My best friend just sent me photos that she took of me in Europe - this is definitely Jojo at her most maternal.
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PHNOM PENH - When I heard we were visiting a silk village as part of the Mekong River tour organized by our very hospitable Cambodian colleagues, I had thought it would be quite commercialized a la Thailand. But it turned out to be a bona fide village - with chickens, mud roads, and very very poor.
亲爱的巴黎铁塔。
FIGUERES - Just came out of the Dali Museum and am on the way back to Barcelona now.
As I walked on, I thought to myself that every single person should have a Dali experience, just so to understand the spectrum of the human imagination. With nostril fireplace, lips sofa, corncob hair, mirrors reflecting illusion after illusion, intertemporal paintings, Dali has ensured that the reality-illusion duality is blurred to a maximum. One is left gasping as one walks through the various rooms. It was a substantial collection of his works (I am sorely reminded of the cheaterbug Picasso Museum in Barcelona) that was presented in a manner that reflected Dali's fauvist quintessence. I spent a lot of time in the courtyard and room 3 because there was so much to see once you look at the details. Yet the number of details was not overwhelming the way Sagrada Familia was. It was just sufficient to occupy the mind, to incite thoughts and contemplation.
(I am tempted to look through the photos I have taken, but I recall the words of my literature and photography class professor - that by recording, snapping away, one renders the memory of the experience to only what one has photographed. Having the intention to write a piece on the obsession of recording, I should not let myself fall into the same trap.)
se. The satirical interpretation of Matisse's La Danse was funny. So was The Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking the Violoncello. I like how his titles are so humorously long. Like the one - 6 Reflections of Something that Looks Like 3 Chinese Pretending to be Lenin When Looked 2 Metres Away, and Like the Crown of a Lion When Viewed 6 Metres Away. Is this too prescriptive? I don't think so. I like to know what the artist intended for while allowing myself room for interpretation. I don't fully buy the Derrida idea that the author can have intentions or meanings that even he himself may not know about. (This would mean that the work attains a life of its own once commenced? If so, then like the conception of life, we have to ask: at what point does it attain its own soul?)
NICE - The sky is finally brightening up and casting a good light on this notebook as I write. The little fibres of my white angora sweater are illuminated, creating a soft focus. I am warm and snug in my sweater and scarf, waiting forthe next train. Such is life as should be experienced by a 25-year-old...
Priceless indeed are certain experiences. To curl up on the grass in Paris and wake up to Tour Eiffel befeore your eyes. To lay on the grass of Epernay, still slightly inebriated from a 1999 Moet vintage, looking up at the azure cloudless skies marked only by contrails of planes flown by. To sit out at night in a 44-euro hotel balcony right in the centre of Plaza Massena, listening to familiar tunes from a classical guitarist busking on the plaza, eating turgid Nicoise olives freshly bought from market this morning... Can life honestly get any better than this?
YOGYAKARTA - The sequined multitude of colours. The little monkeys. The measured steps. The exquisite gestures. The precise execution of the foot cloth flicks. The ascension to heaven. The flames. The painted faces. The economical affixation of the white monkey's tail to the headgear. The angle of the fingers, the waist, the upheld bow. The catching of the arrows. The arm band distinguishing the two brothers. The incesen offering to the four corners of the stage. The aroma. The sonorous music emitting from the orchestra stand. The curt rejection of the devil king.
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SAN PEDRO de ATACAMA - I call this the numbing of the relentless desert heat. Neruda aptly calls it the fierce noon sun with its sharp spears. It is pervasive and there is no respite, no shadows, except in the canyon. Goodness knows how the llamas and the beconias do it. It is like a life without seasons, with nothing to look forward to except the relentless heat.
Of course I don't regret this trip to the desert but I doubt I can live in such harsh conditions for long. The conditions are so extreme - dry and hot in the day, cool in the night and subzero in the altitudes. Am I glad I didn't have the balls to sign up for any altiplano treks!
I am not sure if that is a good thing. At the town of Machupa, the llama meat seemed almost too readily available by being all ready-BBQed on skewers. I guess I am a difficult tourist to please. On the one hand, I shake my head at the crazy bone-rattling journey to the El Tatio geysers (what my Israeli roommate said about being in a washing machine is such an apt analogy!), but on the other, I don't like things too prepared. I like to stumble on llamas and tall phallic cacti, but not be led like a donkey to the water.
The geysers this morning were spectacular as one might expect, but my experience was compromised to some extent by some altitude sickness (at 4200m) and the subzero cold. It was something that one must do in one's lifetime - to feel the power of pecha mama (mother earth) in the mountains, the desert and the exploding geysers, but the rawness of her power is something so unforgettable that it does not need re-verification again...
坐在这 Valley of the Moon， 你不由得承认：人的力量到底是单薄的。造山、创海之人究竟是谁，是怎样的一股力量？古人的多神主义信仰到底是原始的，还是有远见的？把世界的崇山峻岭都看 尽了，我们是否能体会这其中的真谛？若不能，人像攀爬最高峰的无尽欲望又是为了什么...？
It is impossible to look at this landscape and not feel little. I recall The Japanese Story, the sense of being alive and mortal at the same time. Can one go through life just watching flamingoes take flight around the world? Set against the salt lake landscape and the Andes, these beautiful waltzing flamingoes must have one of the most carefree lives in the world.
