On and Off

/ rothpoetry

piet mondrain painting Boogie Woogie Broadway

Painting by: Piet Mondrian, ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’, 1942-43, moma.org

Kim at d’Verse, introduced us to the painting above, and asked that we use it as inspiration for our *Haibun Monday. As I looked at the implication of streets and intersections, I thought that would be too obvious to write about. My wife thought it looked like a circuit board, which really connected with me.
Circuit boards have gone from large boards of soldered tubes, transistors, capacitors, and switches to boards so small you can’t even see the pathways. My hearing aids have four channels and three volume settings, and are hidden neatly behind each ear. Pushing one button controls both at the same time. Now we have wrist watches that can check body functions and even do electrocardiograms. Who knows what they will come up with next.
Hidden solder paths
Connect on and off switches
Summer tree roots ‘twined
******

*Haibuns are a form of Japanese Poetry with two or three short crisp paragraphs of prose followed by a traditional Haiku, that references a season.

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44 thoughts on “On and Off”

  1. That’s amazing, Dwight, a circuit board! I once worked in a lab at Agfa Gevaert in Germany where we developed coatings for circuit boards, and now you’ve pointed it out I can see it too. That was back in the seventies, when circuit boards were big, now they are tiny chips. I love those ‘twined tree roots in among the circuits of your haiku.

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  2. The one thing in common I find out here on the trail is the geometrics of the prompt, map, grid, and mother board; cool. I like your take on it. Technology moves toward sub-atomic microchipping for entertainment and information. All this from the Dick Tracy watch, computers the size of a room, and our enslavement to our technological toys.

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    • Thank you Glenn! Technology has gone through the roof since we were reading Dick Tracy in the daily paper comic strip. And then they were in color in the Sunday edition! Chips in humans is a little scary to me!

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  7. Great Haibun Dwight, and the idea of a circuit board is innovating! (Pun kind of intended 🙂 ) Mondriaan was a fellow country man of mine. I once saw an exibition in a museum in wich the development of Mondriaans work was on display. Being a ‘traditional’ painter at first he more and more stripped his objects in order to find the core of it, the heart, the essence. This developed ultimately into the work he now is best known for. Personally I find Broadway Boogie Woogie a wonderful painting.

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    • Thanks Peter. I hadn’t thought about it, but New York City is definitely a giant circuit board! Love that idea also.
      This is definitely an interesting painting. You can’t strip NYC down too much further! Thank you again for your wonderful comments.

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  16. What a way of looking at it. I keep finding little circuit boards on my kitchen counters (the husband always seems to have them in his pockets and dumps them out in the kitchen). Your haibun made me stop and marvel. Next time I’ll take the time to appreciate their ingenuity rather than muttering small curses about how I’d just cleaned the kitchen.

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  19. Excellent description of what this reminds you of….circuit boards…and then moving from how they’ve changed. Become ,ore complex, more nano and then a total shift in the last line of the haiku – away from man’s ingenuity in technology to nature’s ingenuity in the criss-crossing and tangle of tree roots.
    Well done!

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