[Picnic] by Holly Lee
I sat on the office chair we brought from Hong Kong with eyes closed. It
was used as a prop for a commercial shot many years ago. Birds outside
my window twittering; the room in front of me melted away. I thought of
Robert Frank; he sat watching the sea. Birds jumping from branch to
branch chirping, in Cape Breton. I imagined myself as Robert Frank so I
could hear the sea.
In my mind journey I invent mountains and
seas, in parks, in my proximity. It began in 2010, the first image I saw
was a picnic day, BCE 250. A modern age with a dash of antiquity.
Faint
commotion, tiny buzzing activities! I need a loupe to see what’s in
there and who’s doing what. Three people were sitting on the right.
Wasn’t this scene Manet’s picnic on the Grass? Wrong, the name of the
famous painting is Luncheon on the Grass. Manet painted it in 1863.
Picnic on the Grass is the name of an oil painting on Saatchi Art, by a
21st century painter Igor Zhuk. He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine - the
capital most talked-about now because of the war. In my picture, in
Manet’s, and in Igor’s, they all show a group of three people sitting,
either gazing towards the viewer, or engaging in their own conversation.
It is a fine day for picnicking. These sediments settled and coalesced
into the organic churning of my mind, part primeval, part close range.
Reality is in a state of flux. I pluck a point in time like plucking the
string of a harp.
Here, along the grass where the three people
were sitting, a creek was once flowing. It stretched the length of the
park and flowed beneath a bridge. The creek had since long dried up and
the bridge was dismantled, buried up in the same spot. A little down
south is the buried foundations of a college, a Gothic-Revival
architecture built more than a century and a half ago.
The park
managed to evade concrete invasions. From the ridge of the dog bowl -
the last remnant of the creek ravine within the park, one can see the
city tower, devouring the ravishing sunset and sunrise. Dogs partying
unleashed in the pit throughout the year. In the winter, people go
tobogganing. Someone told me they spotted more than two white squirrels
in the snow. I asked which ones? To distinguish the species, albino
squirrels have red eyes, white squirrels have black.
I sat in
front of the computer fully immersed. I could keep on digging, repeating
the dull work of an archeologist and still finding things. I was led to
a website where a LIVE-NFT button was blinking, luring me to push. I
ignored it, resisting this to be my future. Universe, multiverse,
metaverse. Virtual reality is not just mimicking our world; it is
gradually taking over. Despite legions of phenomenal thinkers, it is
still confusing to step into the future. Does spirituality need to be
redefined? Would it become God, this powerful superintelligence that
qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence? This singularity, is
he God?
Quieting down my fear for the future, I return to some
of my photographs of the parks; revaluing their significance,
contemplating their resemblance to realistic landscape paintings. They
look calm, insipid and uneventful. But some genies seem to be lurking
behind the scenes. Zooming back to fifty years, a hundred or a thousand
years, these landscapes buried countless anonymous stories that never
passed down, nor made marks on the same patches they are now standing
on. I close my eyes; I roll back and forth the office chair I am sitting
on, freeing my mind to do the traveling. In a eureka moment I fly over
mountains and valleys, rivers and seas, arriving at cloud cuckoo land;
places where myths live, die, and begin. I see a flock of gold-shedding
birds flying past the woods; a glowing object moving closer to another;
giant bird with a long neck; summer through winter, a structure with
five basketball hoops waiting for a team to score.
I lift my
head and squint my eyes at ten scorching suns, waiting for the archer.
The blinding light, the searing suns! I duck and collapse into the
minuscule of being. I hear sweet birds sing outside my window. The room,
now big, now small, opens all doors to the ocean. On the spur of the
moment, I understand the birds’ language.
history, mythology
slip by
under our gaze, every Day -
(published at DOUBLE DOUBLE, issue April 2022)