That fresh new-year smell is beginning to wear off the 2009 already, thanks to the crazy schedule I’ve been leading my life on. I decided to do a bit of mind-digging before the novelty wore of entirely, which sent me down some really trippy tour down the memory lane. Here’s a concise version of what I came up with.
There is a film that makes me feel this absurd mix of feelings that I cannot possibly describe in words, most likely due to my lack of command of any language. In that film, as well as in the creator’s other works, aspects of light, motion, and wide open spaces are featured prominently, almost as if the entirety of the creator’s work was designed to take place in an infinitely large, translucent prism that deconstructs light strewn into a million shades of spectrum as it passes through the main characters and vicissitudes of their affairs. Individual effects aren’t really that novel, but when combined together into a coherent whole his works take on certain peculiarly beautiful and memorable allure. The memorability and (illusion of?) profoundness of his works are especially amazing when I consider that his works, when dissected into little atoms of dispositions and styles, aren’t even that unique, possibly even pedestrian. Similar styles can be observed all over the place, East and West, usually when the medium centers around the theme or the existence of sky and atmosphere, though presence of requisite elements does not necessarily guarantee the style.
Whenever I see one of his works, or any work of art that shares the certain ‘style’, the impact on my senses, I feel strange nostalgia… In fact, I should say that I feel quite a number of emotions simultaneously, with distinct after taste of nostalgia running between them. The experience is never really overwhelming unless I let it be. The nostalgia is different from the usual bar-room affairs I have, tacked with dark, foggish candlelight and thick tingle of wine to be washed down later with doses of sleep. This nostalgia is more like clear air, the kind you are allowed to feel for a brief moment at specific moment of twilight, when all things past and future has to be in their right place at the right time. It leaves you with strange sensibility of awake-ness and understanding of the things around you. It’s the nostalgia that draws your eyes to the stars and patterns of clouds, beautiful yet true, telling of the things to come. It’s the nostalgia of the indescribable.
Even when I was young, I was always captivated by the kind of ‘feeling’ I’m able to feel in certain specific situations in life. Pain and happiness are easily understood. I am reacting to bunch of stimuli that can be categorized and organized into myriad of different psychological description of the human self, and even then I didn’t place much significance on those calculus of human psyche. What really haunted me was, the subtlety of feeling (I use ‘haunting’ and ‘feeling’ for lack of better terms in my vocabulary) within very vague and nondescript situations, with no clear coherence of elements yet unmistakable impact. When I was young I would go out during the time of twilight, sit in a park, and watch the world silently turning from violet to blue to black (or vice versa), watching the rhythmical swaying of the trees in the wind, lazy spread of clouds shining in some strange hue of the light, trying to figure out just what exactly I was feeling at that moment. The experience was addictive and frustrating at the same time. I knew I was feeling something, something I usually can’t feel in company of the normal things of life, but what was it? What are the words for the state of mind? Finding the answer was difficult in the least by the fact that the ‘strange feeling’ seem to contain within itself bits and pieces of all the shades of other urges and sensations, ranging from the urge to create to fulfillment, greed, happiness, and reverie. It was a complex amalgam of the primal and the logical, each biting the others tail like ouroboros…
Those experiences were the closest things I’ve ever come to a sort of religious revelation, or intense attraction of any kind. Even now, I still cannot forget about that ‘feeling.’ In fact, the feeling might have been getting stronger, more intense, as I live and understand and feel even more things like sexuality and self-identity. It had significant impact on what I’ve done so far with my life, and my interest in sciences began as an attempt at finding an answer to the question, since I felt that reliance on ‘verbal psychology’ not grounded in hard physical facts will inevitably end up leading to a tangle of other ideas, in an infinite loop of self-reference.
I’m still trying to figure out just what exactly I am feeling.
Consider Bookhling 