Embodiment: Samurais and Literary Giants
A few weeks ago, John and I went to see the SAMURAI exhibit at the Denver Art Museum . 140 artifacts brought to life over 700 years of elegant Japanese pageantry (from the 1100s through the 1800s) - suits of armor, helmets, weapons, horse regalia, battle gear, even ornate swords used by Japanese women to protect their homes when their samurai husbands were away at war. I wandered among the iconic objects, remembering my time in Japan in 1965, imagining the samurai men who wore the helmets, the horses whose lungs bellowed beneath gold-gilt and tooled saddles, haunches muscled up beneath brass-meshed armor. The only thing missing was the pulsing blood, flesh and bones that held up these enduring legacies. I stood in awe, thinking of the men and women who crafted and wore each artifact. Legacies, I realized, stand on the shoulders of actual embodied human beings, and they rise up from the landscapes in which they are rooted. Our finest writers know this. The...