world is wall and grave-core, crooked block of almost-night. Against this darkness, far more richly than the pale scrap of sky, Helga’s hair is shining, gold in a serpent’s hoard, flickering fire. Although the painter once remarked that he was striving for the “frozen motion” in Rembrandt, wherein “time is holding its breath for an instant — and for eternity,” he also said: “I would like to paint so nothing is at rest in my work. Nothing is frozen. I would like people to sense even in those paintings with brilliant passages of sunlight, that the sunlight is not really still but that you can really see the passage of the sun.” And indeed, light of some kind (probably more supernatural than the sun) alters upon the back of her head. Each hair is a wire amalgamated from slightly different proportions of gold and copper than its neighbor. Helga’s braids shine alternately light and dark. A sliver of reddish-orange collar ends her pale neck. And all around her, the earth has been worked like a dark wool coat. It seems to be made of fibers. The Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art sees in this painter’s textures “a similarity of stroke and surface applied alternatively to field grasses, animal fur, and human skin and hair.”

Helga Testorf stands gazing into the weave of the earth, where all of us must go. What does she see? When the shite of “Izutsu” stares down into the well, she discovers that her reflection has changed into her lover’s. He and she are long dead, of course; perhaps each is the other’s opposite. Life looks down into the weave of the earth and sees, I imagine, death. In this painting called “Farm Road,” Helga Testorf, bright goddess of the serpent’s bed, spies death, or love, or herself, or some other entity — possibly the tuber of the true flower; call it the Unknown. As Kofumi-san replied when I asked what this or that dance-gesture meant, “It’s a personal feeling. Isn’t it better that you don’t get anything in advance? It’s all up to the viewer.” Autumn blazes nakedly, and so the artist veils it by painting in a mist.

Even nowadays I still hope somehow to go “deeper” into art, as if by staring at the reverse side of my reproduction of “Farm Road” I could discover a more chthonic slice of earth. Were I a trifle more intelligent, could I interpret beauty instead of merely describing it, then no doubt I would “learn” or “realize” increasingly, in much the same way that a maiko’s crimson collar gets embroidered with ever more silver thread, until it comes time for her to give up her youth and become a geiko…

Well, I will now try to go deeper just the same.

Do you remember what Zeami said about the expression of demonic roles? Even then the actor should appear to be holding a branch of flowers. And the man who painted Helga so faithfully and secretly is nothing if not a flowery demon. The biographer Meryman sees a connection, as do I, between that famous portrait Wyeth did of his friend and neighbor Karl Kuerner — a sad, absent, hard yet tender-lipped face inspecting us sidelong from beneath two meathooks — and the artist’s following admission: “There’s grace in my work like spring flowers. But there’s some harshness, too. I’m a coarse man, really. I’m a strange combination of delicacy — fragile, in another world — and brutality.”

When he first began to notice Helga, she was taking care of Karl, who was dying from leukemia. Her English was accented; and she and Karl sometimes sang German songs together.

“Nobody knows her,” Wyeth described her. “She’s an enigma. She hovers over the land she lives on.”

And he took precautions (at least so runs the legend) that not even his wife knew her — for fifteen years.

In “Letting Her Hair Down,” the first Helga nude, which has been described (wrongly in my opinion) as comparable to the nudes of the fourteen-year-old Finnish girl Siri Erickson (“the same slight coarseness” — I see no coarseness at all — “the same strength, the same defiance, but diluted by a feeling of come-hither”), Helga sits against a dark wall which is constituted of the thick woolen fibers which make up Wyeth’s earth, and her skin exists somewhere between youth and early middle age; it seems to be altering even as we see it, recapitulating the transience of a Kawabata heroine. She gazes to our left, not quite grimly almost-smiling, perhaps shy or amused. The milky light on her upper breasts gives meaning to the yellow-white blankness of the open window. A solar medallion hangs on a dark ribbon just over her collarbone. Her left breast protrudes freely, while the wristbone of her right arm, folded across the left, cuts into the right breast beneath the nipple. Her hair is a stunning stiffness of yellow and whitish-yellow wires of light. Returning to her face, I now see on it a softer expression of patience and sweetness; her rather thick lips appear to be smiling more — an illusion which perhaps only I experience, unlike the viewer of a Noh mask which changes angle. What caused this impression? First, like most human beings, I sought out the human gaze, which Wyeth has slightly withheld from me. Then the softness of Helga’s form gradually made my aquaintance, like the softness of the barn-darkness itself; and so my judgment of Helga’s expression was altered.

As for Helga, she said: ”I became alive. It shows in the pictures. I became young overnight. I’ve never done anything more worthwhile.”

As for the artist, he recalled: “And now I meet this girl and can right get up to her crotch and really look at it and draw it. With no feeling of, oh, you can’t do that.”

And again: “She was an image I couldn’t get out of my mind.”

When Helga undressed for “Overflow,” Wyeth “felt the country, the house, Germany, the dreamy, moist, rich female smell — the whole thing.”

What is the whole thing? Just as paper-thin stage panels painted with flowers sometimes retract, revealing Kabuki dancers arrayed as flowers, so my understanding of female grace may at times draw away, with the same stunning rapidity that a Kabuki dancer’s costume can change from green to red or gold before the audience’s eyes, from what I think I understand now. And how much might that be? — As Wyeth said of Helga: “Whoever she is to us, we cannot know her infinite other identities.”

I cannot imagine any of the geishas and Noh actors whom I have interviewed saying of any aspect of their craft what Wyeth once said about drybrush: “If I control it, it’s no good.”

Perhaps that was why her identities were infinite to him.

In the painting called “Braids,” the black background has grown so rich as to be almost blood-red, and Helga, gorgeously imperfect in the manner of G. M. Hopkins’s poem “Pied Beauty,” gazes down and to the left, hollow-cheeked, with creases at the inward corners of her eyes, and a full nose with a knife-sharp bridge. Her reddish-blonde eyelashes are sufficiently delicate to die for; her braids shine reddish and goldish with lights on them as they twist neatly down her high-collared sweater, vanishing as they approach her sweet breasts; and speaking of sweet, the face of Helga is a mixture of sweetness and severity, unlike her counterpart, the fukai mask, which merely dreams down into the darkness; Helga similarly projects herself into someplace beyond us, but her femininity has been embodied, by her own corporeality and by Andrew Wyeth.

He altered “Braids” after Helga related a certain sexual experience. “I’d painted those braids beautifully coming to the fine end, the fluffy blondness of the hair. I thought, fuck it. This is not it.” He sawed off the bottom of the portrait.

There came the year when he was done with Helga, so that it was time to prepare his exhibition to finally show Betsy. “Taking the lids off the boxes… they had the odor of the girl, they had the whole — I knew they were not just pretty pictures.”

What were they then? “Night Shadow,” according to our authorized biographer, “is Wyeth’s memory of his father in the coffin, the moment he bent down to kiss the forehead, feeling the cold waxiness on his lips.” But what we see is Helga, whose face is paler and softer than we usually encounter it in the corpus of Helga Pictures (“Night Shadow” does not belong to this suite, because Betsy Wyeth kept it and two other Helga paintings), and her familiar half-smile is more of a smile than ever, but her eyes are shut as she lies there on her back, her hair barely surviving the darkness around her, hair braids black, white and honey-gold; a weakish shadow bisects her face below the bridge of the nose, so that she is bright — excepting her left shoulder and the narrow dark ribbon around her throat — below her lovely cream-and-peaches breasts, at which point darkness jaggedly breaks her off. I imagine her as Sigrún in Helgi’s howe, with her dead lover bending over her. But that is merely what Helga means to me. If I were writing a book about Noh, I might try to refer to fog, jade, water; to Nara’s ancient camphorwood statues dim in the rainy darkness. And who knows what Helga would say? For these paintings and drawings of her partake of that mysterious effect based on understated description, yugen. What did the ends of her braids look like before Wyeth sawed them off, and what would it have been like to hold them in my hand? If Wyeth’s father could see from beyond the grave, which if any aspect of himself would he perceive in “Night Shadow”? As for the artist’s wife, when the Helga Suite was first revealed to her, her reaction was: “Who the fuck is this woman? Boy, she looks tough as nails in that one — and she’s as soft as velvet in that one, and who is she and what’s going on here?” John Wilmerding, Deputy Director of the National Gallery, emoted in a more consonant spirit: “Now her sturdy features and sober demeanor, reflective of her northern European background, match the somber browns and enduring contours of this Pennsylvania terrain.” Wyeth himself said, specifically regarding “Night Shadow”: “It’s not just anybody lying there. It’s that momentary thing — something you’ll never see again… That’s my relationship with Helga. Timeless.” He continued, and the past tense made his honesty crueler still, for Helga was (so I’ve read) bereft once he finished with her: “She epitomized all my German background — all imaginative things embodied in her. I used her for a stepping-stone.”

GIRL IN A BOX

To repeat the words of Kanze Hisao: “It is highly detrimental to a mask to be treated like a piece of antique art, to be shut up in a box or shown only in a glass case. It is only on the stage that it continues to maintain its vitality.”

But let me mention a reproduction of a certain ko-omote carved for the Kanzes by Deme Yasuhisa — it is a near-perfect copy of one of Tatsuemon’s masterpieces, which was once referred to by Zeami himself — and this mask, whose underside has been inscribed in gold and red, lives in a box additionally inscribed. “And thus, this mask is known as a hako-iri-musume (girl in a box, meaning a girl brought up with tender care).”

The box opens, offering us a girl’s face sleek with baby fat; her U-shaped double chin mimics the curve of her lower lip. As the mask turns rightward it takes on a shy smile of tenderness or perhaps of pride in receiving some compliment from father, husband, suitor, lord; facing left with its chin a trifle higher, its expression becomes bolder, although no less serene; it could be dreaming of an attachment or contemplating the peace which that attachment’s death will bring. Vertical streaks of light now gild its eyelids. On the left cheek and above the upcurving right corner of the upper lips, birthmarks or timemarks live their quiet lives. The left eyebrow is a wider cloud of black than the left. Darkness shines out at us from the half-smile beneath the black teeth.

The description continues: “A copy of the Honmen of Konparu. The nose tilted to the right and the flesh on top of the cheekbones are superb. Blemish, beauty mark, cracks, and even the damage on the tip of her nose is accurately copied. The colors are quite unique. It is made from the Japanese cinnamon tree¹ like the Honmen, and on the back, the nose, eyes, vertical lines from the lower lip to the chin, and the double horizontal cut with a round chisel which interrupts them, are all exactly the same as on the Honmen.”

Too old to be represented by a ko-omote, Helga would be better portrayed by a fukai. Time’s damage to her face deserves to be accurately copied; and although I have never met Helga, I believe in her; the flesh is superb; the perfection of her particularity is as fragrant as a cinnamon tree.

Helga is a girl in a box. I keep my book about her pictures carefully on the shelf. When I open it, I turn the pages as gently as I can.

“There’s no general beauty in the world,” Mr. Kanze Hideo had said to me, and Helga’s loveliness is certainly not general. — But what is any ko-omote, even this famous girl in a box, but a stylized, hence at least partially generalized representation? How much of its subtle individuality can an audience see as a difference? — Or is this question as ingenuous as an inquiry into whether all women who possess two eyes are more or less the same?

Who is this inside the box? Wyeth must have “known” what he had made, but he lacked the noun to describe it. “Taking the lids off the boxes… they had the odor of the girl, they had the whole — I knew they were not just pretty pictures.”

She remains on her side of the abyss, her paintings relentlessly immobile and two-dimensional — understated, in short; fascinating and inexhaustible.

“THE GROWTH AND DEPTH OF MY EMOTION”

Noh actors and Inoue School geishas repeat that they strive to feel nothing when performing their roles. Zeami insists that the Perfect Fluency “has no connection… with the actor’s conscious artistic intentions or with any outward manifestation of those intentions.” Meanwhile, here is Andrew Wyeth: “To me, it is simply the question of whether or not I can find the thing that expresses the way I feel at a particular time about my own life and my own emotion. The only thing that I want to search for is the growth and depth of my emotion toward a given object.”

Perhaps defensively, he remarked to Thomas Hoving that the Helga pictures were “too real for some people. You have to feel deeply to do this kind of thing.”

For years I hoped to meet Andrew Wyeth to ask him how deep into the earth his emotion was growing, toward what; but as I finished this book, at the beginning of 2009, he was freshly dead, his feeling’s constellation of image-object as motionless as a lord’s retainers in an old Kabuki play. Helga Testorf, so I imagine, gazes down into the place where he has gone. She sees it better than I. When the shite of “Izutsu” stares down into the well, when Zeami envisions snow in a silver bowl, and when Suzuka-san meets her own snow-white geisha face in the makeup mirror, are their visions somehow equivalent?

In Kanazawa I have looked down at the Ishakawon Gate, discovering snow on the roofs, the forest silver behind it, as if I have lost myself in an old Genji Picture-Scroll. Ishakawon’s gangling walls, gabled roofs, complex of ponds and walks invite enumeration, however unsuccessful such a procedure might be. In “Farm Road” it would be impossible, unless one so far misconstrued coherence as to inspect Wyeth’s brush-strokes through a hand lens.

Had I been lucky enough to meet Andrew Wyeth, what holes under the tree-roots might he have shown me? One visitor from 1965 perceived the artist’s identity to be “fluid and fluctuating… You can feel it changing and altering in a constant play while you talk to him. This makes you think you have got behind the mask, but when you leave you don’t know whether you have.”

What then; where then? If on a summer’s night in Kyoto you watch the mask just when the actor turns away from the torchlight, will you learn where the face goes?

And when Mr. Umewaka dances Yoroboshi at Yasukuni Shrine, his mask grows dreamily downturned, inward-turned into a true blind face; then when he raises the mask it seems startled, attentive to some distant sound. Slowly he swirls his almost closed fan before him as he turns. A gash of light catches on his chin like a tear. He turns, more tear-light kissing his mask just under his blind eye; then a circlet of light crowns his forehead. Presently the fan comes before his face, becomes a knife-edge, then slowly cleaves the air. Later he will fling out his sleeve, collapsing when the voices slow. Then the waki comes to face him, but Yoroboshi stares at the ground. The waki spreads his golden fan in what I can only inanely describe as “a very dignified gesture,” after which absolute silence follows. Mr. Umewaka at a wide remove from the waki glides down the bridge, with time itself breaking between them.

Does Helga see what the blind man did? If I could succeed in seeing through darkness, would my vision be one certain and secret thing, or could it be any number of things? When a Noh actor or geisha considers nothingness, what if anything lies beyond this, glowing like a jewel within the earth?

Noh’s overt answer to this might recapitulate the Genjo Koan of 1231: “The individual self striving to realize all things is delusion; all things striving to realize the individual self is awakening. Those who awake to delusion are Buddhas, while those who are deluded about awakening are humanity.” But this is not what I wish to believe. I want to kiss the mask, and when I put my lips against its wooden emptiness, I want to feel a woman’s tongue in my mouth.

And when aestheticians refer to the slow rising of a Noh actor’s hand as “the gateway to something beyond… a symbol not of any one object or conception but of an eternal region, an eternal silence,” I can never avoid wondering whether they have been tricked by the Emperor’s nakedness. But when I experience the yugen of the geisha, or of “Farm Road,” or when the woman I love slowly raises her hand to her hair, then I do believe that there is something beyond.

To look at something far away, the Noh actor shades his eyes, and the cognoscenti know. When he outstretches his sleeve with his fan angled outward, the fan becomes a cup; he is scooping up water. But when Helga gestures, what does it mean? Does grace without allusiveness fall into its own category?

“It’s not just anybody lying there. It’s that momentary thing — something you’ll never see again…” — Genji might have felt something of this sort when Murasaki died. And so it is anybody, and everybody, and all of us who have existed on one or the other side of an alluring mask. I cannot tell you what Helga sees when she stares down into the earth; but I imagine that I can when I am in Kanazawa, at the point of passing through the many stone arches of an ancient castle gate.

Chapter 24. Who Is the Willow Tree Goddess?

Snatches of a Play

On the grounds of old Nagoya Castle, attended by fountain and moat, the rainbow curtain tucks itself up and a heavy figure in turquoise glides out, on its shoulders a bundle of white, in its hands a basket. It stops almost onstage and turns to face another figure, a sprite garbed in the colors of earth, whose hands rest at its breast, the foregrounded sleeve falling below in a long earthern triangle from elbow and wrist. Its face is a honey-colored wig and a Noh mask of something staring and old. This entity begins to chant, and the drums, flute and chorus accompany its song, not a word of which I understand. Then it and the figure in turquoise begin to sing loudly and resonantly to one another from across the bridge.

I could remind you of the functions of the two figures who enter from the little stage door, crossing the mirror-board to kneel at the rear, partially occluding the pine tree. I could explain the plot to you, pretending that even if Mr. Umewaka had refrained from summarizing it for me at the end I would have comprehended the Emperor’s command. If I had educated myself more during my interviews with mask-carvers I surely could have dissected for you the illusion by means of which the sprite’s gape becomes more and more thoughtful when seen from the side. The chanting and music speeds up and deepens, the flute shudders. Only the sprite moves, and he finally lays down his wand, removes a fan; then throughout a long bout of chanting, he stays still, the light glistening on his level mask, and faces the golden envoy across the stage. Never mind who is the Willow Tree Water Goddess. This performance being mediated by my untrained, incoherent perceptions, I can only serve you up with bits of things. I remember a kimono’s white and silver arrows, and a mask thatched with hair and offering us all its gruesomely grimacing wooden lips. Why does the crown have flames on it? The advances and retreats of this being, its dim movements especially, which are as delicately exquisite as horses in an Assyrian hunting relief, its creeping, twirling and stamping, the waving of its fan, the fact that on the bridge it casts a sleeve over its crown and the way its head flickers with ghastly liveliness, have all been choreographed; but even if I were no longer an ape in a cage, and could tell you the significance of each step and syllable, I still could not peer within “the gateway to something beyond”; in fact, I might remain farther away from it, like a darkroom technician whose very skill prevents him from composing interesting photographs. At least, so I reassure myself.

Why Helga is beautiful, whom we are meant to think of when we see a certain pregnant Cycladic marble with a nose like a knife, pointed breasts and a wide flat pubis; why I am bewitched by this geisha’s perfect white face which glows in the darkness as softly as a paper lamp (who is she to me? I think of the Jungian concept of the anima, the projection of the feminine within me, but that can’t be much of it, because she is alien), to these questions the eternal beyondness of understatement gives some answer, to be sure, but if I knew more I could know more. In the Nara National Museum there is an eighth-century scroll of the Flower Garland Sutra: silver-dust characters evenly spaced on night-blue paper; call it a celestial blueprint. I “appreciate its beauty.” But I cannot read it. There is too much in this world for me to know. As the shite says in the madwoman play “Miidera” (literal translation): “Thinking heart is saddened.”

What is grace? The lap drummer cries out; the three golden fans slowly flash.