CAROLYN HASHIMOTO
Dots and After Shocks
Image Description: this piece is made up of blocks and dots, with the poetry scattered in and amongst the large red and yellow dots. There are dotted lines moving between the pages of the text, joining the entire thing in an effervescent, other-worldly series of images and words. Much of the text is written in parallel columns down the page and it is up for interpretation how it is to be read. The following is only one interpretation.
Text:
Red is the circle of the hinomaru [Japanese national flag, written in Japanese] flag
We went to Matsumoto
because of the dots
Red are the dots of Kusama Yayoi’s
mind
big
black
polka
dots
Red is the ring of Fukushima
on
big
yellow
pumpkins
[text inside a large red dot] You are here
You are here.
Marked with a dot.
No ticks in Japan.
A circular maru for yes.
A bats cross for no.
And the sankaku triangle that lies
between them. Maybe. Maybe not.
Yet to be decided.
I miss the ambiguity
and the misunderstanding.
After all isn’t it usually
grey areas
that we find ourselves in?
The circle around Fukushima is decreasing with time. How far would you venture into a no-go zone?
Where would you put the [Japanese text]?
Six weeks since the disaster, and I am determined that we are going to have a brilliant adventure.
Yes, an adventure darling! A great bigadventure. (The trip will be filled with italics and exclamation marks.)
This holiday is overdue. Focus is razor sharp. My brush with death - however inconsequential - has made me impatient and I take matters into my own hands. Plan our route on a local train. Book usinto a business hotel. Pay attention to detail. That’s where the devil lives.
This is an adventure
with seat belts
and safety goggles.
I’m going to take pictures, so we need to look the part. Blue leather jacket. Trilby and army pants. My daughter in her French coat.
Details.
An earthquake of magnitude 9.1 can bend rail tracks 232 miles away.
At 2.46pm on Marth 11th, 2011 all the trains stopped in Tokyo.
Where was I when the earthquake struck?
In the centre of Tokyo. Ginza. I don’t remember what I wore that day or what I ate for lunch, or even the name of the student I had lunch with.
My daughter said it was like surfing on the playground.
How many hours had passed since the earthquake? I still can’t put the events in any order.
I sat for hours in silence with strangers - there were 2.6 million of us stranded in the city that day.
I watched the battery on my phone die.
It’s a little frightening because the meaning of life almost escapes you. If you think you’ve grasped it, you might lose it again - when you see yourself in this context and are reduced to a dot. And that’s frightening. Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Artist, from 3 Artists Commenting on Yahoo Kusama’s Phalli’s Field, Louisianna Chanel, April 28, 2016
We wake early on the first day of
our trip and are first in line to climb the
steep steps of the black Crow Castle. The
cherry blossoms are starting to open.
How many steps, how many stops, how
much we spend. I document them all.
Collect the data.
Silent sieverts send
Geiger counters clicking
like Cicadas on speed.
How can I count with
numbers that make no sense
out of nonsense?
I’ve done my research for the trip and for
our first dinner we try the local delicacies.
The tender slices of [Japanese text]
are not unlike tuna.
Now that I have tried horse,
will I also eat whale?
They’re selling [Japanese text]
from [Japanese text] in our local supermarket.
How many sieverts in a leaf of
Fukushima cabbage?
Our budget allows us one plate.
We crave more.
A small lacquerware bowl
houses the hachi no ko.
I’ve eaten locusts before,
why not try baby bees?
Where is your
comfort zone?
The waiters watch us.
Funny how it’s easier for me to eat
raw horse in a rural Japanese town
than order ramen in Wagamama in
Glasgow.
On the way back to the hotel I buy a
small bottle of sake - I even manage to
control my drinking on this trip.
The highlight of our adventure is a visit to
the City Art Museum.
Before the tectonic plates rubbed
together on 3.11 I though I had
grasped it. I was in a changed room
in H&M when it happened.
The polka dots of Kusama’s mind spread across the gallery like measles. You can’t help but think there’s a bit of exploitation going on here. You imagine poor Kusama being dragged out of the cosy confines of her room in the psychiatric hospital every morning to run the polka dot treadmill of the polka dot production line in her polka dot factory. Genius. Driven. Her face is neither happy nor sad, angry nor elated. Who is benefitting from this therapy? She is quite literally dotty. The town of Matsumoto that bore her then cast her out; that gave her no solace, is now reaping the fruits of her labour. Later when you troll YouTube for interviews with her you take notes - Obsessed. Possessed. She speaks in a nervous clipped manner. She speaks like she is having a panic attack. On the verge of a breakdown, she has broken through, but she is now breaking down?
I wasn’t going to lose my life for a pair of cheap jeans is my go-to-introduction when I bring it up in conversation.
I never bought the jeans. The changing room shook so badly I thought the walls would collapse.
The metal spiral staircase turned to rubber. I clung to the bendy bannister as I wobbled down it in a silent and orderly fashion with all the other silent and orderly customers. How did we contain our panic?
Outside on the street we waited in the apocalyptic silence for aftershocks. Phone lines across the city were jammed and I couldn’t get through to my husband. A Facebook message from a friend in London Are you OK??!?!
There is not rational explanation as to why I have become so obsesseidth these pumpkins. And I have no desire to investigate further.
Reality is fleeting. Join the dots.
Kusama broke free of the restraints of her hometown of Matsumoto and flew to America in 1957. She made her home in New York and unleashed her dots.
I flew to Scotland to visit my parents a week after the earthquake. It was a month since my mum had been discharged from the Crichton Royal Hospital.
With nothing to hold her down or hold her back, she wore herself our, and exhausted from painting too much, Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, the year my own mother gave birth to her only child.
Despite its name, The Crichton Institute for Lunatics was one of the most forward-thinking asylums in the 19th Century. Writing, drama and Art Therapy were prescribed to all 120 patients.
Kusama finds solace and life in her dots. It’s her coping mechanism for the auditory and visual hallucinations that have forced her by her own free will to retire to the confines of a mental institution at night.
But for my mother?
Lithium and Electroconvulsive Therapy. A series of short sharp shocks to her system.
More efficient in these modern austere times.
Above her piano the painting she made of Kafka’s house. Did the consultant know about that?
What would my mother have painted if she had flown to New York?
ECT is not
as shocking
as you might
want to believe.
From breaking free of her own boundaries she broke free of the canvas, letting her nets and dots flow over the walls and floors.
What leaks into the sea and into the fish that the Fukushima fisherman catch in their nets?
Down at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
It took Kusama sixteen years
to come back to Japan.
I came back to Scotland after twenty.
But I still say I left Japan.
She returned to Japan in the year I was born. She grew up in a small town. Are these random coincidences? Are these the dots I am trying to connect?
It was midnight when we got home on March 11th. And the nightmare had just begun. ON our TV screen we watched the horror unfold.
How does Japan contain the madness and keep its people sane? Let them out of their temporary homes once a week until the decontamination is done.
How many suicides since the explosion?
Is it better to have been swallowed whole in a wave of mythic proportions than die a slow and soulless death in temporary accommodation?
Are we any wiser for our advances in emergency relief?
Science has made us arrogant.
My mind goes round in circles with circular thoughts.
To draw a perfect circle you need a ruler, a sharp pencil and a compass. Where on the compass do I lie now? From West to East to West again. Circumnavigating the globe. The only footprints I leave in Siberia are carbon ones.
I am waiting for a conclusion. An insight.
An ending.
Can I join the dots with with aftershocks?
These are my answers
Not all sentences end with a dot