reflection in glass (duchamp's "infra thin" and 仁徳）

The possible, implying the becoming - the passage from one to the other takes place in the infra-thin.

Marcel Duchamp

 

Bai Juyi had sent me an article about an exhibition of Man Ray's famous Paris Portraits, reminding me that most of the important things in life take place in the infra-thin.

 

Duchamp's insisted that the infra-thin was something that could not be defined. But, like reflection from a mirror or glass, watered silk , iridescents, it ocurred with the "exchange between what one puts on view ... and the glacial regard of the public (which sees and immediately forgets). Very often this exchange has the value of an infra-thin separation, meaning that the more a thing is admired and looked at the less there is an infinite separation."

 

Like the reflection in glass, it suggests that to look is to understand. With a stress on somatic practice and the cultivation of sensibility, Duchamp would argue that significance is to be found in the details and in the looking.

 

Like Man Ray's photography, for example

(→　Getty Museum Research Library Man Ray Collection).  Man Ray famously said, “I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.” The Perfect Shot, right? As Davis said in the article about Man's portraits:

 

History was still very much living in his memory: Hemingway, Picabia, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Breton, Stein, Stravinsky, Leger, Miro, Satie, Gris and more. It was like an album of seventy four of our old friends and inspirations. But more than this it was a treasure-trove of personalities that changed history. These were the thinkers who were our most direct artistic ancestors. They provided the "passage from one to the other". As we pored through the reproductions, I saw Marcel Proust. Man Ray had been summoned to photograph Proust on his death bed. The man who had written A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was himself a dead photo memory - the ultimate surrealist/dada image! (see photo here and one of my favorite portraits of Cocteau below)

 

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Another friend mentions how the moon is like a brilliant mirror reflecting back the purist and most beautiful parts of our hearts. He calls this the virtue of the moon, or lunar virtue お月様の仁徳

 

Yet another instance of the Japanese belief in the moral power of beauty-- and yet I cannot help but wonder: what of this lunar virtue?

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So of you may recall my delight in my new  Oracle Bones Script Dictionary. Do you remember how Shirakawa sensei de-constructed  "virtue"?

徳 Virtue (金文 bronze script）

会意文字（kanji made from combination of meanings-- no phonetic component). 徳 is composed of three semantic elements: 行(to go) ＋省(to look; to inspect; to visit)　＋心 (heart).

In a nutshell, virtue is not derived from sitting in your room figuring things out via intellectualization or relying on a priori logic alone but rather demands somatic experience interpreted cultivated sensibility.

省(to look; to inspect; to visit) signifies the spiritual powers of seeing and by adding a "decorative" element at eyebrow emphasizes the aspect of "inspecting" or pilgrammage (巡祭). It is thought that these eyes had the power of dispelling evil.

As 行 (go) is added to 省 (inspect)-- and then with the addition in later times of 心 (heart), Virtue was expressed as the spiritual power of the eyes gazing all around.   

While "virtue" was written signifying the strong spiritual powers that the eye has to really see, the "concept of virtue" only came into being when it was realized that this power is something that exists within humans-- as a self-realized inherent inner human power.

Virtue is 道徳 (ethical path/principles of conduct); 徳性(inherent human virtue) and includes "correctness" (正しい); "good" (良い）; "blessing" （恵）; etc.

 

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The professor had recommended I take a look at Elaine Scarry's book, On Beauty and Being Just. Evocatively written, I read it in no time at all over the weekend. A Harvard professor, Scarry talks about the way beauty has been banned from our intellectual lives-- seen as a dangerous distraction; something superfluous, superficial, or unimportant. Scarry, then-- quite bravely, really-- comes to Beauty's defence suggesting that beauty can make us more just-- or in our language here, more virtuous.

That beauty calls us to emulate or replicate it; that beauty takes us out of our self-centered perspective, putting us in touch with something greater than ourselves; and that beauty inspires through its symmetry-- these are among the reasons she offers. Beijing somewhere has taken issue with this reason of symmetry as he rightly claims that there are many cases where beauty is not founded on symmetry. Japanese aesthetics, obviously, is based on symmetry's opposite: that concept of pleasing assymetry. So too, I think, is Javanese classical dance, and I'm sure there are other instances as well. On the other hand, though, from a Western point of view, since the very beginnings of our tradition, philosophers have been occupied in locating patterns in nature-- the name of God spelled among the rose petals in a Persian garden, or mathematical truths displayed within the interior of giant seashells (Isn't there a word for this occupation?)

That this would form the basis of a Western approach to justice makes perfect sense to me.

Like Scarry, I also believe that beauty can inspire virtue.

But, reading her book, I realized that I am coming at the same conclusion for very different reasons. Japanese aesthetics is certainly not alone in emphasizing the ethical aspect of beauty, but perhaps this ethico-aesthetic sensibility pervades the culture in Japan more than in many other places? That beauty stands to somehow reflect back to us-- like the mirror of the moon-- our own virtuous possibilities is one aspect of this. Beauty also can stand as exemplery model for behavior-- as my tea teacher was forever repeating, it is  through the appreciation of beauty that we cultivate our aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. 

For me, however, this is ultimately a somatic phenomenon. Not unlike falling in love, beauty, calls like "a plank amid the waves of the sea" (Augustine)- - it is, life giving; adrenalizing-- and I agree with Scarry, that it welcomes us. However, rather than causing us to intellectualize or theorize about justice, instead, I think that beauty (perhaps in particular music) has the moral power to elevate us, leading to the suggestion "that virtue and civility can be instilled through an appreciation of, and practice in, the arts" (wiki article)

What is required, we are told, is a quiet mind and a cultivated eye. Yes, the big eye of the ancient charcater for virtue 徳.

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