When I was 12 years old, I went on a backpacking trip with my
scout troop in the Uinta Mountains. I don’t remember very much about this trip
except that it involved a lot of fishing. The thing that stands out in my mind
most was the day I got it into my head to climb up to a ridge above our camp. I
think I simply wanted to see what was on the other side. In my rusty memory,
this was a huge endeavor and no one was willing to do it with me. I felt like I
was heading out to climb Mt. Everest alone. It probably only took me an hour or
so to reach the top, but it seemed like a herculean effort at the time. There
was no trail, just the loose, lichen covered rocks you see so often above tree
line in these high mountains. When I finally reached the top, I was rewarded
with a view that I have never forgotten. It was the first time in my young life
that I had ever been confronted with such massive and overwhelming beauty. Nearly
the whole of the High Uintas Wilderness spread out before me with its craggy
peaks, snow fields, and sparkling blue-green lakes. It was as if the universe
were expanding right before my eyes. I started to cry and then fell to my knees
to thank God right there and then for such a miraculous gift. All that beauty…
I didn’t know how to even begin to process it.
Not long ago, I stumbled onto the perfect word to describe that
experience: Yūgen. This is a Japanese word that means “an experience of the
universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and powerful for words.” Yūgen
is a key aspect of Japanese aesthetics. It’s a word that they use to describe
certain qualities of poetry, art, and theater that you can feel but can’t quite
express. The word is often used to describe the beauty that is sometimes felt
in sadness, suffering, or loss. Like so much of the Zen-based Japanese
aesthetics, this is an extremely nebulous word that is left up to each
individual to try and discover and define. The word itself is a journey; a
beautiful and difficult journey full of yearning, full of longing.
Kamo no Chōmei, a famous 12th century Japanese poet and essayist, described yūgen like this: “It is like an autumn evening under a colorless expanse of silent sky. Somehow, as if for some reason that we should be able to recall, tears well uncontrollably.”
As I set out on my own journey to better understand this
word and, more importantly, the feeling it’s meant to express, I thought of a
talk called
“A Yearning for Home” by the apostle Marvin J. Ashton in the October 1992 L.D.S.
General Conference. In it, he explained how we are children of our Heavenly
Father and that we came to earth to “…experience a period of probation and
testing, a period during which a veil would be drawn over our memories so that
we would be free either to walk by faith and by the Spirit or to forsake our
spiritual heritage and birthright.” He went on to say that “when we have a
yearning and don’t know what it is for, perhaps it’s our soul longing for its
heartland, longing to be no longer alienated from the Lord and the pursuit of
something much higher, better, and more fulfilling than anything this earth has
to offer.” How beautiful! A feeling of homesickness for a home we can’t quite
recall, but our souls long for. To me, that sounds like Yūgen.
Certainly, this is the same thing that Philip Paul Bliss was
describing in his hymn
“More HolinessGive Me” when he wrote:
“More purity give me,
More strength to
o'ercome,
More freedom from
earth-stains,
More longing for
home.”
When I think of Yūgen in terms of beautiful suffering that’s
beyond words to describe, then the ultimate example of this has to be Christ in
Gethsemane. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First
Presidency of the L.D.S. church, recently wrote about this in an article titled
“Encircled in His Gentle Arms”. In this article, he writes, “I am overwhelmed
with profound gratitude for what the sinless Son did for all mankind and for me…
What the Savior did from Gethsemane to Golgotha on our behalf is beyond my
ability to grasp.” Later he adds that when we are suffering, “if we will lift
our hearts to the Lord during those times, surely He will know and understand.
He who suffered so selflessly for us in the garden and on the cross will not
leave us comfortless now. He will strengthen, encourage, and bless us. He will
encircle us in His gentle arms.” The Yūgen-like paradox of beautiful suffering
is clearly felt in the Savior’s atonement.
In this same article, Uchtdorf describes a painting by Frans
Schwartz called “The Agony in the Garden”. It demonstrates the quality of yūgen
perfectly. In fact, Uchtodorf described it as “achingly beautiful” and says “the
longer I contemplate this painting, the more my heart and mind swell with
inexpressible feelings of tenderness and gratitude.” This is exactly what yūgen
is. Benito Ortolani, a leading scholar of Japanese theater explained yūgen as "a
profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe ... and the sad beauty
of human suffering". Ponder this painting in a calm and quiet moment and
see if it doesn’t make you feel that way.
 |
| The Agony in the Garden, by Frans Schwartz |
I’ve often tried, usually unsuccessfully, to infuse my own
work with the quality of yūgen. The most recent example is a scene from my current
novel-in-progress. In this scene, the protagonist, Kirby, is at school with his
friend, Lily, when they discover another friend, “Big”, standing out in the
rain. Here it is:
“Look!” Lily said and pointed out
the window.
I
looked and there was Big. He was all alone, wearing a bright orange Hawaiian
shirt, standing still, his eyes closed, a huge smile on his face, in the rain.
“What’s he doing?”
“I guess he’s…” Lilly paused
searching for an answer, shook her head and then said, “just being Big.”
“He’s going to be late for our
presentation,” I said, “and very wet.”
“Yeah, we better go get him.”
Big was in the middle of a small
courtyard that no one ever used. I didn’t even know you could go in there. It
was just an ugly cement square with ugly cement benches surrounded on all sides
by two stories of ugly glass windows. I suppose it could have been a nice
garden or something, but the sun never found its way down into the narrow
opening to the sky and some idiot decided to make the whole place concrete. It
was about as inviting and comfortable as a Soviet era prison yard. And there
was Big standing in the middle of it smiling.
We found a door to the courtyard
and it was, in fact, unlocked. Who knew? Lily opened it and yelled, “Big!
You’re going to be late to class. What are you doing?” Her voice echoed around
the courtyard much louder than I expected.
Big turned and looked at us. It
seemed like it took a few seconds for him to recognize who we were. Then he
smiled even bigger and said, “Come here, you have to experience this.” His
voice was quiet, almost reverent, but it carried so that we could hear it
perfectly across the courtyard.
“Experience what? Rain?” Lily said.
“I’ve felt rain before. Now come on, we have a presentation to do and you’re
getting soaked.”
“No, really, come here. It’s
beautiful.” Big beckoned to us with his hand and closed his eyes again.
“Let’s just go to class,” I said.
“The late bell is going to ring at any second.”
Lily looked at me, down the hall
towards our class, back to Big, then at me again. “You can go to class if you
want. I’m going to go see what he’s talking about.”
“What? Why—” I started to complain,
but she ran out into the rain to Big. I heard Big whisper something to her and
she closed her eyes. There was a long pause as they both stood there getting
drenched and then Lily laughed the most perfect, beautiful laugh, and that
laugh fluttered around the ugly cement courtyard like a living thing, like butterflies,
and the next thing I knew I was running out into the rain to join them.
I don’t know what the rain is like
where you live, but in Utah it’s cold. It doesn’t rain much here, we are in a
desert after all, but when it does, it’s always cold, even in the middle of
summer. Usually the drops are huge things that smack you in the face and they
are almost always accompanied by enough wind to knock you over. That whole “I
like to go for walks in the rain” crap that you hear about people saying in
personal ads is total garbage in Utah. Maybe other places it’s nice, but Utah
rain, as a general rule, is not pleasant. Sure enough, this rain was cold, very
cold, but it wasn’t the usual big drops that almost hurt to get hit by.
Instead, it was made up of light, small drops that were coming down pretty
thick, and there was no wind.
When I reached Big I said, “What
are you doing? Let’s go back inside!”
Lily said, “Just close your eyes
and listen.”
This was not what I expected. I
thought maybe Big was just being all melodramatic and it was going to be like
in the movies when you see some drought stricken farmer out in the field when
it finally starts to rain and he knows his farm is saved and he looks up at the
sky and savors the feel of the rain on his face, which, like I said, is total
crap in Utah because it’s just cold and miserable. But, no, they wanted me to
listen. To what?
I closed my eyes, concentrated, and
I heard it. Ok, I know this is going to sound stupid, but just trust me when I say
it was amazing. It’s one of those things where, really, you just had to be
there. I’ll try to describe it and it will probably sound pretty lame, so
you’ll just have to take my word for it. First of all, that ugly cement
courtyard had the near magical ability to magnify even the tiniest of sounds
and make them seem big, significant, and perfect. The water pooled on the
ground everywhere making the entire place into a shallow pond that was no more
than a centimeter deep. The little drops of rain hit the pooled water and the
sound was amplified. Millions and millions of drops all hitting the water and
all being amplified and it was as if I could hear each one of them individually
and each one seemed important and beautiful and just right! While I could hear
each of their unique voices, I could also hear the chorus they made together
and they sang like a mother whispering to her baby, “hush, hush, hush.”
Suddenly, I was crying and I didn’t understand why. Embarrassed, I jerked my
eyes back open, but Big and Lily still had theirs closed and hadn’t noticed my
boobing. I figured the rain would hide the one or two tears that had managed to
leak out. All this only took 30 seconds at the most. I knew that I was
experiencing something rare and unworldly. There’s a word for it I think,
ephemeral maybe? Evanescent? No, they don’t quite capture it. Maybe no word
can. Then the late bell was ringing.
The funny thing is, now I know the word that Kirby was
searching for. I hope I managed to give you a sense of yūgen in
that little out-of-context excerpt. I think it’s a
good sign if I can sum the whole scene up in a haiku:
I listen as the
rain whispers in my
mother’s
still voice, “hush,
hush, hush.”
Is that more yūgen? I don’t know. I do know that this
concept of yūgen is something I’ve valued, sought after, and tried to emulate
for as long as I can remember even though I never knew to call it by that name
until just recently. Maybe it all started with that moment in the Uintas when I
wept for the beauty of the mountains. But I would argue it started long before
that. It started the moment I was born, always longing for my home beyond the
veil, drawn to anything that reminded me of it, seeking to infuse just a little
hint of it into my own creations.
