?Interrobang! · Track 54 · middle
Do We Shrink What We Love
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): a baby book — first tooth, first curl, childhood kept. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Giant Redwood Ron — bonsai master from Japan; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: Gangkhar Puensum, the highest unclimbed and sacred peak. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Ron keeps trees tiny for decades though his name is Giant Redwood; left his child's baby-book on the sacred unclimbable peak. Do we shrink the things we love to keep them?
Lyrics
[Intro] [Verse 1] Gangkhar Puensum. The air is a blade. 1994, the decree came down from the kingdom. Sacred. Unclimbed. And here, wedged under a cairn of flat stones... your book. A baby's book. Giant Redwood Ron, they called you. A joke you must have told yourself in the Omiya nursery. Inside: a hospital bracelet, faded to sky. A single tooth, like a seed pearl. A lock of hair, fine as copper wire. [Chorus] Do we shrink what we love, just to keep it? With careful hands and a quiet blade? Do we wire the branches so they never reach? Keep the first year perfect on a single page? [Verse 2] I can smell your studio. Damp peat and metal. The soft click of concave cutters trimming a root. Your big hands, Giant Ron, learning the art of the small. Bending a juniper, year after year after year. An old book said some growers in Kyoto used their own hair... to tie the finest shoots. To teach them their shape. A strand of you, holding a branch in place. A strand of him, pressed under glass. [Chorus] Do we shrink what we love, just to keep it? With careful hands and a quiet blade? Do we wire the branches so they never reach? Keep the first year perfect on a single page? [Bridge] You left the small thing on the biggest thing. The record of a life just begun... on the mountain that can never be won. Did you carry it up here to let it go? Or to prove that some things can be held forever? A perfect, tiny tree. A perfect, tiny memory. Safe from the growing. Safe from the world. [Outro] The book is cold in my hands. The handprint on the page is no bigger than a new leaf. A redwood, kept eighty centimeters tall for a hundred years. A child, who is now... somewhere else. Do you?