the art of paths

 
tell me, is it the fog or is it me?

show a country, speak of a culture, in whatever way,
and you'll enter into fiction while yearning for invisibility


Rituals

                            and the formation of identity

the skill of behaviour, the craft of framing time, the art of paths


why travel, I would say, if not to be in touch with the ordinary in non-ordinary ways; to feel and think ordinarily while experiencing what can later become the extra-ordinary in an ordinary frame


                         start in a room sealed with darkness
and a door or a window immediately etches itself onto the viewer's mind
            

            again, it's that unbearable fellow
            traveller who won't stay behind,
            whom one cannot get rid of


            opening at dawn, closing at dusk


            sorrows forming and falling away
            heavy
            like drops of water from a lotus leaf


            every day from a blossoming lotus
            something's emerging
            every day from deep in the mud
            someone's being reborn


nothing is natural, for the natural in its most natural is carefully created

    in the matted room
    a solitary painting
    barely line, barely shape
    that frail shadow
    of a bodhisattva
    shading its human frame


-- Trinh T. Minh-ha, excerpts from The Fourth Dimension

Trinh T. Minh-ha

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