Cythera

Having a decent camera around is really liberating and constricting at the same time. On the one hand, it opens your eyes more because you're on the lookout of scenes that are worth capturing, satisfyingly secure in the knowledge that you are able to capture it. On the other hand, you also feel obliged to capture it, and consequently you're liable to interrupt whatever you're doing to anti-socially whip out your camera. So the delight in the ability to appreciate beautiful scenes feeds into an oppressive sense of duty to record it down so other people can see them too.

It's striking how architecture can interact with its environment to create a compelling pattern. You start to realise that every building represents an opportunity to be surprised and delighted. As you walk around a built environment, you find yourself looking around more, looking up more, looking for motifs and linkages, relationships that will suggest something - anything - to you. You pay more attention, and you are somehow more awake. And the thing is, expecting beauty does not make it any less surprising and gripping when you do eventually glimpse it.

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Friday marked the end of my teaching for this term. It has, overall, been great fun, and I think that I'm having a positive effect on them. I can't be sure that I will be good for them at the end of it all; I can't say that I'm training people who'll pass English exams effortlessly. But at least I think I am opening their eyes to a larger world out there, helping them to grow out of their current circumstances by treating them as sensitive, responsible participants in a greater scheme of life that extends beyond the classroom.

Next week, I'll be spending a lot of my time planning for the next term, as the students take a week off from studying to do their sabbaticals. Next term doesn't seem as promising as this one; a lot more non-fiction, technical work, on topics that don't lend themselves to imagination, but rather demand a lot from logic and discipline of thought. But, after all, a lesson plan is just a framework, and frameworks can be exploited to one's own ends if one is creative enough.

Anyway, the end of the week yesterday saw me, Joel and Ms. Ong off for what I guess you could call high tea, though the beverage of choice was rather more stimulating, since we went to take advantage of Brewerkz's happy hour. Spent three hours there chatting around three jugs of beer and assorted hearty fare to go along with the hearty drinking. It's nice, as always, to unwind with friends after a week of work, engaging in the sort of wide-ranging and rambling conversations that only take place when you have enough common history in between you. Back in JC days, we went to places like NYDC; the passage of time may have opened up more options for this weekend splurge, but it has not changed the need for it. And why should it? Everyone needs something to look forward to, and if these outings become a weekly thing with us then the week would be that much more bearable because of the promise that lies at the end of each one.

After that, went back to the Museum to watch Voyage to Cythera by Theo Angelopoulos. It's a solid work, not as fanciful as Orphée, certainly, and, I think, more sensitive because it casts its expressiveness in terms of normal life. The amazing experiences that the film portrayed are placed in the context of normal people, and, unlike Orpheus and Eurydice, the audience can sympathise directly with the characters in Angelopoulos' work. This, I think, is a sign of the strength of the director's skills; he could have chosen to throw realism away, or to reflect realism only indirectly through a glass warped by absurdism, but he chose to stick to the outlines of normal experience, and the absurdism that appears in the film (and there is no dearth of it) is even more striking because it is believable, and terrifyingly so.

Like I told Joel yesterday, the film strikes me as an examination of how normal people handle and make sense of epic occurrences. The characters seem powerless in the face of the things that happen to them. Life throws at them circumstances and event that threaten to pick apart their understanding of how the world works, and under the onslaught they are paralysed, petrified, and seek to retreat into themselves and to distance themselves from a senseless and unsympathetic world. I was struck by the image of the umbrella: one of the characters fiddled with his father's umbrella, which wouldn't open, even as the father shrinks away under the oppressively insistent emotiveness and indifference of the modern world. Later, the father is set adrift on a barge in the middle of a storm, and is given an umbrella which can hardly stand up the the remorseless deluge. Things happen to them, and they try to cope, and they find themselves wholly inadequate, and this knowledge hurts them because they know of no way to alleviate their obvious inadequacies.

A reviewer calls this Angelopoulos' version of Fellini's 8½, and there are some common elements. The son tries to make a film of the father's experiences, but the intricacies and overwhelming incomprehensibility of the situation defies his attempts to express them and come to terms with them. The film starts with a scene of dozens of old men auditioning for the part of his father, all repeating the same line over and over again: "It's me", "It's me", "It's me". Later, he walks past all these old men on the way to a café, and they all look at him expectantly, waiting for him to adopt one of them as his father, almost. And then, in a bizarre twist, he later has sex with the actress playing his sister in the aisles of a deserted theatre. But all this absurdity is strictly within the realms of the possible, and this makes them all the more compelling and painful and immediate for a viewer.

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Today, spent the day trawling the city streets for photographable scenes, in preparation for a new project. On the way, visited the Sungei Road flea market, and found among the heaps of scrap and debris a real gem, something so surprising and delightful that it gave me the impetus to write a new story. Not a travel journal, not a fragmentary collection of scenes and thoughts, but a real narrative, with a proper plotline and central idea. It's been so long since I last wrote something like this, though I've been teaching my Sec 2s for the last term how to write a properly constructed short story. And having the opportunity and the impetus to write pure fiction again is pretty liberating.

Today, rediscovered the joy in wandering, and particularly in wandering through places I thought I already knew and still finding surprises. This is the kind of delight, I think, that only big cities can offer. Only in big cities can novelty persist, and the element of the unexpected can exist in such substantial quantities that it makes you sit up and take notice, and forms a real barrier against complacency.