Now you may ask why a book by a visitor to the United States should place so prominently in any quest for the roots of American creativity. If you research the American modernists (artists like O'Keeffe, Dove, Hartley) fostered by Alfred Stieglitz you will discover that many of them were profoundly affected by this simple little book. Maybe it was their reaction to the acceleration of American life as Europe committed suicide in World War I. And after the United States emerged from the war as the dominant economic power, the pace only moved faster.
They needed a pool of tranquility into which to peer as they searched for new ways to interpret the world around them. Recall that O'Keeffe literally stopped painted for two years as the second decade crept toward its midpoint because she felt she could not do original work, rather copying the forms and styles "proven" by Europeans and "approved" by art critics. This little book on tea and the structure the cult of tea imposed on the two dominant Asian societies China and Japan offered a new path, perhaps with a bit of Tao and Zen, to a new way of looking at the world.
And so they did find that way. And, in the process, I am convinced, these artists and writers and filmmakers and composers and choreographers developed forms which each of us can "get" as something which is uniquely American. But, this creativity took time and a lot of staring into those dark areas of the soul...not seeking sadness or guilt...but rather looking for that which had been hid in the process of creating an American soul. And it was found in the richness of the land and of the people.
Most of the seeds had been planted and had sprouted by the time the United States had closed its borders in 1924 to the unlimited immigration that had fed the American industrial revolution of the 1880s forward. As it was, the War had cut most immigration to a trickle, so there were fewer newcomers and those who had arrived previously were swiftly being submerged into the American stream. Most of these immigrants had been the poorest of their peoples, the ones with nothing to leave behind...and certainly the ones who had done little to influence the cultural norms that were characterized by the elites of their states. But what they brought to the United States was a vitality and folk sensibilities which leavened the American loaf.
O'Keeffe was Irish/Hungarian. John Ford was a first generation Irish-American. Aaron Copland's father emigrated from Russia. Others like Ansel Adams and John Steinbeck were children of first or second-generation Californians who had put down roots in the Golden State before Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed forever in 1893. Martha Graham was a relative late-comer to California, but her parents, too, left Pennsylvania for the West sometime after 1910. These, too, were immigrants of sorts, those who abandoned the predictability of the East for the possibilities of the West.
But all found an anchor in something which we today can identify as American culture. Not something translated from British norms or French and German techniques of opera or impressionism or nihilism. They found America in its hills and valleys and cities and people and told these stories using abstract impressionism on canvas or in bronze or sonic riffs which characterized the work of another immigrants' child, George Gershwin. Some argue that Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby tells the American story of the 1920s. Maybe so, but Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is a true sequel exploring the fruit borne by the vines so planted in the 1920s. An American "gets" it. "An American in Paris" or "Appalachian Spring" when performed in Berlin will sound "American" to one raised in Lawrence Kansas or another brought up in Eugene, Oregon. But, to the German ears in the audience, while beautiful, it will not transport them to the same place as their American counterparts.
And these masters arrived at their greatness slowly, with contemplation, looking through that shimmering curtain of quiet and concentration which was discussed in that little "Book of Tea." And that solicitude and calm is what we may have lost in the process of achieving our own speeding modernity.
"The
masters are immortal, for their loves and fears live in us over
and over again. It is rather the soul than the hand, the man than
the technique, which appeals to us,--the more human the call
the deeper is our response." Okakura, Kakuzo"The Book of Tea", Part V Art Appreciation accessed from http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/tea.htm on July 25, 2012.
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