Day 4582: Shin Ohashi Bridge by Hiroshige & TBT

"Torn-up": junk collage.

  

  

Want music?

    

Click:  Take Six, Overjoyed.

 

2GN2S

This is Sudden Shower on Shin Ohashi Bridge by Hiroshige, 1857. It is his most famous, most iconic work. Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote this poem about it called "People on a Bridge." Look closely--is the lone man rolling up his sleeves sporting a samurai sword at his side?

A strange planet with its strange people.

They yield to time but don’t recognise it.

They have ways of expressing their protest.

They make pictures, like this one for instance:

At first glance, nothing special.

You see water.

You see a shore.

You see a boat sailing laboriously upstream.

You see a bridge over the water and people on the bridge.

The people are visibly quickening their step,

because a downpour has just started

lashing sharply from a dark cloud.

The point is that nothing happens next.

The cloud doesn’t change its colour or shape.

The rain neither intensifies nor stops.

The boat sails on motionless.

The people on the bridge

run just where they were a moment ago.

It’s difficult to avoid remarking here:

this isn’t by any means an innocent picture.

Here time has been stopped.

Its laws have been ignored.

It’s been denied influence on developing events.

It’s been insulted and spurned.

Thanks to a rebel,

a certain Hiroshige Utagawa

(a being which as it happens

has long since and quite properly passed away)

time stumbled and fell.

Maybe this was just a whim of no significance,

a freak covering just a pair of galaxies,

but we should perhaps add the following:

Here it’s considered proper

to regard this little picture highly,

admire it and thrill to it from age to age.

For some this isn’t enough.

They even hear the pouring rain,

they feel the cool drops on necks and shoulders,

they look at the bridge and the people

as if they saw themselves there

in the self-same never-finished run

along an endless road eternally to be travelled

and believe in their impudence

that things are really thus.

from all of us, Sensei.

 

  

 

A  1+  minute video, Cat meets puppy , here

 

 

 

  

 

Just because ...

White-crowned Hornbill

 

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