A Majik Word

In Japanese there is a word, yugen, for which there is no corollary in English. Yugen is the word for a feeling, which can be described in English only by describing situations where the feeling is present:

“To watch the sun sink behind a flower clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze at a boat as it disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.”

These are examples of yugen from Seami (a.k.a. Zeami, a.k.a. Kanze Motokiyo), Japanese playwright and theorist from the 15th century. It is, at least to my brain, not immediately simple to draw connections here, intellectually I mean. There is however an ineffable similarity between these situations. If I am to apply my wider imagination, I am quite easily transported to places/happenings I have experienced myself, places/happenings similar to those described by Seami, and I understand the feeling that is same, and so the word with my feelings.

I am likely to prattle on and on about the short-comings of language on this blog, elevating my ironic status to threat-level-mauve… The complex traps, snares and veils of language are a favorite thought-topic of mine. Certainly language does not always work in our favor, not because it is weak, but because language is pervasive and unbelievably powerful.

Reality, individual and shared, is determined by our attention. We cannot make sense of the world in front of us if we do not focus on something (visa vi: leave some things out). Likewise, our senses focus their attention (over millions of years of evolution) on certain wavelengths and types of vibration. Surely there are innumerable aspects of the world, our lives, ourselves, consciousness, and the expansive universe that allude our perception, because we cannot sense them, or because we have not learned, or have forgotten how to focus our attention on them.

On the most practical level, in most cases, for most people, language is our spotlight, our net for the world. We sense what we can say, we do not notice what we do not have words for, and we often struggle with feelings or perceptions we cannot describe… this is something I seek to undo in my life, some language liberation is my goal. But before the spotlight is just daylight, we can widen the beam, expand the net we cast. Sometimes I find a majik word, like yugen, that reminds me that there can be liberation even within this heavy-handed system of symbols and grunts we’ve devised. There are mantras, songs, and incantations… and sometimes a single word.

photo notes: taken by Fletcher Tucker 2008, Stockholm Sweden