on things not said

I am finding nowadays that secret, incomplete drafts are oftentimes more seductive than a completed work. I think of Monet’s changeling haystacks, the Belvedere Torso cleaved of its marble arms and feet, the half-recorded songs locked in Prince’s vault. What is not said, what is not done – the secret, the unbidden and the restrained – is more powerful than the saying and doing itself. While reading an interview that Hayao Miyazaki gave some months ago, where he discussed his last, lumbering venture back into animation with his movie ‘How Do You Live?’, I came across a watercolor image of his 1997 movie ‘Princess Mononoke’. Blue has seeped out the painter’s brush, and I can imagine the pale sky of his water cup, into which he sinks his brushes and on whose rim he taps with absentminded diligence, before daubing pale azure for the ground, cerulean for the trees, and denim for the darkening sky. My eyes linger on the blip of saffron that is Mononoke’s mask, then on the light teal the painter has chosen for Mononoke’s mane, the same shade as her wolf’s underbelly. This one blue image made the entire movie flash through my consciousness, like a children’s flipbook that starts and ends in the space of a breath. That is the power of tone, and of restraint. Just a few clouds of blue conveyed Miyazaki’s entire tonal universe, full of things not said, stories waiting to be told, fragments of dreams waiting to be touched, all with a power that rivals the actual dream itself.

[Image description: A watercolor imageboard from Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” (1997). Credit Hayao Miyazaki © 1997 Studio Ghibli. Printed in this New York Times interview written by Ligaya Mishan.]

I gather that such restraint and perfection of tone applies to writing. What is not written, what is understood and implicit, is more powerful than the writing itself. When Brando screeches for STELLA, a whole play’s worth of loneliness and masculine need can be found in those six screamed letters. Today, I hear the name and remember the entire play. When Marguerite Yourcenar wrote of Hadrian losing his mind to the grief that accompanied Antinous’ death in her brilliant Memoirs of Hadrian, she was immensely measured in describing it. I was fascinated by how, instead of describing Hadrian’s grief the way a psychiatrist would, or the way my young friends and I would when analyzing some long-held trauma (amateurishly and with wanton authority) she simply described the small, petty continuances of Hadrian’s life. In the two hundred pages following Antinous’ death, there is only line that makes any explicit mention of Hadrian’s grief.

After the emperor accidentally blinds his scribe’s right eye in misdirected anger, he writes: ‘Some days later the man resumed his work, a bandage across his face. I sent for him and asked him humbly to fix the amount of compensation which was his due. He replied with a wry smile that he asked of me only one thing, another right eye. He ended, however, by accepting a pension. I have kept him in my service; his presence serves me as a warning, and a punishment, perhaps. I had not wished to injure the wretch. But I had not desired, either, that a boy who loved me should die in his twentieth year.’ The harsh reality that he must stay and live and remain, while his beloved has left, was far more symptomatic of real grief than a scientific rendering of that grief ever could be. And it hurt, like nothing else I had read. This is Yourcenar’s capacity for restraint, her talent for tone. With one line, she makes me feel the largesse of time, the ache of living while your beloved has died, the lassitude of starting a new day, like wading through molasses, while always feeling that sawing loneliness that tempts bodily harm – all in small, tight sentences, where what is not said is far more powerful than what is.

The end of Miyazaki’s interview, written by Ligaya Mishan, is worth reading the way she wrote it:

It is time. Miyazaki rubs the top of his head and lights a cigarette, one of his signature king-size, charcoal-filtered Seven Stars.

I am allowed one last question. “The title of your next film is ‘How Do You Live?,’” I say. “Will you give us the answer?”

The smile comes only after he speaks:

“I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.”