the end of infinity

Infinite blue skies

merged with your blue walls

…travelling-dreaming

we talked about what we would become.

 

At 15 you were already 27

impatient for the responsibilities of being

a mother, a wife.

Our lives were already

bound for diverging paths.

 

I don’t remember studying together

time together was too precious…

Soft white cotton from yesterday’s halloween costume

caught up with baby green leaves

rolling down the pavement like tumbleweed

far from home.

I am transported…

back to your room again.

There were books (weren’t there?)

Neil Gaiman (mine) and Margaret Atwood (yours).

I remember talking and dreaming.

the end of an infinity of

five-hour afternoons

in a time without

distractions

 

There was no way of knowing

(what others thought)

and we learnt not to care.

They were tiny grey pebbles

on haphazardly-laid concrete tiles

(perhaps something worth remembering,

even more important now,

when we are not allowed to forget)

 

There were too many

orange/red leaves

to catch before they fell.

Each one a cradle

transporting wishes

like ours.

 

After the fall…

crumpled green cans

litter the asphalt

showing up dirty white cigarette butts

flayed and exposed

I fell.

tumbling sideways and laughing

but you were not there anymore.

*This is part of an experiment with poetry, film and movement. Click here for the link to the film.

Edward Soja (1940 – 2 Nov 2015): On ‘Thirdspace’

One of the ideas that I greatly value from Edward Soja is the concept of Thirdspace.

Soja uses ‘Thirdspace’ to describe ‘a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings’ that provides new alternatives, opportunities and possibilities for openness and diversity (Soja 1996: 2, 99). Building on Lefebvre’s ‘lived space or social space’, Soja’s Thirdspace, is arguably more future-oriented and offers broader scope for intervention. Lefebvre’s ‘social space’ describes how social hierarchies are prescribed according to one’s age and gender, maintained through relationships of employment and transaction within the ‘space of society’ (Lefebvre [1974] 1991: 35). Soja’s Thirdspace acknowledges how the lived experience of a particular location can vary according to one’s gender, race and social status, but reaches beyond one’s lived experience to include one’s aspiration for this particular location, and one’s lived experience within it (11). This conception of Thirdspace goes further than Lefebvre’s ‘social space’ or ‘lived space’ which focussed primarily on the shifting simultaneity of present meanings created through one’s social interactions with others within a site. In the context of Singapore, Thirdspace could be conceived as all futures possible and the multiplicity of places possible within it.