association-list

When I was in high school, the Chap­lain, who was a lib­eral sort, invited a group of Bud­dhist monks to come and visit. They came and talked, answered ques­tions, skinny asian men, some young, some old, with shaven heads and saf­fron and orange robes, wear­ing sneak­ers or Birken­stocks over socks. Few of these things made any impres­sion on me, though. I was in high school, after all, and knew most things better than they did. I’m still not a fan of reli­gious orders, although I think that I could have a more fruit­ful con­ver­sa­tion with one of them. The thing that really stuck with me, though, was the sand man­dala that they com­pleted while they were there.

I don’t know if you’ve seen one of these things, but they’re quite intri­cate, fine, clear lines of col­ored sand, shaken out of a paper funnel with del­i­cate taps. The idea that they were simply going to com­plete it, let it sit for a few days, and then just tip it into the trash or per­haps use some other, more sacred method of dis­posal were abhor­rent to me. I spent the couple of days that they took to com­plete it think­ing up ways to pre­serve it. My favorite, the one I ended up sug­gest­ing to the Chap­lain, was to have them build it on steel, or some other heat resis­tant sur­face, then bake it in the kiln we had in the art build­ing, seal­ing the pat­tern in glass. He explained it all to me then, but I didn’t buy it then, and am not one hun­dred per cent sold on the idea of enshrin­ing the tran­si­tory nature of things in expen­sive ritual.

Still, there are lessons to the things beyond the obvi­ous, or at least there were for me. The value of art­work as symbol, rather that just being the thing itself. Up until then, art was just some­thing that you did because it was beau­ti­ful, or because it felt good, rather than because it meant any­thing. Some­times, of course, an art­work is just a thing done for its beauty, or the sat­is­fac­tion of cre­at­ing it, and often that’s enough, or even better than had it come gravid with symbol, but for all of my teach­ers nat­ter­ing on about what this or that art­work sym­bol­ized, I’d never known what they meant before then, never had the real­ize that in a par­tic­u­lar con­text a visual art­work could be trans­formed into a tool for saying, lent nar­ra­tive weight beyond its imme­di­ate presentation.

I had intended to say some­thing here about my dis­taste for the internet’s ten­dency towards the pack­rat­ting of ephemera, but on fur­ther con­tem­pla­tion, it’s early days yet. Record­ing every­thing and then using var­i­ous fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms (pri­mar­ily the eyes of the bored, at this point) to ferret out the things among them that aren’t triv­ial or ephemeral isn’t some­thing that we’ve had the tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­ity to do, up to now. As a strat­egy for find­ing the things worth pre­serv­ing, it cer­tainly has its merits. In all like­li­hood, most of the hes­i­tancy we see, the trep­i­da­tion toward being seen as triv­ial or insignif­i­cant, has to do with the human per­cep­tual bias towards the supe­ri­or­ity of the past. We should prob­a­bly give it a little time before we bother to pass judge­ment, or even before we worry about the problem.