online: 31 may 2011 modified: 13, 22, 24, 31 may 2011 13 may 2011 stillness and revival
noh place
...crows calling from west and east... the pines and other tall trees sway in gentle wind that does not reach ground level... or persist for more than a few seconds... and there remain perhaps thirty minutes before the gates are closed for the night... the writer waits for whatever events will take his attention...
...small flying insects bite the skin near his ears... a large rabbit sits nearby and then is gone... the pines grow upward towards the heavens while their needle leaves hang down towards the earth... still home for most of us... though tens of thousands of people (and millions of birds and insects) are aloft at any moment... sounds of small children who arrive on kiddy bikes... with a man and a woman following...
scene 2:
mosquitos replace midges and more painfully attack neck and fingers seeking warm blood... grey sky of moving cloud looks as if it is about to turn into rain... outside in the city these things might irritate... but here in the noh place everything is part of a performance that we have come to witness, to enact, and not to resist...
...people wholly ignorant of noh... have been deeply moved by performances of which they did not understand a single word...
(Royall Tyler, Japanese No Dramas, Penguin Books, London 1992, page 5.)
...ready to leave before the gates are fully closed the writer listens to a pigeon's call and the continual calls of crows... he bows to the trees and the birds, the insects, and the rabbits... and then he goes... beyond this moment...
exit
...on his way back to the city (via the dark wood near Parliament Hill)...
he realises it's time to revive some of his early design plays and to complete some of the later ones here and now... free of the original stress and conflict (to be side-stepped, he hopes)...
...later he notes that Noh is an outdated spelling of No theatre: which nowadays is written with a horizontal line above the letter o... but he avoids this as some people's computers may not be programmed to print this accent... and Noh seems more phonetic...
for comfortable line length please set the window to about half of the screen width
You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you
respect the copyright of quotations.
If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please
send a copyright permission request to jcj 'at' publicwriting.net
(replace 'at' and spaces by the @ sign)
