need to be honest,
and need to be understanding what prompts them,
what really feeds their emotional instincts in order to display,
in other words, to express something, to write something, to paint something.
Again here, like his predecessors,
who we saw in module number one, writers, artists, very,
very concerned with getting down, documenting one's truest thoughts.
In other words, not taking on the identity of someone hundreds of years ago or
trying to be more or less than one actually is in society.
What's important, what's essential,
is to be able to display in one's own words or painting one's truest thought.
"No man or woman born into this world without the capacity to feel a desire to
eat, drink, and mingle sexually with men or women can properly be labeled, 'human.'
For this reason, what I have come to love, follows the universal way of the world."
He uses the Japanese term, tenka no kōdō.
"My instincts are at one with the Masters Wen and Zheng.
For this reason, I have drawn my beloved geisha in order to present to Kensai
(who will either share my tastes or not)."
We know here from the last sentence that this portrait with the prose written
on it was meant as a present to someone else, a gift.
It was to be given to a young painter, whom he was training to be a very,
very important painter named Hirai Kensai.
When I first read this passage, I remember seeing this
painting at the museum that owns it.
And reading the sort of kanbun Chinese verse and
wondering how it would feel, why he would want to
present a portrait of, basically his girlfriend, to one of his students?
That seemed to me to be, well extremely something
that living in the modern day, we really can't really empathize with.
It says, something that I really couldn't figure out.
First of all, like the instinct, what his sort of drive was here.
But as you read over and over, and then think about, as I'm going to explain in
a couple of minutes, what's behind these words, the historical context here,
we have a sense of what he wanted to convey to Kensai here.
He makes a very strong statement, declaration, of what it means to be human:
what it means to be human basically is to follow one's human instincts,
the instinct to eat, to drink, to partner,
to be sexually expressive or closely
bonded with someone else.
[LAUGH] All of these are desires, which according to Confucian dogma
perhaps need to be, or sensed or
thought to be, something which needs to be suppressed or controlled.
Here, Kazan proposes that we become closer and
more true and honest to these desires, because these are what make us human,
and what allow us to form and combine and
conjoin as a society, or as a family or as a domain.