This is my Tree Friend
Perfect Days & Mild Vertigo
“Sappho perceives desire by identifying it as a three-part structure… For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible, on the triangular path where volts are moving, that would not be visible without the three-part structure. The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy… Triangulation makes both present at once by a shift of distance, replacing erotic action with a ruse of heart and language. For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.”
-Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson’s foundational essay on desire in Greek literature, the conscious conception of desire is identified as the basis of the self. Sappho’s poetry illustrates a triangular pattern wherein the self and the other are connected by the distance between them, by the desire that gives shape to that distance. Carson calls this reaching out an act of imagination. If desire is the source of human perception, then it is also the source of human relation. Art is a process of geometry: self, other, and the distance between them. Three stars whose constellation illustrates the connection and collectivism inherent to art.
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Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023) and Mild Vertigo (Mieko Kanai, 1997) both capture the dilemma of lives structured by mundane routine. Both occurring in Tokyo, Perfect Day’s janitor Hirayama and Mild Vertigo’s housewife Natsumi showcase common routines of work and repetition predicated on late capitalist alienation. Hirayama brings an ethic of mindfulness to his role as a public toilet cleaner, the routine of cleaning day in and day out punctuated by his observations of the play of light and shadows on surfaces and by the analog pleasures of cassettes and books. When his teenage niece appears in his life, the spare backstory we are given is just enough to question the level of happiness and desire in his life. For Natsumi, the roles and routines of being a mother, wife, and woman are more thoroughly questioned. Her routine is not at odds with family ties as it is with Hirayama, instead it is a product of them.
In Perfect Days the routine is self-enforced, a way of keeping an obscure chaos at bay. In Mild Vertigo the routine is the life expected for a woman her age. Routine structures their desires. If routine is not forced upon you, it is sought out. If routine is forced upon you, it is sought as a refuge from desire. Desire is defined by distance, by unattainability. The trauma of perpetual unattainability, perhaps just as much as the trauma of perpetual attainability, is regulated by routine. This is as much as we can say about Hirayama. Routine becomes a foundation for both him and Natsumi that renders desire manageable. Hirayama would agree with the maxim of Natsumi’s aunt: “If you don’t have time to be bored, you’ll be exhausted.” But both protagonists understand that boredom is not a permanent state, for we are beings of desire, and desire is not static.
Both stories illustrate how the mindset attached to a routine determines whether it is a sustainable or detrimental practice. The vertigo is the contradiction of unattainability inherent in desire, embodied in Perfect Day’s closing shot of Hirayama's brilliant facial portrayal of comedy and tragedy at war.
Both works are tragic in the sense that they capture life in media res. There is no solution when you’re in the now, there just is. Both works end on moments of emotional vertigo. This nowness, the frozen triangulation that Carson establishes, makes up the forms of the film and novel just as it does their subject. As Greek tragedy embodied the Greek conception of eros, these contemporary works embody a contemporary eros, where class and gender distinctions define our desires and our routines. Wenders and Kanai understand the peace that must be made with the present, a peace structured by routine and mundanity. That routine and mundanity are mediated by troubled societal factors—menial labor, family ties, age—is understood by both stories to be the struggle within which one must learn to fix one’s gaze. Both works are concerned with this conscious aspect of being and desire. They are about people’s mindsets guiding their routines.
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“When people begin to learn reading and writing, a different scenario develops. Reading and writing require focusing the mental attention upon a text by means of the visual sense. As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. This constitutes at first a laborious and painful effort for the individual, psychologists and sociologists tell us. In making the effort he becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action. The recognition that such controlling action is possible, and perhaps necessary, marks an important stage in ontogenetic as in phylogenetic development, a stage at which the individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration… Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self. To control the boundaries is to possess oneself.”
-Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
Photography emerges in both narratives as the gaze (eros) embodied. Hirayama takes joy in the dance of light and shadows on surfaces, but it is only in one spot, at one time, that he captures his one subject: komorebi, or the light that leaks through a tree canopy. He is a still life painter, or a producer of looped samples, or an author who keeps describing the same reach of desire in every story.
Kanai points us to the similarity between photography and the desirous self through Natsumi’s reading of an essay that describes the role of the photographer as the point of interlocking between gaze and desire, something which Hirayama’s photography embodies perfectly. One can imagine Hirayama reading Mild Vertigo by lamplight before bed, plainly pondering the similarities, internalizing Natsumi’s story and carrying it forward along his life. One also imagines Natsumi watching Perfect Days in place of the essay and coming away with the same synchronicities about the role of gaze and photography within a life structured by routine.
The tension between the individual and society in which these two works leave us is unbearable. If art and being are defined by our gazes, our reaching out and interlocking with our subject, what role do other’s gazes serve within this? For Hirayama, other’s gazes are a source of humor and joy when they are strangers or participants of his routine, but are unbearable when they are of questionable proximity. The evident mask he wears upon presenting his life to his estranged sister creates a pivotal moment of breaking. His niece embodies a deeper proximity that is able to fit into his routine.
In Carson’s geometrical conception of desire and self, Wenders creates a constellation pinpointed by Hirayama, his niece, and the distance between them. He is able to share his single, solitary moment of photography with her. She surprises him by pulling out her own digital camera, her own analog gaze, passed down by him himself.
Natsumi is unable to share this gaze capturing with anyone else—she is the recipient as the reader of Kineo Kuwabara. We can see Kuwabara’s writing about photography as its own reaching out, its own arc of desire towards the reader’s gaze.
Part of the vertigo here is how to embody this triangular knowledge in two lives that appear highly individualistic. The gaze and the gazed are apparent, but the third party representative of the society that structures their selves and their desires functions as a hindrance to peace.
I find stabilization for my own vertigo in historian Ali Mazrui’s sole novel The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (1971). Upon dying, Hamisi finds himself in After-Africa, where he is required to serve as defense for Christopher Okigbo, a poet killed in the combat of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Okigbo is on trial for choosing war over art. Making his defense, Hamisi states:
“Art is a heritage from the past, honored and augmented by the present, and then transmitted to the future. but the transmission is not unilinear, and the continuity is a social continuity.”
If we replace “art” with “being” in this sentence, applying the interchangeability of art and being implied by Carson, we arrive at a truth—our gazes, our art and being, are inseparable from one another. Their transmission is not unilinear—our gazes recreate those created long ago constantly, just as we as beings in the process of creation are gazed at by others and by the future. Hirayama’s gift of an analog gaze to his niece is forgotten by him by the time it reappears in his life. The transmission is not unilinear. The most individual act of seeing is simply a part of a larger social continuity.
Through writing, I form a triangle in congruence with these works that simultaneously reach out and are reached for, gaze and are gazed. I reach for their hands and find a semblance of peace in the collective we form.
apocrypha…
On Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem