Kissing the Mask Quotes

“Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities”
― William T. Vollmann, Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater

“What is a woman to me? The answer must be: A projection. Who is projecting, and for what reason, I cannot necessarily know from the performance itself. Mr. Umewaka and Mr. Mikata do not when playing their feminine roles feel themselves to be women; they strive, as I so often in my wonderment repeat, to be nothing; yet when they enact women I see them as women. Meanwhile the psyche within a male body which mechanically performs itself as such may see itself as female”
― William T. Vollmann, Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater