Twitter « Yuri Kageyama

HAIKU SERIES by YURI KAGEYAMA

Photo by Hirokazu Suyama, drummer.

HAIKU SERIES
by Yuri Kageyama

Waaaaaah! So much like Wow!
A Child. Fluttering Sakura.
Language. A Moment.

わあああ！でも　ワウ！でも
ちるさくらみる子
言葉は無

～～～～

a blue plastic bag
so hard so still no more
Tokyo train tracks

青いシート
もうかたくなり
東京の駅

～～～

in my deathly dreams
your sweet breath, fat knees, wet hands
a child forever

甘い息
死んで夢見る
赤ちゃんの手

～～～～

timeless tweet timeline
scroll blindly touch-panel light
mumbles of loneliness

タイムレス　
孤独のつぶやき
みずスクロール

～～～～

stained glass
nudging colors into light
my wife’s fingers

ステンドグラス
ひかりを染める
妻のゆび

～～～～

dead grandchild
a blurring thought lost in wrinkles
skin lotion’s smell

なき孫が
小皺に霞む
化粧水

～～～～

at Hamanako
forgetting burying
beatings by my father

浜名湖に
沈め忘れる
父の虐待

～～～～

Red over green
You got that right, Matisse
Then Today Forever.

グリーンよりあか
そのときもいまも
せいかい

～～～～

spring morning
pink explodes
chiffon whirls

春の朝
ピンクが爆
発シフォン舞う

Haiku by Yuri Kageyama

a blue plastic bag
so hard so still no more
Tokyo train tracks

in my deathly dreams
your sweet breath, fat knees, wet hands
a child forever

timeless tweet timeline
scroll blindly touch-panel light
mumbles of loneliness

I wrote these recently, the last one just a few seconds ago.
The first one is about the body bags that we see lying by the railroad tracks because a fair number of Japanese people commit suicide by flinging themselves in front of commuter trains.
It is stunning how the bags have an eerily impersonal color, and they are motionless and rigid.
But you can tell for some reason that it is a body in there, nothing else.
There is nothing that we can do as witnesses except to pray.
The body bags are a constant reminder of the otherworldly closeness of death amid the mundane like riding the commuter train to work.
They seem to increase during the winter months _ maybe because cold is more depressing than warm, especially if you are feeling down, and maybe because the year-end and New Year’s holiday season comes as a stark reminder of how extremely alone a lonely person really is.
My third poem is about Twitter, which I do quite actively because it is encouraged on my job.
I see how people want to connect to others, not just the people they know in real life, but to others they will never meet.
It’s called networking, and it shows how the world is a small place in this rapidly globalizing age.
As the world turns, the iPhone touch-panel whirls under your fingertips as you scroll the Twitter timeline, showing comments from all over the world, mostly about nothing, and photos of dinners and lunches and sunsets and pets.
It is a cool technology and a convenient tool.
But it is also about how people are alone but can’t stand to be by themselves.
People are lonely.
The poem in-between is about my recurring dreams, where my son, who is fully grown in his 20s, is still a toddler.
My little boy.
I wake up, looking for him, almost panicked, wondering if he is OK, and then I am relieved there is no need to worry.
It is just a dream.
I have always believed death would be like a dream, except you never wake up.
And so I realize these dreams are a reminder that I am still always reliving motherhood, though I am just growing older and getting closer to death.
I’m reliving that moment of motherhood, with my son being that eternal child, and death will not be an end at all but a recurring dream.
I feel as though I am going backward in time.
Life has no beginning or end.
Death is just a string of pockets of different dreamlike moments, in no particular order, in and out, falling and flying and rising, being lost in a blurry faraway dream.

Previous Haiku by Yuri Kageyama.

PS to Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter (2)

P.S. to Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter Part Two:
That is not to say that an artist isn’t confident of one’s value.
If you aren’t sure you’re worth godzillions of dollars, then you can’t be an artist.
You would need to believe that to go on.
Yokoo tweets you just do what you do and then someone comes around who thinks it’s great and pays for it.
He started out as a commercial artist and was extremely successful.
And then, in the 1990s he turned his back on all that suddenly and decided to become just an artist.
That’s partly why his Twitter pronouncements about getting paid for art hold special meaning.

Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter (part three)

Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter drops names and makes you hungry.
He says Yoko Ohno came by and had sirloin “tonkatsu” in the middle of the day because she is a sizzling greasy hot person, and he himself was a bit worried about heartburn.
He also says Yukio Mishima ate steak at least once a week because he believed that art is about the body, not just the mind, and forgetting the body in art makes you a big-headed wimp.

Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter (part two)

Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter says, if you are doing what you truly believe in, what other people say (“hyoka” or social evaluation/assessment) doesn’t matter.
No one really does art to get something back in return.
No one really knows if art is valid or not.
Evaluation/assessment is something that is determined by a commercial market, job contract or social hierarchy.
That’s when evaluation/assessment becomes relevant _ and it must be fair and accurate or else someone is getting exploited, which goes contrary to what art is about from the get-go.
But it is important to remember that something monetary, contractual and social is involved in those endeavors in which evaluation/assessment takes meaning.
But art is not a job and has nothing to do with all that.
That is the privilege of art and also the painful difficulties of art.
Art by definition means you will never be properly evaluated.
No one will come pat you on the back and say: hey, your art is great.
Unless it is an evaluation/assessment that makes art commercial, a job or a reflection of social ranking, which isn’t really about art at all but something just maybe related to art only in the sense that artists are human and need to eat and pay rent.
That is why doing any commercial marketing activity for your art is a big pain because you have to do it even though it isn’t relevant or really meaningful.
At least, even if everyone ignores you and your art, you know you don’t care.

Tadanori Yokoo on Twitter

The way Tadanori Yokoo uses Twitter gives the technology a new dimension. He tweets the way he draws. It’s an approach to life/death and meaning/meaninglessneess and the gaps/spaces in-between. He throws his words out as they cross his mind, reaching out to the other reality that is the shadow of death and the faraway universe inhabited by aliens calling out to us in beeps and brush strokes and gasps of a deranged poet. They come and go, lost into cyberspace, our blood, our flashes, our yearnings, our art. They are maybe ignored, cast away, or found and even treasured before being forgotten like grandmothers and mothers and aborted daughters, and they cross like sparkling crystal of stars through the black universe, hurling into consciousness and lives and thoughts and desperate clawing at art by lonely artists and careless carefree tweets.