The surface
of the water mirrors
many things
~Matsumi Kato
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I know where my longing resides. Longing is like a river. No part of the river is the river. For a river flows. The river yesterday is no longer the river today, yet the river is there eternally. We can beckon but not describe it.
~Yukio Mishima
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Though Ive been writing music for over 10 years now, The Floating Worldas a fully realized conceptis relatively new. Its purpose is to act as an expression of that which cannot be spoken, of that which is unknowable through ordinary perception and indescribable in ordinary language. It looks beyond the seen into the unseen; it dwells beyond the illusion, existing in the ephemeral.
The Floating World was a term used to describe a certain type of Japanese art popular in the Edo period (1616-1868), which arose as part of the emergence and increase of a merchant class in Japan. In Japanese, the term is rendered ukiyo-e, or Pictures of the Floating World, with uki meaning floating, yo - world and the final e denoting picture. The term ukiyo can suggest transitory as well, giving another connotation to this phrase. Besides this more common rendering, according to John Fiorillo, There was another character used to write 'uki', which means sorrow, grief, distress, or melancholy. When that alternate character was used in the compound ukiyo it meant sorrowful world and thus had Buddhist or religious connotations. As with the earlier term for 'ukiyo', it also implied a transitory world, but with the implication that the present reality was ephemeral, or an illusion, a preparatory stage before a more meaningful afterlife. Many writers have linked the two ways of writing 'ukiyo' as two opposites of the same perception of transitory reality, the religious emphasis being on the sorrow of daily life, the merchant emphasis on temporary escape and enjoyment. Neither view denied the pessimism experienced in an ephemeral world.
The Floating World simply is. Imperfect and seeking. And thus, it will continue to be.
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