Circle Line (Yoko Kanno)

(from the live-action film Honey & Clover)

Right now this brilliant piece of music is taking me away to places where I’m not so emotionally exhausted I feel like sleeping all the time.
I feel a deep sense of peace and in a way somehow understanding in this music. Yoko Kanno’s music has always struck this kind of chord with me, and though I haven’t seen the Honey & Clover film yet as I’m awaiting a subbed version, I can easily match the atmosphere of the music with that of the animated series’.

There is a simplicity and grace to Kanno’s music that strikes me in a deeply spiritual way, as if she is somehow connected to the human psyche in a way that no other musician is. At times I’ve felt similar things in response to visual representations, such as the anime of Yoshitoshi ABe and some of the minimalist and abstract films I love to watch, but of-course music is a very different medium. Even though Yoko Kanno’s music is always accompanied by a visual image, I’m easily able to listen to it without the visuals and re-interpret it to my life in whatever way I need to. Not all soundtrack music can be translated as such to a different context, and while it’s true that many soundtracks aren’t intended to be listened to in this way, Yoko Kanno composes with such skill that her most emotional pieces always inspire any number of varied responses when taken out of the context of the visuals it would usually accompany.

The serenity of her music is exactly what I need right now, having just come out of a long-term relationship badly. The sense that Kanno’s music feels something like intimacy would be strange if it weren’t so comforting. For a while now I’ve been continuing to grow in an abstract kind of way, and of-course the more asian and Japanese cinema I watch, the more inspiration I gather from the art. Japanese cinema in particular contains a stillness not found in any other nationality’s presentations. Some European and Middle-Eastern films have very similar atmospheres and while I wouldn’t say the Japanese form is better, it’s probably the one most suited to my personal tastes, though I do enjoy the other two. Perhaps it’s this stillness that I find so intimate; as I find myself cut-off from direct affection and intimacy again, I naturally seek those artworks that inspire those feelings in me.

I was speaking to my father the night before last, telling him about how exhausting it is to feel so much loss, grief, anger, bitterness and disbelief and disorientation all at once. No matter what I feel though, those emotions aren’t unwelcome. I understand that they are natural and important elements of life, and I celebrate them as much as happiness and joy. At the same time that I feel all of these things that tire me so, I still feel good in the sense that I’m alive, conscious and fully feeling it all. I think perhaps being ill in the past has taught me that feeling nothing can perhaps be one of the most horrible things in life, not only disallowing happiness, but denying pain too. Along with all of these emotions there are other subtler but equally as strong ones; for example the irrational but almost despearte desire for everything (meaning life) to just go away, or to just right itself like a ship listing on its side because it’s taking on water. There have been times when I’d wishd that we hadn’t broken up, that she’d just grown out of her problems and we’d just understood and accepted each-other. There have been times when I wished the recent past could just be erased and we could just go back to how we were. That isn’t going to happen, but that desire isn’t a real one. It’s a reaction to what’s happened, and it’s a natural part of our psyche to want things to be easier than they are. I wouldn’t trade where I am now for anything in the world – I need to feel this in a crucial and essential way, simply because it is life. There are other subtle feelings like wishes that a replacement for affection and intimacy would just land on my lap, but again this is unrealistic and further to that, circumvents one of the elements of life most precious to me; the desire to slowly learn about someone so totally that love becomes natural, be it in a passionate sense or with the closeness of friendship. Long ago I set asside the simple adolescent understanding that those we desire can only be lovers or strangers. I don’t ever want to force such things, and if a deeply intimate relationship isn’t to be, it would be foolish to throw away any possibility of a wonderful friendship as we so often do when we’re younger.

Art is a powerful thing. There are times when it is our only friend, and rightly so. Sometimes the very nature of our intimacy with the people around us can isolate us from something very important; a vital part of ourselves that is at once intimately personal in the strongest sense, and that is totally constructed by our own sense of being an individual. This core of ourselves can be described in countless ways, and I think what I’ve discussed here is merely one tiny facet of it.
Nevertheless, I feel it is this very personal core that we ultimately seek to share with another in the form of a lover. This is perhaps why ultimate separation feels so painful, so exhausting, and why we can feel so lost when it happens.

I’m greatful for Yoko Kanno and her ability to write music that speaks the language of this core, the language of the heart.