To live in a world meant for other people

To live in a world meant for other people

   Here a bartender carves a block of ice into a near-perfect sphere with a sharp knife and his bare hand.  A geisha steps onto the elevator in the hotel, her hair brushed back with painstaking accuracy.  In the restaurant, food is prepared with care and served with even more care.  Ugly buildings and tangled wires overhead share space with small gardens and handmade signs and window displays and rows of idle bicycles.  Neon skeletons hang by day and become breathing beauties at nightfall.  Preschoolers line up like ducks in yellow uniforms on a train platform.  I hear one visitor refer to these children as the reason why “they are so militaristic.”  My introduction to Japan is a list of quips like this one from other westerners.  I hear them from strangers on the subway.  I hear them from my co-worker who has lived here for several years.  I hear them from the occasional person I meet in a bar or at a party.  I stand in this museum, looking at the fabrics and thinking about these things. I feel something here. I want to feel it more deeply. 

On my way home after work, I stand under the threads and the gold flakes and vivid colors of the wires over the alley that leads to my apartment.  These wires carry information and power to the individuals who connect to them.  I wonder about these people as extensions of the people I meet everyday.  There exists a built-in interconnection based on weather, sight lines, received social foundations, but each is his own terminus.  Each draws from these wires in his own way.  Each is a unique facet, an art work.  The fact that each work is a painting is not what makes it interesting.  What makes it interesting is that each painting elicits its own breath.

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