Forgetting the Forgotten

As we get older, we get forgetful.  This is familiar to us all, old or young, firsthand or secondhand. It becomes harder and harder to remember names and words, often embarrassingly, in the middle of a conversation.  It is also well known that matters of immediate past are more easily and quickly forgotten whereas matters from our remote past remain intact and often vivid.  Of late, approaching 86, I am experiencing forgetfulness on still another level.  

I forget what I had forgotten.  It is not failing to remember what it was that I had forgotten; it is obvious that what had been forgotten could not be remembered because it had been forgotten. It is failing to remember, not what it was that had been forgotten, but the fact that I had tried to remember something but could not.  For example, I stop washing the dishes, dry my hands and walk to the computer to look up something, knowing that I would not remember if I had waited until I finished the dishes, but, reading the computer, I don’t remember what it was I was going to look up.  Later, settling down at the computer, I have no memory of the earlier effort to look up something, not even its urgency. 

When I think of looking up something, which happened possibly by chance what I had tried earlier to look up, I should remember that it was what I had earlier tried to remember to look up but had forgotten, but I don’t.  I had totally forgotten that I had already forgotten before. This is forgetting the forgotten.  It should annoy me; but, curiously, or rather obviously, it doesn’t.  Forgetfulness is a bliss. I have a glimpse that dementia, in every point of progress, may well be liberating. 

12.31.18

Funny

Funny is a funny word because there is nothing funny the way the word is used here. 

11/28/18

Pontormo's Visitation

Jacopo Pontormo’s Visitation or Miraculous Encounters (1517) from the Church of San Michele e San Francesco in Carmignano near Florence, recently cleaned and restored and brought to The Morgan Library and Museum, is a rare masterpiece, most significantly in the artist’s completely new treatment of the subject matter. 

The Visitation, recounted in Luke 1, 39-56, concerns Mary’s visit of her cousin Elizabeth who was six months pregnant (with John the Baptist) shortly after the Angel’s Annunciation of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception. Traditionally, before Pontormo, the subject was pictorially rendered as a narrative, as we see, for example,   in the Visitation by Giotto in the Arena Chapel (1303-06) and something like the one by Marx Reighlich (1485).

Pontormo, instead, focused on the psychology of the protagonist, Mary. The setting is abstract and the group is arranged in stop action.  The two attendants, presumably one for Mary and the other for Elizabeth, instead of standing behind their respective mistress in proper obeisance, stand guard upstage, looking straight out of the picture but unfocused, rather like two prison guards, between which Mary’s face, itself shaded in contrast to the better lit three other faces, is uncomfortably hemmed in, illustrative of her anxiety in her plight of unexpected pregnancy. Her unease is further demonstrated in the drapery over her shoulder in notable disarray, and one of her feet almost catches the hem as though she might trip and loose her balance. The four figures are placed in a tight rectangle and efficiently dissuades the viewer’s narrative reading. 

The psychological iconography is clear and powerful.  This is what makes this Visitation, in my opinion, a remarkable masterpiece.

11/27/18

Gingko

窓の外
黄映える銀杏
冷え震い

Across my window
the gingko all yellow and bright
quivers in chill air
        　　　　　　　　11/07/18



























黄銀杏も
五日で裸
一本木

The glorious gingko
stripped bare in five short days
is now just a tree
      　　　　　　　11/13/18

Optimist Me

A fortune cookie “fortune” I had recently said this: Optimists believe we live in the best of worlds and pessimists fear this is true.

Curious where the statement came from, I searched and found that it was ripped off from the writing of an American writer James Branch Cabell who has a line in his play The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption (1926), which reads: The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.” 

So, I am an optimist, and this occasioned a thought on my surname,

Kitao,  which in Japanese consists of two characters, Kita and O, signifying North and Tail, respectively, suggests that I sit with my tail pointing north and, therefore, facing south, looking up at the bright sky and basking in the sunlight.  I was happy to discover that I am living up to my name. 

10.24.18

The Emperor: Power of Fiction

The Emperor presented by TFANA at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, is a play that narrates the downfall of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in 1975, the tale written by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski a few years later in the form of fictionalized testimonies of the surviving imperial servants and officials and adapted by Colin Teevan.  Its special attraction is phenomenal Kathryn Hunter, who, accompanied by an Ethiopian musician, single-handedly performs in rapid succession all of the twelve courtiers who reminisce on the emperor. This is spectacular and it alone makes the play worth seeing.  

But its real wonder is the play itself -- that it is a fiction rather than a reportage.  It concerns the contemporary political event but neither reports it nor describes it. Kapuscinski, who as an active journalist who covered Africa for decades was frustrated by the restriction imposed by Selassie’s court and found a way out of the difficulty by resorting to fiction and thereby came closer to evoking expressively the truth of the matter, because by elevating the account away from the reality of the event, he succeeded in reaching deeper into its more universal significance about power and its eventual dissolution.  A satire or a metaphor would not have achieved this as they would still be linked directly to the actual event; only the art of fiction did it as we know in the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the works of Shakespeare, Racine, and even Shaw and Pirandello.  

My experience of two recent political plays confirmed me of my belief in the power of fiction.  One is The Peculiar Patriot, at the National Black Theatre, by Liza Jessie Peterson, which addressed the imminent issue of mass incarceration and featured the playwright herself alone as the protagonist.  Paradoxically, it was a fiction presented as a documentary. There was no question the show was moving; but it was a drama akin to that of fiery sermons, persuasive lectures, and passionate speeches, a straightforward narration rather than a strong theater.  In contrast to a powerful storytelling, a well-agued debate, with two or more minds pitting against one another, develops interactions between characters and engages us as a theater.

The PlayCo’s Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya, by Stefano Massimi, is an admirable account of the Second Chechen Wars, 1999 - 2006 in Checnya, which the indomitable journalist Politkovaskaya covered until her death by murder in 2006.  The event was passionately and persuasively told by three female performers playing several characters; but in the end it was a great storytelling, inevitably lacking in complex web of relationships among them, as The Emperor was able to achieve.  

A play that reports a contemporary event, without elevating it to the level of fiction, I believe, will not endure beyond the memory of the audience who lived through its time, whereas a play on political and social issues presented as fiction has the power to remain relevant beyond the time of the event.  It endures. 

09.20.18

Fiction Credible

Truth can be stranger than fiction, as we all know.  By the same token, fiction can be more credible than truth.  Recently, in a magazine article describing me, it was reported that some women using the women’s room on campus where I taught decades ago, said that they wished I “would leave the toilet seat down.”  This is truly curious.  All my life, at home or anywhere else, I never lifted the toilet seat up, except when I was cleaning it.  It’s just that’s how I always was. In the context of the article that dealt with my so-called “transitioning,” it nonetheless made a good story, most credible.  The thought prompted me, then, to realize how easily some politicians succeed in getting elected to whatever position by cleverly deploying the art of credible fiction. 

07.18.18