In Tibet there is an ancient tradition
of making sculptures of trees and flowers
using butter made from the milk of yaks.
On the night of the Great Prayer Festival
crowds gaze at the carved figures
in the flickering light of yak butter lamps.
As night passes, the butter begins to melt
and by dawn it is all over, its transience
intrinsic to the sacred nature of the event.
* * *
The art’s most famous exponent was Renko
who, before becoming a Buddhist monk,
had gone to Paris in the nineteen twenties
to study sculpture and pursue his dream
of catching syphilis and dying in poverty.
He was soon burning the candle at both ends,
working feverishly during the day in his atelier
and drinking all night in the bars of Montmartre
with many of the leading Surrealists, including
Dali, Duchamp, Magritte and Picasso.
Eventually, tiring of debauchery and excess,
he swapped absinthe for incense,
the Moulin Rouge for the prayer wheel,
the velvet beret for the shaven head
and returned home to join a monastery.
But his artistic impulse could not be denied
and once channelled into the ancient art
of yak butter sculpture, burning genius
coupled with his passion for surrealism
earned him the title, the Salvador Dali Lama.
Not all his early pieces were entirely successful.
‘The Wash Basin’, for instance, clearly inspired
by Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, quickly melted
into a yellow sludge once the taps were turned on
and disappeared down its own plughole.
Moreover his eight-armed Venus de Milo
based on Durga the Hindu goddess
almost had him run out of town. And the less said
about the killer shark, carved out of butter
and deep-fried in batter, the better.
His reputation was quickly restored, however,
by the sequence known as ‘Yak ad Infinitum’
for which, from a massive slab of butter,
he carved a life-size model of the animal
standing noble and proud at over six foot.
Then came the stroke, or rather squeeze,
of genius. He set to work milking the sculpture
and was able to collect enough milk, which,
when churned, provided all the butter needed
to make another yak equal in size to the original.
A lesser artist might have stopped there
but not Renko. Once again it was out
with the milking stool, and he was rewarded
with enough butter to create a third animal
even more magnificent than its predecessors.
A fourth followed, then a fifth, and it seemed
as if this simple monk would go on forever
replicating buttermilk yaks. The art world
was beginning to take notice, when suddenly,
one warm summer’s night, tragedy struck.
Whoever started the fire and turned his studio
into a blazing inferno, we will never know.
A superstitious monk? A jealous Dadaist ?
Perhaps a band of herdsmen, fearing a butter glut
had swooped down from the Himalayas.
A lifetime’s work was destroyed, and clarified lava
buttered the surrounding hillsides and scalded
whatever lay in its path as it poured through the valley.
Over the mountains a pall of rancid, green smog
hung for months, suffocating whole herds of yak.
And Renko perished. But it is rumoured
that on the night of the Great Prayer Festival
the gaze of the crowd is drawn heavenwards
above the flickering light of the butter lamps
to a place far beyond our imaginings.
A blood-red moon, a cloudless sky,
a herd of yak stretching ad infinitum
moves slowly between the stars
before dissolving into smoke, its transience
intrinsic to the sacred memory of the event.