Oku-no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Far North)

Claims (23)

• Above all, this unity comes about because of some quality within. And it is here that the idea of the pervasive I, in every living center, begins to tell us something.
  Beyond the properties, there is an inner essence (the I) that unifies the work.
• After moving to this new Eishin campus, the situation became quite reversed. The early buses were always empty. The last bus of the day was full. It was very difficult to get the students to go home.
  Behavioral evidence of attachment: students felt so at home they resisted leaving, reversing the earlier pattern of early departures.
• As I strip away every bit which is too sweet, I slowly leave the bare bone of something which can affect me, can make me almost choke tears in my throat.
  The process of removing excess sweetness leads to an austere shape that can evoke deep sadness.
• Basho, the great Japanese haiku poet, expressed the unity and sadness of things, visible in the ordinary details of everyday life, perhaps more vividly than any other poet.
  Basho's poetry is held up as the supreme example of capturing the unity-sadness of everyday life.
• But this lake, even though it allows happiness to exist, is much closer to tears. If you have tears, you can feel them at the sight of the lake, or of the wind ruffles on the surface of the water. Its very existence in the school even allows your tears.
  The physical environment of the lake at Eishin campus creates a space where sadness can surface, unlike a typical asphalt playground.
• ECHOES and NOT-SEPARATENESS are two of the properties which most strongly tie things together, and create this inner unity in them.
  Two specific properties from the 15 Properties framework are identified as primary drivers of felt unity.
• I believe it came about because of the freedom which existed on the campus, the freedom was so sincere, and its joy and sadness so real, that the use of uniforms no longer seemed appropriate.
  The living quality of the campus environment fostered a social freedom that led to the abandonment of mandatory school uniforms.
• If each living center is but a reflection of a single unity, has the same origin in its being, then the whole is animated by this same being behind the scenes—and we experience the same living fire in every part.
  The mechanism by which the I manifests: all centers sharing the same ontological origin produce a unified living fire.
• If it is alive, it knows death. If it is truly alive, one can feel its own death within it, even while it lives.
  Genuine life in an artwork or building contains an awareness of its own finitude, which manifests as sadness.
• In this painting there is a quality of tears. The bright colors, reds and yellows, are not bright. They are almost somber, worn by the cares of the world, yet seeming to have the quality of family love, or old affection.
  The specific painting achieves the sadness quality through its somber, affectionate color relationships.
• It is when this happens that we may sometimes feel ourselves to be in the presence of true life, true value.
  The experience of encountering a work where the I shines through is an encounter with genuine life.
• Subtle change of the column makes a difference to its sadness, or to its capacity to hold, and reflect sadness.
  Even tiny geometric adjustments significantly alter the column's emotional resonance.
• The I—that blazing one—is something which I reach only to the extent that I experience, and make manifest, my feeling.
  Access to the deepest self is dependent on the maker expressing their own feeling, not intellectual concepts.
• The making of sadness must come through a process where land, details, rooms form an indivisible whole, always trying to tie it together, to unify it, to make it disappear.
  The artistic process of achieving sadness is a unifying one that ultimately makes the parts disappear into a whole.
• The quality of 'tears,' the sadness that necessarily characterizes all living art, is inherent in the geometry, it is not only an emotion, but is a character of the geometry itself.
  Sadness is not subjective feeling alone but a structural property of the geometry.
• The so-definite fact of this sadness which enters things, and the fact that through this sadness we—all of us, I, you, and the person I have never known—all experience life in those things—it is hard to believe that it is only a trick or a mental state.
  The intersubjective reality of the sadness effect argues against its being merely psychological; it points to an objective quality.
• The unity is not merely a unity in the surface, in the appearance of things — it is a unity of the most fundamental kind, which goes to the raw reality and which has, when it occurs, a highly unexpected, sometimes rambling, sometimes ferocious, sometimes friendly, even sometimes absurdly crude or comfortable character.
  True unity is not about conventional beauty but about a raw, messy, everyday reality that resonates deeply.
• This sadness of tears, when I reach it, is also joy. ... What makes it sad is that it comes closest, in the physical concrete beams and columns and walls, as close as possible, to the fact of my existence on this earth.
  The ultimate sadness is not miserable but a profound acknowledgment of existence, which is both sad and joyful.
• Unity ties everything together—including joy, happiness and laughter, but also including loss, death, and betrayal.
  Core assertion that true unity necessarily encompasses all of life's experiences, thus contains inherent sadness.
• What I aim for is, most concretely, sadness. I try to make the volume of the building so that it carries in it all feeling. To reach this feeling, I try to make the building so that it carries my eternal sadness. It comes, as nearly as I can in a building, to the point of tears.
  The explicit artistic goal: to shape space so that it evokes tears, the most direct route to the I.
• What is remarkable about the color phenomenon is that we experience it as a single unbroken thing, not a system of centers, but we feel the light as a single thing.
  The experience of inner light in a painting is felt as a single whole, not a collection of parts.
• When I opened my eyes very wide to see only the whole, I could see where disunity occurs, where the seams occurred, and then realize—if I concentrated very hard—that a particular yellow had to be modified by a tiny fraction.
  The wide-open eyes state is a reliable diagnostic for locating disunity as gray spots.
• When this is achieved, or touched, to the extent that it is achieved, then, that is what I mean by reaching and touching the I, the blazing one.
  The final definition: achieving sadness in a work is the act of touching the I.