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requiempeace
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Name: Michelle
Country: China
Birthday: 3/21/1987
Gender: Female
Interests: love ~ symbolism~ nature~ city~
you're always brooding, michelle..
no, no, i'm imagining..it's how i find...
Occupation: Artist
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
4/5/2004
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| A city is an interesting thing because its spirit is separate from the humans you meet in that city. Your love or hate of a city is independent of your connection to and relationship with the people of the city. In a large Asian city like Beijing, there are people on every corner and nearly falling out the windows of the crowded buses, there are red and grey stains on white washed walls. Oh, the changing vines, the streets smelling of food and dust and the meandering passage of humanity, the man with his pipe for cleaning bicycle wheels, the vegetable lady, the shoe man, the children playing by donkey carts of watermelon. These images and happenings come not as people, but as symbols of the movement of the city, the force and movement of the inner workings of a culture. We can see things in small intimate pockets, but on streets of a city we feel the general direction and pushing of some sort of life, and that life swallows the individual that we call friend or acquaintance into a collective force that names the city and that names culture and that names our own survival and inspiration as we dwell among those walls and buildings and faces.
This would explain why when a city becomes an integral part of our identity, our culture in the very moving of our veins, we struggle to retain a sense of ourselves, of anything real when we are parted from it and another life force is attempting to push inside us. We may stand at a bus stop and feel the dull numbing voice of a quiet culture erase our grasp of a moving humanity, the way it was turning and struggling and so representative of the whole world. We may feel it slipping away, fading like a non-existent world, maybe even fabricated by our memory, and now existing only there and almost ceasing to exist even in our memory.
It is a terrible thing to loose yourself while loosing pictures of a city, of a face of a grandmother that you did not even know, but who’s wrinkles are part of the spirit, the hands of the man who counted back your coins who also is like the wall and like the vines that you also when you are there are one with these things. They all move in the same way, all the things, the chaos and the pulling of one city, still joins back together in a certain identity and to sense that identity truly and deeply inside is to find a sense of rich harmony that in no other sense that exists.
To lose that sense of harmony through exile from that land in which you were given the gift to sense, especially if it is voluntary exile, is a stripping of the identity. If one balances two worlds they can’t loose either one. For neither one is stable on its own but needs the resistance and contrast of the other to keep the self from feeling utterly lost. If not at home here there is always there until you can excuse the here and there over and over and create a reality that is always caught in waiting to be fully immersed in life.
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| It has never really been any doubt to me that to learn, to write, is to sacrifice self, with all its boundaries, intentions, and presumptions.
If I learn as one out to prove my thesis, I will interpret the world with a tremendous smallness of mind, all things will be machinery for an ultimate defining cohesivity. All things will be labeled beneath a pre-set heading that leaves no room for the unusual, the humbling, the devastating. But if, on the other hand, I leave room for those things, for the wonder and the unexpected, my idea will be a constantly evolving entity, defined by itself and by its movement rather than by a beginning and ending. I will take part in transformation after transformation of vision and understanding, and my ‘thesis’ will be slowly exposed to me from a force outside me rather than from a place of certainty within my own soul. And, in that slow unfolding, I will never call my thesis law or call my thesis a rooted tree, rather I will call it a chaff that blows in the wind, and the wind itself, which moves it, which changes its shape and destination, is what I shall glorify.
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| adding to the list:
Air
Tracy Chapman (political soft folk=))
Nishat Khan (sitar)
Einstein on the Beach
The Phantom of the Opera
Miles Davis
Simon & Garfunkel
John Coltranne
And my new favorite cd....Aradhna Satsang (I think I love and listen to this about equal to Mario Frangoulis)
(I miss hearing dave and phil play acoustic music together. I miss seeing Dave's passion when he plays djembe. I miss the way he shakes his head from side to side like the tabla player I loved. I miss the watching his hands move.) | | |
| music i listen to most lately:
mario frangoulis
enya
phil davis
phil keggy's acoustic sketches
lamb's self titled cd
eva cassiday
an arabic band who's name i do not know
almost any spainish, celtic, or indian
madison green
eddie carey
almost any soft folk
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| I write while thinking that we share suffering as we share a blade of grass in the summer. I write as we share the image of one black bird in winter over barren fields once fertile. i write. | | |
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