Breathing the air you exhaled ▶ Yuning

Hello everyone.

It has been a rainy spring for a while now, but how are you all doing?
It is the season for graduations, and I find myself getting teary-eyed quite often.

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Now, here is today's book.

Tatsuru Uchida & Noboru Yasuda, 'Modulated Lectures on Japanese Classics'

I think people who love reading are the type who enjoy 'imaginatively seeing things that are invisible.' If they were animals, they would just lounge in their burrows once their bellies were full, but humans started drawing pictures on cave walls. When they drew murals while recalling 'things they had seen but were not currently in front of them,' humans gained the ability to travel 'imaginatively' through the past and future.

...Well, this is content you might learn in a textbook, but this 'Modulated Lectures on Japanese Classics' had something interesting to say about it.

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Have you ever heard of a 'negative hand'?
It is this. ↓

It is a drawing technique seen in cave murals where one holds pigment in their mouth, places their hand against the wall, and blows the pigment toward it, leaving the shape of the hand as a blank space like a stencil. When looking at cave murals, animals were drawn as positive images using lines or solid fills, but for some reason, only hands were expressed as negative images.

We started talking about how strange that was, and Mr. Yasuda, a Noh performer, suggested that the ancient people who drew these 'negative hands' might have wanted to leave behind their 'breath' rather than just the shape of their hands. This is because very few animals can freely control their breathing; in fact, it is only humans and birds. Even among other mammals, dogs and cats cannot do this. And humans and birds, who can control their breathing, gained the ability to sing, which humans further evolved into language.

At the same time, the technique of 'synchronizing breath' among multiple people was created, and the ancestors of modern humans were able to take down large prey like mammoths by synchronizing their breath and saying 'one, two' to throw stones and spears. Reading the book's claim that the countless 'negative hands' left on those cave walls might be a commemoration of that fact, I had an 'Aha!' moment.

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In ancient times, people controlled their breathing to sing and talk together,
and they realized the joy and power of synchronizing their breath with their companions.
That was truly a step that made humans human.

...What? You want to synchronize your breath with someone too?
If so, please come to our book club.

Until then, on a day when the blessed rain nourishes the rice fields.

[Contributor] Yuning