Reconnecting with Hokusai's Wave

 

'In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.' (T.S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock')

"I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow." Virginia Woolf, 'The Waves'

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Gazing at two different versions of Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa - and feeling foolish, as I had never realised that there are many versions of this iconic woodblock print, and even more foolish when I realised that I'd been reading that 'off' as 'of' - caused me to focus in a way that I hadn't done before. As with many other famous pieces of art, we are too familiar with them before we've had a chance to really look at them. Works like this pass us by on an almost weekly basis: we find them adorning tea-towels, flasks, diaries; messed about with for comic or satirical effect; popping up on quiz shows like Only Connect .... and so we fail to truly engage with them.

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

But standing there, in a clammy Covid-mask, badgered into position on a conveyor-belt of people at the British Museum's Hokusai exhibition, I attempted to see the image anew. 

What struck me - outside of just how hypnotic the fragmenting crests of the wave itself are – was that it is the volcano, Mount Fuji, that offers up the point of contrast, a calm and a stillness caressed by the curling claw of the wave. The paradox of this still active volcano - it last erupted in 1707, half a century before the artist was born - provided a foil of serenity for the fury of the sea. It conjured up - not for the first time if you are a regular reader of this blog - T.S. Eliot's famous lines 'at the still point, there the dance is'. Was there something in that strange contrast that plays gently across our subconsciousness – an equivalence to the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile, or the fragmentary wholeness of Klimt's Kiss - that raised The Great Wave from its place as just a wonderful piece of art, to the all-consuming status of the universal?

As I stared, I felt sad and adrift. There is always the melancholy sense of wanderlust to contend with when you look at a larger landscape - and it is, lest we forget, a landscape. Years ago, I visited Japan and didn't pay attention. So engulfed was I in the fog of a fragile mental health, that I can't even recall if I saw Mount Fuji or not. And in the lugubrious darkness of the museum, the vista filled me with thoughts of escape, and not just into the autumnal grey of the Bloomsbury afternoon, but further afield. Is this what turning fifty does to us? As horizons shrink, do we wish, like Tennyson's Ulysses, to pursue and sail towards those horizons with even greater zeal? 

A Bolt of Lightning Strikes Virūdhaka Dead

My eyes strayed and alighted on countless other images: demons, animals, waterfalls, lighting bolts - think again of those Eliot lines when you stare at A Bolt of Lightning Strikes Virūdhaka Dead - and I felt a frustration, in that I wanted to get closer to these tiny, intricate images fizzing with detail. Perhaps the best way to experience them would actually be - and I feel I'm about to commit an aesthetic sacrilege here - in a book that you can open up on a dazzling summer morning, sipping tea from a Japanese cup and nibbling on a croissant. The bowels of the British Museum seemed to swallow up and consume the pleasure of this wonderful artist. He needs air and freedom and the space to linger. But those tiny details escape our herded procession. By the very nature of painting The Great Wave is still; yet its genius is that it seems to be in perpetual motion. Likewise us, ushered by the vacant slot offered up in front of us and agitated by those close behind us. We must find the time to stop, to look and be still - to reconnect - and yet, paradoxically, keep moving forward.