Category: Arts - Marie's Cafe

Out of the Maze

12/3/2012

      On my flight home I watched a documentary film entitled Béjart Ballet Lausanne, the artistic director being Gil Roman, Maurice Béjart's disciple and successor. At one point, these words quietly faded in and out on the screen:

      Il m’a fallu des années pour sortir cet artiste incomparable
qu’est Gil Roman du maquis mental où il s’enfermait avec
ses fantasmes, ses amours, ses complexes!
Lentement j’ai compris ses qualités, j’ai réalisé combien il
était proche de moi.

      I rewound the video and watched the same words appear and disappear several times, until I learnt them by heart.
      I realised that I, too, had to get out of my mental maze, where I had shut myself up for so long with my fantasies, my passions, my fears; that I, too, needed to leave the srubland of my entangled mind, if I wanted to live, and create, and give.
A veil of mist lifted and I finally saw reality in its full pliancy.
I was ready to interact.

Her Eyes, and Mine

7/3/2012

     The Getty in LA had a Sketching Gallery. I suggested going there because I wanted to watch others draw, but no other visitors were around when we arrived, so I ended up doing a sketch myself.
     I hadn't done any drawing in quite a while, and the time I spent sketching the bust's eyes was sheer bliss. It was the first time ever I sketched a plaster cast. It made me feel like an art student.
     The eyes of the plaster figure belonged to Adélaïde Julie Mirleau de Neuville.
     The eyes in the sketch are probably more mine than hers.

Jane Eyre 1970 -- Music Theme by John Williams

26/2/2012

I have loved this film, and Susannah York's Jane Eyre, since I was a child. I have finally found the sheet music for that wonderful piano piece Jane plays, after telling Mr Rochester that she plays 'a little'. Mr Rochester stops her, wiping his eyes as if he had dust in them, and tells her that she does indeed play 'a little'.
I also play just a little. Here is what I made of the sheet music.

jane_eyre_1970_theme.mp3
File Size:	1772 kb
File Type:	mp3

Many thanks to everyone who has left a comment for this post. I bet John Williams would be very moved to see all these comments! I certainly have been. I would like to confirm that the sheet music I have is the same version as the one on the webpage Laura posted in her comment on 24 January 2014.

So You Want to Write a Novel...

22/2/2012

Ooh, I love this!

Dance to the Future 2011

28/5/2011

One look from the dancer
and I am that much healed.
For it was a look of recognition.

Lewis Hyde: The Gift

30/3/2011

A Japanese friend in London handed me some recent book review supplements of The Guardian, which I read on the train for Nottingham. In one article, Margaret Atwood recommends a book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde, saying that she always has several copies of the book at the ready to give away to artist friends who work in poverty and obscurity and who are becoming frustrated and doubtful. Once I got off the train, I purchased the book immediately at Waterstone's in Nottingham City Centre, and arranged for it, along with a dozen other books, to be sent to my address in Tokyo. Now it has finally reached me. I was reading it yesterday in the New Yorkers' Café near Chofu Station. I wept at these words by May Sarton:

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and
that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most ...
The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy
burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow
of life were backed up.

This is precisely what is wrong with me. All my discontent comes from this poison, this burden of my energy turned inward. My gift must travel, or else it will die.

Mary Oliver: 'Wild Geese'

11/1/2011

I discovered this poem last night, while reading an article by my beloved writer and life coach Martha Beck. I have to copy it here and share it. I heard the world calling last night, in the husky, urging voice of a wild goose.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

31/7/2008

     July 2008 was a hot month with occasional cool rainy days. I watched the triangular roofs and the clouds above them outside my new flat, I looked for lightning and listened to thunder, and I read Girl with a Pearl Earring.

    I spent most of July studying the novel, reading it on trains, the way I used to draw on my way to and from work, switching pencils or crayons, erasing, while standing in a train carriage of reportedly the most crowded line in Tokyo.

      A jewel of a novel, a reviewer said of Tracy Chevalier's most successful work so far. I agree. The novel reminded me of a phrase I had long forgotten: the plain style, on which I had once written a ninety-thousand word thesis.

    Tracy Chevalier has a deceptively simple style, in writing as in speaking. Most of the time, the truth is told in the simplest words. And she certainly tells it. I am touched by both her thorough research and her rich imagination.

    I remember one Sunday back in Nottingham, Helen the curate and I went for coffee after the morning service. She said she was going to get hold of a copy of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Back then I didn't know what the novel had to offer. I only saw the film in 2006, some time after I returned to Japan. I fell in love right away with the film, and with Scarlett Johansson's Griet. Still I didn't think of reading the novel itself.

    I only tumbled over the book a few weeks ago, in the foreign book section of the local library in my new neighbourhood. It came in the right place at the right time, que le ciel soit loué. It reminds me that not everybody has to write like Márquez. There are women out there who choose to write about women, and in their own authentic voices.

    The Vermeer exhibition in Tokyo starts on 2 August. Waiting another thirty-five hours? I don't know how I can cope.

Books from Amazon (Chang-rae Lee)

15/5/2008

Today was an unusually cold and sombre day for May. I came back from my classes in the late afternoon, with the freshly checked-out, mould-stained books about Ohinata Village in my bag. I showered and lay down for a rest, but fell into unplanned sleep. I had woken up exceptionally early this morning.

At dusk, the doorbell rang. I got dressed and answered the door. Books from Amazon. Chang-rae Lee's second and third novels.

I made myself a mug of milk tea and sank into my massive bean bag, A Gesture Life in hand. I read for the next two hours.

His début novel, Native Speaker, which I read earlier this year, shattered me to pieces and put them back together, reconfiguring a sadder and denser me. No other literary texts had done that to me since those of Carol Shields.

And even more than Alice Walker, Chang-rae Lee inspires me to write, to respond to the sensitivity, and the pain, of another human being in my own way.

I will say this: I still prefer his first novel to his second. (What did Amy Tan say about second novels in The Opposite of Fate again? Expectations, expectations...) I had read part of A Gesture Life while studying in Nottingham, and was not too impressed with it back then. But this second time round, I am no longer blind to the exquisiteness of his prose. I have grown accustomed to his narrating voice through Native Speaker, and will recognise it any time I hear it from now on.

Here is the voice, under the disguise of that of Doc Hata at the end of the first chapter. (Those who might argue that the author's voice and the narrator's should both sound distinct from each other and be considered separately, forgive me. I agree. But I have no better way of rephrasing the sentence above, and in a way, it tells the truth, too.) Incidentally, the following is also what literally and metaphorically happened to me tonight.

I often prepared myself an early dinner of soup noodles or a casserole of oden with rice, but I decided to go straight up to my bedroom and read. It wasn't until the middle of the evening that I stopped, when it occurred to me that I should at least have a snack, so that I wouldn't toss in my sleep or wake up famished. I put on my robe and went out to the stairs, but instead of descending, I wandered down the hallway, to the far door, to the room where Sunny once lived.

The Colour Purple

8/6/2007

    I have just watched The Colour Purple on television. As Carol Ann Duffy says, a sudden gift.

     I tried to read the novel by Alice Walker once, a long time ago. I thought it looked promising and engrossing, but as I was as awkward with novels then as I am now (novels are so long, you know), I gave up—very reluctantly—after a dozen pages. The reason I began reading it was because it was on the reading list of the History of American Literature module, obligatory for all students in the English Department.

    When I was studying in Nottingham, I came across some books by and about Alice Walker in a local library just outside Wollaton Park. I was basically in the middle of an afternoon walk and should have continued walking, but instead, with my sporty outfit and trainers on, I sat down on a wooden stool next to one of the bookshelves, and read away for the next few hours. I checked out one of the books several times afterwards, a collection of Alice Walker's short stories. They were not all perfect, but the energy flowing through them was, and it is that sort of energy that inspires me and calls on me to create.

    Today, that same energy presents itself to me again, throbbing with life's pulses, gushing forth from life's veins. And now as then, amidst the cool summer breezes blowing through the windows into my Yokohama flat as amidst the vibrations of sun and lake and lawn dancing invisibly around that stool in Wollaton Library, it calls on me to write.