Buddha Head
Buddha Head
[tab5](on spotting James Nachtwey in Bangkok)[/tab5]I. That morning bred in it nothing that would suggest a crossing of paths, though intersections were the skeleton of that market, anyway. A grid of infinite inflexible vertebrae, the largest stationary mammal of its kind, half-splayed half-coiled outside Mo Chit Station in Bangkok—the city’s synecdoche in five-thousand stalls flushed with humidity; humans gushed into its tunnels from around the world, bathing in the steam of boiling rice noodles, crabs and a million black-market t-shirts. So chances were slim to folklore- impossible we would cross the same fracture the same day, the same inerrant second the explosive sequences of your bullet-proofed past careened mine to the same. II. Cast from an unknown metal, an alloy of steel and something malleable so the serene calm of its eyes could somehow take expression in the cold alchemy of whatever magic it is that turns an element into something extant—the way a Hindu priest breathes a statue into living that in turn inoculates the breather against the wounds we gallop toward, believing them a bright and blissful future. Of the world, Siddhartha grasped the grasping responsible for our temporary pleasures, released the culvert of mandatory pains that follow—those skulls filled to bursting with larvae, greedy piles of squirming commas gnawing through decay, transforming death into the dream of another being. It hurts the same, but doesn’t linger. III. At first it seems impossible, the sheer distortion of a human milked of its meat and leverage, spine a jagged ridge, skeletal keys punching the air as it crawls across the land that refused to feed it. Or a shadow-only portrait of an arm hungry for heroin, the jab so precisely recreated by the absence of light. Of course, negative space is what your eye sees best: the hollow in us all. Or those guilty feet of passersby that circle a splayed body already knifed by the crude sharpened fractal of metal held by a hand that bleeds out the frame into potential you or I. Belt buckle fastened, laces tied, not the actions of one who that morning rose for his death, but was startled by the anger used to fell him: Whatever justice done, your camera didn’t judge but shuttered. IV. Your eye changed mine. That was the gist of my awe that curled the vowel of my mouth into a hoop of silence wrung by this exchange of spaces in which I watched you search for some souvenir or storm front, when I passed by in periphery to the main composition of your gaze. The market hummed in the background like a swarm of bees devouring a meadow—all teeth and distraction. My idolatry was a simple case of confronting the dream, the softest of minerals to shatter. So I found a tiny kiosk, shelves lined with Buddha heads of different weights and occasions. Then still buzzed by your proximity (our encounter twice removed from the war of living) I bought the head of Siddhartha as a prince, eyes half-open in contemplation, aware yet not awakened.
