i want to go home...

....but where is home

IRreality

where we used to fly kites

breakfast with lao tze and confucius

just had a happy breakfast with 2 strangers.

2 old men, speaking about CPF, hospital bills, bus fares, viagra and (gasp) movies and architecture!

in mixed mandarin, english, hokkien and teochew, their views are so lucid and witty, really puts those forum discussions with university students and all that to shame.

and no, not those angsty neurotic whinings or puerile nostalgic throwbacks you get from cab drivers. they speak with calm ease issues from the english healthcare system to confucian ethics.

its a big world after all...

neurosis/ freedom mutterings

Rudely awakened,
fueled by a yearning-
without the loud sounds of drilling of concrete,
without the incessant nagging by elders;

A place,
where my soul is at peace and mine,
where I can look at the sky and smile,
where I am be-ing my self.

Neurotic to Them,
But I question,
how can one live in a place
where there is We without the I.

(by me)

incandescence

According to Woolf, being independent--owing nothing to anybody--is essential to achieve the state of mind necessary to produce great art. With material and financial independence, "no force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. I need not hate any man; he can not hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me" (A Room 38). Material independence grants its owner an emotional independence, it allows one to be free of "grudges and spites and antipathies," (A Room 56) to have one's mind unclouded by "alien emotions like fear and hatred" (A Room 58-9). Woolf calls this state of mind "incandescence" (A Room 56).

Perhaps what is most important about the idea of incandescence is its requirement that one be free of emotions rooted in dependent relationships. The "alien emotions" that Woolf names such as "grudges, spites and antipathies" are emotions based in relationships, in communities and in dependencies; they are emotions that exist as reactions to other people--they are reactive, not creative. The idea of incandescence recalls that early memory of being alone, when Woolf's emotional experience was independent of others. As well, it reflects the connection Woolf makes between relationships and dependence when writing about her father and her early life.

In Woolf's view part of the danger of community is that it forces people into dependence, and that dependency locks a person into a limited and rigid world. In A Room of One's Own, this connection is made clear in Woolf's discussion of women's crippling material dependence, which leaves them incapable of producing work with "integrity" (73). This discussion is similar to Woolf's recollection of her father's emotional dependence, which locked him into a limited and dependent state of grief from which he often had "no possibility of communication" (Moments 126). Dependence, whether material or emotional, binds a person to a community, forcing them to live a partial life that is reactive, rather than creative. Independence, on the other hand, frees one to be incandescent, or "disinterested," to be unbound by relationships and communities in which one doesn't believe (Three Guineas 17, 38).

The Story of the Poor Rich Man

Once it happened that he was celebrating his birthday. his wife and children had given him many presents. He liked their choice immensely, and enjoyed it all thorougly. But soon the architect arrived to set things right, and to take all the decisions in difficult questions. The master greeted him with pleasure, for he had much on his mind.

But the architect did not see the man's joy. He has discovered something quite different and grew pale. "What kind of slippers are these you've got on?", he exclaimed painfully. The master of the house looked at his embroidered slippers, then he breathed in relief. This time he felt quite guiltless. The slippers had been made to the architect's original designs.

So he answered in a superior way, "But Mr Architect, have you already forgotten? You yourself have designed them." "Of course," thundered the architect, "but for the bedroom. They completely disrupt the moode here with these two impossible spots of colour. Can't you see that?!"

- Adolf Loos, 1900

Generic City and Difference

With all the emotions welling, I suppose it's time to bring us all back to some other views which i think is critical to a critical discussion of our Singapore condition.(especially those who continue to believe they are acting in the service of the people and those who needs to think about the very act of preservation.)

"People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable. Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living."

—Rem Koolhaas interview in Wired 4.07, July 1996

Here I am paraphrasing:
In the Deleuzean concept of becoming, when A becomes B, A does not give up being A. It continues to be A, yet it becomes B without transforming itself into B.
This redistributed "knowledge network" is more of a scattering that allows the differentiation so dear to Deleuze (Diffe'rence et Re'pe'tition), rather than a simple repetition. With repetition comes difference, and also remebrance.
Derrida defines the archive as a form of memory control. An archive exists where things begin, where there is consignment and gathering. Archives allow one to trace something that is repeated, and to repeat it again.
One always forgets one or several elements, either consciously or unconsciously. Hence the pain of archiving.
For Deleuze there is blockage in repetition and its memory, what matters more is finding a difference. With Derrida, on the other hand, suggest that an archive must be allowed to forget occasionally, because if we are only concerned with knowing where something comes from, we will be blocked in our creativity.

What happens when we think of archiving is for difference rather than commonality? Difference is not between entities, but the reason for the subject's existence. To paraphrase again, we need to stay away from the dangers in some of the thinking concerning city preservation. The architect is consigned to the potentiality of the existing buildings because these buildings asks nothing of him/her, imposes on him nothing other than its ban (of the new).