Monday, May 12, 2008

Notes on the spring that skips by

The champagne backdrop shimmers a translucent grayness from which subtle washes build up imaginary mountains on either side. Huge accordioned screens separate the people from the stage before them as the lights, the thundering skies, flicker. A tin bird weaves the navigated course blindfolded. It is a one-dimensional trick but the audience claps anyway. Their village just elongated off the frame horizontally into a perpetual mist.

But where does the hermit sit? Beside, behind or in front of the metallic branches? Each a disfigured limb snakes throughout harmlessly in the foreground yet the old bearded man is oblivious, focused instead on his carton of thinly sliced chow fun. From a long distance, his tiny figure becomes one continuous noodle.

Pink blossoms bloom, its petals blown off from a gust of hot wind. On the ground, its pinkness fades immediately to a waxy white, swirling around like watery fibrous pulp until it becomes sheets of reborn paper.

Contained within an oddly flat bottle, nothing changes at all because time stands expectantly still.

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