You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan W. Watts
Look at this thing. Three streams of water dripping into a pond like some cosmic punchline to a joke nobody remembers anymore. Built in 778, rebuilt in 1633, not a single nail holding it together, just wood and faith and the Japanese conviction that some things shouldn’t need explaining.
Clear water. Pure water.
The tourists line up with their little cups and ladles, drinking what they think are wishes, swallowing possibility like it’s medicine. What gets me is the absolute hunger in that gesture, this burning need to believe that somewhere, somehow, water falling from a mountain can change the trajectory of a life that’s already in freefall.
Alan Watts there with his aperture bit. Yeah, sure, we’re all just eyeballs through which the universe masturbates or whatever. But what he doesn’t tell you is how exhausting it is being the universe’s peephole, how sometimes you just want to be a blocked drain, opaque, refusing the view.
The thing is, and this is where it gets sticky, maybe the water doesn’t grant anything. Maybe the whole point is standing there with your mouth open like an idiot, vulnerable and hoping, which is basically the most radical thing humans do: continuing to desire in the face of cosmic indifference. Continuing to cup your hands under streams that have been running for a thousand years, that watched empires collapse and technologies rise and still just kept falling, indifferent as gravity.
Not one nail in the whole structure. Just tension and balance and the kind of engineering that says maybe holding things together doesn’t require force, just understanding how pressure works, where the weight goes, what bears what.
The photograph captures none of this, of course. Can’t photograph hope. Can’t photograph the specific quality of thirst that makes people believe in waterfalls.