"There is a phrase in Japanese: katachi kara hairu. To enter through the form.
You hear it in the practice traditions. In tea, you learn where the hands go before you learn why. In calligraphy, you copy the same stroke a thousand times before anyone discusses expression. In the martial arts, the sequence comes first, the meaning after, sometimes years after.
Sometimes the phrase is said with a slight apology, as if starting from form were the shallow way in, something a serious person would outgrow. But the traditions themselves mean it plainly. Understanding is not the ticket you buy at the door. It is what the building does to you once you are inside.
Living abroad, I noticed the order was often reversed. People wanted the reason before the practice. Explain it, and then I will do it. That is a fair thing to want. It is also not the only order in which a life can be arranged.
I have written before about shosa, the idea that how you move is who you are. Katachi kara hairu is its quieter premise. The body can hold something the mind has not caught up to yet.
An open form does not insist upon meaning. It simply keeps a place for meaning to arrive in its own time.
We do not keep the form because we understand it. We keep the form so the meaning has somewhere to arrive."
Kyo is discussing something alive in the Japanese culture. It resonates here in the idea that (visual) form also creates a space within which meaning can acrue, it can arrive in its own time.
This lovely quote arrives from Tokyo via Kyo, a writer addressing the unsaid. Find more of her work here: https://substack.com/@theunsaidjapan
