Fragrant Crystals of Time by Byung-Chu Han

 

Even in the broadest daylight, time moves

quietly like a thief in the night.
To stare at time, shout in its face,

until it startles and stops-

Salvation or catastrophe?

The formation of metaphors is also  a practice concerning truth to the extent that it creates a network of relationships, and lays open connecting paths and channels of communication between things. The formation of metaphor counteracts the atomization of being. And it is a temporal practice to the extent that it opposes the quick succession of isolated events with the duration, even fidelity, of a relationship. Metaphors are the scent of things which they release when they befriend each other.

‘Immediate enjoyment’ is not capable of experiencing beauty because the beauty of a thing appears ‘only much later’, in the light of another thing, or even through the significance of a reminiscence. Beauty is owed to duration, to a contemplative synopsis. It is not a momentous brilliance or attraction, but an afterglow, a phosphorescence of things. The ‘cinematograph film of . . .thing’ does not have the temporality of beauty. The age of haste, its cinematographic succession  of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even an ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence. It consists of temporal sedimentation emitting a phosphorescent glow.