Ekphrasis #1: Sakura

Oscar Scholin

December 27, 2023

Dalle-3 generated image of sakura, the Japanese cherry blossom.

Sakura, it’s dark. I’m floating in that dream again. I can’t tell whether my eyes are closed or open or if I’m dreaming or if I’m awake or if I’m falling or if I’m lying down or if I awoke blind. But I’m not scared—this is perhaps the truest place I know.

Indistinguishable from this void a single cherry tree branch blossoms, filling this heart with a light like sweet late season snow dusted with Himalayan salt. A simultaneous sunrise and sunset; I am and I am not. Whether I am here (if here can really mean anything) and whether you are really here too I do not know, but I’ not sure if that’s even the right thing to ask. I feel you. I hold you in my arms as we drift on this sea of shadows under a starless sky raining down tears of remembrance.

You’re whispering. Come closer. I lean in. 

Sadder than is the moon’s lost light,
The more sweeter the memory of that night.

She springs up and down and out into the sea sky like a brush stroking new buds. Why else to dream, to live! She laughs, and I laugh too.

Sakura—it’s dark.

Whispered realms of dusk, where shadows and light entwine in silent fables, cradle a lone spray of cherry blooms. This whisper of blossoms stands as a mute ode to life's enduring dance and its fleeting grace. A canvas bears this temporal passage, its sweep from twilight's ember to the blue of nightfall, a tableau of time's ceaseless ballet. Petals, kissed by a delicate pink, reveal an artful fragility, while buds in wait breathe promises of rebirth and unwavering cycles.

This very canvas mirrors the dance of existence's quiet contrasts; the branch's arc, a bold contour against the mottled stage, sings a hymn to minimalism amidst the cosmic theatre. A symphony of visuals, a mingling of light, pigment, and shape, seizes far more than a transient scene—it seizes the very soul of metamorphosis, the steadfastness of the fleeting, and the rhythm that orchestrates being.

In this space, the beholder is summoned to muse upon the cosmos' craftsmanship, where minutiae meld into a majestic mosaic, a perpetual promenade guided by the baton of physical law. Blossoms, akin to quantum entities, manifest as both singular and spectral, their forms precise yet their essence dispersed, stirring musings of the universe's quantum cantata.

Oh Sakura, if I try to see you your buds drop and your petals weep. I blink and spring is summer and spring is a winter’s daydream. Like Sōseki said, “no form, no color, indeed no light shade or dark, no firm or delicate line, suggests itself….All that exists is a feeling.” What is a picture? To hold you in my mind’s eye this fickle light faint memory—or perhaps all entirely a dream.

This movement—but what is motion? Motion breaks potential so the Greeks say. But what is potential without motion? It’s the ability to do work, for things to change. In the color unseen, you say, life blooms. Life blooms with heavy petrichor and bay leaves, sweet grass and lavender bees; sewage gas and murky pools, blood sweat and tears and sulphuric ash; the freshness of black ink on recycled paper that flutters as you hold your thumb and let the pages run. The pace of time that marks a steady beat and illusion to the diffuseness of what flows at the quantum scale. Like cement that you mix with water, only does the resistance turn motion into immotion when you try to force it; release her, let her drift.

The dance of Sakura, you speak of it so, is a symphony composed in the silence of the cosmos. It's in the stillness, the pause between breaths, where we find the motion that stirs the potential. Like the Zen koan that puzzles the mind until it surrenders to the inexplicable, Sakura is the enigma, the beauty born of the paradox of motion and stillness.

In the canvas of our dreaming, this Sakura, she blooms not just in the colors seen by our waking eye, but in the spectrum of sensations felt by the soul. Her branches reach out into the void, not to break the stillness, but to embrace it, to blend with the hues of the universe that paint the very essence of our existence.

Potential, you say, is the ability to do work, but in this realm, potential is the work of being, the very act of existence. It is Sakura's silent promise, the anticipation of the bud before the bloom, the latent energy of life waiting to unfurl. And so, Sakura teaches us that motion is not the antithesis of potential but its fulfillment.

We thumb through the pages of existence, our lives a book whose end we know not. With each flip, a rush of wind, a blur of moments—each page a day, a year, a lifetime. And in the cascading dance of these pages, we find our own story, written in the ink of our choices, bound by the spine of destiny, and held together by the gravity of our being.

Oh, Sakura, you are the dream and the dreamer, the painting and the painter. In the quiet after the rain, when the world is a canvas wet with the tears of the sky, you remind us that life is the art of seeing the unseen, feeling the untouchable, and understanding the unknowable. And in this art, we find the truth of our own ephemeral, beautiful dance.

A kiss, a wink until tomorrow, that inconspicuous touch of turquoise suspended on my breath,

Cherry blossoms fall,
Whispers in the silent rain—
Dreams blend, night and day.

Sakura, Sakura?



Author’s note: this work is the first in a series by this author on ekphrasis, which is a written work based on a visual one. This ekphrasis is a duet between a human and ChatGPT. First, the human interprets the painting, Sakura, which ChatGPT created, then ChatGPT gives its own interpretation, then the human responds to ChatGPT, then ChatGPT responds to the human, then the human and ChatGPT together finish the piece. There are no formal explicit breaks between the sections to make it a seamless conversation. 

The line “sadder than is the moon’s lost light” is from George Meredith’s The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment. The Sōseki quote is from Kusamskura by Natsume Sōseki.