Anger is a bitter lock.
But you can turn it.
Hokusai aged 83
said,
Time to do my lions.
Every morning
until he died
219 days later
he made
a lion.
Wind came gusting from the northwest.
Lions swayed
and leapt
from the crests
of the pine trees
onto
the snowy road
or crashed
together
over his hut,
their white paws
mauling stars
on the way down.
I continue to draw
hoping for
a peaceful day,
said Hokusai
as they thudded past.
Hello and welcome to Words That Burn , the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This is the second part to a longer special on the poetry of Anne Carson. The first of which is linked in the description of this episode.
This poem is titled Hokkusai and is titled after the famous Japanese artist from the 18th Century. [citation] You’ve no doubt seen some of his more famous works like The Great Wave.
As in the previous episode on Carson’s Shadowboxer 1, this poem is taken from her collection Men in the Off Hours 2. That collection is a series of poems that looks at men from all aspects; their psychology, their physicality, their strengths but more often their shortcomings. Carson's poetry is not always understandable or even accessible; Carson is after all a poet who seems to write primarily for her own benefit as a kind of meditation but, as with Shadowboxer, Hokusai can be deciphered with a little bit of context and by zoning in on one aspect of male identity to explore.
In shadowboxer it was male guilt and trauma, here however it is that of ego, frustration and anger.
Carson is a keen poet of the classics, in fact antiquity in all its forms. It is a huge source of inspiration in her work.[citation] Coming in a close second however is ekphrasis, the creation of writing or poetry around and in response to art. [citation] . Hokusai combines her two great inspirations and applies them into her masculinity investigation series.
The aspect that Carson chooses to focus on here seems to be male ego, anger and the perils of perfectionism. Whilst these negative traits are not quintessentially male, they are most often associated with men. As an avatar for her deconstruction Carson has chosen Hokusai.
Katsushika Hokusai is today considered one of the key figures of Japanese art, being particularly instrumental in the development of the Ukiyo-e art movement.3 He was a great believer in practice in the pursuit of perfection. Some would argue to his detriment. It is that exact argument that becomes clear in the first section of the poem:
Anger is a bitter lock.
But you can turn it.
Hokusai aged 83
Said,
Time to do my lions.
Every morning
until he died
219 days later
he made
a lion.
Carson’s poem starts the poem with a simple couplet. A metaphor for anger that can be understood by any reader. Anger is a difficult emotion to let go of, unlock so to speak, it holds in place but using it can be used and worked, unlocked to a more useful purpose perhaps. Or maybe just let go to a better cause.
These are among the most enigmatic lines of the entire poem, the strange metaphor is almost a parody of orientalist ‘’wisdom’’ but by the end of the poem becomes an analogy for what Hokusai himself is attempting to achieve in creating his lions.
The next several lines are pure biography, directly detailing the later life of the great painter.
Hokusai did begin his daily meditation of painting lions when he was 82 4 Here Hokusai is in the midst of this practice at 83.
There is a very humanising, almost grandfatherly quality to the small line of dialogue that Carson creates for him time to do my lions. It is a testament to the humanity and warmth that Carson can breathe into ancient tales and lives. The subtle ways in which she relates the characters of her poetry has become something of a trademark for her. 5
Hokusai himself referred to the paintings as his exorcisms against bad luck. This was furthered by the fact that the lions were Chinese Lions known as Shi Shi or guardian lions. 6Spirits that are meant to help protect people, all this was done by Hokusai to avoid bad fortune. Bad fortune here is never really defined but this ambiguity is what gives Carson a chance to introduce her own themes.
She takes the ‘’daily exorcisms’’ to be a much more literal thing as we’ll see a little later in the poem.
In the second section Carson takes the opportunity both to commend Hokusai’s talent as an artist and create a flurry of action in her poem:
Wind came gusting from the northwest.
Lions swayed
and leapt
from the crests
of the pine trees
onto
the snowy road
or crashed
together
over his hut,
their white paws
mauling stars
on the way down.
The poet has literally allowed the lines to leap from the page, they are described as vividly as they were drawn by Hokusai (Example). Those gushing winds help to set off the flowing movement so characteristic in Hokusai’s lions. It’s interesting to note that at the beginning of their description, before leaping from the page, the lions are described the same was as the wind; swaying and leapt
Soon after interacting with reality all traces of the lion’s grace are gone. There is a distinct sense of chaos left in their wake with verbs like crashed and mauling being used for their actions. More than that there is a distinct sense of speed and disruption to the snowy calm landscape;
onto
the snowy road
or crashed
together
over his hut,
Even Hokusai’s retreat isn’t safe from their apparent rampage. There is powerful imagery created by Carson here, mauling stars on the way down is one that I haven’t been able to shake since I read it. The figurative lions are causing real damage to the real landscape.
As I said, Carson’s writing here pays tribute to the Japanese master’s ability to bring life to his work. Hokusai himself was very candid about his skill in that regard. He discussed his dedication to working from life in an accompanying text to his work:
‘’From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvelous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own’’7
When reading these words it’s clear that Hokusai was a man gripped by a passion that bordered on obsession. He clearly believed that the only way to produce more work was to practice more. A perfectionist by any other name.
In understanding the level of his passion the final section of the poem is much easier understood:
I continue to draw
hoping for
a peaceful day,
said Hokusai
as they thudded past.
There is a jarring shift in perspective, seeming to the first person, as Hokusai reaffirms his commitment; I continue to draw,
The final two lines of that brief stanza reveal the true intent of the poem:
Hoping for a peaceful day
Solace is not something that seems to be a part of this daily meditation, a paradox in itself. These exorcisms seem to be driving nothing away, perhaps why the famous artist is forced to pursue them over and over. We are left in no doubt that Hokusai is the speaker of those words. The lions that are passing his small shack as he paints his own seem almost unnoticed, something that has become mundane.
As she did in the poem Shadowboxer, Carson has taken an aspect of antiquity and transformed it into a tool to dissect masculinity. What’s being dissected here though? For me it is Hokusai’s relentless pursuit of perfection, which here stands for that ego driven goal in men. We know that he is angry from the very first line of the poem and by the end of it we understand why. He has spent his life in pursuit of flawless artistic skill only to have it placed firmly outside his grasp constantly. We know for a fact that by the end of his life Hokusai was still expressing regret over not having more time to work and practice. Even upon death’s door he apparently exclaimed:
"If only Heaven will give me just another ten years ... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."8
It’s hard to believe that a man who has been recognised as a master of his craft could suffer from such an imposter syndrome and yet that is precisely what Carson is depicting; the impossibility of ego and the anger that arises from its unrealistic expectations. Those lines cause daily chaos for Hokusai, they are an incarnation of his own frustration with painting, each day they thunder through the snowy plains of his mind and regardless, each day he ignores them and continues to draw and paint hoping that one of them will be good enough.
So why this poem? Anne Carson once again provides a startlingly original way of accessing antiquity in this but more importantly than that shows how anger can see into our lives in the most innoccus of ways. It is only ever mentioned directly once, at the very beginning of the poem; anger is a bitter lock but it can be turned. Hokusai, as Carson imagines him, utilises his anger to create art every day. That’s certainly how I read it the first time, I even thought this might be a worthwhile use of that anger. Once the lions and the chaos are introduced though it becomes clear that Hokusai’s anger at his perceived lack of mastery is simply his anger feeding itself in a loop. The lions which are supposed to free and protect him have actually become another source of chaos in his life. They damage the environment around Hokusai, even though he himself is safe. A parallel for the ways in which our own anger can do more harm to those around us.
The poem is an insightful look at unreleased male rage and ego, and how even our coping mechanisms can be destructive if pursued relentlessly.
https://shows.acast.com/words-that-burn/episodes/shadowboxer-by-anne-carson
Ray, Deborah Kogan (2001). Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain. New York: Frances Foster Books. ISBN 978-0-374-33263-1.
Machotka, Ewa (2009). Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai's Hyakunin Isshu. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-90-5201-482-1.
Anderson, Sam. “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson.” The New York Times. The New York Times, March 14, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html.
Marianne Hulsbosch; Elizabeth Bedford; Martha Chaiklin, eds. (2010). Asian Material Culture. Amsterdam University Press. p. 109. ISBN 9789089640901.
Machotka, Ewa (2009). Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai's Hyakunin Isshu. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-90-5201-482-1.
Machotka, Ewa (2009). Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai's Hyakunin Isshu. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-90-5201-482-1.