I’ve been for a walk (I’ve been for a walk)
On a winter’s day (On a winter’s day)
– California Dreaming
We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness
– Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Komorebi is a Japanese word meaning light shining through trees. It’s one of many I like, describing something particular which we don’t have in English. Shinrin-yoku for forest bathing. Hanami, the viewing of transient flowers, cherry blossom in particular. Shinryoku translates as new green for spring leaves, and there’s kouyou for autumn leaves. My favourite is hanagasumi, flowers appearing like a mist from afar.
There’s associated philosophy with these Japanese terms about nature, impermanence, and the passing moment. The central character of the Wim Wenders film Perfect Days likes photographing trees alongside his enjoyment of komorebi. He uses a film camera which slows the process when you wait for laboratory results.
There are thematic connections in Perfect Days to the films Amelie and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. The child Amelie also enjoys the imaginative process of photographs, seeing clouds in the sky as cute animals. I knew a New York City photographer who made a living from street photography prints, which today is unusual. The romantic era of Cartier-Bresson has gone. He mostly used film, saying the prolonged process was a meditative experience.
Film to digital was an astonishing change. I went for a woodland walk with my first digital camera, also taking photographs of trees. I remember the instantaneous image. When I taught college photography, I didn’t enjoy returning to the darkroom. It’s clumsy, using toxic chemicals, not so much meditative as frustrating. It was fun introducing it to young people because they find it exciting, but few pursue it and with good reason. It’s correct to say film photography is a craft compared to computing, but the darkroom practice is awkward.
Music and books are other features of Perfect Days, the film title from Lou Reed who plays alongside iconic tracks from The Kinks, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, Patti Smith, Van Morrison and Nina Simone. Wim Wenders knows music, using Ry Cooder in Paris, Texas to haunting effect. In Perfect Days music is a happy escape within a car in the city, similar to Ghost Dog when Forest Whittaker steals luxury cars and listens to a different style of music.
Hirayama plays cassettes in his van. He thinks Spotify is a shop, which amuses his niece. There used to be an idea CD music was inferior to vinyl. Different perhaps, but high resolution files exceed CD quality just as digital sensors are superior to photographic film. There is some evidence book reading is better than a Kindle, the experience facilitating retention and comprehension. Pages, and flipping through them, has a spatial effect like the mind maps of Tony Buzan. In Photography After Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, H. Amelunxen (1997) considers how photography no longer exists. Phone snaps, and digital files, are pixels within the matrix. Hirayama, in Perfect Days, likes real photographs carefully stored in boxes.
Komorebi moments are never the same and always fleeting. This connects with the I Ching philosophy of change. There are three forms of change – linear, cyclical and the unchanging – which occur in the symbolism of lines, trigrams, and hexagrams. If change occurs, it does so in relation to something else which is the unchanging. As a simple analogy we change throughout our lives physically, emotionally and intellectually, but something remains throughout. We might call this spirit, or identity, as a recording device across the years and changing environments.
Amelie, Polly in Mermaids Singing and Hirayama are observers of society without being engaged. Perfect Days is a soothing film as we accompany Hirayama smiling at the dawn sky, reading books and enjoying trees. “Is that tree your friend” his niece asks him. He likes a woman in a local bar then sees her embracing a man he doesn’t know. The man, it transpires, is her former husband and dying of cancer. They meet, and the man wonders if a shadow becomes darker when it blends with another. They play shadow tag beside a river, trying to stamp on the silhouette of the other. The seriousness of his condition is forgotten in a moment of play, shadows becoming a metaphor for relationship.
Reading, slow photography and komorebi are yin pursuits within harsh yang society. Hirayama drives through the city (Tokyo) of fast cars, busy roads, and imposing buildings after beginning his day caring for bonsai. Public life occurs around him. He talks little and is yielding, passive, receptive, subordinate, mundane and calm. The opposites are yang. He applies himself carefully to his lowly toilet cleaning as if the activity doesn’t matter. Society functions on opposite terms according to role, status, appearance and yang attainment.
Perfect Days is discussed as a film of Zen minimalism with analogue music, trees, books, and a present moment philosophy. Wenders was influenced by Yasujiro Ozu. A bicycle scene with Hirayama and his niece is similar to another in Ozu’s Late Spring, a film about daughter’s love for a father albeit within a patriarchal system where women are decoratively subordinate. It is late spring, because the daughter should be marrying.
Perfect Days is not however quite as it appears. Hirayama’s father is in hospital but won’t see him. Paris, Texas is a film about trauma, Travis wandering away from a woman he loved who literally set him on fire. Wenders doesn’t explain the history of Hirayama but it’s clear there was struggle of some kind. I Ching hexagram number 18 is called Work on What Has Been Spoiled, with Mountain above and Wind below.
Mountain is a trigram which can be positive or negative. It represents meditation, and what in yoga is described as “the cessation of the thinking principle” (The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali). But it also means the control of thought and feeling, a yang line above oppressing yin lines below.
It’s a hexagram of decay and stagnation, but not permanently. The lines say “Setting right what has been spoiled by the father” (yin beginning) and “Setting right what has been spoiled by the mother” (yang in the second place). This resonates with modern sensibility but derives from centuries ago as I Ching trigram symbolism. Something is “spoiled” by the trigrams of Heaven (father) and Earth (mother) from elsewhere in the system.
A line in a hexagram can be described with reference to others. The yin of line 1 in Work on What Has Spoiled (Ku) generates hexagram 26 The Taming Power of the Great (Ta Ch’u) when it changes to yang. Thus the first line of Ku is called Ku zhi Ta Ch’u, the line in Ku which produces Ta Ch’u. This is a subtle layer of the I Ching where no hexagram is separate from others, no moment in life isolated from meaning. The Taming Power of the Great is a positive result from Work on What Has Been Spoiled, when “setting right what has been spoiled by the father” is resolved. Meditating above (Mountain) with Heaven below meaning strength and certainty.
One of the questions people ask about Perfect Days concerns Hirayama’s happiness. Is he happy? In the final scene, listening to Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, he smiles at one moment and cries the next. The message appears to be both exist, like yin and yang, apparent in the poignant moment. Wilhelm calls hexagram 16 Enthusiasm whereas Thomas Cleary translates it as Happiness. The similarity is clear to the extent they are subtly interchangeable. The single yang line rests on complementary yin and is free to rise upward. It corresponds to the first yin line, modesty becoming certainty, although the yin attraction could be problematic. Most importantly for this hexagram the fourth line emphasis is in the place of the heart, as the focus for a transmuted lower.
For hexagram 18 to become 16 four lines have to change. They describe mother (yin) father (yang) and the top line advises “He does not serve kings and princes / Sets himself higher goals.” These final words, yang changing to yin, suggest final freedom. You are no longer tied to either material or social circumstance: the “higher goal” is neither.
Hirayama watches trees and shadows with komorebi breaks in the day. Trees at lunchtime, shadows on the wall when he stands beside a toilet. Hexagram 52 advises “Keeping his back still / So that he no longer feels his body / He goes into his courtyard / And does not see his people.”
Wilhelm explains this as a description of sitting meditation when the spine is unmoving so the nervous system is calm. Seeing people has different connotations. It could mean an arrogant ruler, although this doesn’t apply here when the man was meditating. “People” can mean your own mundane thoughts so a “courtyard” is symbolic not literal.
“The world is made up of many worlds” Hirayama says “some are connected and some are not.” He has komorebi dreams. Film moments of shadow, light, and leaves, which remind me of hexagrams.
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