Yasushi Ikeda

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Air and insects

I'm now reading books about animals for the preparation of the planned special pages of the summer issue of our poetry magazine "Mi-lyre-n". One of them is "Alien Worlds: How insects conquered the earth and why their fate will determine our future" written by Steve Nicholls (via the Japanese translation by Remi Kumagai). The hugeness of 600 pages of this book testifies how large, unimaginable, complicated and mysterious insects' world is. 

One big wonder concerning insects is that they can fly. They acquired wings long before birds did. Miracle. Insects were the first to proceed in the air, and since then they have subtly developed and elaborated their wing mechanism. According to this book, the air is somewhat like water for small insects. Possibly they fly as if they swim and climb in the air. But imagine the first insect that came upon the idea of flight. Maybe it moved some parts of its body and felt the possibility of the air. Genius! 

Poetry also flies in our imaginative space. Air for insects is silence for poems. Not vacuum silence but dreamy, dense liquid silence, I fancy.

Our genuine precious inspiration is the first unidentified flying insect some hundred million years ago.

Yasushi Ikeda

---ESSAY---

Tart or thunderbolt or ...

Some may say a poem is a small tart of never ever experienced taste made with languages. I would rather say it is like a sudden thunderbolt in the blue sky. This is nothing other than the Japanese (Chinese?) proverb "青天の霹靂"(seiten no hekireki) meaning something unexpected appears all of a sudden in a striking and fascinating way. This thunderbolt may come from the sea of dream. Then this flash and thundering have some existential root. And I imagine this thunderbolt may not have the shape of lightning in the sky. It may well be a pebble or a fragment of glass giving out superb shine of a jewel. 

A poet stands on the shore of the sea of dream, wanders and finds something small and beautiful and enigmatic. He or she picks it up and watch carefully. This is the pivotal deed of poetry. A magic tart is sure to delight tongues and eyes and noses. A thunderbolt cannot help surprising eyes and ears and hearts. A tiny enchanting drift on the spiritual shore will have the potential to describe a tremendous amount of secrets kept unseen in the world. A twig of a thunderbolt drifting along the border of day(consciousness) and night(unconsciousness) is omniscient.