Never Far Below the Surface, Bubbling Out

[Image: Lion and Sculptor, by Katsushika Hokusai. This is not one of the 200-odd lion drawings referred to below, but I do like the spirit it shows. See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

Hokusai

Anger is a bitter lock
But you can turn it.

Hokusai aged 83
said,
Time to do my lions.

Every morning
until he died

219 days later
he made
a lion.

Wind came gusting from the northwest.

Lions swayed
and leapt
from the crests

of the pine trees
onto

the snowy road
or crashed
together

over his hut,
their white paws

mauling stars
on the way down.

I continue to draw
hoping for a peaceful day,

said Hokusai
as they thudded past.

(Anne Carson [source])

…and:

From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I shall be a marvelous artist. At one hundred and ten, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self ‘The Old Man Mad About Drawing.’

(Hokusai Katsushika [source (in slightly different words)])

…and (italicized portion; excerpt):

11

Like clouds, once gone in their long drift,
there’s no coming back—
And like the wind that moves them, we stop
Wherever we please, or wherever we come to be,
Each one in his proper place,
not too near, not too far
From That’s okay and No one was ever interested enough.

How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
with no ripple, without us in it.

How is it it’s taken me almost a lifetime to come to the fact
That heaven and earth have no favorites
in either extreme?
Bits of us set out, at one time or another, in both directions,
Sleeping fitfully, heads on our fists,
Now close together and warm, now cold in the south sky.

Each one arrives in his own fashion,
each one with his birthmark
Beginning to take shape and shine out
And lead forth like a lead lamp.
Look for us in the black spaces, somewhere in the outer dark.

(Charles Wright [source])

Not from whiskey river:

One of the most delightfully eccentric figures in the history of art is the Japanese painter and woodcut designer who has come to be known as Hokusai. During his eighty-nine years, Hokusai lived in at least ninety different houses and used some fifty names. The name that stuck for posterity — Hokusai — means “Star of the Northern Constellation”…

As Hokusai’s fame spread, he was often invited to give public drawing demonstrations. Legends of his virtuosity abound. On one occasion, the story goes, he stood before the assembled crowd outside a temple and drew an immense image of the Buddha, using a brush as big as a broom. Another time, he drew birds in flight on a single grain of rice. Hokusai’s sense of humor, never far below the surface, came bubbling out when he was asked to perform for the Shogun (the military governor). As onlookers gathered at the palace, Hokusai spread a large piece of paper on the floor, painted blue watercolor waves across it, then took a live rooster, dipped its feet in red paint, and allowed it to run across the painting. Bowing respectfully, he announced to the Shogun that his creation was a picture of red maple leaves floating down the river.

(Mark Getlein [source])

…and:

Audubon

Audubon perfected a new way of drawing birds that he called his.
On the bottom of each watercolor he put “drawn from nature”
which meant he shot the birds

and took them home to stuff and paint them.
Because he hated the unvarying shapes
of traditional taxidermy

he built flexible armatures of bent wire and wood
on which he arranged bird skin and feathers–
or sometimes

whole eviscerated birds–
in animated poses.
Not only his wiring but his lighting was new.

Audubon colors dive in through your retina
like a searchlight
roving shadowlessly up and down the brain

until you turn away.
And you do turn away.
There is nothing to see.

You can look at these true shapes all day and not see the bird.
Audubon understands light as an absence of darkness,
truth as an absence of unknowing.

It is the opposite of a peaceful day in Hokusai.
Imagine if Hokusai had shot and wired 219 lions
and then forbade his brush to paint shadow.

“We are what we make ourselves,” Audubon told his wife
when they were courting.
In the salons of Paris and Edinburgh

where he went to sell his new style
this Haitian-born Frenchman
lit himself

as a noble rustic American
wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist.
They loved him

for the “frenzy and ecstasy”
of true American facts, especially
in the second (more affordable) octavo edition (Birds of America, 1844).

(Anne Carson [ibid.])

__________________

About the image: One of twenty-five works by Hokusai (collectively referred to as “Picture Book in the Katsushika Style”) in the online collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I haven’t found a name or description for this specific image, although I’m sure someone knows them; my referring to this as “Lion and Sculptor” is almost arbitrary. The human figure in this print is as much a samurai as a sculptor or other artist — and what’s up with the hooves?!? — and may be either attacking or, well, making the lion.

Hokusai is a favorite artist here at RAMH. He created the “internationally famous,” much-reproduced (and even -parodied) work The Great Wave off Kanagawa. His Fifty-Three Stations of Tokaido: 44 (Yokkaichi) served as the “somebody chases a hat” annual image heading the anniversary RAMH post, in 2013.