9/15/09

In Salvador Dali’s painting “Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus” there is expressed something very close to what I experienced on my last day in Tokyo.  Upon looking at Dali’s painting one has a feeling of great time, as if ages have passed and the buildings of some great empire have slowly crumbled and eroded until now in their final days they assume this humble posture.  And, of course, it is a posture of prayer.  There is something so human and full of care in the way they stand.  And it is this human care, so beautifully expressed in Millet’s original painting and through Dali stretched with nostalgia to a more universal dimension, which speaks poignantly to my heart.

I spent the afternoon of my last day in Tokyo in the Meji Shrine forest between Shibuya and Shinjuku.  The sky was dark with clouds but not raining.  The weather seemed suspended on a course towards a storm but all was still.  This made for a dreamy quality in the park.  The old trees and the dark sky made Tokyo seem a world away from where I wandered.  However at one point I emerged into a field where I could see the buildings of downtown Shinjuku towering above the trees.  There wasn’t a soul in the park as I found out later it was past closing time, but I lingered in my ignorance of this fact and absorbed the strange view for a while.  Due to the presence of the forest only a handful of skyscrapers could be seen above the treetops.  And with the dark sky behind it looked like a scene from the future, unreal almost, as if I wasn’t seeing the actual Tokyo before me but instead an abstraction, an artistic representation of reality that made reality even more vivid for me in that moment.  I was seeing an archeological reminiscence of Tokyo’s heart.  The sky was full of crows and I was alone in this forest with seething masses of the city around me seemingly gone and only the skeletons of a culture, a humanity, and a dream remaining.

Of course the reality of present day Tokyo soon returned when a policeman arrived and told me to leave the park as it had closed already.  I eventually made my way out of the park and slowly entered the throngs of people all moving towards Shinjuku station at 6pm rush hour.  I have been told this is the busiest train station in the world, seeing over a million people a day pass through its turnstiles.  The sky continued to be dark and ominous adding to the dramatic effect of dusk and the lights of downtown Tokyo emerging in the gloom.  By the time I got to the station I was in a sea of human bodies all headed somewhere.  I was going to Yokohama for my last class with Yoshito and made my way to the Shonan-Shinjuku train line.  The Shonan-Shinjuku is an express train line to Yokohama and it is so crowded during rush hour that JR literally hires white gloved workers to help push the people onto the train.  I made my way into this sardine can transportation service and headed for Yokohama an hour away.

Just a few minutes into the ride I noticed a slight tickle on my arm and discovered there a small ant crawling on my skin.  He had come from the park!  I remember upon seeing him I literally said out loud “oh honey that was a bad idea!”  I couldn’t believe he had ended up here on the train with me.  He was doomed of course, but I felt some immediate connection with him.  And it seemed so absurd to me because I was vividly aware of both his perspective and the human perspective all around me.  The scene should be described in more detail to be fully appreciated.  There I was standing squished together with hoards of people all oblivious to anything but their cell phones, video games and I-pods, so tight that I could feel the breathing of the man next to me through our bodies and I was trying to protect and understand this little ant who had unknowingly ended up in this dangerous situation.  Very absurd! 

So, for the next forty-five minutes the ant and I rode together to Yokohama.  I simply let him crawl up and down my arm.  At one point he actually fell and I thought for sure he was a goner.  But after a few minutes of staring at the floor he re-appeared on the backpack resting at my feet and I picked him up again.  We eventually arrived in Yokohama station and I parted ways with my new friend at the station platform where I left him crawling on a beam towards the ceiling.  Of course, being separated from his colony he didn’t have long to live.  But still, it seemed like a better place to be then stuck between a hundred or more shoes on the train.

It wasn’t until later that evening at Yoshito’s class when he asked us to dance the “smallest” dance that I started to understand how much that little ant had affected me.  And now, after many days have passed and I am back in my own country I can see what a profound story it really was.  I actually became that ant while I was with him on the train.  I saw in that short time together how I am no different from him.  The world is so vast and we are all so small.  On whatever dimension we choose to look we will see this truth Be it an ant, a human being, a mountain or even the earth itself, we all swim in something much larger than ourselves.  And it was this honesty between God and myself that struck me so deeply upon meeting this ant. 

So again, I think of Dali’s Reminiscence.  It is this humility in the face of something greater than us that makes his painting so powerful.  This is the essence and the beauty of prayer and was it not Dali’s own humility in the face of Millet’s great work Angelus that enabled him to create something new?  I believe more and more that the best art is only prayer.  It is a way to come to terms with and honor both our own smallness and the greatness that surrounds and sustains us.