[Statues of Buddha]

[Guest guest]

"Statues of Buddha everywhere, of Lord Buddha...The severe, upright,

worm-eaten statues, with a golden patina like an animal's sheen,

deteriorating as if the air were wearing them away...In their cheeks, in

the

folds of their tunics, at elbows and navel and mouth and smile, tiny

blemishes: fungi, pockmarks, traces of jungle excrement...Or the recumbent,

the immense, recumbent statues, forty meters of stone, of sand granite,

jade,

stretched out among the rustling fronds, emerging suddenly from some corner

of the jungle, from its surrounding site...Asleep or not asleep, they have

been here a hundred years...Yet there is something soft about them and they

are known for an other-worldly air of indecision, longing to stay or go

away...And that very soft stone smile, that imponderable majesty which is

nevertheless made of hard, everlasting stone---at whom, at how many, on the

bloodstained planet are they smiling...? The fleeing peasant women passed,

the men from the fire, the visored warriors, the false high priests, the

tourists who devour everything...And the statue remained in place, the

immense stone with knees, with folds in its stone tunic, with a look lost

in

the distance and yet really here, thoroughly inhuman and also in some way

human, in some form or contradiction of statue, god and not god, stone and

not stone, under the screeching of black birds, surrounded by the wingbeats

of red birds, of the birds of the forest...We are reminded of the terrible

Spanish Christs we inherited wounds and all, pustules and all, scars and

all,

with that odor given off by chruches, of wax candles, of mustiness, of a

closed room...Those Christs had second thoughts about being men or

gods...To

make them human beings, to bring them closer to those who suffer, midwives,

and beheaded men, cripples and avaricious men, the inner circles of

churches

and those outside the churches, to make them known, the sculptors gave them

the most gruesome wounds, and all this ended up as the religion of

suffering,

as sin and you'll suffer, don't sin and you'll suffer, live and you'll

suffer,

leaving you no possible way out...Not here, here the stone found

peace...The

sculptors rebelled against the canons of pain, and these colossal Buddhas,

with the feet of giant gods, have a smile on their stone faces that is

beautifully human, without all that pain...And they give off an odor, not

of

a dead room, not of sacristies and cobwebs, but an odor of vegetable space,

of sudden gusts of wind swooping down in wild swirls of feathers, leaves,

pollen from the infinite forest..."

 

Pablo Neruda

 

 

 

--- John Metzger

--- riverjohn77