Grammodes Geometrica

Image from painting by artist MightyYellow

I was having dinner last night with the artist who made the image in Photo 2 for the upcoming ampuletsX7 exquisite corpse project. She was assigned the butterfly “Painted Jezebel” as a theme. Towards the end of dinner she pointed out “hey, a moth” outside the window behind us. ⁣⁣
Insects love my flat because almost all the windows are constantly kept wide open and the breeze carries them in, coupled with the smell of plants, flowers and earth. At night, there is also the draw of the single moody light in the otherwise dark flat. I give this explanation in case some of you are already leaping into non-scientific plots. ⁣

 ⁣
Later that evening as I was doing the dishes, this Grammodes Geometrica (what a cool name right!?) landed on the pile of rubbish from the washing up. It made me remember my own companion image (see below) for this project of the painted jezebel. 


Butterflies and moths are these beautiful winged things we accord all kinds of meaning and value to. When I first read about butterflies as a teenager (I have a literature student’s crush on Nabokov, oh Nabokov! And he was butterfly mad), this one fact about them stuck with me: they feed on decaying matter. For all the nostalgic, romantic and pretty connotations we have dreamt up for the butterfly (and less so for the clothes-destroying death-heralding moth), you wouldn’t imagine the butterfly or moth on a corpse or, in my case, a pile of rubbish. Yet it is there that they feast and get drunk on a different nectar. ⁣
⁣
We all secretly enjoy these coincidences and chance meetings, don’t we? They allow us to see patterns and make meaning - and therefore weave structure into our lives.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

miracle man

Image
I can never quite tell if Ma J is asleep or just pretending The old lady in the bed next to Ma J's is in hospital because of a second stroke. When we were visiting Ma J this afternoon, the old lady's middle-aged son was also there. He was in his usual round-neck tee tucked into a pair of blue jeans with a belt made of buffalo hide. His limbs are slim, but his belly is round. His bald head, too, is round and abnormally large for his small frame. Let's call him Ah Biao , or if you prefer an English name, you can think of him as Bill (after his buffalo hide belt). When J and I walked out of the ward, Ah Biao or Bill followed us. Three of us stood around the counter by the nurses' work area. J and I were quiet, enjoying the break. Then Ah Biao wanted to show us something special. "Eh, I show you something." Ah Biao unzipped his black waist pouch and took out a small yellow cloth pouch. He untied the colourful string that secured the opening of the pouch. He weigh
Read the rest of this post

on a Hou Hsiao Hsien movie set

Image
By the tracks of the Jiji Station, the oldest train station in Taiwan OK, not quite. We did not even manage to go all the way south to Hou Hsiao Hsien's KaoShiung or even Tainan, but we did venture out from Taipei for 3 days to Taichung. But the real takeaway was actually this supposed feature of Hou Hsiao Hsien's films - trains! Trains are about the best thing about traveling. Unlike cars and taxis, trains are a social mode of transport. Train stations allow for reunions and departures, points to assess and affirm relationships. I admit that all this fades away when you are tired or in a great hurry (or both). But seriously, cars (oh, 4-wheelers!) have only brought about pollution and wasteful consumption, traffic jams, asphalt, mindless obsession with speed and countless quarrels in the stressful, enclosed interiors of cars. Friends, take it slow. Take the train. Read a book. Hold your partner's hand. Be there with the people around you. With Taiwan's highspeed rail
Read the rest of this post

fear not history

Image
Fiction on this island has never quite flourished. Perhaps because we've never quite made peace with our histories. But two genres of fiction hold special place in Singapore as a result. Ghost stories - the art of unresolved pasts. And that even stranger fruit of fact-as-fiction/fiction-as-history. Part speculative history. Part documentary fiction. A romance of obscurity. The Lan Fang Chronicles , Choy Ka Fai's work supported by the Arts Council's Arts Creation Fund and commissioned for this year's Arts Festival, is maybe of this latter genre. Choy Ka Fai chances upon the Lan Fang Republic, supposedly the first democratic republic in SEAsia, set up by the Hakka Chinese in West Borneo. His research in West Borneo, China and Holland takes him through archival material, abandoned sites, photocopied photographs, a supposed descendent of Luo Fang Bo (founder of Lan Fang) and accounts of Dutch missionaries and colonists. These materials allow him to re-construct a sk
Read the rest of this post