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VOL. 01:4 |
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$12.50
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Parabola's Winter 1976 issue: Rites of Passage It is significant that the word rite comes from the same root as art and order. Like all real art, like the movements of sacred dances, ritual provides order, a pattern, a channel through which the energy of an event or a series of events can flow in an evolutionary process toward a larger meaning, or a new stage or level of life. It offers us ways in which our transitions may be illuminated, helped to move up to consciousness instead of falling into accident and chaos: made to make sense. It is a ladder or a bridge, like that of the Noh theater's stage, marking the slow and exact steps of a passage from one world to another, between our ordinary daily lives and another dimension of meaning which surrounds us and yet is a "mystery" because our eyes are closed to it. But the bridge itself is not a mystery and the eyes must not be closed. What combination of long discipline and inspiration, what marriage of service and grace, produces the Noh actor, or indeed any real artist? The hero may be you or me, but only at the highest reaches of our most impossible possibility. The Symplegades were never traversed by accident or in a dream, but only in the most active instant of a perfect and present attention. The rite of passage demands our total participation. --from the editorial Focus Cover: Cover by Frederick Franck "The drawing of Noh on the cover, as well as the ones accompanying my article, are not "illustrations." They are in fact the nucleus around which the words crystallized; for drawing is my way of seeing, and my eye fell in love with Noh at first sight. These drawings were all done during performances in the Noh theaters of Kyoto and the one that is part of the Oomoto sanctuary at Kamtoka." --Frederick Franck In this issue:
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