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I never got back to my long-ago promised review of Yumi Yamaguchi’s Warriors of Art, any more than I got back to my promised review of Erik Davis’ The Visionary State.
The indefinite delay on the Davis book is just plain laziness, since I have no known disinclination to discuss the historical varieties of California spiritual architecture.
However, it now occurs to me that Davis’ book deserves one of those comprehensive essays I no longer find myself able to write. Davis describes so well how California has attracted such an astonishing variety of types of spiritual practice: His book deserves a review explicating the reasons behind the Far West’s attraction for alternative spiritualities, in a state where America and Asia collided and the frontier not so much encountered the end of the landmass as the sea road to other cultures, and where everyone not on a literal voyage was not so much questing as left adrift.
But that would require from me everything from a different reading of Thomas Pynchon’s most recent novel to an evaluation of Jeffrey Kripal’s history of Esalen, which I expected most impatiently and now find myself unable to read, or usually even remember that it exists. We live in a shifting sea of day-to-day relevances, and the manipulators of American politics are good at exploiting this fact by making sure that what appears relevant to the American voter is as irrelevant as possible to the actual problems and issues. But that would be a digression.
I have a small excuse for neglecting Warriors of Art: I wouldn’t be able to evaluate Yamaguchi’s claim that the book is actually “A Guide to Contemporary Japanese Artists,” but it’s an excellent stimulus to the imagination whether it is or not. The psychology and politics filtered through pop culture is incredibly varied, and ranges hugely in depth and intent. Just seeing the many serious uses of the even the most extreme frivolities of the manga-and-anime culture that has so unpredictably overrun the planet is worth it. But I don’t have the mental energy to write the summaries and select the examples that a review would require.
In fact, I was reminded of the presence of Yamaguchi’s book in the immense stacks of volumes that are hemming in my sleeping quarters by a typically improbable free association beginning with my re-reading of John Crowley’s Love & Sleep.
But the only way forward from that observation is back, more or less in reverse sequence. Hence the most general philosophical issues will show up near the end, with all of this foregoing stuff being illustrative examples.
I was reminded of Warriors of Art while reflecting on how different the 1940 Olympic Games of Tokyo were from the 1940 Olympic Games of Helsinki that succeeded them in the list of never-held Olympics. The Finns, proud heirs to architectural and artistic modernism, wanted to put on a sporting event for which they built a neat-looking stadium as they scrambled to fill the void left by Japan’s cancellation midway through the normal four-year process of preparation. The Japanese Olympic organizers appear to have been engaged in a covert civilizational crusade at odds with their government, which was happy in 1938 to use the excuse of wartime exigencies to put an end to plans both for the Games and the International Exposition, in favor of more inward-looking, patriotic sporting and celebratory events for the 2600th anniversary of the Empire’s birth from a divine lineage.
All of this is of sufficiently minor interest that I have had to piece it together from fugitive biographical notes that have since disappeared from reorganized websites of Japanese cultural organizations. (Prior to the internet there were even fewer clues available for anyone not fluent in Japanese.) But regardless of the increase in information, the fact remains that this is a subtopic of no interest to English-language historians of the run-up to the Second World War. or Japanese politics, or Japanese social relations. And the motives of various organizing-committee members are of no interest to sports historians.
One of the many reasons to thank Clint Eastwood for his film Letters from Iwo Jima is that he gave us a small glimpse of that unsettled quality of the whole Pacific Rim that I mentioned in conjunction with Erik Davis’ book: The Japanese commander who competed in the equestrian events of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics is a reminder of the trans-Pacific interchanges that had been going on from Admiral Perry onward. But I’ve written before, probably in conjunction with the Japonisme volume, of how the waste paper in shipments of export porcelain spawned an artistic transformation in Europe, and I hope I wrote about the more recent biography of Foujita that captures the next century’s stages of the immense cultural exchange that happened half by accident, half by design. (I know I wrote something about The Great Wave far back in this blog, in that regard.)
I got to thinking about the 1940 Olympics because I was pondering the historical questions on which there seem to be no extant research because the problems they illuminate seem so minor, or are of interest only to those who don’t have the training or language resources to pursue them. And that has to do with the issue of what seems of day-to-day relevance, and how personal and collective systems of relevance shift without anyone noticing. But that would be a digression. Let’s stick with the little questions, the questions for which those who are interested can find no answers, and those who could provide answers can find no interest.
I was reminded by a recent review, for example, of Thomas de Hartmann’s arrangement of supposedly recollected Byzantine and Syriac hymns. We have innumerable recordings of Byzantine and Syriac hymns, including historical reconstructions from extant manuscripts, but no one interested in de Hartmann has the background to tell whether his transcriptions are real or completely made up or a combination of both, and of course specialists in Orthodox hymnody (presumably greater in number than one would think) have no interest in what a European composer was purportedly doing.
And then there are the offspring of famous fathers who present offhanded descriptions of their childhood that are so at variance with what one would have supposed that numerous questions arise in the mind of the few who care. The even fewer who could provide answers don’t even acknowledge that there seems to be a disconnect.
And there are a few strands that I shall omit that lead us back to Love & Sleep, which on this re-reading is doing it to me again, as it did on every previous occasion. Boy o boy, is there more than one history of the world. There is more than one history of the history.
The indefinite delay on the Davis book is just plain laziness, since I have no known disinclination to discuss the historical varieties of California spiritual architecture.
However, it now occurs to me that Davis’ book deserves one of those comprehensive essays I no longer find myself able to write. Davis describes so well how California has attracted such an astonishing variety of types of spiritual practice: His book deserves a review explicating the reasons behind the Far West’s attraction for alternative spiritualities, in a state where America and Asia collided and the frontier not so much encountered the end of the landmass as the sea road to other cultures, and where everyone not on a literal voyage was not so much questing as left adrift.
But that would require from me everything from a different reading of Thomas Pynchon’s most recent novel to an evaluation of Jeffrey Kripal’s history of Esalen, which I expected most impatiently and now find myself unable to read, or usually even remember that it exists. We live in a shifting sea of day-to-day relevances, and the manipulators of American politics are good at exploiting this fact by making sure that what appears relevant to the American voter is as irrelevant as possible to the actual problems and issues. But that would be a digression.
I have a small excuse for neglecting Warriors of Art: I wouldn’t be able to evaluate Yamaguchi’s claim that the book is actually “A Guide to Contemporary Japanese Artists,” but it’s an excellent stimulus to the imagination whether it is or not. The psychology and politics filtered through pop culture is incredibly varied, and ranges hugely in depth and intent. Just seeing the many serious uses of the even the most extreme frivolities of the manga-and-anime culture that has so unpredictably overrun the planet is worth it. But I don’t have the mental energy to write the summaries and select the examples that a review would require.
In fact, I was reminded of the presence of Yamaguchi’s book in the immense stacks of volumes that are hemming in my sleeping quarters by a typically improbable free association beginning with my re-reading of John Crowley’s Love & Sleep.
But the only way forward from that observation is back, more or less in reverse sequence. Hence the most general philosophical issues will show up near the end, with all of this foregoing stuff being illustrative examples.
I was reminded of Warriors of Art while reflecting on how different the 1940 Olympic Games of Tokyo were from the 1940 Olympic Games of Helsinki that succeeded them in the list of never-held Olympics. The Finns, proud heirs to architectural and artistic modernism, wanted to put on a sporting event for which they built a neat-looking stadium as they scrambled to fill the void left by Japan’s cancellation midway through the normal four-year process of preparation. The Japanese Olympic organizers appear to have been engaged in a covert civilizational crusade at odds with their government, which was happy in 1938 to use the excuse of wartime exigencies to put an end to plans both for the Games and the International Exposition, in favor of more inward-looking, patriotic sporting and celebratory events for the 2600th anniversary of the Empire’s birth from a divine lineage.
All of this is of sufficiently minor interest that I have had to piece it together from fugitive biographical notes that have since disappeared from reorganized websites of Japanese cultural organizations. (Prior to the internet there were even fewer clues available for anyone not fluent in Japanese.) But regardless of the increase in information, the fact remains that this is a subtopic of no interest to English-language historians of the run-up to the Second World War. or Japanese politics, or Japanese social relations. And the motives of various organizing-committee members are of no interest to sports historians.
One of the many reasons to thank Clint Eastwood for his film Letters from Iwo Jima is that he gave us a small glimpse of that unsettled quality of the whole Pacific Rim that I mentioned in conjunction with Erik Davis’ book: The Japanese commander who competed in the equestrian events of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics is a reminder of the trans-Pacific interchanges that had been going on from Admiral Perry onward. But I’ve written before, probably in conjunction with the Japonisme volume, of how the waste paper in shipments of export porcelain spawned an artistic transformation in Europe, and I hope I wrote about the more recent biography of Foujita that captures the next century’s stages of the immense cultural exchange that happened half by accident, half by design. (I know I wrote something about The Great Wave far back in this blog, in that regard.)
I got to thinking about the 1940 Olympics because I was pondering the historical questions on which there seem to be no extant research because the problems they illuminate seem so minor, or are of interest only to those who don’t have the training or language resources to pursue them. And that has to do with the issue of what seems of day-to-day relevance, and how personal and collective systems of relevance shift without anyone noticing. But that would be a digression. Let’s stick with the little questions, the questions for which those who are interested can find no answers, and those who could provide answers can find no interest.
I was reminded by a recent review, for example, of Thomas de Hartmann’s arrangement of supposedly recollected Byzantine and Syriac hymns. We have innumerable recordings of Byzantine and Syriac hymns, including historical reconstructions from extant manuscripts, but no one interested in de Hartmann has the background to tell whether his transcriptions are real or completely made up or a combination of both, and of course specialists in Orthodox hymnody (presumably greater in number than one would think) have no interest in what a European composer was purportedly doing.
And then there are the offspring of famous fathers who present offhanded descriptions of their childhood that are so at variance with what one would have supposed that numerous questions arise in the mind of the few who care. The even fewer who could provide answers don’t even acknowledge that there seems to be a disconnect.
And there are a few strands that I shall omit that lead us back to Love & Sleep, which on this re-reading is doing it to me again, as it did on every previous occasion. Boy o boy, is there more than one history of the world. There is more than one history of the history.
