Fox eyes

There is much that puzzles me in Japanese art.

In my last entry I discussed the round eyes of supernatural beings like tengu. Let me show a piece of complicating evidence. Look at these two depictions of Commodore Perry made in the in the aftermath of his arrival to Japan in 1853. As historians like Gregory Smits (see this online lecture) or John Dower (see this online essay) point out, Perry is portrayed as a tengu.

Tengu came in two kinds: either bignosed goblins with glaring eyes or birdlike beings with wings. The "tengu" on top is of the former kind and the one below of the latter kind.

What strikes me is that the depictions show Perry with narrow and slanted eyes rather than the round eyes usually associated with tengu. Neither did Perry "in reality" have very narrow eyes. So why are the eyes narrow?

Interestingly, the portraits show that this time it is narrow eyes, rather than big round ones, that inspire fear. Could it be that these portraits reflect the emergence of a new cultural convention, common today, that associates narrow eyes with evil and round eyes with goodness? That's a tempting hypothesis, but I don't think it holds. Narrow eyes continued to be standard in portrayals of human beings in the Meiji period. Instead, we can note that there is something inhuman and fox-like in Perry's eyes.

Foxes (kitsune) are of course famous as tricksters in Japanese folklore, widely believed to be able to possess human beings, cause madness and conjure up hallucinations. As far as I can tell, foxes have always been portrayed with narrow slanted eyes.

But why do these fox-eyes emerge in the Perry portraits? And how do the narrow, slanted eyes of foxes relate to the round eyes of other beings with supernatural or superhuman powers?  

Clearly, I need to have a closer look at foxes and at how foxes have been thought about.

A hypothesis

Considering that round eyes become "cutified" in the course of the Edo period, could it be that Perry had to be given narrow "fox-eyes" in order to convery the proper sense of dread?

This is an attractive hypothesis.

Let us first look at some corroborating evidence.

First, let’s recall that Perry’s arrival was something extraordinary - the first time Westerners had a major impact on Japanese society. The Dutch in Dejima harbor or the Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century were never portrayed with anything like the same monstrous features, probably because they were never felt as a threat to Japanese society. Despite being referred to as "red-hairs" (kômô), or "southern barbarians" (nanban) the Portuguese and Dutch were surprisingly little exoticized in most pre-modern Japanese illustrations. As Smits writes, "they are clearly 100% human, with no monster-like features".

It is possible, however, to find pictures of foreigners with monster like features, both in the Edo period and in the modern times.

To the left is a detail of picture from around 1830 by Yanagawa Shigenobu. To the right is a wartime cartoon depicting president Roosevelt burning democracy with the torch of dictatorship. Both pictures use big round eyes to convey a sense of monstrosity.

We can note, however, that this "monstrosity" is no longer fearsome. While Yanagawa's picture purports to depict the bed room chamber of "southern barbarians", the male character is reminiscent of a Buddhist guardian god. Yanagawa being famous as a producer of shunga (erotica), his aim may very well have been to surely to suggest, under cover of portraying foreigners, the titillating motif of Buddhist deities engaging in sacrilegious sex. The round eyes, rather than inspiring fear, have become a comical sign of spiritual weakness and depravity.

Roosevelt is depicted as a devil (oni). But note how comical and desperate he looks. The cartoon is clearly not intended to show the allied leader as fearful, but rather as ridiculous.

These examples suggest that round eyes are no longer sufficient if you want to convey a real sense of threat or evil. While round eyes can still be used in illustrations to suggest a likeness to the traditional idea of devils or guardian kings, the beings equipped with such eyes seem to have lost the force to inspire dread. If fact, they've become powerless. The guardian deity is no longer in a reliable guardian against evil and Roosevelt clearly looks as if he's losing the war. The round eyes, then, have become signs of the very opposite of what they once used to signify: power.

 
So why aren't foxes cutified?
 
But why choose fox-eyes for the Perry portraits? For some reason, the "cutification" of monsters or other beings close to superhuman or sacred power during the Edo-period doesn't seem to apply to foxes. Why? Is there any discernable reason for the narrow, slanted fox-eyes to have been more dreadful than the big, round eyes of other monsters?

Let me suggest three reasons:

First, there are the inherent traits of foxes in popular imagination which may been hard to "cutify" - their association with deception and night, a time of day for which respect lingers on even in modern societies.

Secondly, one can move outside such inherent traits to search for broader and more general explanations. Superhuman beings of the round-eyes type seem to have been closely linked to Buddhism (think of the old association between Buddhist monks and mountains, tanuki, tengu etc). Foxes too once shared this link through their association with Dakini, but over time they came to be more closely linked to so-called Shintô though the Inari-cult (and through the cult of the mountain god, which which they were also associated). Now the Edo-period was a time when the revival of Shintô began (kokugaku) and Buddhism lost vitality, being institutionalized and ”tamed” by the state. This is probably the most important factor that explains why “round eyes” cease to be feared while foxes continue to be awed as carriers of sacred powers.

Finally, one might add the basic difference between the primary objects of worship in Buddhism and Shintô. As Motoori points out, the kami have nothing to do with good or bad. The only requirement is that they inspire awe. Even today, one finds Japanese who say that they are not afraid of going to Buddhist temples at night, but going to a Shintô shrine is another matter. Buddhas, by contrast, are benevolent, guiding all living beings towards liberation and peace. Even the most fearsome beings in the Buddhist pantheon – like Deva kings and tengu (who came to be regarded as protectors of Buddhism) – ultimately served this aim.

These factors help explain why foxes resisted the trend to the ”cutification” and why round eyes would not have conveyed the proper level of fear on the Perry portraits.

Big eyes: Cuteness and the domestication of the wild during the Edo period

Just a brief thought. Today in Japan round eyes are considered cute. That's an expression one hears all the time and it is also evident from anime and manga, where likable characters have round eyes and the baddies have narrow eyes. But when did this positive view of round eyes start?

If we look at premodern Japan, we find round eyes in depictions of devils (oni), goblins (tengu), Deva kings (niô), hannya-demons, animals such as tigers and lions, and warriors in battle. Round eyes seem to have been regarded as something terrifying and perhaps related to the supernatural.

These round eyes do not seem to be just a sign of agitation. Supernatural beings (yôkai) usually have the same round eyes even when they are relaxed and at ease. To the right is Itô Jakuchû's famous Tsukumogami-zu (painting of spirits inhabiting things one has used for a long time) from the 18th century.

Or take the Hyakki yagyô-zu (Pandemonium painting) below, which is from the Muromachi period:

By contrast, everyone who's ever seen a nô-mask or ukiyoe-print knows that ordinary people were usually depicted with narrow eyes. Benevolent deities (think of Ebisu or Daikoku) or buddhas also usually have narrow eyes. When did things change?

First lets consider what may look as an anomaly: depictions of Bodhidharma (Daruma-san). As far as I know, Bodhidharma has always been depicted with big round eyes in Japan. Many who are familiar with the popular Daruma-san dolls would object to what I've just written by pointing out that these dolls are often very cute. But when did they become cute? Might it not be a very late phenomenon? Let us have a look at some earlier depictions of Bodhidharma.

To the left is Sesshû's from the mid Muromachi period (1333-1573), to the right is Hakuin's from the early Edo period (1600-1868):

The portraits seem very different. Only in the later one is there anything resembling what we today would call cuteness (a subjective judgment of course). Wouldn't it be possible to say that originally, the round eyes of Bodhidharma signified not cuteness at all but rather a closeness to terrifying supernatural forces, similar to what we find in depictions of dragons and so on? That would fit the well-known gruesome anecdotes about him - tearing away his eyelids to stay awake during meditation, meditating until his legs fell off, and so on.

Itô Jakuchû (1716-1800) is to me a painter who has played an enormous role in the development of "cuteness" in art. Sharon Kinsella and others usually date the start of "cute" to the late 60's or 70's, but as Itô's paintings how this sensitivity goes back much further in time. Take this frog for instance!

If we look at one of his contemporaries, Takeda Shunshin (Baiôken Eishun), we find a painting of Bodhidharma together with a prostitute. The round eyes are cute rather than fearsome or uncanny. If anything, it is the prostitute, smiling and towering over him, who looks superior.  Recall that cuteness is a sign of the lack of power, of defence. Is this where we see the beginning of Bodhidharma's transformation into a cute mascot? Whether by coincidence or not, the popularity of the Daruma-san dolls also dates from this period (the latter half of the 18th century).

So, something happens in the Edo period. Perhaps this is when round eyes start to appear cute?

This is corroborated by the example of the tanuki (raccoon dog), a classical trickster and evil-doer in Japanese folktales. The tanuki too is usually (but not always) depicted with big round eyes. Most people who've been in Japan are familiar with this comical-looking figure with the big belly who greets visitors at the entrance of restaurants or private homes. This "cute" tanuki, however, seems to have been an invention of the Edo period. In folk tales from the middle ages, like Kachikachi-yama, the tanuki is depicted as gruesome and man-eating. Just like "Daruma-san", then, the tanuki developed from a feared into a cute character, and it seems to have happened during the Edo period.

Incidentally, people of the Edo-period felt that there was a similarity between Daruma-san and the tanuki. There's a woodblock print by Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) showing a tanuki being dressed up as a Daruma-san by a gang of other tanuki. This motive also seems popular today (as in the ceramic figure above).

The kappa is a similar case. This originally Chinese river deity (hébó, pronounced kahaku in Japanese) was imported to Japan in the 6th or 7th century. At that time it was fearsome enough to be thought to demand court sacrifices. Today, however, it is pictured as a rather cute, green and childlike being with turtleshell, a bowl on its head, and round eyes. When did the change take place? The Edo-period.

But why did round eyes become regarded as cute? That's anybody's guess, but the process is probably related to the domestication of nature. Remember that big round eyes were once associated with animals, with the "wild", with terrifying inhuman powers. As mountains and forests became viewed less and less as a threat during the Edo period, its inhabitants too - like the tanuki, but also hermits and "mountain priests" (yamabushi) - started to be regarded as harmless or inferior to the inhabitants of settled society, as cute and defenseless rather than fearsome. That would explain the "cutification" of tanuki as well as of Daruma-san. Probably, it's no coincidence that it's in the Edo period that we see the appearance of "cute" Zen monks like Ryôkan, famous for having loved to play games with children. So in that sense, the "cute" eyes of manga characters today reflect the domesticated forces of the wild!

Addendum 1: How about ghosts?

But wait a minute, if big round eyes were once a sign of closeness to the supernatural, then how come ghosts in the meaning of spirit of dead people (yûrei) usually never have round eyes despite their uncanniness? Here's a ghost from the Muromachi period (from the Eikokuji temple):

So how should we account for the narrow eyes of ghosts? Look at this post (and the follow-up here) for a discussion of how to solve this riddle!


Addendum 2: The word "maru"

Speaking about the cutification of round things, let me mention one more instance - the word "maru" (round). It's well known that many ships in Japan have names that end with "maru". The first example of this in the sources is from 1187, so the explanation that this has to do with the Portuguese mare (sea) falls. "Maru" was also a common postfix in children's names. Research based on Edo-period sources has shown that  "maru" was also used in the names os swords, helmets, armours and musical instruments. Amino Yoshihiko rejects the interpretation that such things were favorite or beloved objects. Instead he argues that "maru" was used for things not quite belonging to the human world or that were thought to possess magical or supernatural powers. In medieval times it was used in the names of hômen, former convicts employed as executioners who were regarded as outcasts and who probably wore a hairstyle similar to that of children (kiyome-maru was a name used for them as a group). Children were considered close to the sacred, as seen in the proverb that children belonged to the world of the gods until the age of seven, and were believed to possess superhuman abilities that helped them control animals (Incidentally, I wonder if this might not be the reason why some of them used "hôshi", Buddhist priest, as a postfix in their names, like Oda Nobunaga whose child-name was Kichibôshi). Musical instruments were used to call forth gods and hence were considered sacred or magical. Ships, swords - here I recall the "Onimaru" in Taiheiki or the "Azamaru" mentioned in Shinchô kôki - and other pieces of warrior equipment were things to which one entrusted one's life or that were used in extreme or liminal situations. Although "maru" may have come to indicate cuteness in the Edo period, originally it would have evoked feelings of dread or awe (Amino, Chûsei no yûjo to hinin, Tokyo: Kôdansha 2005:97-102). By the way, does anyone recall the robber Tajômaru in Yabu no naka? This explains why this decidedly un-childish figure has a child-name.

Tajomaru

S/N

Last week I saw went to see a film recordning of S/N, dumb type's celebrated theatrical dance performance from 1995.

It's about AIDS, but also about much more. Watching it I increasingly felt that it was also about the sediments of my self, poisoned with gender, nationality and power.

It opens up with darkness. There are figures running and falling, electronic sounds that are sometimes painful. A swirl of circle shaped images of naked torsos in a cold, inhuman blue light - all round, as if put in the line of fire or seen in a microscope.

Dance, music, images, text drill themselves into your eyes, ears and mind.
The beauty of pain.
No, this is no whole, no damned, smooth, claustrophobic Gesamtkunstwerk.
It never makes you impatient, since it opens up and tears away.
Who could fail to love anything that chills your heart like this?
It is montage at its best. It is so good.

There is a montage-like effect in the juxtaposition of actors too: in the movement between Furuhashi's acerbic, unsettling intensity and Bubu's gentle patience.

Much of the force of the performance comes from  genre-montage, as when Furuhashi in drag bursts out in "People who need people". Just as love can no longer be thought without AIDS, songs that would have been boring in themselves are suddenly good, rescued by their insertion into a montage, as if only sarcasm could make them sound just so sweet, innocent and moving as they probably aimed to be when they were created.

No doubt it's copyright problems concerning som stupid quoted chanson that's prevented the S/N DVD from being released.

If irony and desperacy are the only ways to save sweetness from being ideological, then why am I then suddenly so moved by totally un-ironical words like these: "Don’t cry, you’ve finally made a step in the right direction”?

S/N hits you underground, it digs open these hardened layers of self (so poisoned with prejudice), and makes you long for change.

Take Jun'ichiro

Here are some artworks by Take Junichiro:

Wonderful detail... I'd like to call them vortex paintings. You're being sucked in, drawn in - but at the same time there is a strong sense of movement. You don't have the time to let your eyes wander leisurely, since you're flying.
 
These and many other works can be found on his hp (http://homepage.mac.com/take_junichiro/Menu9.html).

Vilk's caricatures

About a year after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark in 2006 the Swedish artist Lars Vilks published a drawing depicting Muhammad as a dog. This led to a death threat and a heated debate about artistic freedom and free speech.

The arrest a week ago of a woman who allegedly plotted to murder him has led to a renewed flurry of newspaper articles. Lars Linder, for instance, writes (in Swedish here) about the "necessity of defending the right to be stupid". In his view, what Vilks did was regrettable and artistically trite, but his right to do what he did, no matter how stupid, must be defended. Unavoidably, he quotes Voltaire.

Almost everyone (with an refreshing exception here, also in Swedish) seem to think of rights as a purely juridical problem - as if everyone had the right to do anything that's not illegal. Surprisingly few are ready to state in public that things that are right can be illegal and vice versa. To understand why, one needs to look at social dynamics. Laws are necessarily crude and inflexible, while moral norms are formed in ongoing social interactions which make them supple and sensitive to context. If we try to lead our lives merely according to standards of juridical correctness we will end up as stupid robots.

I have a legal right to blow cigarette smoke in the face of a person who hates cigarette smoke. Suppose that person gets hysterical and starts yelling at me, perhaps even looks ready to slap me. What should onlookers do? Enter the fray on my side to a man, cigarette in hand, so that we can all blow smoke in the person's face together, in solidarity, to defend our rights?

In the wake of the Jyllands-Posten caricatures, several European newspapers made a point of publishing the caricatures to manifest support for the freedom of expression. By that logic, if I provoke a person to anger by insulting him, onlookers should start insulting him as well to defend my freedom of expression.

Please note that I’m not saying caricatures are wrong. A nasty caricature is a legitimate way for me to express my anger if I’m upset with a certain politician, institution or political system. But in these cases my anger precedes the caricature. I’m attacking something because of what I feel to be a legitimate cause. I am using the caricature as a weapon in an already ongoing struggle. Which is of course fine. Nothing wrong with that. But Vilks was not upset with Islam - or at least so I want to believe. The question then is: is it right for me to publish a nasty and insulting caricature without that anger, out of the blue, against a group of people who have never done me any harm whatsoever, just in order to prove some principle such as my ”right of expression”?

Vilks may of course have been upset with something else - the political correctness of Swedish critics who failed to defend the freedom of expression of Jyllands-Posten perhaps. The structure we get would then be the following: A says you shouldn't provoke B, and C then provokes B solely for the purpose of trying to provoke A. The problem is that if you think that this is solely a quarrel between A and C, then you've forgotten that B is in fact human and not an instrument you can use as you please.

On the one hand there are laws and jurisprudence, on the other there are norms and social dynamics.

Here's a travesty of guess whom:

I don't share your anger, but I'm ready to die for your right to vent it.

Urusei Yatsura and "1968"

A few days ago I visited an activist in Sapporo, a central member of a group - Hokke no kai - that had become famous in the late 80's for its protests against the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant. I was charmed by house – a huge grey structure made of concrete and filled on the inside with flags, old toys, instruments and other quite quotidian things that for some mysterious reason appeared like wonderful and beautiful decorations. In particular I remember an enormous palm tree whose green leaves together with the light from big windows and the sound of water from upstairs lent the room where we sat a sunken, submarine quality.

But what I want to write about today is neither the house nor anti-nuclear power activism. The members of his group, my host told me, often used to watch anime together, and today I want to write about the anime which we watched together in the evening – Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984, directed by Oshii Mamoru, below Beautiful Dreamer).

First a brief synopsis. It starts off with Ataru’s and Lum’s highschool, where everyone is busy preparing for the school festival. Everything quickly takes an uncanny turn. The overworked teacher Onsen-mark breaks down in a neurosis the day before the festival and deliriously laments to the school nurse (and miko) Sakura that people have always said "until tomorrow", as far back as he can remember. What if time is standing still? What if they are all damned to live like this forever, caught in a time trap, like Urashima Tarô? Soon other strange things start to happen. In the evening they are unable to leave school since all streets lead back to it. A taxi chauffeur suddenly starts to sound like a demon, talking about being a turtle taking his passenger (Sakura) to the Dragon Palace. A terrific scene is when Ataru and a few others are riding through what appears to be completely deserted streets late at night and suddenly hear the eerie sound of flutes and drums, and see some weird musicians parading through one of the streets. “E-he-he, seems the chindonya have started 24 hour service”, Ataru suggests nervously. In a desperate escape attempt involving a jet fighter, they discover that the entire neighborhood around the school is travelling through space on the back of a gigantic turtle, apparently torn away from the rest of the earth.

Life now changes: they relax, drive around in the empty town on a big truck, play and have fun all day. In the background we see that the school has fallen into ruins and sunk into a lake. New life starts in the ruins of the empty city. Time stands still. The convenience store alone is a cornucopia forever filled with new goods. Apart from Sakura, Mendô is the only one who continues to search for a way to get back to ordinary life. Lum feels sorry for him and, carrying a big melon, comes to invite him to play with the others. The only thing she cares for, she says, is to have fun with her friends every day for ever and ever. Finally, however, this world is revealed as a dream created by the comical Kansaiben-speaking demon Mujaki. When Sakura manages to capture him, the dream (after some breathtaking scenes) collapses back into reality, the normal everyday routine of the school.

Who, by the way, is the demon? He is hardly Satan, as Sakura insinuates. His name, Mujaki, is spelled with the signs for dream, evil and devil, but the word is homonymous with the word for innocent. To be sure, he admits that it was he who made Caesar’s and Hitler’s dreams come true, but how the dream develops depends on the human being he happens to possess. Tired of all megalomaniacs he’d encountered through history he actually wanted to retire, but then one day in an aquarium (another allusion to the Dragon’s Palace?) he finally met someone who was different and utterly innocent – Lum, who only dreamed of having fun together with Ataru and the other friends.

How should we interpret the film? We can recall that it was released in 1984. Miyadai Shinji famously claims that popular culture in the 80’s was characterized by two competing eschatologies or visions of the world’s final destiny. One was the “neverending everyday” (owari naki nichijô), which was suffused by the sentiment that “the future will not be different from the present”. Since the future will bring neither “brilliant progress” nor any “terrible collapse”, there is nothing left to do but to take it easy and play about endlessly, as in everyday life in a school or in a junior college. Apocalyptic visions are explicitly and mercilessly poked fun at in manga such as Takahashi Rumiko’s Urusei yatsura. A second eschatological vision was the “post-nuclear war community” (kakusensôgo no kyôdôtai). Its violent message of “redemption through Armageddon” was expressed in smash hits such as Ôtomo Katsuhiro’s Akira or Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaa (Miyadai 1995:86ff).

If we try to situate Beautiful Dreamer in relation to Miyadai’s two eschatologies, we find that neither fits very well. It is true that it no longer has much in common with the “neverending everyday” or the original light and innocent playfulness of the manga Urusei yatsura on which it was based. Takahashi Rumiko acknowledged as much when she unenthusiastically commented that the anime was Oshii’s work, not hers. To some extent, one could perhaps claim that Oshii – famous for anime hits like Ghost in the Shell that belong rather unambiguously in the second strand of eschatology – transformed the work into its opposite, into a “post-nuclear war” work.

Still, this diagnosis is insufficient. The Armageddon-like struggles of the “post-nuclear war” are usually characterized by a paranoiac feel that comes out very well in films like Matrix. In these films, it is taken for granted that the task of the main protagonist is to break out of the “fake” world of simulacra and return to “reality”. The “illusion” or “dream” must be denied. If we look at Beautiful Dreamer, we feel at once that “dream” or “illusion” plays an entirely different role. The Dragon Palace in the sea, which Urashima Tarô visited, wasn’t a prison. It was a place of lost happiness. That’s why time seemed to stand still there. Sure, there are some characters in the film – like Mendô or Sakura, or, finally, Ataru himself – who try to break out of the dream. But these attempts are portrayed as somewhat ridiculous. Especially Mendô, who likes to drive around with a tank, is portrayed as a self-important wanna-be hero and besserwisser who is very much a bother (mendô) to the others. Neither is the demon who created the dream really evil. I feel a lot of sympathy for his attempt to make Lum’s dream come true.

What characterizes the anime’s relation to dream or illusion is neither a whole-hearted affirmation of it, nor a desperate and paranoid attempt to combat it, but rather a form of love for a dream that is not only beautiful, but above all fragile, ephemeral and rare. Time stands still, yet at the same time one knows that the dream may soon be over. One lives in it with all one’s heart, because one knows that life is so rarely visited by moments like this.

Let me return to the film: to the scenes when the young friends drive around lazily in the empty town and the school lies in ruins in a lake. There is a strange bliss in these scenes. A new life starts among the ruins, where everything is for free. Time stands still. Parents and teachers and all authority are gone. There’s freedom in the air. To me this is a fine image of a town that has turned into a no-man’s-land, a commons. There was a memorable monologue here by Megane-san, which was too long for me to memorate, but as I recall it, it blended effortlessly into the lyrical descriptions of the liberated zones behinds the barricades in Paris in May 68.

Behind the demonstrations and riots, the clashes with the police, the wildcat strikes and factory occupations in May 1968, a new everyday unfolded behind the barricades, a life in which ”the uncommon became the everyday”, as Viénet writes (Viénet 1992:72). Participants write enthusiastically about how they experienced this everyday separated from the rest of society: time stopped, as did the metro, the trains, the cars and the workplaces. ”People strolled, dreamed, learned how to live. Desires began to become, little by little, reality.” (ibid 77). Cars were burned. People got used to the disappearance of money, instead they helped each other.

The hierarchical pyramid had melted like a lump of sugar in the May sun. People conversed and were understood in half a word. There were no more intellectuals or workers, but simply revolutionaries engaged in dialogue.... (Viénet 1992:76f)

No one worked. No planes, trains, mail. No gas. No trash collection. Neighbors, who had lived within ten feet of each other for twenty years, became acquainted, strolling and talking in the empty streets. So this is a revolution, they said – not bad. (Feenberg & Freedman 2001: 43)

Life in the occupied parts of town was more or less like a dream. Sadie Plant has described it as “surrealism on the streets” (Plant 1992:101). Lacking newspapers, people chatted with each other. Alain Jouffroy recalled “the great joy that we experienced for the first time in the streets of Paris during May 1968, that joy in the eyes and on the lips of all those who for the first time were talking to each other.” (cit. i Plant 1992:101).

As I have already mentioned (here), this is a state that can be described with Turner’s term "communitas". In contrast to the alienated being of everyday urban life stand the intoxicating moments when the atomized masses seem to melt together in an undifferentiated feeling of universal brother- or sisterhood, when borders dissolve and everything seems possible. The experience of alienation seems, if only temporarily, to be suspended and to revert itself into a feeling of spontaneous belonging together. ”Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society.” (Vaneigem 2001: 110).

Conversely, the waking up from the dream is the dismal return to order, the retour à la normale, the defeat of the revolutionary movement which the Situationists depicted as a herd of sheep heading back to the fold. As in Beautiful Dreamer, the students return to the school bench, the festival is over, the clocks start ticking again.

"What a master-piece!" (“Kessaku deshô!”), my host said when the film was over.

References:

Feenberg, Andrew & Freedman, Jim (2001) When Poetry Ruled The Streets: The French May Events of 1968, Albany: State University of New York Press

Miyadai, Shinji (1995) Owarinaki nichijô o ikiro (Live the never-ending everyday), Tokyo: Chikuma shobô

Plant, Sadie (1992) The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, London and New York: Routledge

Vaneigem, Raoul (2001) The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Rebel Press.

Viénet, René (1992) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68, New York: Autonomedia, London: Rebel Press.

Homage to great wanderers & restless minds

"Only those thoughts that come when you are walking have any value” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

”Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying...” (Benjamin, One-Way Street)

"In middle age Bob became increasingly eccentric. He dressed strangely, often slept with his clothes on and started to wander around on the streets all alone. He liked to explore socially backward parts of the city, especially ethnic areas where he wouldn't necessarily be recognized. He also prowled around in the wealthy areas of Los Angeles not far from where he was living. One day when Ted Perlman came back home to his house in San Fernando Valley he caught sight of what he thought was a bum sitting on the pavement. Perlman was about to ask him to leave when he realized it was Bob. 'I thought I should drop by and see you and Peggi.’ 'How long have you been sitting here?' Perlman asked. 'An hour and a half maybe. I've been looking around at the area', Bob replied" (Howard Sounes' Dylan biography)

“The world must be known through the legs and the genitals. Friends and lovers are the best media for learning about the world, something money cannot buy. It’s something you create with your lower half.” (Shimada Masahiko)

“It’s good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.” (Anatole France)


Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Leadbelly too,
An' to all the good people that traveled with you.
Walter Benjamin, Bob Dylan, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Murakami Haruki, Louis Aragon, Guy Debord, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, Rimbaud, Socrates, and Chaplin.
The wanderer as media, the isôrô artist, the marebito, the outsider, the visiting stranger, the disappearing holy man. Yes, here's to your hearts and hands...
All ye who come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

Credits to the owners of the images & thanx to Eva (from whose refrigerator door I stole one of the quotations). And apologies to all you other great wonders & wanderers. I’m sorry for only mentioning celebrities. My homage goes via them to you.