Lhasa

Striving for non attachment, yet clamoring for fulfillment. Just like the ancients of Lhasa, who grappled throats for factionalism. Just like the young widow, who tucks a crying child under her arms and desires the return of her lover. Just like the cavalier, whose eightfold path strays into dirt roads of vanity. And in the ghostly remnants of the palace of some wayward Khan, listen carefully for the soft echoes of the Buddha’s rebuke. This is how the lost city gains her fragrance, truth, beauty, and magnificence.

What If?

"My Lord, where do you live?

Your servant lives in Hengtang",

Boats pause, just long enough to ask a question

And what if they were both from the same village?

-Anonymous

Beautifully consistent with the East Asian aesthetic tendency to compress vast spaces and entities into breathtaking, comprehensible miniatures, and thereby serenading the audience with a semblance of panorama and magnanimity (consider scenic portraits and banzais), this simple quatrain achieves that precise effect through the magic of language – The polar opposites of the pronominal “me” and “you”, creating a vastness within the poetic textuality which frames the imagery of a placid river, upon which drifts the characters’ fishing boats. Notice how such a compression of essence should never be confused with the onerous and mechanistic, albeit similar task of cartography. What is truly charming, however, is the creation of an almost wistful hope for coincidence, when the boatmen ponder the possibility that despite chancing upon each other in the poetic vastness and flux of the aesthetic landscape, their point of origin might after all be the same. Hence the minor ripples of a threat to collapse the entire miniature universe constructed within the text; hence the tension and the deliberate non-resolution of a thought provoking philosophical situation; hence the dynamism through which forces and relations inherent in the conceived vastness of the subject matter are successfully preserved and elucidated.

Values

The inculcation of prescribed, subjective "values" has become big business in today's society, compelling all to hearken even as vultures peck mercilessly in our desolete ephemeral landscapes within. Designed, packaged, mechanically conceptualized, have these desirable and irreducible moral processes ended up being codified, assigned to constricted compartments of meaning, referentially narrowed and slided along the conduits of our language? Must we now forcibly assign artificial boundaries in vain pursuit of that dubious horizon of definitional beauty? Has piety become a sub section in the conceptual overhead bridge, bearing the letters "LOVE" ridiculously spray painted over the cement by buffoons donning cloaks of authority? We have turned a deaf ear towards the pitiable cries of those who wallow in their tombs...the priests of yesterday, with their retrospectively magical ability to resonate their teachings and meanings over shared experiences, over the immense power of ritual. How I long for a return to the hearth, for the harpsichord of morality to strike a note in our collective consciousness again. That we may see and understand! Values overlap, extinguishing the pretentious borders of their neighbours, leaving a sweet aftertaste of internalization that we may all savour.