Crime of passion
[ about the book: In praise of shadows by Jun’ihirō Tanizaki ]
The one who wrote you believed in the beauty of transience. Even love is always
piercing, sad and aware of it’s ephemerality. That is why I need to destroy you.
You, who opened my eyes on the shadows.
This world believes in light, trusts the light.
Takes into account only these things that appear to us in an obvious,
unquestionable way. This world praises certainty, matter and science. While
you, you and your mono-no aware* are breathing in illusions and dreams, in fragments
of the fading reality.
You filled me with empathy for imperfections, allowed me to accept and
experience my faulty surrounding with affection. The beauty lays in things that
we cannot completely understand, measure and preserve. Now, you need to die,
because you don’t belong to the light. This possessive world will set a bonfire in
the deepest ocean just to capture the beauty in shadows.
You were written in a way that a melancholic person would draw their delirious
thoughts with a thick brush on a paper. It’s more of a dance really. I will collect
every one of the printed copies of you, your sisters. Once I have them all stacked
on onto each other, in a beautiful chronological order, I will set them all together
on slow, gentle fire. For a couple of days they will be together, stuck in the
intimate experience of one another. Turning into ashes; the ultimate state of
beauty, the impermanence.
But that is not the end of you.
All of the ashes from your mindlessly reproduced by the world siblings, I will
gather and create the ink. This ink is going to be so oily, deep and dark that when
I will be covering your old, fragile texture with it, page by page, the ink will soak
into this paper so deeply that when I will be finished, even your spine, the
wooden cover will start to bleed.
My both hands are now covered with blood of your relatives, who all finally have
returned to you. To the source. The alpha and omega of their existence.
And you are safe.
Humans body is mortal in every aspect of it. Our memories are fragmented, over
a time we can detect only those that we value more than the others. Our skin has
a soul of a paper. It gets old, changes colour and looses firmness.
What from the birth was intend to stay in the same form until it’s last day, can
never belong to the beauty. Can never serve good. It is because of the most
important curse of our reality. The time. It’s touch is cold and vibrant, yet subtle
enough for people to easily miss it’s existence. And this is when we fight with our
destiny. With the impermanence of our life.
This book tells a story of the beauty of transience. Everything that we cannot
catch, control and preserve belongs to the emotions, hope and beauty and
ultimately those are the fragments that builds our sense of life. Those are the
fragments that we belong to.
Therefore, keeping you in a shape of a book, something that raised with an
intention of bringing the immortality, it is a true crime. We are afraid of the
impermanence because we are afraid to loose control, which at the end we realise
we haven’t really had.
Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.
mono-no aware* - in Japanese culture; the awareness of impermanence