The Great Wave: Hokusai by Donald Finkel

4:00 AM Friday, April 26th, 2024

Katsushika Hokusai - The Great Wave at Kanagawa

But we will take the problem in its most obscure manifestation, and suppose that our spectator is an average Englishman. A trained observer. carefully hidden behind a screen, might notice a dilation in his eyes, even an intake of his breath, perhaps a grunt. (Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art)

It is because the sea is blue,

Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue

Men have white faces, like the snow

On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their

Boats. It is because the air

Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing

Will harm these frail strangers,

That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers

Will not fall; and the blue men

Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans

Against the sky.

In the painter's sea

All fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.

But the innocent bystander, he merely

'Walks round a corner, thinking of nothing': hidden

Behind a screen we hear his cry.

He stands half in and half out of the world; he is the men,

But he cannot see below Fuji

The shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches

His claws against strangers. He is

Not safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.

He fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat

Blindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.

Jé Maverick

The Great Wave: Hokusai by Donald Finkel

🡄 Time And Materials by Robert Hass

I, Too by Langston Hughes 🡆

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