Eye in the Sky— At the West End Gallery
Ten Thousand Years’ Play
I got into the ocean and played.
I played on the land too.
I also played in the sky.
I played with the devil’s children in the clouds.
I played with shooting stars in space.
I played too long and years passed.
I played even when I became a tottering old man.
My beard was fifteen feet long.
Still I played.
Even when I was resting, my dream was playing.
Finally I played with the sun, seeing which one of us could be redder.
I had already played for ten thousand years.
Even when I was dead, I still played.
I looked at children playing, from the sky.
–Tozu Norio, There are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan, 1970
While Eye in the Sky, this year’s edition of my annual solo exhibit at the West End Gallery, may have ended yesterday, this morning I came across a poem that might have captured in great part the theme of that show. It’s a poem written by an 11-year-old child from Japan, Tozu Norio, published in a 1970 book called There are Two Lives: Poems by Children of Japan.
I could very well envision the ten-thousand-year-old narrator of this poem as the peering eye behind the clouds in a dream from several years ago that provided the basis for this show. The dream was described in the statement for the show that accompanied the blogpost for the title painting from the exhibit, shown here at the top.
I was just struck this morning that a child from Japan, who would now be about my age if the poem was written in the same year as the book’s publication, wrote such a poem as an 11-year-old. The idea that we might share a vision of an ancient overseer who was not a god-like character looking at us from a distant perch in the sky after playing for eons with the sun was an interesting one.
I was not able to find any more info about him and only one citation of the poem itself. Nonetheless, the poem rang bells for me. I enjoyed it very much and am glad to have stumbled across it.
Redtree Times 