Infrastructure of the Soul
I have a guest from Singapore staying here for a couple of days before he gets fully settled in residence at Carleton to do is MA in Political Thought and Theory. We were discussing differences between Singapore and Canada and as I was listening to his description, i stated:
Singapore sounds like it has the most impressive integrated infrastructure in the world, but seems like it missed developing the infrastructure of its soul as a nation.
Singapore is a teeny tiny city state, centred right in the middle of some of the worlds most dangerous and chaotic developing nations, it is super clean, has universal education, no homelessness, laptops in everyroom, cell phones in all pockets, people eat really well, but alas you cannot body surf at a concert, chew gum in the streets, you are guilty until proven innocent and there is no jury system nor can you challenge the government openly in any form of public protest. There is comfort, and the neighbours are very disorderly, and the place is really small with no resources of its own, so the state government can justify keeping tight controls and people go along mostly cuz they are comfortable & things work. My guest did however discuss the very clever and subversive nature of theatrical, musical and poetic satire.
Perhaps there needs to be some sort of axis where infrastructure and poetry are on the axes? Imagine trying to do a statistical regresssion analysis between the quality of a nations poetry and the quality of its infrastructure!
When the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg visited Germany before WWII with his mother, he had an ominous feeling because their train (and all German trains)arrived with zero-minute delay !
The Germans were obsessed by perfection, discipline and “purity”. We all know the results of such a “Brave new world”. Honestly I prefer the chaos of Dakar to the cosy and hyper-clean Singapore…
Comment by Omar — August 31, 2006 @ 8:25 pm
Maybe the real question is whether and how poetry can be found within infrastructure - either in resistance to rigidity or in organic growth (or both).
Comment by alison — September 4, 2006 @ 6:02 am