OCEAN OF THE STREAMS OF STORY

2020 — 2021

“He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and he explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.”

— Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta Books, 1990)

The Ocean of the Streams of Story, Kathā/sarit/sāgara, was composed by Somadeva in Kashmir in the second half of the eleventh century to amuse Queen Sūryavatī. It is a vast repository of Indian fables written in a simple yet elegant Sanskrit, based upon a much larger collection of stories known as the Bṛhatkathā, or The Long Story written in the lost Paisaci dialect by Guṇāḍhya. The Long Story has now been lost, if in fact it ever existed.

Kathāsaritsāgara contains multiples layers of stories, tales within tales within tales. It consists of 18 lambhakas (books) of 124 taramgas (chapters) called “waves”, and approximately 22,000 ślokas (distichs) in addition to prose sections. The śloka consists of 2 half-verses of 16 syllables each. In more than twenty thousand verses the Kathāsaritsāgara tells more than three hundred and fifty tales. Quoting from Sir James Mallinson introduction:

“They are told to illustrate events in the main narrative; they are sallied back and forward as argument and counterargument; they are told for the amusement of the characters in the main story; they are told for no reason at all...”

Its translation into English by C.H. Tawney, first published in 1880 and then again in 1920, has made it one of the best-known non-religious Sanskrit works. Later well-known translations are available such as “The Ocean of the Rivers of Story” translated by Sir James Mallinson, first published in 2007 by The Clay Sanskrit Library (New York University Press) and JJC Foundation.

The title directly alludes to this outstanding Indian collection of stories — Ocean of the Streams of Story – already worth it for the title alone... and perhaps the main reason I was drawn into these books, later also fascinated by the way it is structured. It has been a great source of inspiration, a wide-open metaphor that deepens and enriches the more you know about the original source. The previous quote taken from Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories describes it beautifully.

By appropriating this title and some ideas behind it, I found an unlimited expansion, the open platform I needed on how to gather my own compilation of daily visual stories, organized as “chapters” called Streams. A stream is a body of water flowing in a channel, a liquid current, a continuous flow or succession of anything, a series of things, a stream of words... stream is flow, both a noun and a verb. Ultimately, it is Life.

Ocean of the Streams of Story here consists of a series of Streams made up of the accumulation of daily visual notes and sketches. Mainly unexpected moments, day-to-day glimpses of life that capture my eye as if anchoring time through a deeper gaze. Each image a tale on its own, yet when joined together become other stories, in liquid form, changing, flowing, becoming new versions of themselves.  Alive.

It might be that through the acknowledgment and insistence of a certain form or a particular pattern, observing a natural template or its absence, by connecting similarities, noticing differences, resemblances or uniqueness, while joining and disjoining, or simply during the inevitable pause of recognition that I find an open space. A vanishing point. Silence.