Fireworks
The following comes to mind:
我知道我就要开始回忆
像烟花绽放后留下黑影
不肯散去
It’s a phrase from Sunrise. It roughly translates as:
I know from now on I can only think back to those memories
Like the darkness left by fireworks
Unending
I’m watching, and I can’t help but think that fireworks embody the importance of being in the herenow. Any experience or sensation exists for but an instant, and then is transmuted somehow into another experience. To deeply engage in that experience - instead of floating along until encountering an experience so jarring it shocks us out of a kind of stupor - one has to be absolutely wakeful.
I’m thinking as the fireworks dissolve before me one after another … have I experienced the firework? It sparked, lit up the sky, fizzled. All within irretrievable seconds. It leaves a faint imprint on my memory. Is that all there is? A cube of sugar on the tongue, gone? A wave goodbye from a friend I haven’t seen in years, vanished the next moment?
The darkness is a symbol for thirst. A thirst for sudden brilliance. A certain kind of ecstasy … the kind that rejects darkness as holding potential.