Ant-seething city, city full of dreams, Where ghosts by daylight tug the passer's sleeve. Mystery, like sap, through all its conduit-streams...

-Charles Baudelaire

Empress Lawn, 2018

St Michael’s Road, 2018

It is rather difficult to get lost in a small city. A wrong turn into an alleyway of a nameless street brings one back to the overused routes in a matter of minutes. One can only seek to wander out and disappear into the impenetrable city, dissipating into some unseen by shifting the gaze away from glaring signs pointing towards the shortest route and the glass and concrete buildings that stand obnoxiously in the way. The main roads are geometric perimeters, a square, rectangle, a circus of limbos that do not allow for spillage or slippage, marking any attempts to get lost as a failure to follow the orders of the city. Disobedience is not permissible in this city, even if it was accidental. The body resists getting lost when unchartered terrain seems distant and estranged. 

In this city, there is no Walden wilderness, no backwoods, no hinterlands. There is no zomian dreams. Instead, the only way of getting lost is to be caught in various encounters of the threshold. That space before one enters or leaves, the point in which one experiences enough to get lost in what is no longer there. The word threshold comes from the Old English word threscold, a 17th century practice of stomping noisily to remove mud or snow from one’s shoes before entering a house. To thresh also means to thread or trample. The suffix of to the root word which is “cold” remains a mystery and over the years it was transformed as “hold” for convenience and familiarity. When one threads and tramples in this point, one breaks the order of the city momentarily and may be able to see beyond it, loss from what is visible and familiar. 

To get caught in this space is a mystery too, in which not many is able to traverse. In a field guide to getting lost, Solnit wrote about how those who are lost may able to find themselves from the objects that they have misplaced along the way but most of these objects formed the secret constellations of their irrecoverable pasts because material objects witness everything and say nothing. To be caught in the threshold is to be able to discern traces of these pasts even if it has been long forgotten.

The survivors are calling it the absence, the deterioration of the brain's ability to retain the past. The first obvious symptom are cycles of a hyper-fugue state lasting weeks and gradually months. lovers would wake up in their beds as strangers, children would walk aimlessly in the streets unclaimed by their parents who have forgotten that they were ever conceived. The fugue state is followed by drone-dreaming where millions of the infected occupy spaces of resource and consume everything in their paths, forcing us the survivors into hiding. there was no way one can be protected from being marked by the absence, no possibility of escaping it, rendering us helplessly waiting for our turns. I have imagined the end of times as fast and unforgiving, a prophetic calamity sweeping our sorry selves into extinction; never realising that it has always been this slow arduous decay of collective existence. these are remnants of diseases from the past escalating its way into the present; dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's all which have been a struggling search of providing comfort and care but never a cure. Now it was already too late to prevent the source disintegration. No information could be retained to figure out a cure, even if there was ever a possibility of one. Drone dreamers would sway in polyrhythms into the endstage. Some of us have called it the spectacle of madness, the final expulsions of consciousness, of characters and habits, of any sense of self. We would watch from afar, the exuberance of these strangely hilarious acts before finally submerging themselves into the sea. They would bob themselves up and down fighting their own bodily resistance against their demise.

in the woman in the dunes, Kōbō Abe describes that barrenness of sand was not caused by its dryness but its ceaseless movement rendering it inhospitable to all living things. he describes surrendering to this movement, a resistance against staying still, as a way to escape competition and possessing a great ability to adjust. but isn’t it in our nature to stay where we are, a futility against the flow, digging ourselves out of the circumstantial states we are forced into, rather than surrendering to it.

I stood amongst the buried ones, joining their blistered hands, fervently scratching a wall so high that I could not see the top. in the darkness, I caught glimpses of bodies bending over, stretching upwards, lying down: harden bodies as still as trees, their branched out limbs scraping and scratching to their own rhythms of desperation and despair “why are we doing this?” I asked and the scattered voices replied all at once “it’s the only thing we know to do.” time has ceased completely and I feel a blackness blooming inside me, a swirling dark, like ink in water. gret, gret, grud, grayt, szut, szus, gret szays, grayz, the sounds from the scratching formed into patterned conversations, into comforting sounds. I would hear affirmations to our collective suffering as if we were all asleep and sharing the same dream, and we could all wake up at the same time. suddenly a bright fluttering flash caught itself onto the wall, like moths frantically gravitating towards the light. it took me a while before I realised that the wall had cracked open to an other, too small for us to peek through but big enough for us to feel a momentary triumph. the exhaustion takes over and our legs buckled and we fell like bricks. “Let’s take a rest,” the scattered voices, this time including my own catching me off-guard, said all at once. we rest ourselves onto the light, a small tiny beam fluttering around the wall and fell asleep. we woke up at the same time only to find that we are back in the same dream once again, behind a wall with no marks, no scratches and no cracks. #35mm #purapuraparade #filmisnotdead #staybrokeshootfilm #blackandwhitephotography #singapore

katong, 2020

dear tuan moechtar,

it is twenty thirty two. there was a point during the passing of these 100 years that we have stopped writing letters on paper; the hardcopies were soften into secrets that lay themselves between the inter-webs undeciphered, cryptic crumbs to lead the way when the time is right. but time was never right and no one knew where the way was anymore, or what it has become. there was a point, not too long ago in which we experience the erasure and all was lost; that great digital amnesia. yet we are back, once more to where we’ve started, ink on paper, addressing them to the hungry ghosts of our future sons and daughters.

where is 84 Onan Road,

where is 131 Arab Street,

where is 709 North Bridge Road,

at which point do we forgot and at which point do we remember?

how do we remember?

there were several points and then there was no point. i was given a box of letters that was written to you tuan moechtar, letters that were unopened and undelivered. somewhere in that 100 years, we were all forced into illiteracy. it was safer that way; illiteracy as a vaccination against the plague. that was a long time ago, decades before the erasure. some of us escaped and I was one of them, through my ancestral lineage of oral transmitters I was told to read these letters, me and a small number of other readers. they call us tracers. but with the passing of time, we witness the death of these languages, millions forced into silence,  i lost my native tongue long before I was born. tracers adopt languages of the old trade systems, decrypting oceans of hardcopies, stitching semblance of meaning, tracing the silhouettes of dead societies and phantoms of the past.

I opened a letter dated 14th April 1926, it read,

“…..you will never become free and independent, as long as you do not throw away all the dirt of magic of your head, as long as you still hold to the ancient culture which is full of fallacies resignation and fossilized notions, an as long as you still have a slave mentality…”

it was signed off as Tan Malaka, as were all the letters I have read these past months...