Batik
Many years ago, I happened to wander into a little private gallery. It was one of the earliest in the city – a tiny shop for hungry eyes, filled with pottery and pendants, postcards and icons, rings, silk garments, naïve watercolours and heavy oil paintings.
I had walked in simply to look around when, all of a sudden, my eyes caught a winged silhouette on the wall. It was a painting on silk. Against a glowing abstract background hovered a blue bird – free, weightless, untouched by any decoration – my bird!
I went mad over it. I named it The Blue Chick, or simply that batik, and I started daydreaming about how I would buy it. It cost three hundred dollars. My monthly salary was barely ten. So my dream hung there, just like the bird within its frame. Yet week after week I returned to the gallery, explaining to the owner every single time how desperately I wanted it to be mine.
One day I walked in. The bird wasn’t there. My God, what a pain shot straight through me… but the owner only smiled.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I only took it down to clean it.”
She disappeared behind a curtain and returned with the bird. For a long time I stood there gazing at it. It filled me with an inexplicable energy. I couldn’t imagine it would be the last time I saw it.
I sank into my work. Time passed. Fortune came my way, bringing money with it, and as I was thumbing through those foreign banknotes, thinking how best to use them, the bird came to mind.
I rushed to my bird’s dwelling, but… the gallery was gone.
In its place stood something dull and ordinary. I can’t even remember what kind of shop it was, because I have never set foot there again.
Years later, I happened to attend a reception at the embassy of batik’s homeland. For the first time, I discovered what the word batik really meant.
It comes from two Indonesian words: baris – line, and titik – dot.
A graceful young woman, dressed in batik, as delicate as a figurine, told us about the history of this ancient craft – its colours, its symbolism, its hierarchy, the wax-resist technique, the tools… The most enthusiastic guests even tried creating a small batik of their own.
A line and a dot. One and infinity. Everything and nothing. Music. A winged creature between earth and sky. Simple things the world is made of.
They shook my bag of memories. And the blue bird appeared again. It is with me now.