A fragmentary translation of Zeami [世阿弥 元清]‘s The Nine Stages of the Noh in Order served as both inspiration and creative headfuck for me during my time in Tokyo. As an outsider to the performance tradition in which it’s founded, The Nine Stages is opaque, yet provocative: the image of the Flower of Stillness — snow piling in a silver bowl — abides with me, and in my work.

• The Nine Stages of the Noh in Order
• • Higher stages
  • 1. Flower of the miraculous – transcends power of speech and working of mind due to the yugen of a master actor.
    2. Flower of Supreme Profundity: profound mystery of a landscape.
    3. Flower of Stillness: snow piled in a silver bowl.
  • Middle Stages
  • 1. Flower of truth: first step toward attaining the flowers.
    2. Art of versatility and exactness: to describe complete the nature of clouds on mountains, &c.
    3. Art of untutored beauty: Learn the Way of Ways by following the usual way. Beginners start at the beginning.
  • Lower Stages
  • 1. Art of strength and delicacy: will stand up to detailed observation.
    2. The art of strength and crudity: like a tiger cub.
    3. The art of crudity and inexactness: When an art lacks delicacy, it becomes crude and inexact.

Start with Middle, then Upper, then Lower. Middle is the training stage, Upper is the yugen, and Lower is the indulgence of the masters of yugen. Some masters choose never to descend to the Lower.

How few crowd shots I have. Those there are, are mostly compositions of faces, foreshortened by a long lens, flattened into a single plane. And not an absence of crowds, only, in my pictures — absence of the space for crowds, absence of space itself. What the world is: bodies & light.

At Anne-Fay’s, in swine flu quarantine limbo. So no shots of Nando’s performance at EYHO last night, which saddens me.

Instead, been catching up on mailing-list reading and thinking about images, in halt compensation for inability to go out and make them. More on that later, but first a note to self, bookmarking a short thread on the Empyre list’s discursions around Relational Aesthetics this month. Reminded me I’ve never read Barthe’s Camera Lucida, so have a 2nd-hand copy on its way from Amazon… of which, I would be very interested to read James Elkin’s “Camera Dolorosa” in History of Photography, vol. 31, no. 1, (Spring 2007) pp. 22-30, if anyone has a copy handy?

Later: Thank you, Google. Elkins’s essay is available here.

Excerpt:

Sometime later I thought photography could be better compared to a sheet of black ice, the kind that forms overnight on a lake when it is bitter cold and there is no wind [...]. I know from experience that it can be terrifying to walk on black lake ice: it fractures with each footstep and the breaks squeal and shriek as they spread through the ice. Underfoot, the fissures look like white crystalline ribbons. Somewhere a foot or two beneath them, the ice ends, and the black water begins. Black ice is a horizontal window that looks down onto nothing visible. Peering down, you see into a thick deep darkness: not a black surface like a wall in a dark room, but a place where light becomes weak, where it loses energy, where it dies in some viscous depth. The lake water that must be underneath the ice seems more an idea than anything visible. It is an idea of falling or drowning. It is a place that admits light but does not give back any image.

So I thought that looking into a photograph is like standing on black lake ice and looking down into the water beneath it.

The Film Noir crew took over both floors of the Superstore on the hottest Friday night of the year. Severino’s and Helen Noir’s back-to-back sets of take-no-prisoners, hands-in-the-air afterhours disco and electro set the basement on fire. Fabulous. Pix here.