As I glared at the spinning top with the boy, I thought of the Andromeda galaxy that’s 2.5 million light years away from earth. As far as I remember, this spiral galaxy rotates at a speed even slower than the boy’s top. Lambda is also the name of a cosmological constant. Einstein once suggested this cosmological constant but withdrew. Scientists believe it is a constant representing the virtual energy and pressure that the cosmic space is filled up with, and that it is related to the dark matter. The existence of dark matter can be deduced from the difference in values earned from an optical observation and values obtained from the gravity effect when calculating the total mass of the universe. More than anything, it is called ‘dark’ because we do not know what it is. All soluble barium compounds including baryta, are toxic. The artist marked the image file names with some of the printer profiles. Passiflora. Borges recalls Funes the Memorious held this flower with his delicate fingers. To a man who remembers every moment of his life, the movements of clock needles are idle. Living in the hours of insomnia, he remembers the details in every moment of the flower as it blossoms and withers.

I received the photographs, not in Hahnemühle photo rag prints, but in data files that resembled the dark matter. The mass of these data never occurred to me but I believe they should be included in the total mass of the universe. I spent my time watching the files on my iPad screen and flipping through them with the tip of my fingers. I placed my hand on top of the photographer’s hand that’s placed on top of the sculptor’s. Then I remembered someone’s hands, their fingerprints worn away and the palms all smooth. They belonged to that person flipping those slippery hoddeok (Korean pancake) batter placed on the hot and oily pan. Fingerprints not only enhance friction but they supposedly heighten the sense of touch. My iPad screen is always tainted with my fingerprints so it needs to be cleaned frequently. I tried to imagine flipping the screen with fingertips without any finger prints.

Funes’ memories on every single moment resemble the greed of photography. Photographs urge us to remember every moment of the time. Borges suffered from insomnia for a long time and wrote the story of Funes as a metaphor for his loss of sleep. His story is about the memory. I believe memory is an image. I cannot think of my memories without the image. Yet there are those who are born without sight and can only remember through one’s hands. This is unimaginable to me. I already admit my sense of touch is dominated by image. Only darkness will awaken the sense of touch. I conclude that although the cosmic dark matter is invisible, it can be touched. Yet even when the pitch-dark night drags on, the amount of memory Funes the insomnia patient remembers does not change. He is not an image but a person who remembers time.

Kenzaburo Oe wrote on humans and described them as a being of coexistence and recovery while he looked after his son who had autism. The son even appears in the novel several times under the name ‘Iyo’. What do you dream about? This random question asked by the son’s teacher made Oe realize his son does not dream. When the adults repeatedly asks Iyo if it’s true that he does not dream, the boy bursts with anger. To him dream was a difficult matter to discuss. Then through an incident the writer comes to know his son who does not dream understands the others do. One day the boy insisted and the two came to a mountain cabin in the midst of a storm. That night the writer falls asleep, drunk and worried about his young son’s future. In sleep he hears the voice of his son consoling him, saying it is fine, it’s a dream, and there’s nothing to fear. Like the writer, fathers are afraid of their own absence. However, the writer confesses he handled the issues of his life by writing about them in his novels. He now believes if his son can dream one day, he will be able to determine it’s a dream. Even if that dream begins with a nightmare, he believes the boy will tell himself that it is fine, it’s a dream, and there’s nothing to fear.

When the room became pitch black, it began to snow. A phrase from Kenzaburo Oe is attached to the text by the photographer. Then, there is no reply from the days that I have reminisced. Are these the words of the photographer, or of the writer? I searched through the writer’s book of short stories and began to read The Guide. Iyo appears again in this story, as a boy receiving music lessons. The writer wrote down all the stories of him and Hikari as if he needs to remember his life entirely. Like him, would our countless problems be resolved if we write about them? Then what should be done about the text’s fate when it leaves my hands? I read a short essay by the writer titled Role of the Hand. In it the writer introduces a phrase from his mentor Kazuo Watanabe’s book Chapters on French Renaissance. Humans are different from other living beings as we have reason and language, but because we have hands we can amend the ideology that we indulge in when we solely rely on reason and language. For a writer who tediously revised his writings repeatedly, the language he had acquired at the last moment was the work of a hand.

In a similar way, the photographer keeps touching the image with the fingertips. Like the fingertips of a visually challenged boy dashing from one dot to another, she summons the photographs with the touch.