Does the Sea Dream?

Noh Theater, patriarchy and coastal vulnerability.

Detail from “Are We Lost?” First state Aviva Rahmani 450 x 303 mm woodblock print 2025

In retalation for global warming, the sea seems to be coming for coastal humanity. This is not because the sea is vindictive and malevolent. It is because the sea has always been in conversation with continental coastlines, giving and taking sediment to keep estuaries alive. Scientifically that exchange is understood as tidal flushing. Metaphorically, I think that is the healthy in and out breathing of the sea with the land. But today that may be more the dream of the sea alone, speaking in her sleep, rather than still be her reality. Perhaps the sea still dreams of a former glorious time, when she held power over coastal change and humans humbly acknowledged her power. Perhaps it is we, who have tried to vanquish the sea’s power, equally ignoring her dreams and our reality, deafening ourselves to her voice by hardening our coastlines, who have created a crisis.

This essay will make some cultural comparisons between the world I am experiencing in Japan and the world I know in the USA by reflecting on Noh. What I have seen here about Buddhist life in Japanese art has been provocative and was epitomized when I saw my first Noh performance. Noh is a very complex and stylized art I am not an expert on but I think what I experienced might still hold clues to translate the dreams of the sea and our relationships to each other.

In this essay, I will only consider two aspects of Noh theater, as I understand them, poetry and choreography. Poetry is one way to distill experience and resolve conflict. Choreography is bodies in motion in time. Noh, as part of Japanese culture is an expression of Buddhism. I am interested in finding a relationship between greater democracy between people, which I see as a poetic solution to dissent and coastal adaptation to sea level rise, which I see as the choreography of nature. My hope is that this comparison between these two narrow elements of Noh, human relationships and what bioengineering may require might be useful for humanity’s future. I will argue that hardscaping and extractive entitlements are myopic to reality and the opposite of what I see in Noh. I will contend that myopia is also the opposite of a solution to sea level rise or totalitarianism. My lens to convey those comparisons will be through my own work.

My premise is that coastal hardening is analogous to the political hardening of authoritarian regimes and patriarchal systems privately and publicly, that cannot tolerate dissent. Negotiating coastal differences is what the sea understands. I believe democracy depends on how we voice emotion and hear dissension. The former, emotion, is what Noh style especially codified. The latter, unresolved dissension, is embodied in Japan’s tumultuous history. but resolved in Noh’s poetry. I saw both resolution and poetry negotiated in the relationship between performance and audience in Noh.

I have been in Japan since May 6, comparing what I see here and what I hear of news from theIn 2008, This essay will be published from here May 27, the day after Memorial Day in the USA. America’s Memorial Day is a time when our military deaths in defense of democracy are commemorated. Any war is about a failure to negotiate dissension. This year our commemoration will take place at a time of unprecedented political dissension for my country. The dissent is over whether we still have a democracy that can survive a hardened militant adminstration that cannot tolerate dissent and is victimizing it’s own citizenry. Provisionally, Japan seems to have found orderly resolutions to conflict in democratic norms. In considering Noh’s relationship to calm and chaos through the lens of poetry, I see a much deeper undertstanding of time and change. Recognition of that depth was established when Noh was designated for the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Japan, is an archipelogic island nation. She knows the occassionally violent conversation with the sea of any coastally dependent country very well. However, today, like coastal zones worldwide, Japan is trying to control the voice of the sea. She has hardened the edge between water and land with built infrastructure to accomodate urban infrastructure. Yet arguably, all of Japanese culture is predicated on an understanding of historical time, that understanding is closer to how conversations with the sea have historically unfolded. That fluid conversation with the sea brought powerful adaptations to her shores as, Buddhist and Confucian values imported from China.

It is my first time here but my fascination with Japanese culture goes back to my teens, when I first learned about Noh theater and saw Japanese art. I was introduced to Noh at fifteen, as part of a class in drama at the local public school I attended that year in Tarrytown, New York. What I instinctively and immediately recognized was an expression of calm at the center of chaos. That calm in the eye of a storm of chaos may have felt particularly resonant for me because my family has had a long history of participating in and surviving the chaos of war.

The first thing my partner, Richard and I did after arrival was to complete a six-day woodblock workshop wirh Katsu Yuasa in the outskirts of Tokyo. I carved six woodblocks for a small edition based on my series, "Are We Lost?" The base image for that series has haunted me for almost two years: two people reaching to each other despite obstacles and the dangers that surround them. It was meant as a metaphor for how individuals must create connection to overcome the dangers of global warming. The image of people engulfed in violent waves, represents one more species negotiating with nature after unsupportable extractions, apparently risking the possibility that this time, they may be lost and won’t survive.

Global warming has emerged as the single greatest danger to humanity today. It manifests equally violently as fires and floods. I experience our times as individuals reaching towards eachother for sanity despite danger and chaos, while wondering whom may be lost to eachother and themselves in violent seas of dissent and change. My premise is that the chaos we must escape is brought upon us by our extractive behavior. I see the consequences of those extractions in our interactions between each other and within our crumbling ecosystems. The systems instigating those dangerous extractions are authoritarian and militant. Any rigidly militaristic system is an extractive model. Militia cannot brook dissension without hardscaping repression. The individuals and communities in such rigid systems feel entitled to extract to the point of collapse. I believe that rigidity is the opposite of what the sea might dream. In Japan’s history, rigid militaristic systems without dissension were an often repeated and violent model between groups to assert power amongst themselves and against other nations, as, Korea. In the United States, parallel systems protected slavery and excused the genocide of Native Peoples.

Visually, the image for the drawing series that culminated in my woodblock print was partly inspired by the Japanese wood block carving traditions Richard has been researching for several years. The images that obsess him are from the relatively quiet Edo period in Japan, after the former capital of Kyoto, where we are now, was razed and moved to Edo, which became Tokyo. Many of the images from that period include complex carvings of swirling waters, which required extraordinary skill to coax from the hard cherry wood typically used at that time, a challenge that required as much physical strength as dexterity. The work of producing those intricate designs for editions depended upon many different craftsmen to produce each complex illustration: the original artist, the carver, the printer and the producer. It was only gradually that the producers came to fully value and attribute the contributions of the carvers to their beautiful final products.

That gradual attribution to others for essential cultural work is a victory for a more fluid social inclusion that recognizes how productivity is collaborative. It allows a final outcome that publicly valorizes more than just one man and somewhat parallels how women in the West are now being recognized for contributions to the brilliant achievements of the men they partnered with, from Camille Claudel's contributions to Auguste Rodin's sculpture to Albert Einstein's wife, Mileva Maric, or Francis Crick's wife Odile, an artist who designed the first symbol for DNA.

It was after completing our woodblock printing, that we attended my first live Noh performance. As a teenager, I had been capitivated by Noh’s severely stylized formalism, expressed as deliberately paced choreography and ritualized poetic emotion. Those two attributes of sylization and pacing distinguish Noh from Western opera and seem embodied in the two aspects I’m focusing on: poetry and choreography. With few exceptions, Noh’s aesthetic principles about attenuated time in movement are paced to a slow heartbeat. The dances combine highly controlled movements with lyric elegance in the poetic narratives. Together, they express mystic and supernatural experiences.

Despite my limited experience of Noh, those formal attributes about slow choreography and poetic reductions inspired important aspects of my entire career as an artist. My projects have each spanned many years. Conceptually, they choreographed my attentuated reflections and experiments and tethered me to poetic similes. Collectively I created a consistent poetic narrative from project to project for myself, for example, how Ghost Nets at one site led to the Cities and Oceans of If at global sites and eventually, to Blued Trees and international justice. My journey began in 1966, when I gave myself an injunction to start integrating all the knowledge of my previous training. My work since has passed through stages of trying to comprehend human alienation, violence and environmental scarcity and has culminated in a deeper understanding of justice.

The consecutive titles of my projects make a subjective poem, my personal haiku about fifty-five years of projects:

Synapse reality

Stay wait look listen

Sunsets

Floating worlds

Ghost dreams

Requiem

The outsider

Ghost nets

Cities and oceans of if

Blue rocks

Blued trees

Are we lost?

Does the sea dream?

Tolstoy & I

My actual experience of Noh in Tokyo opened me to an entirely different, broader and deeper understanding of how Japanese culture regards time. It explained to me why Noh moved me so much so early in my life that I think I expressed those influences in my own practice for the rest of my career. What I saw as we sat in the audience was how individuals and a community might seamlessly weave cultural history into their lives despite great and perpetual chaos in the society at large, a chaos that bookended the Edo period and was often far more devastating than anything we have yet seen in the United States, even, arguably, our Civil War. On Memorial Day this year, that perception came at a hardscaped nadir for me as news of escalating chaos in the United States continued to come in.

Perpetual exchange is how the sea has maintained a fluid balance between order and chaos for untold millenia. The relatively recent imposition of rigid boundaries may explain this American nadir.

Many in the audience, of all ages and genders at the National Noh Theater we attended appeared in traditional kimonos with Obis, echoing the choreography of the performance and affirming an historical and cultural lineage I have seen deeply ingrained in every aspect of Japanese culture since we arrived. Many in the audience may have understood the coded symbolic messaging from the performers, for example, how turning the head might convey the length of a journey. The performance itself took place on a classic raised dais, close to the audience, positioned almost like an ancient Greek ampitheatre, making the drama an intimate conversation. The effect on me of the choreographed performance was even more explosive than I had anticipated. The costumes and masks were intricate and extravagant art forms in themselves, so dazzling that I often couldn't take in the full impact of other aspects of the event. The centrality of slow movements and poetic metaphor punctuated by music riveted my attention. As I watched, I felt like I was being given a key to the entire world of Japanese culture.

Since then, we have been viewing temples in Kyoto, participating in tea ceremonies, marveling at stone gardens and centuries old Bonsai trees, a disciplined art rooted in Buddhist teachings and Confucianism that requires practitioners to hand down the care of a single plant from one person to the next across many lifetimes of dedication, despite any external upheavals. One tree alone we saw at Ryogen-ji Temple was eight hundred years old, which means its care survived many wars. This attention to the production of exquisite and revered artifacts, often relatively physically small in scale, always meticulously detailed, in service to commonly held spiritual beliefs across deep time despite external distractions is astonishing to an American. The cultural beliefs codified by the Japaneese in these ritual details has as much mythological and mystical significance as any grand Noh performance.

All this work is at the expense of the individual ego, as would be expected in any military culture. The Japanese, however, also recognize that humility can become pathetic self-righteousness. I watched that humility ridiculed in the text of one Noh play we saw, in the form of a nobleman so obsessed with the purity of his own poetic license at the service to beauty, that he didn’t carry money to pay for sweets. He presumed his poem would be adequate compensation. That would have been consistent with a disdain the military classes had for the rising power of the merchants, whose gradual financial power eventually came to control the empire. In performance, the nobleman was ultimately "punished" for his arrogance by the peddler whose mochi he gobbled up without payment, by pursuit from the peddler’s ugly daughter for marriage, making the noble poet's ideals of beauty at the expense of others, the cause of his downfall.

The staggering beauty of Japanese culture until very recently, in such fluid relationship to emotions and history, was built on very rigid and periodically violently challenged caste systems. It is contested whether that rigidity might have even represented a prelude to World War II Fascism. The argument that Japan was inherently Fascistic has been widely researched. Whether or not we quibble over terminologies it must be recognized that at its extreme, humility in service to a wider community, whether or not it is explicitly militaristic, can become as extractive in its own way as fascism is to any society and ultimately, functional ecosystems.

For centuries Japan was ambivalent about Western influences, at times culturally hardscaping itself, practicing an insularity regarding Europe as the Christian Outsider and colonizing invader, even as European artists were profoundly influenced by Japan. That happened while Japan was also deeply beholden to Chinese standards and values. It has been argued that Hokusai's Great Wave was a representation of that political ambivalence, with the wave representing Europe's dominating influence.

It's hard to reconcile the oppressive cruelty of extreme self-sacrifice required of the individual in loyalty to a community with the tranqillity of the art I am studying here. Even the Edo period didn't allow much mobility, particularly for women, a cruelty in itself. The exceptions were among the highest caste military elites or in monastic enclaves. The samurai, who were patrons of Noh, allowed some steady flow of influence and power between classes. Functionally, the samurai became one crucial part of complex trading relationships with other nations.

Today in Japan, I see the ghosts of ritualized and costumed Noh performances that blurred distinctions between performers and audience in the black suit uniforms of mostly male administrative and corporate legions traveling in twos and threes on the subways and the dainty young women in flowing skirts and translucent tops on the streets that make them appear like exquisite and ethereal flowers.

The reification of militaristic and sexist values is hardly unique to Japan. A rigid, gender-based set of social class rules governs many cultures. The prototype of the rising male star in many aspects of European culture also has military aspects with psychological implications in its competitive aggression. In that construct, competition is regarded as a battle for dominance at the expense of others, often recapitulated in sporting events, such as football. It is no “accident,” that recent medical research has observed patterns of catastrophic head injuries amongst the players. Second wave Feminism critiqued some women who seemed to rise to power using strategies copied from the patriarchal values of materially successful men around them expressed as male-identified.

The conventional tropes of such male social success, defined as power over others, at its extreme, has more recently been called toxic masculinity, a term which arose out of the culture of traditional American male poets such as Robert Bly, an associate of Gary Snyder, himself heavily influenced by Japanese Zen culture and deep ecology. Bly questioned those behaviors. It is only recently that serious research has investigated the psychological implications. In the seventies, male-identification as a casual term meant a ruthless unigendered ambition for power at all costs, particularly at the cost of less-powerful women or people of color. I would describe that as an extractive model that destabilizes ecosystems.

In the eighties and into the nineties, some of us saw that exemplified at the time in Margaret Thatcher. The association was so ubiquitous that a gallery emerged sardonically called by the same name. Today, the reification of conventional male dominance seems to have survived and permeated the entire American Republican party and authoritarian regimes across the planet. In Japan, the flip side of that male dominant iconography flourished in the traditional cult of the Geisha, a woman trained in many arts, whose virginity is bid for and spends the rest of her life as a superbly disciplined courtesan in service to a powerful man.

In nineteenth century America, Godey's Manual gave strict guidelines for female behavior in service to men. In upper class Western society, that meant rigorous training in a number of arts, from the physical endurance of ballet, equestrienne practice and figure skating, to multiple musical instruments and languages as well as how to stand for couturiere fittings and how to enter a room full of strangers, poised for effect. In the American fifties and early sixties, virginity before marriage in that system was as crucial, ritualized and impersonal an entry level requirement for marriage as the bidding for any Japanese Geisha once was. Arguably, the more contemporary Western proletarian model with geisha trappings is expressed in Martha Stewart's consummate guidelines for being a good hostess, particularly in food preparation.

In the original second wave feminist discussions I participated in, we recognized how onerous the demands for gendered behaviors were on anyone. Both traditional cis gendered roles required the internalization of many psychological frustrations such as fear, blame and shame. Rigid roles paved the way for destructive acting out and self-sabotage in various addictive forms, from rageful venting to alcoholism. At extremes, those outlets for repression at the service and paradoxical expense of others manifests as suicide, implicitly or explicitly. In fact, in Japan, Sepukku was the actualized penalty for disobedience.

In the West, the problem of success at any cost is not just about over-weaning ego. A model of success that reifies individualism at the expense of community is a false construct. No one succeeds in isolation. Service to a wider community also doesn't preclude individual accomplishment. Community that represses individual needs is just totalitarianism. The persistence of these traditional tropes goes to the acceptance of extractive models of behavior towards each other in the name of social cohesion and a cultural status quo. It also requires the perception that there is an outside enemy who must be vanquished.

Of course, it’s ironic to view that deluded behavior in a Feminist but there are as many women in every culture who would step all over everyone in sight and call themselves Feminists to service the ideals of social power as any ambitious man. Tolstoy parodied such characters and their devastating impacts on others in an authoritarian regime in "War and Peace." It is a reason I have drawn self-portraits over and over on his pages in my series, “Tolstoy and I,” searching for my own identity in a story of vainglory, even as the USA falls to vain-glorious authoritarianism.

It is no different for a woman who is a driven political or professional operative to sacrifice others to her own ease than any Trad wife who attaches herself to a powerful man who subjugates others and their own children’s well-being. Some people are willing to sacrifice anyone and everything to their own comfort.

The extent of that liability to a community for ecocide was a question for me at the heart of "The Sea Has The Last Word," the operatic iteration of Blued Trees performed at the Anita Rogers Gallery in 2024. Personal ambition for personal gain is ultimately a narcissistic model whether expressed as an irresponsible Japanese poet in a Noh performance or a corporate fossil fuel executive hiding the impacts of climate change for profit.

The alternative behavioral model many of us explored in the seventies and later, was like the Beatles song, “All you need is love, luv.” The models were intended to be co-operative, generous with attribution, willing to see the universe as abundant, inclusive and pluralistic. In 1970, I established a small commune to explore what that might look like, based on what I had absorbed from auditing Herbert Marcuse’s lectures at the University of San Diego in La Jolla and many conversations with him in his office about how to apply progressive ideas to relationships in practice. I called the commune a "Synapse Reality," an allusion to how neurons interact and conceived of it as a performance event.

The discussions that informed “Synapse Reality,” came out of questions that had first arisen as I directed my performance group, the American Ritual Theatre (A.R.T. 1969-71) and from the encounter group movement I was part of then. Later, I briefly attached myself to communities formed around powerful women, as, Judy Chicago, in a search for matriarchal models for community. Throughout my life, I’ve also often looked to indigenous, particularly traditional Native American cultures for guidance. They are often still matriarchal, systems in which the women hold the property and chose the war leaders. The most fundamental premise I learned from the tribes was that any interaction requires an attitude of gratitude, predicated on giving back to life rather taking from life and others: fluidity in practice and the opposite of hardening.

My premise in these searches was that the key to social transformation was in mindfulness that evolved past militarism. Mindfulness has focused on specific kinds of interactions but they all work like the sea does: in a flow between points of view. Many thinkers have addressed child-raising as the nexus for mindful change based in flow, as the Montessori approach which governed a private school I attended for several years, Scarborough Country Day School and may have prepared me for a lifetime of interdisciplinarianism. But that opportunity for another approach to childhood learning is also predicated on a healthier model for intimate famlial and parental relationships than most people encounter or grow up in. Arguably in the last century, Israeli, Russian and Chinese models explored models for different familial relationships. Those models were based more in community values than isolated nuclear families. The results were indeterminate.

What I learned from my mentor Allan Kaprow, whom some recognized as a Zen master, was that an art practice could be metaphorical, a notion consistent with what I had learned as a teenager from every aspect of Japanese culture I studied, from Haiku to Noh and yet have real world effects.

I have always believed mindfulness requires practical strategic application. The projects I initiated and detailed in my work memoir, "Divining Chaos," all manifested in some real world way. They began in 1970 with a work I called, "Stay Wait Look Listen," which emerged from A.R.T.. my performance group, as a precusor to “Synapse Reality.” Together and sequentially, I feel my projects comprise a complete pilgrimage narrative that enacted my own living version of a Noh performance, seeking enlightenment through ritualized behaviors with practical implications. In Blued Trees, I applied my trigger point theory to intersections between legal theories as agents to counter fossil fuel infrastructures. I identified how definitions of copyright and eminent domain might be a Trojan horse for authoritarian fossil fuel hegemonies. The conceptual interaction between the two aspects of the law implied to me that we could re-examine the premises in policy decisions around ownership that lead to ecocide.

In my personal journey towards mindfulness, which has included many recovery programs and life-long therapy, I came across one model for couples that has had a big influence on my recent thinking about a healthier model for intimate relationships and consequently, families. The first premise is that whomever you are with is your ally, not your enemy and when we criticize others, we lapse into adversarial relationships with toxic and addictive properties. In interaction, they advocate for eschewing patterns of criticizing others. That restraint can result in respect-based interactions that are fluid not rigid. Needless to say, this works best when all parties agree to refrain from personal attacks. It doesn’t work in a neofascist world. But basically, this is no different than the old adages of love your neighbor as you love yourself, turn the other cheek and so on. When those ideas are one-sided, it is simply another opportunity for the tragedy of the commons. The tropes of social competition for dominance and acquiescence can be deeply ingrained. But neither the sea nor a relationship can tolerate a one-sided exchange forever.

Nonetheless, I have found that principles of reciprocity for healthy intimate relationships can apply to almost any relationship, including those we have with Others in nature, whether trees or insects. When I worked with the ecoart list serv, which culminated in the "Ecoart In Action," textbook, those were the ideal models for our loosely rules-based interactions.

In “Are We Lost?” whether we succeed in applying mindfulness before we are washed away by a tsunami of chaos is still indeterminate. I took the questions posed by Blued Trees as far as I could (ICC). That was part of an iteration of the Pacific Standard show exhibited there in 2025. The insight that emerged for me while producing the recent woodblock print of "Are We Lost?" as with the series of self -portrait drawings on Tolstoy's "War and Peace," “Tolstoy and I,” may not be kumbaya but still seem relevant: solutions to gender-based expectations, authoritianism or sea level rise all come back to problems with rigidity and extraction vs. flow.

The two drawing series refer to the “The Sea Has The Last Word” opera excerpt. They are bringing me closer to identifying trigger points of accountability for ecocide. In my woodblock print, the two figures live in an envelope of light, perhaps at an intersection of the commons, legal liability, ownership and human behavior.

This work is being created from the safety of Japan now and my reflections on Noh, as I struggle to see a clue to preserve values that might protect the Earth. Tolstoy didn’t have an answer 160 years ago. The stone gardens we are admiring in Kyoto are equally mute.

What I am sure of is that the assault progressive societies today appear to be engulfed in is a new kind of world war. The effects are manifesting in an environmental war against all life on Earth. The collateral damage seems to be awakening the sea from her dreams.

Science has long been essential to my practice. In island biogeography, we look for abundance in where and how exchanges occur between ecosystems, impossible across hardened boundaries. An understanding of island biogeography has guided all my major ecological artworks since 1990. Systems die and transform from the edges but are revived by flow. When I first developed trigger point theory out of the Ghost Nets project I had one clear goal: to identify specific small but degraded or collapsed geographically located habitat sites whose restoration could trigger a nuclear cascade of repercussions for large landscape protection. My criteria was to look for the potential for flow. Incipient flow is in variations in geomorphic features where water and soil might accumulate. My specific original interest was in degraded estuarine and wetlands systems. Since then, that interest has intensified as coastal landscapes have become ever more vulnerable to sea level rise and emerged as prime places where storms created by climate change are causing damage. What I didn't anticipate in that research was how that would take me into the questions I explore now about hardscaping.

In Tokyo, I discussed sea level rise and hardening Japanese wetlands systems with Michiko Akiba and her colleague Hiroko Shimizo of Waseda University in Tokyo. After seeing the Noh performance, I speculated that there could be an intersectional trigger point between the model of audience participation, the poetic content of the Noh performance I experienced and finding answers to local coastal environmental challenges. Could trigger point theory observe and contribute strategies from Noh to intervene in coastal land loss that doesn’t depend on either retreat or hardening?

Japan is struggling with the same problem the entire world is struggling with now: coastal habitats house the majority of human populations. Every coast is endangered by sea level rise now. The forcible removal of populations causes extreme distress. This is the same problem I have been personally confronting since early 2024 in Maine: how might I save the building my own coastal studio is in from the escalating effects of hurricanes?

The paradigm Thomas Kuhn identified in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that there must be a marriage between historical understandings of how things work and new ideas, such between Newton’s contributions and Einstein’s. That marriage is what I intuitively believe I observed in Tokyo between the Noh performance and its audience. Perhaps now is the time to reconcile unconventional past and present sources of knowledge.

Can we hear the seas last word? Art has the same porousness defined by island biogeography. In trigger point theory, I have insisted that we must layer all possible information, not just digitally or even logically but intuitively and aesthetically to find answers to chaos. In the real world, perhaps it is time to bioengineer a higher level of poetic complexity and intuition based on what art can intuit.