Hitoyogiri Rhythms

I've been reading through hitoyogiri manuals from early and mid-Edo era Japan. In case you don't know, the hitoyogiri is considered to be the predecessor to the shakuhachi, and was actually called by the same name - shakuhachi - on account of its length: in this case, isshaku hachibu instead of isshaku hassun. (1.08 shaku instead of 1.8 shaku). The two share a lot in common, and I've been growing increasingly fond of this smaller, simpler (?), older flute.

From Shichiku Taizen:

Take care to follow form in terms of fingering, but don't get caught up in following a particular rhythm. You should play "ウエフエ" [a common phrase beginning many classical hitoyogiri solo pieces] without long or short. If you lengthen the next notes, then the end [of the phrase] will be short; again, if you make the end longer, then the beginning ends up short. Play so as to forget what lies ahead, so as to not know what came before. Straining to blow too hard is bad, too.

If you're not careful, this can sound like the author is saying to blow every note with the same length - but that would go against what he says at the beginning: don't get caught up in following a particular rhythm. The point is just to play the note your playing, until its finished. Once the note is finished, don't keep playing it. Don't stop it before it's over, either. Both cases are examples of dwelling on what came before or over-anticipating what comes next. You have to get to know the piece, feel how it likes to be played, and be present to it.

Shakuhachi is the same. It's about listening. 

Listen to everything. When you are present as you play, even "wrong" notes sound right. It's not about how you play, in terms of techniques and specific timing. It's about who is playing. When you play, and you are listening, and you are around people who are listening, your playing changes. It's alive. When no one is listening, maybe the birds and trees are. This changes your playing, too. When no one is listening, and birds and trees aren't listening, God is still listening. When I'm not aware of anyone listening, I usually stop playing, and just listen. 

深夜 Shinya - the dark night of the soul.

I've had mixed feelings about this shakuhachi piece for a while. I played it at a concert once, admittedly not having much of a grasp of the piece's intent, though I had been playing it for about 15 years. At the time, I had taken it as a portrait of the various activities of night - silence, bug sounds, etc.

A man who was taking lessons from me at the time wrote to me afterward with his impressions. For Shinya, he pictured demons dancing on a distant shore, preparing mischief. 

This threw me off. It wasn't what I had intended with the piece at all. Granted, these old pieces are designed to lay hearts bare, both that of the player and that of the listener. What he heard wasn't necessarily what I was playing... but his comments touched on something - there was an aspect to the piece that I still didn't get. I put it aside, and didn't play it much at all for a few years after.

I was at the World Shakuhachi Festival this year, mainly to translate for some of my own teachers who were giving lectures. I jumped at the chance to translate for Atsuya Okuda, who was leading a workshop on his version of Sanya. During the workshop, he said that we shouldn't be too literal in interpreting the title. For me, as soon as I heard this it seemed so stupidly obvious that I have no idea how I missed it all these years. It's not about bug sounds over the backdrop of a still night. It's about the dark night of the soul.

Okuda-sensei said it was about the complex condition of the heart before enlightenment - struggle, right thinking, distractions, falsehood, faith, all mixed in together. 

In St. John of the Cross' poem of the same title, the dark night of the soul is a period of darkness - of struggle, or perhaps a darkening of the senses wherein God seems to be far away - that leads eventually into new depths of intimacy with God. Our senses seem to be dead and passionless, and God seems to be absent - but this is only because we are being refined, broken, and molded into something new, someone capable of containing the depths of God, the love of Christ. Love is not something we are naturally able to feel, in its true form. God is hidden in his light, which looks like darkness from where we stand - "Clouds of deep darkness surround him." Here we learn what faith and love are - a faith that holds on without seeing, a love that is faithful without being able to feel.

At the same time, this doesn't quite fit the character of Shinya... not completely, anyway. It expresses peace, but also struggle. It's not about a period of not being able to see God as it is about the complex or confused state of the soul. Jesus' words in his midnight conversation with Nicodemus come to mind:

For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.

I think Shinya is about exposing your heart to the light - all the good, all the bad, all the confusion, just as it is. From Psalm 139:

even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.


God shines in the darkness.

Faith is the only way through. When our wrongs, our shame, our failings tempt us to despair, we turn our gaze away from ourselves to Jesus. When things are going wrong and it seems like we won't have "enough" (friends, or money, or approval, or whatever), we exercise faith in God who provides, and act as if we have plenty (because we do, actually). When our old, dead self flares up, we just keep going. When we can't see, we trust that we are seen by our Father who is good. 

This is what Shinya is expressing: faith mixed with fear, goodness mixed with unwanted evil, vision mixed with blindness. This is a piece for dark nights, for laying the soul bare before God, trusting God with everything that's going on inside. As the earth turns, darkness passes and turns to light. There's nothing we can do to speed up the process, but we can be present through it, with the One who is always present to us.