Journal Entry#5 Courage to stand on.
Class reflection:
I feel that I get more focus and grounded in class after a month and feel three hours are getting not enough to cover what we read and think. So, from next week, I will try to share more personal memories and share my deeper thoughts and read more journals of my classmates so that I can make more three hours fruitful for my learning. At the beginning of the last class, we heard about Eiko’s performance at the grave. We come up with many themes to talk about in relation to the grave such as the dead, death of someone close to us, dirt, and a tree at the grave. Eiko's image and reflection on the tree in the grave she danced by were thoughtful and impressive for me. Eiko grabbed dirt around the tree and did the movement of trees. She said that trees suck energy from the ground that the dead sleep in and the image of her and words explaining a relationship between a tree and dirt and the dead stood out to me and they were helpful when I did the tree movement for the assignment.
After the reflection on Eiko’s performance last week, we moved on to the movement activities while watching the movement videos of our classmates. We focused on one object in the video, anything we like to do. It was a new experience for me since we have a strong visual image to follow and imitate. I tried a passive object in Juliette’s video since I wanted to try something new with this new activity. I tried a tree and the ground. There were a cat and Juliette herself filming the cat so I tried to move as passive objects that to be affected or exist but do not move in the video. When I moved as the ground or felt like to be the ground, I felt the cat’s slow steps on my shoulder and wiggle to support it. Next, Eiko invited us to be aware of knitting motions in the video such as tying shoelaces and making pasta. I tried to move to be aware of passiveness and activeness existed in the same object. Tied and tying. Eaten and eating. Suffered and suffering. By feeling two sides of my body – activeness in my body and passiveness in my body – I come to think that I actively move my body with my consciousness but also my body is moved by my brain’s signal. My brain thinks that my body does “my” motions but my motions I do actually derive from my past memories and learnings in my lifetime. The feelings of being active and passive were useful when we did the tree movement as well. Trees are planted and do not move fast so they are passive. But trees are active in the sense that they suck nutrients and water and power from its roots, they grow their leaves and branches, they memorize slashes and history on the bark. And after I finished the tree movement, the words from Hara’s The Land of Heart’s Desire, “live for the dead.” We live but live for the dead. We all have roots in our ancestors (passive) and inherit their history and past, but at the same time, we need to live and create our history and memories by remembering what our ancestors have left us. These thoughts were connected to what I felt in the tree movement.
Towards the end of class, we did the reciting activity. It was surely different and deeper than the last time we voiced together. We listened to each other’s recitation one by one, and we got to hear why we chose a specific part. I felt more silent than time in other parts of the class although we recited the sentences. I think it was not just a voice, which trembles the air, that was delivered in our space. We delivered our emotions, our imagination, our body in our space by reciting sentences from the books. I think that I felt silence in the sense of the actual sound, but the voice of our hearts was strong enough to hear through our space and I received my classmates’ voice surely. I recited: “I myself have long cherished a vision of an age when harmony would come to the earth when deep in men’s hearts would sound the quiet murmur of a spring, and there would be nothing to snuff out individual existences any more….” from Hara’s The Land of Heart’s Desire. I tried to carry hope and wish in my voice since I interpreted that it was the message that Hara wanted to leave for us in the future generation after he got through a cruel experience: hope and wish for a world where nothing snuffs out individual existences any more.
Reading reflection & OP-ed/speech statement& reciting reflection :
I read Kenzaburo Oē’s Hiroshima Notes when I was in high school. It was one of the memorable works I read in high school. The words that in Hiroshima Notes come back to me from time to time, especially from the chapter on human dignity. It was a great opportunity for me to read it again and I read it in Japanese this time as well as I found that translation changes the nuance of a good amount of portions in the texts and I felt like to. My word which attracts my attention in Hiroshima Notes is “courage” and “bravery.” It seems that Oē writes about “courage’ to go on living. I believe that Oē thinks it needs tremendous “courage” to live on after the tragic experience of Hiroshima and the wounds of the body and heart of victims. He understands how cruel to live after Hiroshima and he keenly listens to the life story of the survivors but he gains “courage” to continue his life as he sees people who got through Hiroshima sustain their dignity. And I do think in the way after I read Hiroshima Notes. Oē’s concept of “courage” – the most necessary courage for our life but atomic bombs were so malicious enough to snuff it out – resonates me from Hara’s words I chose to recite last week: his hope and wish for the world where nothing snuffs out individual existences anymore. So I come to think that I would like to talk about “courage” in my speech for the class project because this concept visits me many times in past weeks and as myself born in Hiroshima I’d like to explore this concept of “courage” to live and human dignity through my project. I am also thinking that I’d like to use my native language, Japanese, to navigate through my speech project. I think that I’d like to link it to the history and experience and literature that my native language contains. I’d like to start off my thoughts from a quote from Hiroshima Notes: “But the human tragedies I witnessed in Hiroshima even if seen only by a traveler's eye, and though I do not have the courage to turn hopeless tragedy into something of positive value at least made clear to me wherein lies the human dignity of the Japanese people.” I resonate with a word “a traveler’s eye” because I didn’t get through this experience. And it is true that no one has the courage to turn this hopeless tragedy into something of positive value. But the human tragedies I witnessed in Hiroshima made clear to me also wherein lies the human dignity of the Japanese people. I’d like to express this feeling to people in the US and hope to make my project to bridge the languages and establish the dignity of Hiroshima people in US history.
I recited first, “it was a cruel and complete silence, worse than any other, like ‘a moan that cannot be voiced’ since I thought Oē captured perfectly the concept of silence in Hiroshima in this sentence and I feel attached to this sentence. But, when I recited it in front of others I had a hard time because it was abstract and I felt like I was not able to convey my emotions and feelings enough through I got to read this book to people who never read this book. So, I recited this part of the young woman's observation: “I'm blind! I tried to raise my hands, but my right hand was heavy and beyond my control. With the fingers of my left hand, I touched my face lightly; my eyebrows, my cheeks, and my mouth felt like a mixture of bean curd and gelatine. My face was swollen, like a big sponge; it was as if I had no nose. I shuddered as I suddenly remembered the spooky shapes at the foot of the concrete wall.' At this point, however, she had no choice but to join the circle of gloomy silence.” Since it is strong descriptive sentences that tell us about the tragedy of Hiroshima, I was scared to recite this at first. However, I came to think that I would like to grapple with these sentences because with this concrete description of her experience I would express more of my emotions and feelings that I gained by reading Hiroshima Notes. So, this experience to face the tragedy by reciting the sentences in front of others was, I think, useful to think about my own project as well.
Move reflection:
I went to a park near my house and did my movement with the trees in the park in the evening. There were many kinds of trees there: a ginkgo tree, sakura tree, and a maple tree. (I got to know their kinds because they had a name tag for each.) and I chose a ginkgo tree because it grows straight and I felt stronger standing beside it. I first started my movement beside the trunk. I felt strength from its powerful and thick trunk. But as I danced around the ginkgo tree, I also came to see the history in the tree. I thought about the tree rings inside it – must be much older than me – and thought about the time that has pasted in front of it. It was overwhelming to think so my body shook, especially my hands were like its leaves brushed by a breeze. And then, I came back to the current time I live and I thought about the roots of the ginkgo tree, reflecting on how it takes in power and energy from the ground, which existed much before the time this ginkgo tree was planted, and how it grew about 10m high as it is now. There must be a lot of movement and I moved by thinking of how the roots suck time, energy, power, and space from the ground. My hands shook like a wave and I strongly came back to the trunk. I repeated these movements overtimes. And I am glad that I learned about the passiveness and activeness of a tree in class. If I didn’t learn of it, I might only focus on the passiveness of a tree to a breeze, bags, and humans because it’s easy to see it. But I saw a lot of activeness in a tree while I moved and I’m so happy to feel their courage to grow and stand and have roots in the ground.
