How to Build a Robot

Abstract

Review Vollmann continuedfrom previous page the viewer how to feel? Should I cold-tone the street girl and warm-tone the prison-cage, so that only the subject remains? In daytime, says Zeami, perform subdued plays, and in nighttime do brisk bright ones. When an actor expresses anger, "he must not fail to retain a tender heart. Such is his only means to prevent his acting from developing roughness...." When he stamps his feet, he must suppress his upper body into near immobility; and vice versa. The treatises offer many more such examples of cancellation. Always the tendency is to reduce, understate, dampen vibrations, approach neutral buoyancy so that beauty hovers in the water, massively still, profound beyond sight, so pure that it might be mistaken for nothingness. "Ifthe motion is more restrained than the emotion behind it," he writes in "Kakyo," "the body will become the substance and the emotion its function, thus moving the audience." What would happen if the motion were insufficiently restrained, the silver gelatin ofthe photograph insufficiently neutral? Then ourhothouse could raise only false flowers. This is why Zeami warns that a "surface brilliance" of visual spectacle may actually be inimical to a great performance, because the audience can miss the subtle beauties of the acting. To avoid this, plays have slowed themselves down over the centuries; and, for the same reason, the sound of Noh ought to be "sober" even if that bores provincial audiences. When I see a Noh play, I think ofstrong, stately stillness. Indeed, as Zeami remarks, an actor may even fascinate his audience when seemingly doing nothing — in other words, when he is between two actions or movements. This achievement is possible thanks to tension and concentration. It is as if I could simultaneously increase both the warmth and the chilliness"of my photographs, leaving each print to appear almost untoned. If so, my representation would be richer. What then is the flower? What is grace? What is beauty? Many specific things can be said; for instance , body posture is as important as the specific characteristics of any role. Never mind. In another of his methodically enigmatic utterances, which always point beyond conceptualization, Zeami writes: Forget the details of a play in order to see the entirety. Then forget the play itself and consider the actor. Next, forget the actor himself and observe his spirit. Finally, forget his spirit and the essence of the Noh will be manifest. And so the lovely woman approaches, sliding silently across the stage, the ancient mask of her face shining warmly like ivory. She is not a woman not only because she is a man but because she is inhuman, perfect grace, and womanhood itself. Slowly, slowly, she inclines her head, and her face alters expression an infinity of times, each expression feminine, tranquilly lovely, and unknown to the faces of any of the living women I have ever known. Who is she but the true flower herself? 1 cannot tire of her. She gazes through me, into the spirit world; she sings in a deep old man's voice. How beautiful is she to me precisely? With his customary flair for subcategorization , Zeami offers nine levels of beauty. Lowest of all is the way ofcrudeness and leadenness. 1 can understand that; 1 can grasp all of the lowest three levels, and even the middle ones, but of the' highest three levels, each of which is associated with its own flower, I can comprehend only the third, and my comprehension, like my admiration for this woman on the Noh stage who is still more transient than I am but whose face may still hover above a stage centuries from now, is wordless. Never mind the highest level; I am too small to see its beauty, let alone describe it. Never mind the second. Let me express, with grateful thanks to Zeami, the beauty of this woman from the perspective of the third level, which she might already have gone beyond—a beauty beyond logic, as beauty must surely be: "The art of the flowe