Yourself?

Hmm Updates!

Well Astee will be leaving us for Imperial College in 4 months time, to pursue her destiny in Chemistry. I'll miss her really madly. It's kinda the last of my really good friends in Singapore. Somehow I'm sure we'll still keep in contact, but kinda wonder about my circle of friends getting smaller and smaller each time a plane leaves for the UK/US.

We've been having communication courses, and it's really interesting when i drew out my circle of friends, how much they share common interests and weirdness. Like we're all out of the box people, with our interest in art and science and music and photography, and how we just defy to me a logical sort of grouping. I don't know how we became so close, because they all came from diverse places, and Fate just shoved them my way and my hands were open just in time. It's so hard to get to know someone in Singapore, yet it seemed to be so easy to get to know these particular people. Your friends are after all, the people you manage to get to know isn't it?

Anyway I just came back from the Australia trip and it was kinda fruitful. Just being out of the country itself and talking to Aussies relaxed me and rejuvenated me. Aussies speak slowly and are warm and helpful and service oriented (most of them) and they really made my stay great. I learnt so much about communication between people, and why they value it so much. But this is all becoming kinda pointformish when in my mind it's a beautiful continumn of experiences and serendiptious philosophizing.

Well I guess one of the main issues in my life that was resolved with this trip is that of my own censorship. I was at Kino over Queen Victoria Galleria where they had this shelf of books banned by various groups in America. Judy Blume (one of those writers handling teenage issues) edited and wrote a foreword about the sort of censorship that parents are imposing on books through pressure on schools because they didn't agree with the content in the book or that their children be exposed to such undesirable material at a young age. It affects writers, because they wrote such things in their books because they thought it was a critical issue affecting children, that it was important to raise disscussion of such issues between children and parents, between people in society. Instead, some parents prefer to sweep such discussions under the carpet and pretend the issues never existed in real life. The dilemma facing such writers is simply thus. Do I write based on my artistic vision, and characterization, and tell it like it is, or do I censor what i write and go for the lowest denominator, something that everyone in society will have no problems with. When writing childrens' books especially, do I risk offending someone and not having my message sent? Or do I write for everyone, make boatloads of money and not send any message at all? Eventually, the fear, is not that the books are censored, but that the censorship occurs in the authors mind, and the issues that are closest to our hearts are buried under heavy self-censorship.

I've been under that same self-imposed censorship for quite a while, and it took me a few history digs to see what I've been missing out. In the past, I would think about issues and not fear to write about how I felt. But somehow, this brashness and boldness has died with time into a sort of conformist stance. Do I risk getting myself ostracized because I am different? Because I think differently, or see things differently? Or have friends in different circles that I try my best to keep up with? Self censorship just made me lose out on so many interesting experiences I may have had. So many people I may have met or gotten to know or even understand and have disscussions about. Who wins in censorship? No one except the lowest denominator!

This is juxtaposed brilliantly by Sherry's reading of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which happened to be on that same list of 100 banned books. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I saw in his comments that the battle between knowledge and insanity is analogous to the battle between efficiency and creativity, mechanization and craftsmanship. But there is an axis missing between the two extremes of knowledge and insanity. If there is selected misinformation, (e.g censorship) or incomplete information available to us, can we said to bave free will and choice if we have incomplete knowledge of our choices and their consequences? How does this then tie in with religious free will or societal free will? Are we really free if we are misinformed about the choices we may have, and the consequence of our actions?

I went to the Museum of Sydney and the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of my wanderings. Looked at self portraits, portraits of people, people exposing themselves to the camera literally and figuratively. What is the point of all this really? What is the point of all art? Why do people fight for, and die for art? What good does it do for someone to expose himself, flaws and all for a voyeuristic audience only interested in your own self destruction so they have something to think about, or something pretty to hang on your wall. Is art simply to expose yourself and your perception of who you are as a human? Oftentimes artists hide behind a powerful facade of ideological terminology, but really, they speak about who they are, what do they fear, and what do they hope to accomplish. Nothing's easy, but deciding to shed your armour and expose your most sensitive and vulnerable parts must be one of the hardest things of all.

On the issue of mechanization and craftsmanship. I visited the Hunter Valley, place of a few large mechanized vineyards, and some smaller boutique ones. And the issue of picking grapes comes up. On the smaller holdings, skilled workers are employed to cut the grapes off the branches, and thus earn the label handpicked. On the larger holdings, mechanical grape harvesters are used that flick the grapes off the bushes, kinda like how a large storm would rattle the grapes and cause them to fall off on their own. And so the smaller boutiques were saying that hand picking is superior in so many ways, because of the camaraderie it provides, and because the workers all know intimately how the grapes are growing and can produce the best wines from them, and provide great advice on wines. Well sure, there are tangible qualities and intangible benefits of boutique wine production, (and the wines do taste pretty good) but how do you export the intangible quality of products like good service and camaraderie and all that. Craftsmanship production of items is bound to fail because your intangibles cannot be exported. Those who manage to export these intangibles (brands like Rolex watches), are hardly handcrafted in the first place.

So it's been a kinda fruitful trip :D I'll talk about other things when I think of them :D Right now it's kinda late and I don't have much more brainpower but I'll try to answer some of Joachim's issues, or at least my view on them.

posted by Downhere. @ 12:12 am