Current mood:

spiritual

pictures and forgetting
I'm beginning to revel in places with large, "no photography" signs. The time I spend there belongs to me in one particular sense: now. Of course, there's memory, but memory is to now as plastic nicknack is to Eiffel tower. I went to Gohyakurakanji temple in Meguro and looked at lacquer statues of Bodhisattvas. I couldn't take photos. I admit, my first impulse is to photograph everything for future nostalgic purposes; I like it when my hands are tied.

There's this urge I have to capture the moment just as I see it and give it to someone else. The way that scraps of gold leaf clung to their faces in liver spot like splotches, the way that defused light came through the window and fell across their shoulders, the way one statue's eyes reminded me of my father's, - these are small, magic things. Isn't it natural to want to share them? But they're intrinsically unsharable.

There was one particular statue in that display of nearly three hundred that moved me. I looked at his face, scant ten inches away, and became hyper aware of my own breathing. I realized that most likely, my breath was contributing to the gradual erosion of his lacquer form. He acknowledged it, and pointed out that my breath, secondhand of time, marked the erosion of my form as well. I noticed that his shoulders rose and fell with mind. While I marveled over his breath the other statues around us shifted with small stirrings of life: like they were shifting on their zafu.

I turned back to ask the statue how, and a woman, another visitor, came up to me to ask if I could read the plaques that identified each statue. The spell broke. We talked, she and I, and she apologized for interrupting me. I went back to that statue's inanimate face, and I knew, looking into his mahogany colored features, that I would forget its contours as soon as I looked away. I thought frantically that if I only had my sketch book, I could draw him. He smiled and told me that it was okay to forget.