Myo

By
Heidi
 – February 15, 2011Posted in: Stacks

Lydia Minatoya’s lovely and thoughtful novel The Strangeness of Beauty is narrated by Etsuko, a woman straddling two worlds —  the austere elegant world of her samurai family in Japan  and the encroaching  modern world. The book, set in the years between World War I and World War II,  takes the form of Etsuko’s I-story, an autobiographical novel and ancient art that is given new life and urgency in the 20th Century.   Etsuko explains,

“critics have questioned the motivation behind the amateur I-Story. Often it seems so futile. Why would so many work so long to create novels meant for their eyes alone? The answer involves social upheaval — in which a sudden infusion of excessive education … has clashed with limits in opportunity, to turn a nation of habitual haiku writers half mad.”

She goes on to say that they are a nation of people dying to be understood, “roiling with confessional angst”.

Yet there is something else in Etsuko’s need to document and make sense of her life. She wants to capture myo — the strangeness of beauty — that is found in everyday living. Towards the end of the novel, Etsuko writes of a visit to famed iris gardens in Tokyo. She describes encountering dozens of amateur artists, “jammed” together, painting unremarkable paintings that look almost exactly the same. Contemplating these “Sunday painters,” Etusko asks, “Do you laugh, cry or applaud?”

I am a Sunday Painter, an I-storyteller, a blogger with a miniscule audience in a big, noisy world. Oftentimes, I feel a mild sense of despair over my lack of talent or panic with each approaching deadline. I’m not going to set the world on fire with my musings on Miss Piggy or Liz Phair, but I am keeping something lit within me.  Etsuko goes on to say:

“To me these Sunday painters represent myo — the strangeness of beauty — an idea that transcendence can be found in what’s common and small. Rather than wishing for singularity and celebrity and genius (and growing all gloomy in its absence), these painters recognize the ordinariness of their talents and remain undaunted.
It’s the blessings in life, not in self, that they mean to express.
And therein lies the transcendence. For as people pursue their plain, decent goals, as they whittle their crude flutes, paint their flat landscapes, make unexceptional love to their spouses — in their numbers across cultures and time, in their sheer tenacity as in the face of a random universe they perform their small acts of awareness and appreciation — there is a mysterious, strange beauty.”

Novelist Esther Freud recently wrote, “For many of us, our lives our littered with regrets over unfulfilled ambitions … It’s what people don’t do that they regret, rarely what they did … Often these things are worth doing just for the pure pleasure of doing them.”  And, so I applaud. I applaud middle-aged lawyers and accountants who gather once a week in the garages of their well-kept suburban homes to practice Metallica or Rolling Stones covers, getting ready for occasional shows in bars or county fairs; I applaud community theaters putting on Shakespeare and The Sound of Music and teenagers in small English market towns who attempt American accents for their school’s production of Grease. I feel a sense of kinship with people all over the world who will take their sketchbooks into museums today to draw, lovingly covering the territory of the masters. I applaud their — our –yearning to participate, to say I am here and I see and am part of the strange beauty of life.

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