flemmings | (no subject)

Reading Yumemakura's Seimei, vol 4, get to the atogaki. "I have never once in my life had the experience of just going about my daily affairs and minding my own business, when suddenly hallelujah! the idea for a story descended on me from heaven. Not once." Not sure what to say to that, except possibly Sucks to be you. "The best way to get an idea for a story is to think about it. Just think. Focus your attention on it and think think think."

Which is possibly true if you're writing Seimei stories, as I'm half inclined to do. Fine for Yumemakura to be steeped in both Buddhism and Japanese weird tales, but for me the ethos requires a certain amount of... squinting and peering sideways to see how the mindset works. It isn't ours, that's for sure. It has a large helping of the grotesque, and you really have to go back to the 19th century to get something similar in English-- or even worse the 17th. (Ghastly centuries, both.) Grotesque doesn't have a very good pedigree over here. It's not elegant, and god forbid the supernatural should fail to be elegant and/or terrifying. Japanese spooks may be terrifying, especially when they rend people to shreds; but otherwise the instinct is to laugh at their absurd appearance.

It's also very domestic in a way that's foreign to me. For one, it requires removing the Christian-based assumption that otherworldly phenomena are exactly that, other-worldly. Nope, sorry, very much this world. For two it requires a reflex animism. Things have souls and personalities and behave rather like people. Demented people often enough, in Yumemakura's stories and Ima Ichiko's manga, but still, just like us when we're crazy. Weird things occur and cause terrible distress to the inhabitants of the house or monastery, and on investigation the culprit proves to be... oh, a pot gone a little senile, or a kimono behaving PMSish because my former dead owner isn't weaaaaring me any more nobody loooves me I'm gonna diiiie and take you with me.

This stuff is a world away from The Velveteen Rabbit and Steadfast Tin Soldier, by the by; these objects are all more than a little neurotic. By our standards they need to get a life- and so do all those vengeful ghosts who spent one night with a guy and then pined away and died in anger and grief waiting for him to come back. I swear, there's no passivity like Heian Japanese female passivity. It suffocates. That's what being an aristocrat does to you- removes any possibility of action and leaves you in daily soul-crushing boredom waiting for the miraculous Him to arrive. Agh. These women rarely even left the house; think what the psychic atmosphere in a place like that must have been like. It's no wonder their mirrors and robestands became obsessive delusional stalkers and occasional murderers. 'Treat me like furniture, will you? Right, I'll show you what furniture can do.'

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LOL!!!! As you segue into Hatsu ...

I think you're right. If you wanted to write Canadian, you could probably sit down and think it through the way Yumemakura saya she does. Still, I doubt her matter of fact-ness is really as matter of fact as she claims it is.

"I'll write endlessly and obsessively about you in my diary, you heartless bastard, and then I'll die and HAUNT THE DAMN HOUSE and the world will remember you, not me! Even though it's utterly improper for my actual name to be recorded or anything. But WHO gets the world-famous No play named after her?

"Ah ha ha!"

Yumemakura's a he, as it happens. Which sexist me thinks makes it more likely that he does indeed sit down and think hard about what Seimei might say to Hiromasa this time as they sit drinking on the porch. 'OK I need a monk and a weird dream and an object that might have caused it-- hm, attachment or possession? let's make it attachment--'

In a way these tales are like detective stories- another afternote floored me by mentioning Holmes and Watson as well. But it's there: noble clients, odd events, the need to go down to Sixth Street to investigate the scene of the uh haunting. Concocting those is likely to be a left brain activity. (Even nicer, Seimei needs Hiromasa and says so often enough, at least in the short stories. In the manga I'm not so sure. He makes much more fun of Hiromasa- and he looks terribly like Holmes.)

It's that the famous No play gets written in the first place that gives me pause. That means someone- and someone male- thought it perfectly fine for people- female people, preferably- to pine away from unrequited passion. The Heian attitude that jealous women are ravening demons, and such a nuisance as well, also makes me foam at the mouth of course: set up a social and economic situation that makes jealousy inevitable and then complain that jealousy exists to impede your tomcatting freedom.

But at least that's more rational than 'Oh look at this woman who had no life and can't forget her one afternoon with Ariwara no Narihira who wrote a smug little poem and then forgot her- isn't it splendid to be her! Isn't her warped and deforming obsession beautiful? Ahh the melancholic poetry of it!' By me it's the spiritual equivalent of bound feet. (OK, end rant.)

(I shall mention that Ariwara no Narihira god-what-a-name gets his comeuppance in Yumemakura. Ijiwaru Seimei says Oh yes that poem about the poor woman ripped apart by demons yes well what *really* happened there was that Narihira tried to abduct this princess from her house but her brother saw him and stopped it; and so he concocted this sad story with its little poem to save face: oh yes I did get her away but oh sad too bad demons tore her apart as we were sheltring from the storm.' And I go *sporfle*) (The closest thing I can think of to the court in Heian is a smallish highschool, maybe a boarding school for overweight. Cliques and hierarchies and the cool crowd and everyone knowing what everybody else does always.)

Inappropriate of me to even think of comparing it to certain fandom cliques, I take it?

Totally. Utterly. Completely. No resemblance at all you must be on crack to suggest it.

The thing about fandom though is that it's so invisible. It happens among words on a screen, not breathing personalities. At the Heian court you've got maybe several hundred people tops who not only all know each other, they're all related to each other one way or the other. There's a kind of physical proximity there that might blunt the worst of fannish behaviour if it existed in fandom.

(That proximity doesn't do that in high school has, I think, more to do with the ages of the people involved and the fact that none of them actually wants to be there. *Everyone* wants to be at court. So it's more like Louis XIV, I'd say. Nasty and feuding, but at least you have to do it with panache, whereas no panache is required in fandom cliquery- just a mastery of the Anglo-Saxon expletives relating to body functions and genitalia.)

Ok- end prolixity. (sigh)

True -- it can be harder to really cut someone when you're face to face with them. (Can be easier, too, for some personalities, but I think those are extreme enough to be left out of the norm.)

And in fandom cliquery one can assume everyone's listening -- it's not like school, when you can see them turn around and walk away from you and just not bother.

Very flattering to the ego. "Ah, she loves me so much that she has no life." And you also get to despise her for refusing her to accept her place as a secondary wife or mistress who *should* have the sense to accept that Great Lovers will be Great Lovers and Cannot Be Confined.

Grumble.

"Like I'm gonna go out with you with *that* calligraphy. Ewwww. Cooties."

But it's not merely 'she loves me so much she has no life.' Fine for the man concerned maybe, though that implies that he gave some thought to what the woman was feeling in the first place, which I rather doubt. But what ego-boo does Zeami get out of this two or three centuries later?

I suppose it's just part of the general belief (in Noh at any rate) that being unable to unattach from the things of this life is ohh beautiful and poetic and full of melancholy drama. Men get attached to the wrongs done them; women get attached to the men they've loved; and isn't there one where a flower gets so attached to the poem written about it by Some Famous Poet that the flower's spirit can't find release? Which may strike us as bats, but there's no arguing with a culture's emotional aesthetics. Hell, look at the idiocy that followed after The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, not to mention the recent goth thing. Pot, kettle, black.