Meeting these artisans allowed me another opportunity to reflect on the craft of origami and how it had come to be practiced in the United States. The passion, artistic vision, and technical refinement that Indian craftspeople bring to their work are the outcome of centuries-old traditions passed down by word of mouth from father to son and mother to daughter. Each piece of craftsmanship expresses a culture’s repository of religion and folklore while simultaneously allowing the artisan a limited amount of freedom to explore his or her own creative ideas. And while the created object is ornamental and decorative, it is also practical: something to be worn, to carry food or water, to create music (the ghatam, an ancient south Indian instrument, is a specially fashioned clay pot), to serve in a religious ceremony.
The same could certainly be said of Japanese crafts and of origami as it was practiced in Japan for most of a millennium. But when Westerners took up origami around the middle of last century, they chose to appropriate the technical rather than the cultural aspects of Japanese folding. Such uniquely Japanese traditions as the thousand cranes, the Shinto shrine, the tea ceremony, and the strict master-disciple relationship meant little to the new self-made folders of the Americas and Europe; instead, they seized upon the geometry of the kite base, fish base, bird base, and frog base as if it had always been their own. Western paperfolding began with a powerful set of mathematical relationships but little or no cultural tradition in which to ground them.
I came to realize that my own origami designs fell squarely in the middle of this traditionless Western tradition. Unlike Japanese origami or the crafts I encountered in India, most of my early creations had no historical origin, no set of cultural associations, and no utility: they were objects to be seen, not used. They arose not from a collective, cultural wellspring but rather my own, individualized response to principles of geometry and to creatures that I had seen only in aquariums, zoos, or—stuffed—at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. (In India, the depictions of tigers, elephants, and monkeys are often based on encounters in the wild.) Whatever aesthetic delight my creations afforded the viewer arose from their finished form and the technical ingenuity required to fold them, not from a shared, empathic relationship between the viewer and the creator.
Typical New Yorkers are oblivious to origami design on phone booth.
Memories of my childhood in New York state brought to life these three scenes of Montauk Lighthouse, the Adirondack Mountains, and a Sailboat in a series I designed for the New York State Department of Tourism. The finished versions were folded from the tourism brochure, and photographs of the models appeared on telephone booths and billboards throughout New York City. The lighthouse cottage appears in this book.
Seen in perspective, the mountains reveal the irregular crags and promontories, the order mixed with improvisation, of their counterparts from nature. They employ a spiraling sequence of closed-sink folds that avoids unnatural-looking horizontal or vertical creases. The folds are similar in shape, but because they rotate and reduce in size with each turn, no two faces of the mountain are the same, and the resulting origami models appear natural and asymmetric.
Many of my earlier models exhibit a high degree of symmetry. The pattern of creases in my model of an Elephant reveals mosaics of repeating shapes. The taut geometry reflects an efficient folding process, necessary to achieve the elephant’s pointed tusks and tapered trunk (with tiny “fingers” at the tip).
A Mysterious Affinity
Along with Indian crafts, I found myself deeply influenced by Indian music, from the classical ragas I heard performed by renowned musicians such as L. Shankar and Zakir Hussain in a Mumbai concert hall to the powerful, rough-hewn folk music I heard sung by the goat- and camel-herders of the plains and deserts. Classical Indian music has a completely different quality than most Classical Western music. Often meditative and dreamlike, it can give the sense of being in motion without going anywhere. Evoking the paradox of the raga’s journey, the Indian music critic Raghava R. Menon writes in Discovering Indian Music, “Its possibilities are infinite and yet it always remains unfinished. Its ending is always a temporal ending . . . In the immediate present, there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing is finished . . .We can see the invisible in it, laden with mystery and revelation, candidly open in its transit . . . It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place.”
In contrast to the perfection and inevitability of a piece of Western classical music like Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, whose entire score is written out note by note for the musicians to perform, an Indian raga is always improvised. A raga begins with the sound of a tanpura, or drone. There is as yet no rhythm, no measured beat, no pattern. One could say the drone is the sound of the universe before the beginning of time. Out of this hallucinatory mood emerges a second instrument, possibly a sitar or sarod, which weaves melodies hypnotically in and around the drone. And then, with the introduction of the tabla, with the first drum beat, comes the beginning of a kind of order. It is a very complex order, with highly varied patterns of beats that initially sound quite strange to Western ears. Other musicians enter, and the raga becomes a dense, polyphonic intermingling of voices. Like a piece of Western classical music, a raga has a complex structure, but the structures are completely different, reflecting the very different relationships in India and the West between man and nature. Menon writes, “The Indian ethos postulates the existence of a reality behind the appearance of things, a mystery that lurks in the core of all created things,” and goes on to add, perceptively, “The delight of Indian music, then, lies in the search for this elusive, mysterious beauty, not in its ‘finding.’ If this delight is transferred to the ‘found’ beauty from the search for new beauty, a sudden loss of vitality, a facile sweetness begins to show, and a superficial estheticism takes over.” It is not hard to hear, in Menon’s description, echoes of Yoshizawa’s belief in unseen essences and beauty that can only be found beneath the surface.
Using imagination and the power of suggestion, two Japanese artworks evoke differing moods of water: a raked-gravel Zen garden and an interpretation of Hokusai’s wood-block print View of Mount Fuji Through High Waves off Kanagawa from the cover of Claude Debussy’s printed score for La Mer. Debussy owned a copy of the print and chose the image himself.
My exposure to Indian crafts and music gave urgency to my struggle to escape the hegemony of geometric determinism in origami. I gained conviction, too, from the music and writings of a couple of Western classical composers whose works I had loved but perhaps not fully understood. Western composers began to absorb Asian influences into their music at the end of the 19th century, a time when the French composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie struggled to break free of the Germanic determinism that had dominated classical music from Beethoven through Brahms and Wagner. While some British and Central European composers looked to native folk traditions, Debussy and Satie turned primarily to inspiration from ancient Greece, medieval mysticism, and the exotic sounding harmonies and rhythms of the Far East.
Although Indian music was little known, the appearance of a Javanese gamelan orchestra at the 1893 Paris Exposition had a mesmerizing effect on Debussy. A keen collector of Japanese woodblock prints and other Asian objets d’art, Debussy began to experiment with the pentatonic scale (Satie was doing much the same with medieval scales), generating indeterminate and unresolved harmonies that possessed, in common with much Asian music, a kind of static motion. Much of the music that Debussy produced has subtle correspondences with nature and human experience—famous examples include the piano works The Sunken Cathedral, Pagodas, Evening in Granada,