Bibliomancy

Words and messages (or attempts at them) are impossible to avoid on the streets of the city. Whether or not we can read them, understand them, or interpret them, they are powerful images that attack the senses. These are snapshots from my trips to and from school and extra-curriculars. These are the images that assault my consciousness.

See the map of this post from Manhattan.

T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock’ has influenced and continues to influence my ‘days and ways’ ever since I first encountered the poem when I was thirteen. I remember hating the poem when I first read it, but I hated it only because I did not understand. After reading and re-reading it many times, reflecting and considering its winding ways, I began to understand: I began to understand that life is beyond our capacity to understand and therefore by quelling our pressing desire to make sense of the senseless, we can understand it more: as George Orwell said in his book ‘1984’, “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength” What I take from Orwell is that the minute we categorise and label something is the minute its mystery, its boundless form, its ability to surprise is quite removed.

In this film, I wanted to show man walking away from what he knows, to turn his back on the ‘one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants’, to remove himself from the ‘streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent’. The image of the sophisticated world: the highways, the cars, the consumerism, the happy MacDonald smiles that infiltrate a increasingly dissatisfied society is overlaid with the simple image of a pair of feet that walk towards the camera; away from the flow of traffic into the city; away from our ‘civilised’ society. Why I wanted to do this was because I feel that so much of the way we think today, the way we act, is mediated and influenced by the media and governing powers. We’ve come to depend too much on the thinking of others, denying our instinct to the point where we no longer feel our instinct.

In essence I wanted this short film to be a turn on everything we are educated to do and to believe in: this idea that we must have jobs, we should marry and have a family. But what happens when the day comes where we look at ourselves in the mirror and say: ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’, the day we realise that we kept telling ourselves ‘there will be time, there will be time’, and now all that time is gone. That our lives have been wasted on dreaming of the future and living in the past, it’s such a rare thing to meet someone who lives every day as it comes, who lives entirely in the present, but why?

Monday, I was part of a group museum educators that visited a public school in Hempstead. We were invited to be audience to short performances inspired by books, first through fifth graders had read and studied in the school year that’s drawing to an end. Against sets and backdrops created by the students and their parents, the students, often in costume, presented fragments from works by authors such as Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss, and from books like Charlotte’s Web and The Magic Schoolbus. One fifth grade class had chosen poetry—the poetry of Langston Hughes. I enjoyed being reconnected to his poetry, to hear I, too again. Being an immigrant, I wasn’t introduced to his work or that of other American poets, until my thirties. This morning I was stirring, woke up at 5, got up, went to my desk, and took The Collected poems of Langston Hughes off the shelf. I sat down, opened it, and did so, on page 390 and 391—a spread of children’s rhymes.

By what sends
the white kids
I ain’t sent:
I know I can’t
be President

… was the rhyme my eyes landed on, a rhyme written, at least half a century ago. A rhyme that is being rewritten this year, being transformed by Senator Obama and the America of today, the America of June 4th 2008, the America of the morning after the day Senator Obama clinched the Democratic nomination.

… Tomorrow,
[He]’ll be at the table…

See the map of this post from Langston Hughes' Home.