Build a Sandcastle

it's an existential experience

How many of you enjoy(ed) the process of build sandcastles?

Yours may not have looked as formidably fragile as this, but the entropic principle is the same - creating beauty only to watch it erode. Imagine creating these only to watch them slip away as if they’d never existed (8 mins):

One of the things that I think is beautiful about working with sand is its ephemeral nature. It’s here today and gone tomorrow. … One of my favourite parts about the art is that it’s here and it’s gone. So watching that process … putting in all that time and energy … just to watch it wash away I think is a very interesting process to see. It’s a beautiful kind of release. You look back and it’s gone. (Sand sculptor, Albert Lucio, Jr.)

During the week, I rewatched Samsara (2011). The film takes the viewer on a wordless five year journey through twenty-five countries. When it was first released, I had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t seen its forerunner Baraka, I knew nothing about it, and for me, it was going to be a fun evening out with a friend. I had no idea how hard it would hit.

During the film, I felt an outpouring of emotion I could not explain. It stayed with me for a long time after and didn’t go away. If I was to put feeling to words, it was the beauty of suffering and pain while simultaneously feeling a boundless joy.

“Visually, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, but, you kinda leave feeling a little bit shell-shocked and questioning your existence.” (Viewer’s reaction shortly after screening).

To view the film is an existential experience.

Samsara (or more correctly Saṃsāra) is a Sanskrit word which connotes cyclical change. It is a concept inherent to early Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism. In the latter tradition, the term is linked to the concept of karma. At its simplest, it represents the endless cycle of life, death and rebirth.

That’s kind of how we envisioned it from the beginning: a non-verbal guided meditation of themes on birth, death and rebirth. And that’s exactly what we have been trying to do, to let the audience just flow with it, not have a narrative that could stop that flow. The title Samsara means the wheel of life, or impermanence. (Filmmaker, Ron Fricke)

The film opens with Tibetan monks creating an intricate mandala with tiny grains of coloured sand, painstakingly placed, mirroring the symmetrical pattern laid by other monks they work with. It then closes with the same monks brushing the mandala out of existence - a perfect illustration of samsara.

Tibetan Buddhism isn’t the only culture to ritually create mandalas. The Navajo people of North America conduct ceremonies lasting nine days, known as Sing. During the course of a Sing, a mandala is made, the goal of which is to heal an afflicted member of the group. Through a Sing, balance is restored to the universe, which in turn helps to heal the individual concerned. The ceremony aims for Hozho, an idealised end-state of being, a state of beauty and harmony. Hozho also has a dark-side of ugliness and disharmony, Hochxo. They are not opposites, but mutually exist within the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, a belief and practice which is strikingly similar to Buddhist mandala rituals, which are also purposefully created for universal healing.¹

The mutual existence of the two conditions of Hozho and Hochxo were well-captured, even if not intentionally, in the film, Samsara. Beauty and cruelty, connection and disconnection, social simplicity and complexity - all co-existing. When questioned about their choice to choose certain images which have social and political implications, the filmmakers responded:

We are not saying it is good or bad, we are just showing it. We don’t have a point of view as a manifesto or something. We are really trying to show just what’s there and to let the images speak for themselves. (Ron Fricke)

Our view of death as the end of life is perhaps a misguided one. A 13th century, Japanese philosopher, Dōgen, said that the linear understanding, that we pass from life to death, is a mistaken one. If we consider our relationship with life and death in this way, we are looking at it from the outside of both. By objectifying life in this way, then it is no longer life as it is. We live our lives existentially at every moment from within, not as an external observer. To explain this, theologian, Masao Abe, uses the metaphor of swimming in the middle of a river. We experience our self as an entity in the flow of a separate entity - the river, doing something else entirely - swimming. A living reality, however, is when we experience self, swimming and river as one. Similarly, an objective view of life and death is of two separate states, when existentially, they co-exist.²

When someone builds a sandcastle, they are doing so as an existential act. They are not an individual self, in the act of creating a separate object which will eventually die, but rather a living whole - self, creation and death as one.

Samara portrayed not so much the cycle of life and death and rebirth, but the existential nature of living-dying, the coexistence of human contradiction and the paradox of existing with life-death simultaneously. For me, it helps deepen the understanding I have of my emotional response and don’t feel quite so helpless in externalising the internal feeling of living the film.

Note: This post was edited to remove a YouTube video of clips from the film Samsara due to copyright infringement.

Up Next:

In next week’s instalment of this series we take a look at the work of a single ephemeral artist. It is my intention, as in this post, to explore the human condition through the relationship of art, artist and the environment.

Embers

Not unlike the theme of this reflection, in you, a bird and the endless now,

Chloe Hope

shares her experience of the paradox of “the simultaneous holding of both suffering and beauty”:

you, a bird and the endless now

1. Mandala: Constructing Peace through Art by Tom Anderson

2. Transformation in Buddhism by Masao Abe