BGM: The Beatles - Hey Jude
I guess my room has about 100 books, but there are not so many books of collection of poems. In other words, I don't have any habit of enjoying reading poems in my life usually. All I do is just listening to various pop songs. Through enjoying them, I have been soaked into the vast sea of poems... so I have never lived until now with having any respect for the poetic culture/heritages in our history. Recently I have been into poems, and even writing. Therefore I want to read poems within some anthologies as Iwanami bunko's "American Poems Collection" because I start feeling ashamed of my ignorance. My life goes like this. Really "readymade"... Although I had to experience a irrational event in my workplace, I could feel that my vitality/mentality got revived actually when I started writing my sonnet. I'm such an easy-going person. Turning around any material successes, I want to write my things steadily... so I tried to do so in a free time today, and built a blog to collect mine. A friend of mine has been writing his original poems for a long time. I have to follow him.
It was a day off. This morning I had an online meeting about English conversation on ZOOM. Today we learned a word "subtle". This word has really profound meanings. One of them is "a little", and all members actively made their own example sentences. The sentence I created was "rice has subtle sweet taste". After that, we tried to make our own sentences from the words "make up for". I tried to write as "This Koutaro Sawaki's book will make up for the coming hard days", and also showed the book I had by chance. It's the Koutaro Sawaki's "Midnight Express". I said to a member from India that "Your country appears in this book", then he said to me "Is that book translated in English?". I was impressed by his great strong curiosity. After that, we enjoyed small talk. "How do we celebrate our birthdays?" was the main topic. Me, I opened my birthday on Facebook and LINE so many friends send me celebrating messages. In other words, I can enjoy the "online/virtual party" every year. I remembered that a friend had said to me as "Thank you for being in this world, seeing us!". I am impressed by that grateful comment.
After taking a nap, I made a draft of presentation I would have with my friends tomorrow, the next Thursday. Nowadays I often look back at my life, and in this presentation I want to talk about my youthful days, my teenage sensitive days. When I was a child, there was never a piece of concept of so-called autism. But, already I had a terrible difficulty to live on so I had to say to myself "Why should I keep on being alive?". Even I was a teenager, I couldn't enjoy any pleasant youthful events. Just I had to face huge difficulty. The people blamed me as "You are different completely from us" and "You are too strange". So I had to be "thrown away from the classroom" (in other words, I had to be bullied). After that, in my college days I couldn't find any part-time job because of this autism. I had to be alone, with no friends. I read many books at that period, and had a certain ambition to be a writer by reading Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster. I can write something great... But, about 30 years after, I actually start writing my journal and poems. I couldn't imagine... I even write them in English! I am really grateful for the friends who has been supporting me.
This evening I attended the "danshu" meeting. A person said his opinions about "how should we talk to the person who are in serious trouble" and "how should we stand close to help them". Going back to my group home, I thought about that besides creating my poem and also reading Shuntaro Tanikawa's poem collection. If I saw the person who were in troubles? They could think as "I wanna die" and "Everything must be over". I remember... I have a friend who were once hikikomori. I remember how he could go out from his room finally and start his new life. He once had faced the fact that his parents were going older more and more, and that let him decide to go out (I heard so). From that life story, I thought that "we need the person's will. He/she must think that he/she wants to live again from himself/herself individually". But I don't want to say that "Other people just have to observe him/her because others can do nothing to" or "Wait for the time he/she will start his new life". All the things we the people around him/her can do are just to let his/her inner fire again. Let his/her will fire, and show the future. Me, I quit drinking and start showing shameful myself (I am now showing crap poems to the world!). I wish this could be a piece of hope to the world.
