On the nature of Planck’s Space

I’m dreaming. I’m walking through the Seattle Public Library, not even days after its reopened. The Rem Koolhaas, “Cool house,” starchitect from Europe has been interviewed on everything and anything that has to do with art, design, contemporary architecture, and the zeitgeist. People want to write about the novel, and this glass box, built in a way that some of the people I would meet later would critique as “hard to use,” as libraries go, was definitely quirky enough to photograph, blog, and sentimentalize.

Being there with my friend M., who had just begun to get to know me and I her, was like starting all over in some ways, in that space. Planck’s Space, I call it, the kind of room where you go into when you’re not sure what door you’ll exit, and how it’s going to feel when you get there. Going into what M. would later describe as “the clear, wide open” took something from us. Some kind of trust. A trust that wasn’t easy to find, in this particular city, and here it was, cold and… was that snow outside? A simple drift.

Drift was the word on my mind, too, as I thought about the philosophies described to me by an architect who welcomed the way of living that encouraged you to move, light and left, right and up, if you wanted, sliding through and beyond, wherever the mood took you. Paris is a good place to do this, she said. I’ve been there, I thought, but I would say Prague might be better. Not just because of the new, the near, and the now, the philosophy of drift that has gripped the better part of me for more than a decade, but because of a compulsion to make, that’s what got me to pull out the digital camera in my pocket and take a few shots, tripodlessly, and weave them into what you see here.

Drift with me for a bit. Find the quiet space, and then, who knows what’ll await you, when you get to the up and out. —DK

Reflexivity

I pick up everything. Postcards, brochures which I’d imagined clients at my design studio would enjoy, bits of fabric. But mostly glossies. I still like to collect them, but for just one reason. So I can cut them up, and put them back together, and this time, not in the way that the advertising directors had intended them to be consumed. It’s easy to absorb freely the inflow of advertisements and distractions that come from living in the digital, information-cluttered era, (“Sponsored ads are a given of Twitter,” someone tweeted to me once. “How else are they supposed to make money?). Mindless acquiesance? Maybe. It’s harder to question it, because we are accustomed not to questioning. Yet if we can remind ourselves to take a step back and root ourselves not in the spectacle being played for us, but instead, in an inward and conscious intelligence, we’ll be this thing that we’re not in America: happy. Yes. I said the “h” word and I didn’t get caught up in religion, dogma, or vacations to Tahiti priced at a whopping $499. No, what I’m talking about is the kind of contentment one can only arrive at by paying attention to who she is individually, without the applique of social mores, trends, or opiates.—DK

In Kansai

The beginning of my break from the scientific method came when I photographed small 3″x3″ glimpses of the near and delicate, or simply interestingly arranged, while living in Kyoto for a year of undergraduate school. I left my engineering program for a sabbatical of Japanese language study, and turned that into my first-ever artistic immersion. What better playground for the aesthetically inclined than the tiny crevices and miniature details of the way Japan likes to arrange itself, when space is scarce. Kansai is the region that I explored with most zest, as I grew more confident on my bicycle beneath the willow trees of Demachi Yanagi at first in Kyoto town, then later, the buses to mountains with festivals upon their tops, and finally on the trains when I learned how to find my way home. This picture is from Nara, where middle school age children from all over Tokyo will come for their “cultural” retreat. —DK

The universe, cosmos, and a hundred thousand landscapes

On the top of a mountain cliff, deep in Himachal Pradesh of northern India, I stood looking out at a valley that, when you squinted, looked like a fluffy carpet. Fuzzy dreams, those, and the beyond were a curtain of Himalayan peaks with silver-blue threaded eyes. You could see that, all of that, if you stopped trying so hard to look. Because it was there, inside of you, all along, and the vista only served to reflect that back. So that in one moment, you could stand there, stunned, in a new kind of knowledge. One that isn’t in any way quantifiable. One that is myth, in mist, and dissipates as quickly as it is found. “The universe, cosmos, and a hundred thousand landscapes,” I wrote that evening in my journal from Manali, “block my sense of reason altogether.” And against reason, from that giant leap I took off the clifftop, I have remained forever since. For the 12 years since my journey, I’ve been writing about that moment. It’s hard to talk about in regular word—the instantaneous inversion of reality from that of Kirchoff’s laws to something elsewhere—but I’m putting these together now in a final draft of my story. Inspired by that moment, also, was this piece, “Cosmos.” —DK

Yes!