Airconditioning

Sitting in aircon drinking coffee and 

Singapore Coffee Shop
CC licensed. Click image to view source.

Hearing accents like my own 

I'm looking out through picture-frame glass 

At the local coffee shop across the road. 

The price of my coffee would have 

Bought me breakfast over there. 

I could say I’ve already eaten - 

Which is true - 

But I also wanted the comfort 

Of the familiar, 

Of a filtered environment 

Where I can breathe easy. 

In the humidity over there 

And the noise of passing traffic 

I'm a little less in control, 

A little less comfortable. 

Here, in my ubiquitous 

Coffee shop, 

I can quietly turn my back 

On the world I am colonising.

Reference of Frames

I got lucky, once, when teaching a Literature class about point-of-view. My friend Mark Friedlander had made an art installation which showed what I was struggling to tell.

I took my class to the gallery and invited them to engage with Mark’s work. It was plywood, like a packing case, about two meters high and a meter square. On two sides were tiny holes. If you walked up and put your eye to a hole, you saw into a miniature white corridor illuminated from above. It was like looking into the start of a labyrinth; your imagination was invited into the possibilities of a space where your physical body couldn’t go.

Mark Friedlander

You can see some later iterations of Mark’s work here.

It strikes me now that Mark’s box was a lot like the way I think about poetry: it was a space for the viewer/reader to make meaning. Many meanings were possible but all were bounded by Mark’s manipulation of the space - his crafting of the materials and his manipulation of the light source.

Tonight I have been thinking again about Mark’s art as I try to find a way to describe a dance performance I have just seen. The performance was called Impulse and it was extraordinary.

Unique in my experience, this was a “site specific” work, which meant that the performance wasn’t on a stage. Instead, the ticket gave directions to the stage door of Singapore’s Esplanade Theatre with clear instructions that if you were late, you wouldn’t be admitted.

At 7:00 pm sharp, I found myself backstage in the greenroom with 30 other audience members. After an initial safety briefing - “we’ll be moving around a lot, be careful - when you sit or stand for each scene, stay inside the taped areas otherwise you might get hurt by the dancers” - we were led through to the first performance space, a loading bay where we were asked to sit on the ground in the small space designed to be occupied by an off-loading truck.

Da:ns Festival

Load industrial music. Drum beats and sounds like assembly-line machinery. Dancers in blacks and greys and khaki. High energy. Running and jumping off walls. An intimate space with concrete and echoes. But a beginning that was powerfully confronting as a female dancer had her head bounced in slow motion against a wall and then held by her male companion against a railing. And the two of them froze for an uncomfortably long time so that the audience started taking furtive looks around to see if something was meant to be happening somewhere else. When the tension was broken by the four other dancers re-entering the space, the energy kept building. The raw intimacy of the dancing was accentuated by droplets of dancer-sweat hitting my face.

Clearly quite a performance. From the loading bay we moved to an industrial lift for the second movement and then to a workshop and finally a basement corridor between warehoused props.

It was in the workshop space that I started thinking about "framing" and Mark’s artwork. Ordinarily the workshop we were in builds the props which frame the dancers but tonight it became a frame itself. The choreography made extensive use of the fixtures in the space with the dancers plunging over and under tables, sliding on saw-benches and climbing on prop-boxes. The music and choreography was again pulsing and industrial with machine noises and movements that made me think about things being made. Things being shaped and controlled.

I’m struggling to find the words to describe the power and the point, but I think that may be part of the point; dance like music is its own language and not usefully reduced to the banality of words.

As I sat to try to write about it, I found instead that a poem was forming about my ambivalent relationship with cameras. Like Mark’s box, the camera takes the endless possibilities of the world and sucks them through a lens into a box. The world is framed and so often this seems banal. An Eichmann-like repetition of an unreflective act.

What I value about art - poetry, sculpture, dance and photography - is its capacity to reframe our experience - its capacity to invite a different view shaped to unsettle us from what is familiar. Tonight’s dance performance will keep me searching for words for a long time to come.

You can read the poem I wrote here.

A window into the soul

Sunday night in Singapore

Primitive people, so I’m told,

Feared photography because

It stole their soul.

In civilised countries,

Like Singapore and Australia

Kalashnikov cameras

Shoot holes in everything -

Capturing images

Like there’s no tomorrow.

Remnant

In the small patch of forest

Beside the new

HDB they’re building,

There’s a family of

Dogs that seem

Somehow to survive.

I see one standing

Sentinel sniffing the air

And watching warily

The towers of concrete

That slowly encroach

On his home.

Last night they chased me.

Three wild dogs barking

At my heels

As I pedalled down

The footpath, heart

Pounding, trying to look calm.

They didn’t bite

Despite my fears

And my vulnerability.

Instead they left me wondering

Whether the world will be better

When they’re gone.

Ligature - that which ties you

The things that bind us are many and varied. Ties to family, to culture, to faith and to conviction keep us upright and braced against the vagaries of fate. Equally, however, our ties may hold us fast and prevent us from moving with the times even when change would be for the best.

Many years ago (I find myself writing that line more and more), my friend Peter Lenten and I designed a social studies unit on religion. For years we had been taking students to visit a mosque and a church and a synagogue. It occurred to us that, whilst these were important places for our students to keep visiting, few of our students would feel any personal connection with these religions. In fact, in a largely secular school, few of our students had much of a tie to conventional religion at all.

Peter had studied divinity many years before my many-years-ago and he explained that one etymology of the word "religion" is from the same Latin root as "ligature": historically "religion" has a sense of meaning "that which you are tied to". We decided to add one more place of worship into our tour and so took students to the largest shopping mall in our city. What we were interested in helping students explore was the way humans find meaning in their lives and the way that consumerism fills a defining space in the lives of many secular identities.

 Some rights reserved by xiquinhosilva

Shopping malls, like churches and mosques and temples of many creeds and colours, can be inspiring places. As a young traveller I visited St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and stood, neck straining and head stretched, looking in awe up at the vastness of the dome. It was an inspiring experience. Despite my ambivalence about religion and the tensions I felt about the wealth represented in the Vatican, I was inspired by the sense of grandeur and the enormity of the space. This also is a feeling that I have often in Singapore. This largely secular island is filled with architectural extravagances which, despite my reservations about the resources involved, constantly amaze me. Architects place boat-like structures on top of casinos or turn lotus flowers into museums or build waterfalls and temperate rainforests inside vast, glass, refrigerated snow-domes.

http://sg.lifestyleasia.com/features/Entertainment/
singapore%E2%80%99s-latest-performing-arts-
centre-the-star-opens

Last Wednesday I visited a particularly inspiring space. Sharon, my wife, bought tickets for us to hear Nora Jones singing at the Star Theatre. The tickets were expensive but the theatre alone made me feel like we were getting our money’s worth. Vast escalators suspended in open space carried us up through glass floors and into suspended anti-chambers which took us to more escalators and then into a theatre space that dwarfed anything I have ever been in. A black roof dotted with star-like lights and two sweeping mezzanines which seemed bigger than half a football stadium provided space for 5000 people. Nora Jones was extraordinary, and, with the physical force of the music combining with the atmosphere of the theatre, the experience came as close as I think I am likely to get to religion. How interesting, then, to discover that the Star Theatre project is a joint venture between  a mall developer and a church and that each week thousands of Christians ride the escalators past the designer clothes shops to meet in this space.

I remain ambivalent about religion, but once again I have found myself standing in awe in a religious space.

Seeing things

Half my lifetime ago, and a quarter of the world away, I started my first job in a tiny rural town on the edge of the Australian desert. At night I could jog 10 minutes over the crest of a hill and see no artificial lights, only stars. There were no public busses, no parks, no traffic lights, no supermarkets, one policeman, one doctor, one store, two pubs and a school of 100 students where I taught.

Every other weekend I drove 10 hours round-trip to visit the girlfriend I had left still studying in the city. The first hour of the drive was along a single-lane bitumen road that, in line with popular practice, I would travel at 120 kilometres an hour slowing to 100 to put my left wheels in the gravel if I met a car coming the other way. I might pass 4 or 5 cars before I hit the T intersection with the main highway and could relax onto the two-lane road that would carry me down to the city.

Half way along this first stretch of road was a small shop with a section of concreted footpath and a wooden bench. I assume the building was a shop because it sat so close to the road but it no longer served any commercial function. A section of wire fence on one side enclosed the dry weeds of what once was a garden.

As I whizzed by I would see two old men sitting on the bench. All I’d get was a snapshot glimpse of two hat-clad men sitting in the shade looking out across the road. I never stopped. They sat watching and I drove by.

What strikes me most, in retrospect, is the speed of it all. In a place of such stark beauty and timelessness, I passed, regularly, meters from these two men and knew nothing of them. Perhaps they knew that I was the young teacher - one of a regular cycle of young teachers who would stay a few years before moving on. Perhaps they didn’t notice me at all and just waited for the dust to clear and their view of the wheat paddocks to re-emerge.

 Some rights reserved by Valley_Guy

In Singapore where cars are so expensive, I ride a bike. In the park each morning I pass dozens of old men and women out for their morning exercise. One man always waves and says “good morning” as I ride by. No dust here. The sky is much closer and regularly washes everything clean. Strange, though, that in such a fast-paced city I find myself travelling so much more slowly.

The younger me never took the time to wonder at what those two old men might be seeing as they looked into their memories. 

Singapore

The bus

Singapore Ian Tymms

On a school excursion
to "The Cement Works"
Drove down the
Sides of an open-cut
Mine to the
Bottom
Where we found ancient
Shark's teeth.

Now I live in a
Concrete tower looking
Down on the trees and
Earth below.
Cranes on every horizon
Are emblems
Of a desire to rise
Above the complex
History of this
Place.

But there are still
Shark's teeth in the walls.

Finding a line in shifting sands

Thoughts, like water, are essential to sustaining life but they are similarly difficult to shape. Writers must always struggle with the possibility - no the probability - that the texts they pour their ideas into will take a different shape in the minds of their readers. For me, as a writer, this is my greatest struggle: to find forms for my ideas which have enough structure and integrity to sustain their approximate shape as they pass into the minds of others.

The significance of this struggle has been foremost in my mind as I have reflected on whether to publish the post I wrote last week.

What I wrote responds to the sentiments of Mikhail Gorbachev published last month in a letter ofcongratulations (p.26) to the United World College movement on the occasion of the movement’s 50^th anniversary. Gorbachev writes about how little he feels has been achieved since the end of the cold war; he argues that, instead of striving to make the world a better place, the last twenty years has seen a focus on ‘superprofits and overconsumption, on social and environmental irresponsibility, making the human being merely a cog in an economic machine.’ In my post I paid tribute to Gorbachev as a man of integrity and vision and I wrote about the incongruities of the affluence that supports the UWC movement and the challenges that Gorbachev believes face the world.

Because I work for one of the United World Colleges (UWCSEA) my own position on this issue is complex. The UWC mission statement says that, “UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future,” and so a part of my job is to prepare students to critically engage with the world as they strive to improve it. But I also work in Singapore and so when I signed my work contract, I agreed that I would not comment publically about the Singapore Government. My lifestyle, my affluence, my students’ lives and the affluence that is necessary to the very existence of my school is predicated on the economic miracle that is Singapore and Gorbachev is asking some challenging questions about the economic foundations of this system. It is difficult to ask these questions without also reflecting on the economic values of the city in which we live and there is a risk, as I explore Gorbachev’s writing, that I could find myself being critical of the government here in Singapore.

I am overstating the problem of my own post but I am doing so because I have a further point to make. What I wrote is not critical of the Singaporean Government nor would I want it to be. I don’t know exactly where the line is in the sand that I must not cross, but I am experienced and aware enough to know roughly where it is and to stay carefully at a distance. My real worry about my post is that it is written – like this post – largely for my students and I don’t know that this line is as easily discerned by them.

And this is the real challenge that I wish to raise: how do my students, who are by definition young and learning about the world, explore and challenge the status quo without the risk of crossing lines? What is my responsibility as a teacher in regard to inviting enquiry but protecting my students from crossing into territory where they should not go? Should my students’ blogs be public and thus allow a meaningful engagement with the world, or private and there-by remove much of the risk but also much of the engagement? If I am not standing beside my students when they enter the online world, am I leaving them to enter it alone and without guidance?

The complexities of these challenges were highlighted by the recent transgressions of an Australian/Malaysian woman here in Singapore. Amy Cheong wrote a ‘Facebook post railing over the noise from a Malay wedding being held in a void deck near her home, which was filled with expletives and insults about the community’ (The Strait Times October 13, p. D4). Within 24 hours, Cheong had been sacked by her employer and left Singapore.

The media discussion around Ms Cheong's treatment has been extensive. Whether the response was proportionate is not my concern in this post. What I would like to note is that Ms Cheong was tertiary educated, 37 years old and professionally employed by the National Trades Union Congress. She should have known where to find the line.

When I write about issues of economics or social justice, so should I. But when I do so, I tacitly open this possibility for my students, too, and I can’t expect them to be as able when reading the nuances of the world. That is why I am writing this post: to remind my students that the writing they do in their blogs (and in their private lives on Facebook) is real and can have real consequences. This is powerful and something to be embraced, but, as they experiment in the sandpit of the internet, it is important that my students are constantly thinking about where the line might be.

In the Saturday Straits Times (13/10/12, p. D4), Law Professor Tan Cheng Han, chair of the Singapore Media Literacy Council (MLC), was asked to comment on the Cheong incident. As part of his article, he wrote about what the public can do to engender a better social media environment:

As in the real world, show your disapproval of anti-social behaviour. And also try to be fair-minded and courteous even in disagreement.

            After all, most people who don’t agree with you are more likely to at least see your point of view if you put it across politely.

            They may even come round to your point of view eventually, but they almost certainly won’t if you put your points across insultingly and condescendingly.

I am educating young people to make a better world: Prof Tan Cheng Han’s advice seems like a solid foundation on which to build that world. Finding an appropriate line in the sand will always require careful reading and thoughtful engagement with others and I don’t believe my students can do this from outside the sandpit. I want them engaged, active, thoughtful and respectfully changing the world. Thought and language always requires care and negotiation as ideas are passed from one mind to another. These are skills that must be taught and learned.

My advice to my students:

• ·            Think about who might read your writing and what it might mean to them.
• ·            Write respectfully.
• ·            Be productively provocative – ask questions of your world and expect that it can be better.
• ·            Strive to understand the context in which you live and write and, if you’re not sure, ask others who might understand it better.
• ·            Draft – because drafting means, amongst other things, that you will take some time between writing and publishing. It is always good to get another opinion on your writing and to reread it yourself with fresh eyes.
• ·            Remember that there can be consequences for getting it wrong – both for you, for me, for your family and for your school – but that we trust you to explore the world honestly and respectfully and we support you in doing this. I would far rather an honest mistake than a failure to try.