Words rippling on water

Huai Su is said to have planted thousands of banana trees in order to practice his calligraphy on banana leaves when he had no paper.

Here is a picture of "Prince Hongli practising calligraphy on a banana leaf".

Very large leaf!

Calligraphy may be practiced with water, on stone, so that it evaporates as it is written.

I have a fondness for this form of calligraphy, and for ephemeral arts in general, which I sometimes call "sandcastle art" recalling my father's drip castles: wet sand dripped from the fingers to form spires, arches, all manner of architecture dropped onto the beach to be washed out by the tide or dried out by the sun or trampled to ruin under the feet of some person who has remembered his Godzilla nature.

Part of the pleasure I take in watching these sandcastles form comes from the knowledge that I will also see them fall.

The experienced present of the art rises like the crest of a wave: the crest as falling water, built on a foundation of water constantly rising from and rejoining the Tiamatic void.

Not that ocean waves end at the ocean surface.

But where the ocean wave crests and breaks into fractal foam, where the past breaks into our awareness, is present time as a sustained explosion of past time.

Memory shapes our experience of the present into an illusion of frozen moments, transforming the moving-time-illusion of fluid ocean foam into the static-time-illusion of mountain ranges.

Imagine a mountain range "read" as a soundwave.

Time as a physical wave, the physical wave as sound, as music.

The wave on the ear, the brushstroke on stone.

Where water and brush touch stone, a spot without form. Where the brush moves, trailing water, a formless spot becomes the history of the evolving present, shapes the meaning of the brush, dictates new direction, evaporates, dissappears.

Brush as dancer, calligraphy as dance.

A progression can be constructed:

Toward one extreme, thought without extension. Idea created and destroyed in an instant, no visibility.

Then thought expressed in motion: dance, music. The event experienced, if not as it happens, then a correlative rate. Events streaming through a fixed point of perception. Sound waves hitting the ear. Everything gone as soon as it happens. "Real time".

Then water on stone. The dancer leaving a visible trail of light. We get to see where we've been, because we've turned memory into external object, and we can turn the external object back into present experience, and back into memory.

Toward the other extreme, writing with ink. Durable creation. Where experience turns into object, and object exists as object. We can remove our experience, cease imbuing meaning, cease finding relationships, cease awareness of the process, and later pick up the object, turn it back into experience of event, imbue it with meaning again, rinse repeat.

Where writing and reading happens. And during the process of reading, the creative process is renewed. Our observation and comprehension of imprinted signs recreates them, reimprints them, the object becomes sign and the signs form relationship, our thoughts are born and die again with each reading.

Beyond that, maybe, objects and events independent of, non coincident with experience.

Earlier today I was researching solid state disks as potential elements of a planned new computer.

Solid state information storage devices make use of floating gate transistors for memory storage.

"floating gate" is a poetic, evocative term.

Makes me think of floating torii.

Torii gates mark a boundary between profane and sacred space and passing through a torii gate is an "act of sanctification". Torii even look a bit like floating gate transistors, through which electrons are passed to become imbued with meaning; with memory.

Memory made by electrons through a gate, by water on stone, by words, and again, electrons, on mind .

Ephemeral beauty as imbued meaning, the imprint of sacred meaning on the chaos of objective existence.

Objects become art, and events become stories when we discover and create their relationships.

In writing this post, I remembered Rabindranath Tagore's Fireflies as an example of poem-as-enduring-ephemera: brief splashes on the page, the beginning and the ending all in view at once.

Revisiting the verses, I find some nifty reflections of my own thoughts.

For instance:

My words that are slight
may lightly dance upon time's waves
when my works heavy with import have gone down.

And here I learned that Rabindranath Tagore completed Fireflies during a stay in Balatonfüred Hungary, where he received treatment for heart disease, and where, after his recovery, he planted a lime tree.