All of us who have a membership in the Older Than 50 Club remember those dreaded days of childhood when the joys of summer ended, and we once again had to give up our relatively carefree lifestyles for the more stilted – and yes, boring – aspects of getting an education. I remember them so clearly because I was not one of the kids weary of the endless days of summer and itching to get on with something else.
That inevitable day came when we filed into English class, some of us naturally having more inclination to be fascinated with language than others. I was one of the former. Also inevitable was the first class assignment, which each and every American school child knew by heart. In one page write on the following topic: “What I did on my summer vacation.”
I was an admittedly precocious kid, so I always found the assignment dull, if not an utter waste of time. Somehow, the implication seemed to be that summer was a relatively nonproductive time. If you participated in this annually-assigned ritual, didn’t you just hate it? And didn’t you most likely wonder how in tarnation you’d ever be able to fill one sheet of perfectly blue-lined, white notebook paper with just enough balloon juice?
Not me. I am genetically predisposed to not only fill the page, but ask for an extension. I’m sure I was a real nightmare to my many English teachers. Just writing name, rank, and serial numero took a half-page minimum. And my summer exploits were rich beyond belief and ready to leap off the pages (plural). The first day of school, I was always bummed because I knew what was coming.
And that brings me to haiku, the incredibly sophisticated Japanese literary form. Some of us were born to bust the page, and some of us were born to haiku. I am the former kinda person.
It’s always amazed me that haiku could capture, in 17 well-chosen syllables, an essence of something. Sheesh: look how long it took me to get to this point! The obvious beauty of haiku is its reliance on the human imagination to run the cranial powerhouse linking thing to thing, thought to thought.
Going back to my school days, had a teacher been clever enough to ask me to write a haiku about what I did during my summer vacation, I would have been fish bait. I revel in the ride –sometimes gentle; sometimes turbulent – on the stream of consciousness. You will never catch me without a paddle, and I dip it regularly and deeply in the current.
I got thinking about haiku after watching a powerful, moving documentary. “The Cats of Mirikatani,” chronicles the friendship that bloomed between American born Jimmy Mirikitani, who was interred in an American concentration camp in California during World War II, and filmmaker Linda Hattendorf. It is a story of ultimate human tragedy and triumph.
Mr. Mirikitani lived on the streets in Soho after the bombing at the World Trade Center, selling his artwork. Many of his paintings were of cats; I am a cat person. For too many years, this talented artist was treated as a social castoff, a victim of one of the ugliest chapters in American history.
The ability to boil things down to essence is apparently a family trait. As it turns out, Mr. Mirikitani is the cousin of San Francisco’s poet laureate, Janice Mirikitani. The two were eventually united, and the documentary thrust Mr. Mirikitani into the limelight. He has since had a well-deserved one-man show of his artwork.
As I watched the documentary unfold, it became obvious that his work is visual haiku. Highly stylized, deceptively simple, rich in color, mentally engaging. When I was in high school, art class was my home room and my favorite place to be during the day. Despite my best efforts, I would never have been able to make my own artwork sing and be so compelling.
It takes an abundance of training and talent to make visual art look so simple. What Mr. Mirikitani brings to his pieces is the leap of culture, boiled down to its core. His work also reminds me that an unfamiliar walk in someone else’s comfort zone can be a moving experience.
