Creative Visual

BACKGROUND TO GENESIS (written 2023)

At the start of winter quarter, 1969, I realized I had completed all my required courses at Stanford for my honors political science major, including my honors thesis on the De Gaulle and the Algerian War, as well as all other required courses. I only needed three units to graduate.  I had applied to law schools including a combined business/law program at Stanford. Everything seemed set and clear for the next phase of my life.

But that summer I had some challenging experiences. I was taking two classes, one on trial law and one on religious studies.  In one I  learned of Buber’s I-Thou as a way to treat people in their wholeness and fullness and in the other I learned about  the adversarial approach of law’s I –It. Also over the summer I went to San Francisco to Glide Church, met Rev. Cecil Williams, and had some experiences which  exposed me for the first time in my life to a poverty and unfairness  that shocked me, making me face the privileged life I had been living. I had never before seen such living conditions.

Read Genesis: Venturing Forth

Kinkakuji-Temple (Golden Pavillion)

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INTRODUCTORY COMMENTARY (on finding and re-reading this, 2023)

This “snippet” “LEFT” was written on a ship, bound for Japan, the first week of May, 1970.

It was written as “creative fiction.” I was neither at the 1968 Democratic Convention demonstrations and police brutality nor at the  Kent State shootings,  which happened May 4 1970. When we arrived in Japan, we filmed some demonstrations between protestors of the Vietnam War and police.  I wanted to create some a fictional reflection of a character’s  inner  struggling with these events.  It was originally titled “Todd and Al dialogue” and intended to be part of a  new fiction writing after J’s the novel.  But that didn’t happen and just this snippet survives, which I recently found.  Reading it all these years later it seems an interesting “x-ray” into where my mind was, and the inner/outer struggle regarding society and change. This snippet is now  just one characters’ musings. Certainly there are autobiographical elements.  Part of J’s the novel shared my journey to Israel, living on the Kibbutz, tracing Jesus’s path through the Holy land reading the “Old” and New  testaments.  I had just finished reading Auerbach’s Mimesis, about his viewing the Bible as complex and ambiguous compared to Homer’s Odysseus, and now was leaving Western literature and turning East. In this snippet  I’m on a ship to  Japan with the goal being India, to live on Sri Auribindo’s Ashram in Pondicherry.  I was reading about Gandhi’s fight for internal liberation and his nonviolent battle against external British rule. I also wonder now, looking at this writing, how much seeped into it unconsciously of my own internal work I had to do regarding my father as a volunteer policeman, his anger and physical violence, his undercover cop car with the red light. Oh, Freud you would have a blast with that.

Read Left…

SEEKING INNER PEACE, COMPASSION, WISDOM
The Start of Our Asian Journey
Summer, 1970
Johanna and Deane Shapiro

The attached is a 10 minute movie snippet that we originally made in 1970 at the start of our trip to Japan.

We took video and audio of three different activities: Japanese protests against the Vietnam war, and against the US/Japanese security treaty (and US bases in Okinawa) ANPO—a seeking of “outer “peace. We also filmed some images of the Buddha at Kamakura and of rail commuters. We were trying to figure out how or if we could “fit” into society without getting depersonalized and squashed!

In 2023 we decided to edit this ancient footage as coherently and creatively as we could. It was an interesting effort. And the themes of how to fit into society, how to find inner peace, how to stand up for social justice are timeless and universal ones that we continue to wrestle with.

The vision – inner and outer peace—remains; (as does the love).

“It’s great to see the color images of the protests,… your film gives a sense of your overall perspective quite well. The care with which you helped non-Japanese speakers make sense of the banners and helmets is very much appreciated . We could all do with a bit more peace in the world to be sure.”

William Morotti , Ph.D   Associate Professor of History, UCLA;Author,  Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013)

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Additional Information about the movie

• Movie Table of Contents
• Deane and Johanna 2024 comments about the movie
• Footnotes