The Poetics of Things

Feeling sadly poetic today.

The snow is falling despite the bright sky. They fall through the cracks of cloud, falling with the glimpses of sunlight.

I was thinking about my practise and how I always notice the cracks on the road, peeled wall surfaces. There are so many of them scattered around the world, it can barely be called art for how common they are. Yet somehow there is a beauty in it that I can never take my gaze away. They say that the world is supposed to be this kind of ruin and always in need of repairing. Perhaps that.

Or perhaps this is how we, humans, live. This is how we find joy. We step and dance in any opportunity we have, in the midst of deadly crisis, on the verge of losing everything, in the moment of saying goodbye to beloved homes.

"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it." (Jane Jacobs, 2011)

I begin to loathe so-called minimalism more and more as days pass. We are plied with things and we live our life by stuffing it. I promise I'm not a hoarder and I love a neat home. But the sheer will of keeping things clean and minimal, smooth surfaces, almost-solitude-looking objects, the universal "usefulness" is what I do not bind to.

We collect things. From places we have been to, people whom we love. Those things that we have ownership over, power over, a possession, somehow always outlive their places, people and memories... and eventually ourselves. We attach our soul to them, sometimes some things seem so easily discardable - of no importance; some other times you see someone crying over a sentimental object that seems like a piece of trash to you.

Perhaps you then realize the more important the object is, the less of an existence of the person or place that the object is attached to. We treasure a ring from parent, because the parent is not there. "In memory of" is never of a present human. Perhaps by that moment, when you see the ghost of memory hovering on that "piece of trash", you'd feel something.

Some days I feel like spring wind, a soft river, fluid, changing, and enjoy every second of this dying presence; some other days, like today, the lake freezes, snow travels aimlessly, I just want to hold on to something that will never, ever, ever, change.