Remember, remember

We are landed with fallible, frailty, imperfect memories. Nonetheless, confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: it allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to contribute to the common mind. Memories are… unlike Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled with every act of recollection; they are dialogic. Hence perhaps our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine.

In Lewes, the town where the country’s biggest annual bonfire festival commemorating the Guy Fawkes night is said to take place, the local societies’ banners read “we burn to remember”.

(Photos taken in Lewes, East Sussex, UK, 2013)

Zeal

There is no way to explain an edge, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others — the living — are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between the 'now' and the 'later'.

(Photos taken in Mt. Merbabu, Central Java, 2013)

Pentas Bebas

Jika betul bahwa hidup adalah pentas, maka segala visualisasi yang hadir hendak menegaskan adanya bukanlah sebentuk ilusi tentang realitas. Pentas adalah tempat di mana realitas diproses dan penonton pun turut dalam arus pembebasan dari ilusi: aktif merenungkan persoalan momentum dalam lini masa sebagai gerak ke arah pembebasan.

(Demi aksen yang terberi pada simbol sosok orang ramai, pada gerak, pada detak, atau justru pada ketidakhadiran.)

Arrive

We have to live with the certainty that we will get old, our bodies decline, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. There will come a time when we ought to be making the most of joy in the final hours in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. That, and tell ourselves that it is now that matters, to construct and deconstruct, to surpass ourselves everyday, to make everyday undying, and to do them in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. 

That is what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

(Photos taken in Huangyao, China, 2012)

Continuum

Only a fanatical will to make a vanished world endure despite the passing of time can explain this belief in the existence of an 'always within never' -- an entire world that had disappeared, a mixture of flavors, smells, scattered fragrances that has left its sediment in ancestral rites and local dishes, crucibles of illusory memories that seek to make gold from sand, eternity from time.

(Photos taken in Sapa, Vietnam, 2012)