Musica che affronta il silenzio - Scritti su Toru Takemitsu - Pavia ...

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Giangiorgio Pasqualotto
meet someone whom you recognise as the personification of truth, you have to kill him,
because it is precisely this operation of identification which has to be eliminated. One must
banish the idea that something infinite like truth, enlightenment or nature can be captured.
For Linji the ‘blind idiots’ are all those who ‘look outside’, who content themselves with
names, phrases, theories and doctrines, thinking that all this constitutes Enlightenment.
Whereas in fact to attain enlightenment they should abandon this paraphernalia of forms,
strip away every ‘robe’ and seize experience just as it presents itself: ‘Virtuous monks,
don’t acknowledge robes. Robes cannot moves of themselves, but people can put them on’
(Linji 2009: 259). This propensity to grasp experience prior to any conceptual or linguistic
contamination is so deeply rooted in Japanese culture that it recurs in the writings of the
most important contemporary Japanese philosopher, Nishida Kitar (1870-1945), considered
the founder of the School of Kyoto. In his first book Chapter 1 deals precisely with
pure experience (junsui keiken) (Nishida 1990: 3-10). 5 Later on, in an essay published in
1923, Nishida reiterated the importance of grasping – rather than ‘describing’ or ‘capturing’
– pure experience through intuition: ‘We may contend that we attain to an even deeper selfconsciousness
in aesthetic intuition than we do in mere conceptual self-consciousness’ (Nishida
1973: 112). Thus for Nishida there is a consciousness which goes deeper than merely
conceptual, abstract, formal awareness. It arises out of artistic intuition and is realised in a
form of attention which goes beyond any artificial separation:
and the sphere of pure experience coincides with the sphere of attention. But the
sphere of pure experience is not necessarily limited to a single form of attention
within the state where subject and object have not yet separated. For example, a
climber's determined ascent of a cliff and a musician’s performance of a piece that
has been mastered through practice. (Nishida 1990: 5-6)
The profound attention paid to the state which precedes separation between subject and
object, and in general any type of separation, is also found in other traditional Japanese
arts which have confronted the problem of space: whether painting, dealing with two-dimensional
space, or architecture, involving the third dimension.
In art we can consider Landscape, painted in 1495 by Sessh Ty (1420-1506).
The true protagonist of this kakemono is the empty space, which accounts for 84% of
the painting’s surface. Out of this space there emerge, in the distance, the diaphanous
shapes of mountain peaks, and in the foreground a few scant brush strokes evoking the
presence of bushes rocks and roofs. In this case too the broad empty backdrop is highlighted
not as an element opposing the representations but in continuity with them,
exalting them, like a pulsating, living matrix which generates them. This is an effective
5 Nishida associates this expression and the corresponding concept with the terms etoku ‘meet and take over’;
taitoku ‘take over physically’; jitoku ‘spontaneous appropriation’; and sets against it rikai ‘intellectual
comprehension’.