Perhaps this begins to account for the unique mix of solidity and transparency you see in his art, as if the lightness of rooted Japan danced around the gravitas of mobile America. Perhaps this explains, too, how he was as indifferent to borders between genres–seeing landscape as a form of sculpture, painting as a kind of dance–as between cultures. He worked for the most part in silent forms, like a man who brings different worlds together not to speak in a common language that neither of them knows well, but to touch one another, glance at each other, mingle in silence and pause and gesture. In Zen, the world that exists ouside and beyond names and black-and-white distinctions, he found (as he said of Kyoto) an art of life “which was beyond art objects.” If the map celebrates lines and divisions, he would hover above it, in the air that belongs to all.
In this way, his work was “global” before the world existed, and anticipated, you could say, the convergences of Salman Rushdie, the curiosities of American Buddhism, the harmonies of World Music, which sense that the tabla and the digeridoo can say things to one another that they could not say to members of their own traditions. It seizes on the space between fixities as the place of potential, unclaimed, hostage to no past, subject to the enmities of neither side. And it speaks to people like me who shuffle between Indian and American and British passports while realising that we belong somewhere deeper than such categories, in a mock-Californian suburb in Japan, perhaps. Noguchi lived, one feels, in a nation of his own, whose flag and national anthem and constitution were nothing other than the work that he produced.
At times, therefore, the world he outlined on his journey reminds me of Michael Ondaatje’s novel (and Anthony Minghella’s film), The English Patient. In the wake of World War II, in the rubble of exploding nationalisms (where people die for being English–or not English), four wounded characters assemble in a battered nunnery to interact with no thought of race or passport, and to try to find the human core that plays havoc with such distinctions. They woo, they tell stories, they remember and they read, and try to stake out a domain that provincialisms can’t touch. One, fittingly, is a nurse; another is a defuser of bombs. A third is a map-maker, and the fourth, no less importantly, is a thief (since, in this vision, as in Noguchi’s pictures, the notion of universalism is not smoothed down into a child’s jingle or something universally benign; it is unsettled and outlaw and draws blood). The order they root themselves in, in place of ideology, is art–“We are communal histories, communal books,” the novel says–and those who read the book carefully see that there is a fifth being in the house with them, not coincidentlly, an “old mongrel, older than the war.”
Noguchi’s life story is itself an art form of sorts that he constructed to show how he would try to do something that would correct the recent collisions of Japan and America. He got married in the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, and would work on the U.S. pavilion at the Osaka World Fair. He designed the garden for the Reader’s Digest building in Tokyo, and worked on a playground for the newly formed United Nations. When the mayor of Gifu, in western Japan, pointed out to him that the city’s paper lantern industry was suffering, he came up with Akari Light Sculptures, which suddenly gave Japanese lights a new and universal identity. It was as if he was making of his very commissions a reminder that cultures can’t be kept apart; they mingle and whisper secrets into one another’s ear, and out of their convergences comes something out of time or space.
It is often mentioned that his design for a bell tower in Hiroshima–what might have been his crowning work in this collaborative vein–was rejected at the last minute, perhaps because his mother was American. Nationalism does not die quickly, even after it has been responsible for millions of deaths. But if you visit the new, revived city that bustles along around its Peace Museum, you will find that the railings he designed for two bridges there are still guiding you from the busy streets into the place of peace, on both the east side and the west.
The more I looked at the images contained in this book, therefore–thinking back to an elderly Zen master I know in Kyoto, who has made it his life’s work to go every year to America to teach his discipline (“I am attached to only one thing,” he told me once, “the image of a bridge”)–the more I began thinking back to the days that led me to the place where I live now. I remembered how, penned up in a New York City skyscraper in 1983, I took off for the East–India, Bali, Burma–and then ended up, as expectation decrees, in a Zen temple in Kyoto. I had grown up, in Santa Barbara, on the novels of Yasunari Kawabata, the clear-water haiku of Basho, the Prussian-blue landscapes of Hiroshige, which pierced me with a sense of familiarity, of homesickness even, that I could not explain away. They were telling the real story of my life, I felt, which somehow I had forgotten in my sleep.
I arrived on the back streets of the eastern hills on a bright day in early autumn–cloudless blue and only the faintest tracings of color on the trees–and stepped into a temple. A life of simplicity is what I wanted, free of categories and bare as a classic Kyoto tea-house. Stillness, silence and the moon. Modern Kyoto is not very hospitable to such precious notions, however–perhaps Noguchi found the same in his restored samurai house in Kamakura, Japan’s second great Buddhist town–and the forty or so motorbikes the two monks kept in the temple yard were largely festooned with pictures of Mickey Mouse. I wandered out through the temple gate, and found myself more at home with the Japanese replicas of America I discovered in the clangorous (but always decorous) modern arcades of the old capital.
I drifted for a year around this dreamland and then returned to Santa Barbara to write up the story of my pilgrimage (interested, as Noguchi would put it in the context of his Bollingen Fellowship, in leisure both contemplative as well as active, in play as a form of leisure, but also prayer, or doing nothing at all). As I was about to complete my account, I walked upstairs to our living room and saw 70-foot flames cresting above the picture windows, the heat pricking at my neck.
I jumped into a car, but there was nowhere for me to go and, for long, long minutes, I sat on the lonely mountain road watching the forest fire reduce everything I knew–my notes, my hopes, the projects I’d been contemplating, the books I’d half-completed–to ash.
A couple of years later, my family built a new house on the same property, thanks to our insurance company, and fired, perhaps, by that born-again innocence that lingers in the Californian air, and that drew us from our old worlds of England and India to its clement light. It was a solid building this time, sturdy as a Tibetan fortress, sitting on its ridge overlooking the town and the Pacific Ocean, blue in the distance, and matching the adobe and white stucco homes that were coming up around us in the hills, rebuking the past and the elements with their air of defiant rootedness.
When the house was complete, we were in a whole new construction of our lives with two wings and a forecourt, and planar roofs that made a pattern as of birds above a ship. But the place was entirely empty. I decorated my bedroom all in white, with hand-made bamboo screens on the windows, and nothing–nothing, nothing–on the walls or floors. In California I would make the empty Zen room I had once travelled all the way to Kyoto to find.
As I was about to settle into my empty space, a friend said, “There’s only one thing you need.”
“What’s that ?”
“A single Noguchi. To offset the emptiness.”
I sit in my all-white room in California now, back from my mock-Californian suburb in Japan to visit my mother, and feel the emancipation of no possessions, no history, no nationality. The luxury of simplicity that is one of Japan’s most elegant bequests to the world.
In one corner, though, there’s a single lamp, as light as an autumn leaf, and yet as quietly refulgent as a Japanese sky in early autumn. An Akari Light Sculpture, making old Japan universal, and available to all of us. I turn it on, I turn it off, it doesn’t matter. It lights up my life the way these images, I hope, will light up yours.