Updates, Live: Mono No Aware

(video by jovosuck123)

Matt made another superb video: it's snowing a lot and he's going home. The title is Mono No Aware: the elegiac feeling of the transience of things; more than that: your empathy toward things, your sadness that they are passing. Lacrimae rerum says Virgil in Aeneid, tears for things: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

The term Mono No Aware was coined in Japan in the Edo period and it is essential to understand the Japanese aesthetic. You see, some structures transcend civilizations: Mono No Aware has a correspondent in Lacrimae rerum.

How do they get this effect of Mono No Aware, the Japanese artists? Look at the video of Matt: he is a Briton, but he loves the movies of Ozu and Hou. I talked here about Millennium Mambo; the video of Matt calls in mind the final scene of Millennium Mambo, and that in turn is a tribute paid by Hou to Ozu: it snowed in Tokyo that winter. It is not by pure chance that Hou moves suddenly the action of his film to Japan, and creates a Mono No Aware effect.

The video of Matt, like the final scene of Millennium Mambo, puts us in front of a reality that is beyond our power to control things; we live in the country of snowmen, our dreams will die once the sun melts the snow, things and dreams and our lives will pass, while snow will come again, and again, and again. Here, in front of the snow that keeps on falling, we have the revelation of the transcendental: the moment of stasis.