Crush

Monday, June 11, 2012

I was scanning through the photographs i took during the school trip to Tokyo, and here i sat for five whole minutes trying to focus my mind on the exact dates i've been there. It was end feb to early march, i reckon, but was it this year or last?? Neither seem possible, being too long ago and too recent respectively; i could check the dates i put on the album name (i always name albums with the dates and place) although having to do that feels silly and the point i'm making here is about how i always feel that Time moves 'simultaneously too fast or too slow', never 'just nice' or perhaps i am just never in pace, drowning in the great river of life.

Another point would be the fact that i seem to remember things event-based, snippets of time people smells taste etc nicely packaged and compartmentalized in my head. When i reminisce things, like my Tokyo trip, i tend to remember the people, the things that we did together, the feel of the place and mostly split these places according to whether i would visit them again or no. However, i feel nervous when i am unable to pull up the name of a place i like or am unable to describe the train route by which to get there. Then i realise that these factual details are as important to me as my feelings, as without them i am unable to recollect my memories in an organised chronological manner and everything remains a haze or a puddle at my feet. No closure, no finality, but a tangled bunch of beautiful memories that ideally should be weaved into the fabric of my being. Instead, they are 'compartmentalised', never truly absorbed into my essence; perhaps that is why i always feel 'different but the same', and it makes me wonder which is it - feelings/facts, heart/mind - that i cherish more.

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo was showcasing Lee Bul's exhibit: From Me, Belongs to You Only
This is a significant memory for me and every time i reminisce Tokyo i will recall Lee Bul. Her art is beautiful and provocative, and i say 'beautiful' only because her sculptures are either intensively grotesque or comically glamorized, and i enjoyed her extreme wit sarcasm and humor. It is funny how she manages to make sculptures out of gems and bedazzling crystals look so fucking gross.

I wrote down these phrases from one of her sculptures, mon grand recit: weep into stones..., and since then they have been somewhat etched into the back of my skull :

WEEP INTO STONES
FABLES LIKE SNOW
OUR FEW EVIL DAYS

I found out that these are excerpted from Chapter V, Hydriotaphia by Sir Thomas Browne, longer excerpt below:
"Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.."

I think Sir Thomas Browne was an optimist. I wish it was this way for everyone.

she's not here @

10:01 PM