When snow carpets the ground, your lives seem shut off from the rest of the world. No one dares to visit you in the mountains. Having no contact with the outside world, you seem like inexistent. Here is a short poem from Kokinshu, another old anthology dating back to the 10th century, describing that kind of sentiment.
雪に一面覆われると、特に人里離れて暮らしていれば、世界から隔絶されたような感覚になります。外界とのつながりを失い、自分が存在すらしていないような感覚に陥ります。その感覚を詠った和歌を、古今集から紹介します。
雪降りて 人もかよはぬ 道なれや あとはかもなく 思ひ消ゆらむ
ゆきふりて ひともかよはぬ みちなれや
あとはかもなく おもひきゆらむ
The snow-covered garden, with no prints or dots
On the front path leading to my place
There is hardly a trace left of my thoughts
When snow shields you from access, you feel like your existence gets muted, blanketed and swept away. You eat and sleep but your life seem to have nothing to do with affairs other people concern themselves with. Even your thoughts get scattered in the silence and lose a tie to what you have been through.
雪によって外界から遮断され、自分の存在の音が消され、隠され、隔絶されたように感じる様子が詠われています。生活はしているが、外界の営みとの関係を失っていく。考えや思いといったものも、静けさの中で消え入るように思え、自分を失っていく。
We place relationships at the center of human existence and are expected to interact with the world — be present. However, solitary activities do help deepen our connection to our own life.
わたしたちは、ひととの関係を存在の中心に据え、外界との関わりを持つことを期待されています。それが、「存在している」ことの証明だと。しかし、孤独な営みは自分自身との関係を築くことを助けてくれます。
Snow provides us with a mental cushion from the external stimulation, and some space we need to reflect. As invisible to others as they are, you can incubate the ideas, reconnecting ourselves with our experiences and desires. Let the silence settle.
雪が、心のクッション、外界刺激に対する緩衝剤、自分に向き合うための余裕を与えてくれます。他人には見えませんが、様々な思いは自分の中で孵化し、経験や願いといったものを思い返すのです。静けさは降り積もっていくもの。焦る必要はありません。
Released in 1978, written by Shinji Tanimura and sung by Momoe Yamaguchi, Days That Used To Be has soon reached lyrical milestone by its imagery and lyricism in depicting the arrival of spring and emotional landscape of leaving for another place. The main character gets to find some kind of closure about the past and make a step forward.
「いい日旅立ち」は、過去に整理をつけ、当てのない未来へ踏み出そうとする、そんな主人公の姿を描いています。春の訪れと旅立ちの情景を抒情的に描いた歌謡曲の金字塔ですね。
Winter passes and spring is on its way when you look up the sky and throw your past plans and anticipations away. You used to have people around, with whom you shared your dreams and memories. You are alone now and determined to step forward on your own.
It feels like you have lost your home. Well then, you just can leave the past behind and start to make memories. Though your outlook seems as fickle as going somewhere else, you still have some confidence in what future will bring. You just seek something that would warm you heart.
It’s no easy translating these sentiments, or nostalgia, in a way that the lyricism speaks to readers of another language. It’s still a universal human tendency to use songs to think of days that used to be.
When snow starts to melt
With spring thaw on its way
I call out for the northern sky
To bring back all dreams lost in time
I feel warm inside
With all those gone crossing my mind
All I can do is just set out all by myself
Ah, somewhere on this land, not across the sea,
There must be someone ready to meet me
No better day for leaving
For a sunset I saw
On the back of my dear mom
All those songs will stay in my mind
Fishing at the rocky beach is a small boy
Going home through the green plume grassland
From here my memories are to made
Leaving a good bye message on the sand
Ah, somewhere on this land, not across the sea,
There must be someone ready to meet me
No better day for leaving
For cotton-wool clouds I saw
What I learned from my dad
All those songs will stay in my mind
Ah, somewhere on this land, not across the sea,
There must be someone ready to meet me
No better day for leaving
For happiness
What I loved to sing
All those songs will stay in my mind
Nick Drake (1948-1974) released just three albums before his early death. This enigmatic song inevitably foreshadows his tragedy but also tells much about our universal, emotional challenge – sporadic renewals of negative feelings.
Repeated over again in the song is a symbolic figure, “a black eyed dog.” Let’s just define it as a negative feeling that comes up in our mind every so often. Just as a black eyed dog comes at the door and makes more demands, our unresolved conflict, whether it be inner or with someone else, bugs us with renewed sense of disruption and intrusion. Your efforts to create your own life are often interrupted by uneasy negotiation with reality, overshadowed by your past mistakes or challenged by your old enemies. Negative feelings catch up with you just when you feel you have run far away enough. You feel scared to see your old enemy track you down. It could be sadness or regret in the silence. You just can’t let down your guard.
This recurrent emotional turn-offs are so exhausting that we just crave for time and space where we could breathe and unwind. Home is supposed to be a place where you feel right in your own skin. But as we grow old, we drag more of our past shadows and persisting, incurable pains. Negative emotional experiences wake up uncomfortable memories, highlight your inner bitter spot and make you feel inadequate, weak and miserable. Your attempt to settle down stays incomplete at best and seems impossible at worst.
The lyrics and imagery are somewhat grim and somber. His voice is no powerful. But it’s genuine and warms our hearts like an emotional pat on the shoulder.
Just as the water surface reflects light and shadows, our everyday life is an arena of a bitter-sweet conflict between excitement and disappointment. In her bleak poem, Crossing the water, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) uses symbols to depict shades of our existence, whose contradictory nature is highlighted in tension with the outer world.
波立ち光を揺らめかせる水面のように、私たちの日々には明暗が交差します。暗く寂寞としたイメージを漂わせるシルヴィア・プラスのこの詩は、私たちを取り巻く世界との緊張関係の中で浮かび上がる明暗を、象徴的に描いています。
The apparent imagery here is a herd of dark trees casting shadows over the lake water. The trees are personified in the shape of cut-paper people; human beings lose their presence in the shadowy, tenebrous natural surroundings. Lights flicker in the darkened world. There should be hope. We try to move on. But obstacles come over just as the thick leaves on the water keep us from moving forward. A little glimmer of hope seems liberating but such anticipation pushes us down the emotional descent in the shape of a disappointment. Frequent disappointments discourage us from moving forward physically and emotionally.
It sounds pretty encouraging when people say that whatever you do each moment definitely creates its ripple effect on what surrounds you and that’s the way you make a difference in the world. But deep down there is some space in our hearts, where stagnant memories and emotions devour our optimism. We sometimes get stunned and overwhelmed by the enormity of darkness within us and others.
Sylvia Plath is often associated with a tragic end of her life and the bleak tone throughout her works. But as we can find in this poem, she captures shades of our emotions. Our troubled hearts are vulnerable but real. Our daily emotional challenges are made up of something more than a fit of desperatipon. It’s in the silence that we touch our innermost emotion. The darkness and silence arouses thoughts, regrets and frustrations that are kept and stored in our mental “Lost and Found”.
This series aims at visiting our mental “Lost and found,” calling for a poetic help to take back a certain emotion we bury away at some point in our life. We lose some things along the way. It might be what you were as a child. This poem, In Retrospect, by Michizo Tatehara (1941-1939) helps us figure out what to do after tracing back our life journey down to where we were.
詩の力を借りて、埋もれてしまった感情を見出だす。そんな「心の遺失物保管所」を訪ねることを本シリーズの目的としています。無くしたものは何かと問われると、自分の原風景とも言える子供時代を思い返すこともあるのではないでしょうか。そうして心の原風景を辿った後どうするのかを考えるのが、立原道造(1914-1939)の「のちのおもひに」です。
In this poem he revisits where he was, including the imagery of younger days along with what he experienced during the course of his life. But he suddenly stops and says “My fancy won’t go any further”, letting his fancy frozen in reminiscence. This can be interpreted as his preparing himself for death because he died at the age of 24.
It definitely means physical death but it can be also interpreted, in a more positive way, as a mental death and rebirth. We can capsulate in our reminiscence what we have been through, then move on. Opening the door, we walk down the road less traveled. It might be off the beaten track but full of opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise even imagine.
Every now and then we take a trip down our memory lane lined with woods and rivers. After the pastel childhood tunnel unfolds the vivid path of later years. We all have particular life experiences whose brilliance take on their own unique hues.
Whether it be bitter or sweet, what you remember about your early days is definitely a bedrock of who you are, upon which you put pieces of experience as you pass each day. This spade work does you good, but at some point you feel boxed up. A set of mindsets is so deeply ingrained that you can hardly envisage a different life course and the idea of pulling out your keystone sounds like losing a part of you and scares you.
Nevertheless, once you take one single step away from where you have been, the infinity unfolds before you. The galaxy you’re living in is not the only galaxy that exists in the whole universe. It’s hard to leave behind your psychological fauna and flora that you are familiar with as well as the galaxy encompassing your planet where things are laid out in a particular order. The outer space, in contrast, looks bleak and vacant. But that vast space outside of your galaxy accommodates even more galaxies, which await your visit. That’s how you “make your way under the starry skies.”
My fancy always took me
To the lonesome village
To the hills at a distance
To the grass in the wind
To the calm woodland trails
Tireless crickets chirring
In the warmth of the afternoon
Clear and blue was the sky above
The mountain lay dormant
And I was
A tireless storyteller
On isles, waves, capes
All that I have seen
In the sun and the moon
With no one listening to me
My fancy won’t go any further
In the attempt of nullifying
All the memories
But what did I forget anyway?
Let it get frozen in wintery reminiscence!
From the open door
Into the desolation
Under the starry skies
Make your way
We’ve been examining how art draws out our innermost emotions. I should definitely introduce another great modern poet. Rin Ishigaki (1920-2004) struggled through painful friction between poetry writing and household burden while she made her living as the only bread winner of her family.
This poem illustrates the moment of a gushing emotion when she stopped to think. She fought through life with a resigned focus on her household life instead of pursuing her own dreams, interests and creative aspirations. In front of rubbles and debris of her household life, an overwhelmingly painful regret came over and she realized how much she lost. This indescribable sense of anger, defeat or powerlessness drew tears to her eyes.
At times we are overwhelmed by an emotion that we have long harbored but tried to suppress while going through day-to-day challenges. This mixed feeling is not owned by anyone else. Your emotions are to belong to you. It’s crude, genuine and real because it’s safe from someone else’s definition, interpretation or terminology. Poems are supposed to tell something that would be compatible with what you feel deep inside.
Many poets including Chuya Nakahara struggle to strike a balance between two different dimensions of existence – pursuing artistic aspirations and making a living. It’s no easy living up to social expectations while instinctively letting passion veer the course of life. Quite a few fell on the road in the effort of seeking a creative outlet.
Nevertheless, poetic sensitivity plays an invaluable role in finding and creating meaning in what people are not always aware of. It helps us through our life journey, a journey of maintaining decency and making sense of what we do. It also helps us feel assuredly compatible with something deep inside that we struggle to express verbally.
You just can’t live without eating
Food
Veggies
Meat
Air
Light
Water
Parents
Siblings
Teachers
Money and hearts
I just couldn’t have lived a life
I’m full now
My mouth wiped clean
The kitchen floor in a mess
Carrot ends cut off
Chicken bones
Bowels of my dad
Forty years passed and the twilight came on
First ever came into my eyes
Savage tears
With tolls of New Year’s bell dispelling earthly desires, people welcome the New Year with a refreshed and invigorated mind. It would be great if we could renew our mind overnight. In reality, however, we can’t. Just as we did yesterday, we still undergo pangs of regret and remorse, or feel a void in our hearts. In front of us emerges something that we didn’t give much thought to while wading through hectic days.
除夜の鐘とともに煩悩を追い払い気持ちを新たにする、それが新年の迎え方とされています。日が沈んで、また昇る。その間に、すべてを一新できればいいのですが、現実はそうはいきません。昨日と変わらず、心に引っ掛かる棘や、失くしたものが残した空白、そういったものが疼いたりもするのです。日々忙しくする中で、忘れかけていたものが、ふと息をついた拍子に、突然眼前に現れる。
To discuss these emotions, let me introduce one of the most popular poems on sadness. It’s written by Chuya Nakahara. Sadness here is not about what you are crying over at this moment but about what lingers after your tears dry. It’s about your heart aching 1) when people describe your own ineffable sorrow in a clichéd manner, 2) when you are racked with self-doubt over the belief that sadness is experienced by everyone, big or small, and self-doubt over how to argue against the idea that one’s sadness is of great or little value, and 3) when you put too much interpretation on sadness. Let’s see what sadness of ours that “ain’t innocent at all” looks like.
What does it mean, this sadness that “ain’t innocent at all”? Let’s see how it can be interpreted. In the first place, we are not simple-hearted anymore. While small children burst into a fit of laughter in the next moment after throwing a tantrum, we, as grownups, like to make things complicated. We just can’t keep things simple. Not only do we take care of ourselves, we also take into account our family and the communities that impose an ever-growing burden and sadness. We also give too much meaning and interpretation to sadness when explaining, or illustrating, a sadness of our own. It all ends up finding a sadness lost its original sensations or colors. It becomes ugly and gross.
Another cause is disregard of one’s own sadness. Even with life imposing burden and pain on us, most of us believe that we somehow survive. Is it a privilege to indulge in this sadness? Isn’t it more righteous to think about what you can do to others and the wider society? It’s true your sadness is yours and invaluable, but you somehow belittle yourself in awkwardness and feel harder to break out of your ever harder shell as you sink into yourself.
Another possible interpretation is that sadness comes from a sense of being violated and tainted. There is something that you feel authentic about your sadness, but this can be described with worn-out clichés or interpreted within the frame of ready-made ideas. Once you venture an expression, you fear that people are too judgmental. Then you feel intimidated, discouraged and resigned from giving careful explanation in view of possible misunderstanding. Unwillingness and powerlessness overwhelm you.
Art has power to find whatever feelings you suppress, try to forget, or let go. We’re going to examine this role played by art – a mental lost and found.
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
Under another pall of snow
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
Standing stiff as chilly gusts of wind blow
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
A fox pelt is something alike
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
Scrunching down as snowflakes strike
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
Never missing human wishes in their absence
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
Inertly tempted to end this existence
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
Scared and small
This sadness ain’t innocent at all
Stranded as the nights fall
Do you ever get bewildered by the conflicting aspirations pulling yourself in opposing directions? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by contradicting ideas of conforming to the wider society while hoping to keep tied to where you are so that you feel secure and authentic? Thomas Mann(1875-1955), famous for his novel Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), explored this theme strenuously in his less known short novels.
こんな正反対の思いに戸惑うことがありますか。安心して自分らしさを維持したい一方で、世の中とも歩調を合わせていたい。トーマス・マンは、『ベニスに死す』で知られていますが、こうした葛藤を短編小説で多く取り上げています。
Ich stehe zwischen zwei Welten, bin in keiner daheim und habe es infolge dessen ein wenig schwer. (…) Sehnsucht ist darin und schwermütiger Neid und ein klein wenig Verachtung und eine ganze keusche Seligkeit.Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann
Our existence is an amalgamation of contradicting beliefs, realities and aspirations. What Thomas Mann tried to do in his short stories was to step further in his attempt to illustrate heartbreaking inner conflict of young artists: The nature of artistic self-consciousness and inner suspicion that the artist must be an outsider relative to respectable society.
He examined these issues through a series of dichotomies. He explored the youthful disillusionment by contrasting it with the happiness and blithe naïveté found in many of people. The protagonists are envious of innocent vitality their counterpart enjoy but proud of his insights, philosophical profundity and aesthetic sensitivity.
We sometimes find ourselves craving for, if not envious of, what we don’t possess but our counterpart does while taking pride in what you have and who you are. Deep down you are wishing to live a more laid-back life while energized by intensity of your professional pursuit. To the contrary, you might be interested in throwing yourself into more challenging, vibrant business while hoping to stay around with a relaxed, intimate and like-minded circle of people. There is a dash of contempt for those on the other side, which keeps you from leaving behind what is comfortable and familiar for you.
Creating dichotomy between art and life as well as intellect and nature, he explored the ramifications of this separation and portrayed protagonists as the agent of reconciliation between these facets of existence. In one of his short stories, a young man reaffirms his faith in humanity and love for life as his alienation is surmounted at last by his love for humanity. It was ultimately a quest for some kind of balance and wholeness for human values that would be personally sustained.
In her song called Maman, Louane, a 20-year-old French singer, sings about how we pass dull, tedious days in resignation and desperation. We sometimes feel so trapped in the net of circumstances that we get passive-aggressive. We get to express indirectly our negative feelings of anger, distrust or frustration by procrastinating, showing indifference to what’s going on around us, or distracting our own attention from what really matters. Then we are led into a cul-de-sac, where we are getting weary of reaching out for what we should be.
フランスの若き歌姫ルアンヌは、「ママ」という曲で、あきらめと投げやりな気持ちの中で、ただただ毎日をこなしていってしまうわたしたちの姿を歌っています。あまりにも、身の回りの状況にがんじがらめにされているがために、様々なことに対して、ある意味、逆ギレ気味になってしまうことがあります。怒りや不信や葛藤といった暗い感情を、間接的に表現しようとするのです。それはズルズルと物事を後回しにしてしまったり、身の回りのことに無関心を装ってみたり、大事なことから目を逸らしてみたり。そして、袋小路に陥り、こうしなきゃという気持ちにただただ疲れてしまったりもするのです。
In this song she calls on her mother to help her make sense of what she is. She knows this is not right but has no idea what to do. There is good rhyming throughout the lines, but some of them don’t seem to have as profound meaning as listeners would expect. This disappointment listeners experience, however, is the very emotion we are truly exposed to on a daily basis.
