The Blade and the Wax

Consider the exactness of it. In a workshop beside the temple, weeks before the festival that gives the city its name, a man lays warm wax over an armature, coat upon coat, and then takes up a knife and begins to remove what he has just added. A lotus emerges under the blade, then a naga with each scale told separately, then a line of scripture cut so fine the letters could be read by a devout ant. He pauses, tilts the float a degree toward the window, deepens one petal that was already deep enough. He works with the composure of someone who has done this many years and expects to do it many more. It would be indelicate to remind him that the object of all this precision is to be finished a few days before it is destroyed. He knows. That, one gradually understands, is precisely the condition under which he prefers to work.

The Mun River comes through the town without hurry, and the town arranges itself along it with the same unhurried logic — temple, block, market, park. In the early market the broth carts send up their steam into a morning that has not yet decided to be hot, and the chanting drifts out over the sound of motorbikes without either giving way to the other. There is a comedy in this, though no one laughs: the sutra and the two-stroke engine, agreeing to share the air. A traveller who arrives expecting a festival first finds instead a wooden shutter, a seated Buddha darkened by candle-smoke, a bowl set down in front of him. The famous thing is being prepared elsewhere, quietly, by hand.

What unsettles is not that the wax will melt. Everyone knows the wax will melt; the melting is the point, and the men who carve it are the least sentimental people in the province. What unsettles is the perfection insisted upon anyway — the scale that no eye will study, the scripture no procession will pause to read, cut with a patience that seems almost like reproach. The beauty is genuine and the beauty is doomed, and the carvers hold these two facts in the same hand as easily as they hold the knife.

Then the parade passes down the main avenue and the floats are taken back. The wax is lifted off, returned to the pot, kept for next year's re-carving; nothing so accomplished is buried, only reheated. It is an oddly consoling economy, and an oddly cruel one, and Ubon appears to feel the strain of neither. What stays with a person afterward is that composure itself — the willingness of a whole city to spend a year's craft and faith on a few days of wax, and then to render it back to liquid, and next spring begin again from a bare frame. The workshop reopens. Another armature is dressed. The same knife, or a knife exactly like it, finds the same first petal, and no one present treats this as a tragedy, which is the most disquieting part of all.

Watch, at the end, a single curl lift at the edge of a lotus petal where the sun has found it: a thin shaving of wax turning back on itself, still bearing the exact mark of the knife, already softening past the point where anyone could carve it further.