C’MAS 2013 ~ 0

Ground Zero

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_zero#History

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_zero

THE HIROSHIMA PANELS

1 GHOSTS (1950)

It was a procession of ghosts in an instant all clothing burned off hands,faces,and breasts swelled.

The purple blisters on their skin were soon burst and peeled offhanging down like pieces of rags.

With hands lifted half up,they were ghosts in procession.

Dragging their ragged skin behind them exhausted,they fell down moaning in heaps and died one after another.

At center of explosion,the temperature reached six thousand degrees.

A human shadow remaind on a stone step nearby.

Could a body vaporize?

Did it blow away?

There is no one to tell what it was like at that moment at the center.

Burned charred faces,no one could tell one from another.

Voices weakened,they told their names but even then were unrecognized.

An infant with innocent face and delicate skin lay asleep

Was it saved in it’s mother’s tender breast?

Oh,that even this one babe will awake to rise up again.

Iri Maruki (right), 1901-1995
Toshi Maruki left), 1912-2000

We lost our uncle to the Atomic Bomb and our two young nieces were killed ; our younger sister sufferd burns and our father died after six months ; many friends perished.
Iri left Tokyo for Hiroshima on the first train from Tokyo, three days after the Bomb was dropped.
Toshi followed a few days later.
Two kilometers from the center of the explosion, the family house was still standing.
But the roof and roof tiles were mostly gone, windows had been blown out, and even the pans, dishes, and chopsticks had been blasted out of their places in the kitchen.
In what was left of the burned structure, rescued bomb victims were gathered together and lay on the floor from wall to wall until it was full.
We carried the injured, cremated the dead, searched for food, and found scorched sheets of tin to patch the roof.
With the stench of death and the flies and the maggots all around us, we wandered about in the same manner as those who had experienced the Bomb.
In the biginning of September, back in Tokyo, we heard for certain that the war had ended.
In Hiroshima, we hadn’t known.
It had never entered our minds–at that time, we couldn’t think beyond what we were seeing and doing.

Three years passed before we began to paint what we had seen.
We began to paint our own nude bodies to bring back the images of that time, and others come to pose for us because we were painting the Atomic Bomb.
We thought about a 17-year-old girl having had a 17-year life span, and 3-year-old child having had a life of three years.
Nine hundreds sketches were merged together to create the first paintings.
We thought we had painted a tremendous number of people, but there were 260,000 people who died in Hiroshima.
As we prayed for the blessing of the dead with a fervent hope that it never happen again, we realized that even if we sketched and painted all oflour lives, we couldn’t never paint them all.
One Atomic Bomb in one indtant caused the deaths of more people than we could ever portray.
Long-lasting radioactivity and radiation sickness are causing people to suffer and die even now.
This was not a natural disaster.
As we painted, through our paintings, these thought came to run through and through our mind.

Iri Maruki, Toshi Maruki

http://www.aya.or.jp/~marukimsn/english/indexE.htm

John Donne 1572 ~ 1631
Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

“No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee…”