Among the Vases of Today.
The vase in the photograph had no business interrupting my afternoon. It was not the subject of the photograph. It had not negotiated for attention. It stood quietly in the corner, carrying itself with the sort of confidence usually associated with old aristocrats and cats.
Yet there it was.
Waiting.
I have long suspected that my fascination with vases began somewhere among palace corridors, museum halls and places that expected visitors to admire kings, queens, battles and dynasties.
I rarely cooperated.
While everyone else was examining treaties, swords and portraits of important men looking uncomfortable in magnificent clothing, my attention wandered elsewhere.
Towards the vase.
Always the vase.
The Greeks & Romans left them behind.
The Chinese perfected them to an art form.
The Japanese taught restraint through them.
The folk artist decorated them.
The nomad carried them.
The bamboo weaver reimagined them.
Empires have a habit of disappearing. Vases, annoyingly, remain.
There is something deeply amusing about that.
A king may spend an entire lifetime attempting immortality through conquest only to discover that three centuries later a tourist from another continent is standing in a museum admiring the vase near the window.
The absurdity of an object travelling silently through centuries while generations of human beings arrive, argue, build, rule, collapse and vanish around it. They remain as testaments of whispers and valor. Of love and affairs. Through time and tides.
A vase from Greece whispers differently from one born in Kyoto.
Venetian glass speaks a language of light.
Bamboo belongs to rain and monsoons.
Blue porcelain carries entire oceans and trade routes in its memory.
Even now I find my eyes wandering towards them in photographs, hotel lobbies, forgotten corners of houses, window sills and places where they are merely expected to behave like decoration.
Poor things.
They have been mistaken for decoration for centuries.
They are clearly historians.
Sowmya’s fascination with vases has followed her through museums, palaces, galleries, travels and forgotten corners of old houses for longer than she cares to admit.
If today’s wandering has persuaded you to look at vases differently, here are a few that recently interrupted her day. Take a look at Vases of Today