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May. 5th, 2002 01:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWent into New York again today. I had a free ticket to the Japan Society's The New Way of Tea exhibition, since I'd bought a ticket to the other half of it at the Asia Society. The items on display were fascinating to look at, and it was amazing how much of the past could be seen in the items made as recently as the 1990's. The atmosphere, the setup, everything was very conducive to understanding on an instinctive level what the artists were trying for, and what their society was about... The only flaw in it was that the exhibition had the atmosphere of a cathedral during the off-hours, very hushed and reverent, and into this hush came two very noisy Americans who talked to each other at levels a little louder than I would be willing to use in most quality restaurants. I wanted to strangle them. I suppose I should just chalk it up to further understanding the experience, both in terms of the too-busy world that those on the way of tea are trying to transcend and in terms of how Westerners must've come off to the Japanese when they first hit Nippon's shores - noisy, rude, irreverent water buffalo who don't even know enough to know they're being rude.
Which is a very odd experience for me, since I'm American bred, born, and raised, of Western European stock, from the city of New York - home of noisy, rude, irreverent, loud water buffalo. I've had the experience before of seeing what things or people around me must seem like to other nationalities or other cultures, and it never fails to unnerve me, but this time it was my own response to the situation that made me blink. They were not getting into the spirit of things. They did not understand what was before them. And that was, on some level, personally offensive to me - and I'm not even a Nipponophile.
I'm going to put this in the category of Signs That You've Assimilated Someone Else's Culture A Little Too Far, alongside 'you get offended when the man from the Indian subcontinent starts explaining a trinket by saying 'this shows a thing from China called kung fu - which is like a kind of karate - you know what karate is, right?', and 'you see a man in a tall plumed helmet on horseback, with a long halberdlike thing in his hand, and your instant response is 'ooo, nice General Guan statue', even though it turns out to be St. George and the Dragon'.
Right now, though, it's late and I'm tired. I walked from Penn Station to the Japan Society (333 East 47th St, across from Dag Hammarskjold Plaza), and then walked up to the Met (81st and 5th), and then after several hours of drawing the Sanxingdui masks again wandered through the rest of the museum. For some reason, the Qing dynasty ceremonial armor always looked beautiful and perfect before. Two or three visits ago, when I looked at it again, I realized there were worn and frayed spots. There were places with faded colour, and regions where the dragons' embroidered forms had started to go away. True, the outfit was older than my entire country, but I had never noticed this before... it made me sad, somehow. Especially when I went upstairs to the Decorative Arts of China and found Qing dragon robes just as old that were in absolutely perfect shape. I couldn't help but wonder if I'd managed to succeed in drawing it that one time in order to take its spirit home with me, and that now it was simply letting go, or if I'd captured whatever essence it was that had attracted me to it in the first place and it no longer needed to appear new and perfect to me, because I now had that engraved in my brain...
I know it sounds cliched, sappy, silly, trite, whatever, but that's what I've found myself thinking. I really don't know why I never noticed before. I know that I originally just wanted to draw the sword, but the sword never seemed to fit on my page and come out proportional - so I sat down to draw the whole thing, and managed to get it perfect. The whole time, I was thinking that I wanted to take it home with me. I wonder if I have...
Just a thought. I don't mean to sound like a bad installment of Changeling.
Today's pulp survival tip is #174. Be aware of the differences between dialects of any languages that you or others of the party speak. If there's some way that these differences can lead to trouble, rest assured, it will happen.
Which is a very odd experience for me, since I'm American bred, born, and raised, of Western European stock, from the city of New York - home of noisy, rude, irreverent, loud water buffalo. I've had the experience before of seeing what things or people around me must seem like to other nationalities or other cultures, and it never fails to unnerve me, but this time it was my own response to the situation that made me blink. They were not getting into the spirit of things. They did not understand what was before them. And that was, on some level, personally offensive to me - and I'm not even a Nipponophile.
I'm going to put this in the category of Signs That You've Assimilated Someone Else's Culture A Little Too Far, alongside 'you get offended when the man from the Indian subcontinent starts explaining a trinket by saying 'this shows a thing from China called kung fu - which is like a kind of karate - you know what karate is, right?', and 'you see a man in a tall plumed helmet on horseback, with a long halberdlike thing in his hand, and your instant response is 'ooo, nice General Guan statue', even though it turns out to be St. George and the Dragon'.
Right now, though, it's late and I'm tired. I walked from Penn Station to the Japan Society (333 East 47th St, across from Dag Hammarskjold Plaza), and then walked up to the Met (81st and 5th), and then after several hours of drawing the Sanxingdui masks again wandered through the rest of the museum. For some reason, the Qing dynasty ceremonial armor always looked beautiful and perfect before. Two or three visits ago, when I looked at it again, I realized there were worn and frayed spots. There were places with faded colour, and regions where the dragons' embroidered forms had started to go away. True, the outfit was older than my entire country, but I had never noticed this before... it made me sad, somehow. Especially when I went upstairs to the Decorative Arts of China and found Qing dragon robes just as old that were in absolutely perfect shape. I couldn't help but wonder if I'd managed to succeed in drawing it that one time in order to take its spirit home with me, and that now it was simply letting go, or if I'd captured whatever essence it was that had attracted me to it in the first place and it no longer needed to appear new and perfect to me, because I now had that engraved in my brain...
I know it sounds cliched, sappy, silly, trite, whatever, but that's what I've found myself thinking. I really don't know why I never noticed before. I know that I originally just wanted to draw the sword, but the sword never seemed to fit on my page and come out proportional - so I sat down to draw the whole thing, and managed to get it perfect. The whole time, I was thinking that I wanted to take it home with me. I wonder if I have...
Just a thought. I don't mean to sound like a bad installment of Changeling.
Today's pulp survival tip is #174. Be aware of the differences between dialects of any languages that you or others of the party speak. If there's some way that these differences can lead to trouble, rest assured, it will happen.
