This week we started off on Wednesday by going to the library and learning on how to improve our formatting for the Show and Tell. We were shown how we could add image maps, infographics, and gifs, as well as highlight specific important sections as a way to garner a reader’s attention and make them interested in the story we are weaving. Also, we were told of sites like Draw Attention, KnightLab Projects, Google My Maps, WeVideo, Photopea, and Canva. These sites can give us even more variety in our choices for show and tell such as KnightLab Projects which have story maps that make you feel like you are in a video game. We saw the work of Denise Lu for example as a great representation of some of these formatting practices. We were then allowed the rest of the time to work on our show and tell.
Next class, we went on from the show and tell and went around the room commenting on different pictures and readings from the Tale of Heike such as a picture of the death of Kiyomori. I also felt that the Tale of Heike was an interesting tale and very action-packed. There were many scenes in the tale that remind me of parts of an action film I would see today. I was surprised by the death of Taira no Kiyomori because he was still pretty young. Probably during this era though he was considered old. Also, he was put in water to help soothe his pain but it says that he died not of old age but his Karma said that it was time for him to go. The Tale of Heike describes, “Most sadly, his sole escorts must have been the evil deeds of which he had so often been guilty, coming to greet him in the form of torturers with the heads of horses and oxen.1” In this quote, it says that the spirits that greeted him were torturers with the heads of horses and oxen. Were these spirits his punishment for all the evil deeds he performed such as burning down a Buddhist temple and all the people he killed? Is this the Karma that they were speaking of in the Tale of Heike? If so, this leads me to believe that his Karma is the dead spirits of people he killed. However, the Tale of Heike describes it as almost a curse, “There were tens of thousands of loyal warriors seated in rows high and low at the hall, each ready to exchange his life for his lord’s, but none of them could hold off the invisible, unconquerable messenger from the land of the dead, not even for an instant.2” I also found the battle at the Uji River to be very compelling. It is the age old tale of one person trying to beat impossible odds. The odds in this case are running away from a group of people on horseback with bows and arrows flying at them and somehow trying to escape. Also, I thought by this time the bushido code was not made yet, but someone tried to perform seppuku by drowning themselves, not a traditional way to do it. Was this the first case of it? Or was this what inspired seppuku?
Bibliography
The Tale of the Heike, translated by Royall Tyler. New York: Viking, 2012. (PDF)
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