I kept having the following thought during Mr. Ho's class last Saturday. I imagined what would happen if the people in my company, especially my bosses and senior colleagues, were there in the classroom, attending the class. Once I started, I somehow could not stop.
Some background information: I work at an information system engineering company which does outsourced jobs from the government. It is headed mainly by people who have been there for 15+ years (that is, ever since it started), and whose lives revolve solely around the company. They are people who can be found working at the office at 4 in a Saturday afternoon. Surely they are respectable people who work hard trying to make some contribution to the society, but I sometimes wonder if they truly LIVE at all. Have they ever had the chance, or been inspired to examine their lives from a new perspective? Would they feel being thrown into the deep end if they were asked to do so? Would one of our directors, an avid storyteller, be able to re-examine her many stories, which are often loaded with prejudice and hasty generalization?
It is also sad for people to become so jaded and weary because of the humdrum of life and "business concerns", failing to recognize the simple pleasures.
2009年1月18日 星期日
2009年1月16日 星期五
Dimension
One of the first assignments in my early days as an architectural student was to take Chinese calligraphic characters, manipulate them and create shapes, forms and space from them. The instructions we got read something like:
"...explore the 2-D, 3-D and 4-D architectonic possibilities of the Chinese calligraphic characters ..."
The 2nd Dimension and 3rd Dimension, we could understand perfectly well. "But what the heck are we going to do for the fourth dimension?" Perhaps for the first time in our lives, "dimension" became a mind-boggling word that was too much for us to handle.
Shortly after, we pulled out yard after yard of tracing paper to work on the drawings, and later, buried ourselves in piles of foam boards, trying our best to carve/cut out some nice looking, pristine white models (to this day I still remember the horrid smell of melted polystyrene). For some of us, the 4-D models were just upgraded, fancier versions and variations of the 3-D ones. We had quite a hard time making sense of how to present space-time through the models.
Ironically, while working on something about dimensions, we got trapped - trapped in the plane of creating fancy graphics and physical form of the models, but failing to project ourselves one step up into another dimension - to experience (or imagine to experience) the kind of feelings we might get from entering into the space we had created. Walking through a structure is a space-time experience. Each step you take places you in a new perspective, giving you new sights, and possibly new insights as you move about.
"...explore the 2-D, 3-D and 4-D architectonic possibilities of the Chinese calligraphic characters ..."
The 2nd Dimension and 3rd Dimension, we could understand perfectly well. "But what the heck are we going to do for the fourth dimension?" Perhaps for the first time in our lives, "dimension" became a mind-boggling word that was too much for us to handle.
Shortly after, we pulled out yard after yard of tracing paper to work on the drawings, and later, buried ourselves in piles of foam boards, trying our best to carve/cut out some nice looking, pristine white models (to this day I still remember the horrid smell of melted polystyrene). For some of us, the 4-D models were just upgraded, fancier versions and variations of the 3-D ones. We had quite a hard time making sense of how to present space-time through the models.
Ironically, while working on something about dimensions, we got trapped - trapped in the plane of creating fancy graphics and physical form of the models, but failing to project ourselves one step up into another dimension - to experience (or imagine to experience) the kind of feelings we might get from entering into the space we had created. Walking through a structure is a space-time experience. Each step you take places you in a new perspective, giving you new sights, and possibly new insights as you move about.
My Story
One of the first "classwork" exercises we did in the first lesson of the Adaptations, Theatre and Culture course last week was to work in pairs, with one team member telling (and then re-telling) a story about herself, and the other just listened and later compared the two versions told. A couple of classmates, who did the listening, got the chance to interpret the stories they heard in their own words/actions.
In my pair, I was agreed to be the "speaker". It wasn't until then that I realized it was actually not easy to be able to come up with a story about myself all of a sudden - a story that is worth telling, in which I have learnt something from it (and hopefully the listeners would learn something from it too). Suddenly my mind was filled up with all sorts of vignettes - memorable fragments that have left a mark in my life, such as...
the child assessment test that I, aged 2 1/2, took - the dawning of my free will;
a slammed door;
a particular walk in the park;
being alone, devouring orange in a little house bathed in late afternoon Aussie sun;
a merciless but purifying rainstorm in the floating city
They can hardly be qualified as stories on their own. They are in no way epics, and may not even be moral tales. But together, each having its own unique place, these vignettes make up what is essentially me - my memory, my consciousness of this world.
Still...
From now on, I should spare more thoughts on collecting, forming and editing my own stories. Who knows... They may probably come in handy some day. Some day soon.
In my pair, I was agreed to be the "speaker". It wasn't until then that I realized it was actually not easy to be able to come up with a story about myself all of a sudden - a story that is worth telling, in which I have learnt something from it (and hopefully the listeners would learn something from it too). Suddenly my mind was filled up with all sorts of vignettes - memorable fragments that have left a mark in my life, such as...
the child assessment test that I, aged 2 1/2, took - the dawning of my free will;
a slammed door;
a particular walk in the park;
being alone, devouring orange in a little house bathed in late afternoon Aussie sun;
a merciless but purifying rainstorm in the floating city
They can hardly be qualified as stories on their own. They are in no way epics, and may not even be moral tales. But together, each having its own unique place, these vignettes make up what is essentially me - my memory, my consciousness of this world.
Still...
From now on, I should spare more thoughts on collecting, forming and editing my own stories. Who knows... They may probably come in handy some day. Some day soon.
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