Discarded Monster

The Blossom Monster Sculpture (last year, after I had just made it)

Last year, for a cherry blossom viewing party, I laboriously built a human sized blossom monster out of papier-mâché.  But what does one do with a blossom monster when the party is over and the blossoms have fallen?  I really meant to throw him away. Yet, somehow, whenever I went to discard him, something else always came up.  He was lurking in a different part of the garden..or it was not garbage day. There was always and excuse to save the fluorescent monster, no matter how threadbare he got.

But winter was not kind to him: he had sunk to the ground and his legs were coming off. One of his glitter lantern eyes was gone. It really was time for him to go (plus I made a new group of blossom monsters to celebrate this year’s cherry blossoms).  So I had to toss the poor art creature (a fate which will seem instantly familiar to arts professionals).

However, once I threw him in the garbage he gained his creative fulfillment. Indeed the pathos of the discarded monster was quite moving.  His last act was his finest and now I will forever think of him like the maimed protagonist of a Caravaggio religious painting, with divine light shining on his fallen countenance.

Advertisement

The Baku

A Bronze Statue of a Baku

There are two sorts of dreams. In a figurative sense, your dreams are your aspirations and hopes for the future (for example I dream of getting a paying job, becoming a world famous visual artist, and colonizing our sister-planet Venus). However, in a more literal sense, dreams are a series of unreal adventures which take place inside your head when you are sleeping. Real dreams consist of strange phantasmagoria, troubling psychosexual images, intense emotions and memories as well as and undigested mental odds-and-ends…and horrifying nightmarish fears.

A baku inhaling nightmares

To start off our Halloween week of dreams and nightmares, here is a mythical animal which embodies the tension between both meanings of the word dreams. The Baku is a supernatural entity which devours dreams and nightmares. Apparently stories of the baku originated in ancient China, but these days it is most prevalent in Japan where it plays an ever growing role in folklore and fiction. The baku is a chimera which is said to have an elephant’s trunk, a rhinoceros’ eyes, an ox’s tail, and a tiger’s paws. The creature devours dreams by inhaling them through its sinuous proboscis.

Not surprisingly, the baku’s moral alignment is highly controversial! In traditional Japanese texts it was a pleasant and helpful spirit which ate nightmares and thus provided afflicted sleepers with peaceful & pleasant (albeit somewhat bland) dreams. However in our fractured modern world, the baku has darkened and now it sometimes eats a person’s figurative dreams (although not having aspirations, ideas, or ambitions presumably makes a person an ideal office worker).

Baku (tattoo art by hiraistrange)

Originally bakus were regarded as completely supernatural, however in recent times they have become conflated with the inoffensive tapirs–which certainly physically resemble the descriptions of the mythical baku. This fact makes the baku even more confusing. It is now both a supernatural dream eating monster dwelling in the ether…and an actual living mammal which can be discovered in the rainforests of Malaysia and South America. I have always liked tapirs a great deal and so I am going to insist they are in no way malevolent. They appear to live exclusively on rainforest vegetation, but even if they did decide to branch out and inhale some human dreams, I am certain they would take our nightmares and not our fondest wishes.

An adorable baby tapir!