Backscatter
Title: Hida, Japan
Date: October 2004
Medium: 35mm Film
Photographer: Steve Elkins
I stumbled upon the Zen monastery during one of many train rides into the central mountains of Japan, which I insisted on taking to find some preservation of an older country, removed from the cornucopia of neon pink, J-pop, neo-Harajuku hipsters, and coffin hotels. Fall leaves were everywhere, and bullet trains were nowhere to be found. Here, the much older trains had to take the difficult mountain passes at a more leisurely pace, as we passed spectacular valleys, rivers, and rice farms. Late one night, I stepped off the train into a village shrouded in the perfect mist of a Japanese landscape painting, to find the air imbued with the sound of children humming local folk music as they were carried through the streets in pagodas resting on the shoulders of farmers. As I walked down cobbled streets and across red bridges spanning rivers that cut labyrinthine paths through the village, I found myself weaving between slow processions of villagers, who emerged from the mist swinging red Japanese lanterns that bathed the two-hundred year old wood of the surrounding merchant houses in a luminescent glow.
An elderly Zen monk allowed me to sleep in his monastery in exchange for some small chores around his shrine and garden. But he insisted it was mandatory that I meet with him regularly for tea and miso paste infused with maple leaf burning on a candle. The monk explained that the process of serving tea in Zen Buddhism was so important, that the entire design of Zen monasteries was intended to be an active part of the experience. "The rooms are bare," he explained, "because drinking tea is a celebration of poverty. It is learning to be sufficient within the insufficiency of things. In Zen, the reality of a room is not to be found in its four walls, but in the empty space between them. Only by focusing on what is not in the room, will you realize that you actually possess something in your poverty."
Whenever the room was emptied of his voice, it was obvious what the room did contain. The light crackle of the burning log. The smell of maple leaf. Moonlight. The sound of raindrops dripping off the leaves outside. The faint taste of tea in my mouth. Liquid simmering in the suspended pot. In this room, where nothing was happening and almost nothing was contained, every sensation became a well of gratitude. "When you have nothing," the monk said, "everything becomes a treasure. No room is empty when the mind is full."
Title: Mahakala Caves, Bihar, India
Date: January 2006
Medium: 35mm Film
Photographer: Steve Elkins
From all over the world, Buddhist monks are gravitating right now to Bihar, mostly on foot, and prostrating themselves flat on the ground after every step as a prayer to reduce suffering and violence in the world. Many have walked for three and a half years, having made several million full body prostrations and worn all fingerprints off their hands to achieve this goal. And here we are, presumably at the final destination of their good karma, only to find that the actual inhabitants in the geographical heart of their beliefs are setting off bombs to express that the annihilation of suffering is a luxury they cannot afford. Contrary to the centuries of non-violence embraced by the monks, the Biharis have concluded that their only hope of annihilating suffering will not be found in reducing it to an intellectual abstraction to peel from the kernel of their souls, but by actually becoming suffering's mouthpiece. And fire has proven to be its most universal language. Or at least the only translator they can afford to hire.
Wendy and I return to Bodhgaya, where we learn that we have just missed the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa, who made a procession down the main dirt road of the village only moments ago. They have left their footprints of peace in the same soil where children, only a few turns down the same road, compensated for their less consequential imprints on the earth with those of the fallen rocks they threw at our heads. And connecting them all like hyphens, are the indentations left in the dirt by bodies of Tibetan monks that have prostrated their way past the village life around them, to reach the tree where the Buddha found enlightenment. The surface of the road is inscribed with more words than libraries, and the story it suggests is that of mankind's varied responses to suffering. Unfortunately, no journalists or camera crews have appeared to lend some permanence to the traces of Bihari suffering along these roads. As usual, even the wind will reveal its bias to the Buddhist view of life, when it carries these delicate outlines of their struggles to an audience of thin air.
I am interested to find that the outer border separating the "real" world from the spiritual world within Buddhist mandalas, is always a ring of fire. Fire is placed around the perimeter to incinerate "coarse matter," because entry is denied to the uninitiated. Just beyond this wall of fire, kalachakra deities are supposed to reduce suffering and violence in the world. The only thing standing between this more ideal world and the real world around us is this barrier of fire.
But as I look up from the mandalas to the landscape around me, I see fires telling conflicting stories. Butter lamps burning in the hands of the monks say that the only cause of suffering is ourselves, and that the divine prays for that suffering to end. Meanwhile fires rising from heaps of cow shit and corpses in the surrounding villages say that a divine plan itself has caused our suffering, and although suffering will not end, meaning will remain as present in it as God is. Meanwhile, bombs are sending up their own fires to contradict the first two, saying that it is neither ourselves, nor a divine plan, but other people who cause our suffering, and all the prayers in the world have not been enough to stop them.
It strikes me how sharply the inhabitants of this parched landscape are defined by their relationship to fire. Each soul is shaped by the belief that the borders of their own fire contains the meeting point between God and man, and that the border of the next man's fire marks the precise point at which God is separated from man. If the history of Bihar is the forked path of fire's touch, then even the air is not exempt from communion. With every breath, history descends from its perch on the breeze to inscribe its words on the pages of my lungs.
Title: Thar Desert, India
Date: January 2006
Medium: 35mm Film
Photographer: Steve Elkins
Shot in India's Thar Desert, near the border of Pakistan.
Title: Catalonia, Spain
Date: August 2006
Medium: 35mm Film
Photographer: Steve Elkins
In May 2006, I began walking in France, and didn't stop until I had walked all the way across Spain. Unfortunately, the 500 miles I tread from the Basque region to Galicia did not pass through Catalonia, where I had long dreamed of going to admire the architecture of Antonio Gaudi. Later that summer, the opportunity arrived: I went on tour drumming at music festivals from Buenos Aires to Vienna, which got me back into Europe, and afforded me a cheap flight to Barcelona. Developing the 70 rolls of film I took cost me far more than all of my flights across the Atlantic combined, and this is just one shot that I think captures something of my delirious state during those five trigger happy days.
