With what lens, what eyes, may we view our own chaos? There’s a trickster in each of us, with the power to instigate change.
His generative nature laying fertile beneath the surface, beyond age, gender, and experience.
Much of the time hidden in the shadows of the mind.
Sometimes hiding in plain sight between heaven and earth.
And sometimes appearing to us when we least expect it, subtly altering our perceptions.
He knows change is inevitable, and his every action begs the question, What will grant you the power to adapt?
Even in the gloaming, after much is said and done, the creature lurks, ever present.
Even in places and feelings we’ve abandoned to the past.
Even then, pattering along, does he search for victims or guard the community’s source of sustenance?
Abducting the fruits of the community’s labor for his own purposes, or preserving its legacy’s potential?
In a gathering storm, he is at home where the past is washed away and destroyed and where the future is born.
A glimpse at his passing, dashing uncontrollably across the landscape, transforming from one form to another in every second. The oval of light shaped by the moment of the eyelid raising, making the surrounding darkness a reflection of the viewer’s interior. Or is it a mushroom cloud, with the flash of 10,000 suns, tearing the air asunder, the only thing that makes him visible; the moment of ultimate disaster and chaos the only instant we see his, or our, true nature?
Dancing, leaping in place, his head and face up against the edge, the border between light and darkness. A dance of death? Reaching for the stars? Or simply feeling at home in an instant of pure liminality, when matter and antimatter exist in both opposition and balance?
We may be anxious about what he has wrought. Is it dusk or dawn? Is this his, or our, last dance, first steps, or both?
After the waters have receded, a harvest of pain, but without guilt or shame.
The light of the sun reflected by the full moon, which his body reflects upon the dry, sallow land, regenerating its fertility for an even greater future harvest.
Even shorn of traditional implements, memory is yet held and translated. Mourning the dead or revivification?
Hibernating, communing with, and rejuvenating humanity’s fertile potential.
Back in his lair, the shadow of the mind, floating, waiting, transcendent...
(Photos by Hosoe Eikoh; featuring Hijikata Tatsumi; from the series, "Kamaitachi")
