Hagoromo in 2010

A recital performance at the Kongo Noh Theater in Kyoto.  My teacher, Udaka Michishige, is the chorus leader just below my fan.

A long time ago on Mio cape, near present day Shizuoka, a man of low birth is cursed with the bad karma from taking the lives of animals for a living.  He is a fisherman in this life, but his name indicates a more glorious past.  White Dragon.

In the ancient Chinese collection of stories, “Garden of Tales” from the 1st century BC, is a story an adviser tells the king as a warning not to take on the guise of one of his own subjects.  The adviser tells about a white dragon who turned himself into a fish and lived in a pond on earth until one day a fisherman shot him in the eye with an arrow.  The dragon flew away to the king of heaven to complain, but the king of heaven replied that fishermen shoot fish for a living and there was nothing he could do.

And so, it is said by some that the dragon died and was reborn, this time as the object of his hatred, the fisherman.  Of course, the fisherman has no knowledge of his past life as a dragon and lives in ignorance of a greater good, except for a strange affinity for natural beauty.   This is the point in the story from which the play “Hagoromo” begins.

Orgy of Tolerance

(c)Frederik Heyman

In the 20th century, logic came to power.  That which was unnecessary was eliminated in Bauhaus, communist propaganda, American manufacturing, engineering, war, design. . .  Life was simplified to a minimum that could be logically understood.  Everything else was eliminated.  That is the world we still live in today.  Our scientific understanding abstracts from all emotion.  Subjectivity is set aside in search of a greater truth, but what is good for research is not necessarily good for life in general.  We lost our ability to understand ourselves.  We do not know how to deal with our desires except to satisfy them or to cry out in want and pain.  We abstract our emotions when sympathy is called for.  We are emotionally dead to violence when it is performed in the name of our own protection.  We are slaves to fear when violence draws near.  Hoping to escape from or at least deaden our fear and desires, we overcompensate with consumption.