The Chinese New Year celebrations for 2009 have ended yesterday with the Lantern festival, closing 15 days of quasi-constant fireworks and firecrackers.
Despite the decade spent here, I remain an outsider, never quite integrated – this society still quite closed on itself when it comes to foreigners or laowais, and perhaps because of this, I feel a responsibility towards my role as a witness. In the margin of things, the distance compulsory, what I see, hear can possibly be registered with a perspective proximity would never allow.
I wait every year with great expectancy for the Spring Festival, looking forward to this monstrous display of noise and lights, deeply fascinated by the enormity of the spectacle, its duration, its overbearing insistence; in short, how it dominates everything from activities to sleep schedules.
There’s also a lot to say about the blatant contradictions the event brings to mind, at least for someone standing at the heart of this exuberance while never experiencing a true sense of belonging.
Chinese friends, colleagues, students, neighbors, acquaintances all have this in common: their general quietness, a surface docility often expressed by a marked tendency to agree too quickly and therefore, a propensity for a yes or positive attitude that is often confused, I think, with a sign of impeccable politeness. A calm I often, on my side, confuse with passivity. People who will rarely raise straightforward objections or even reveal their thoughts. Individuals with seemingly such a high respect for authority that, even when that authority is obviously and absolutely full of crap, it would take a genuine miracle for the entourage to verbally acknowledge the fact. People who appear to dislike risks. Who often invest major efforts in guaranteeing a so-called harmony, even if at great cost.
But then, here it is. Not the words. Not the sentences. No discourse. But an immense collective outburst. The orchestration of a grandiose chaos. A gigantic uproar. Fun from putting in immediate danger your limbs lighting up, with most of the time absent safety measures, millions of boxes of explosives manufactured in dreadful conditions by villagers who regularly blow themselves up during the fabrication process. Drunk guys in the middle of the roads triggering their blasts while cars veer to avoid catastrophes. Or running among boxes detonating in all directions, unpredictable eruptions of powerful burning gushes, flames rushing out at incredible velocities with a will-power of their own, an unbearable din rising over the city. Shocks sending tremors to the innermost parts of your being, the cacophony stretched for days, unrelenting, commanding.
Night after night, I walk through the streets, my camera ready, capturing the wild, the unbelievable, the daring. Catching with my lens a staggering collective operation. An endeavor made by thousands of explosions, adding to each other a forcefulness of the scariest dimensions. It is a matter of amount, this achievement. This unimaginable extravaganza. A question of numbers, of endless replications. A sudden communication of spasmodic grandeur. Of unthinkable proportions and decibels.
So, I want to write a poem. Verses for this unique moment of expression in humanity’s history: the deliberate and long-lasting arrangement of sounds and lights to produce an intensely intolerable context. A communication approach so loud, so visible in the night that only the bombs of warfare come close to matching that noise and its violent bursts, the infinite tempestuous blazes reflected on all things. A poem to ask why.
And I want my poem to be read silently, deciphered in the reader’s head while all the time exposed to the sight and the uproar of the fireworks. Like subtitles at the bottom of a movie screen. The juxtaposition of the quiet and the racket.
Scenes of repetitions, of persistence necessary for a glimpse at the amplitude involved here. A poem on images of sustained man-made violent eruptions. On the inescapable that is intrinsically linked to the nature of the phenomenon. Rhymes perhaps to underline the governing force of echoes characterizing each evening.
Words in an effort to render how much impressed I am every year. From the apparent peacefulness of an entire population to its thunderous skyrocketing manners. How amazed I feel, standing in the midst of a paroxysm. Caught by the magnitude of an auditory and visual outburst that blows away any preconceived idea on behavior I have. Left there, shaken by the persevering ferocity of the pyrotechnics. By the quantity. By the fierce rate of recurrences. Wondering what is being said, what’s the message. What’s behind the hysterics plastered all over the sky. What’s that communal endeavor, that stretched instant of ardent togetherness, detonations all over the place answering each other like long and loud shouts night after night. Moments of rumbling communion, flashes of self projected unto the darkness above, so many, so much, that midnight becomes as bright as day. The rumbling and crashes, what do they hide. On their mega-sound waves, what do they tell us. What part of life do they claim. What do such vociferous statements contain. This extensively loud collaborative ear-piercing happening, how deep does it run inside the soul. The mammoth flamboyance, what would its meaning be, what does it augur. What are its promises.
Not having the answers, I think a poem about questions (but without question marks) that could be shown against filmed scenes of fireworks like some thin filigree contrasting with the excessive turbulence on view could succeed in stating the scope of my puzzlement. Maybe. Maybe.
A moving collage of flares and blares with queries and a focus to test if it’s possible to make it louder, longer, brighter. To write directly on the material of time to see what happens next.
laolao
Despite the decade spent here, I remain an outsider, never quite integrated – this society still quite closed on itself when it comes to foreigners or laowais, and perhaps because of this, I feel a responsibility towards my role as a witness. In the margin of things, the distance compulsory, what I see, hear can possibly be registered with a perspective proximity would never allow.
I wait every year with great expectancy for the Spring Festival, looking forward to this monstrous display of noise and lights, deeply fascinated by the enormity of the spectacle, its duration, its overbearing insistence; in short, how it dominates everything from activities to sleep schedules.
There’s also a lot to say about the blatant contradictions the event brings to mind, at least for someone standing at the heart of this exuberance while never experiencing a true sense of belonging.
Chinese friends, colleagues, students, neighbors, acquaintances all have this in common: their general quietness, a surface docility often expressed by a marked tendency to agree too quickly and therefore, a propensity for a yes or positive attitude that is often confused, I think, with a sign of impeccable politeness. A calm I often, on my side, confuse with passivity. People who will rarely raise straightforward objections or even reveal their thoughts. Individuals with seemingly such a high respect for authority that, even when that authority is obviously and absolutely full of crap, it would take a genuine miracle for the entourage to verbally acknowledge the fact. People who appear to dislike risks. Who often invest major efforts in guaranteeing a so-called harmony, even if at great cost.
But then, here it is. Not the words. Not the sentences. No discourse. But an immense collective outburst. The orchestration of a grandiose chaos. A gigantic uproar. Fun from putting in immediate danger your limbs lighting up, with most of the time absent safety measures, millions of boxes of explosives manufactured in dreadful conditions by villagers who regularly blow themselves up during the fabrication process. Drunk guys in the middle of the roads triggering their blasts while cars veer to avoid catastrophes. Or running among boxes detonating in all directions, unpredictable eruptions of powerful burning gushes, flames rushing out at incredible velocities with a will-power of their own, an unbearable din rising over the city. Shocks sending tremors to the innermost parts of your being, the cacophony stretched for days, unrelenting, commanding.
Night after night, I walk through the streets, my camera ready, capturing the wild, the unbelievable, the daring. Catching with my lens a staggering collective operation. An endeavor made by thousands of explosions, adding to each other a forcefulness of the scariest dimensions. It is a matter of amount, this achievement. This unimaginable extravaganza. A question of numbers, of endless replications. A sudden communication of spasmodic grandeur. Of unthinkable proportions and decibels.
So, I want to write a poem. Verses for this unique moment of expression in humanity’s history: the deliberate and long-lasting arrangement of sounds and lights to produce an intensely intolerable context. A communication approach so loud, so visible in the night that only the bombs of warfare come close to matching that noise and its violent bursts, the infinite tempestuous blazes reflected on all things. A poem to ask why.
And I want my poem to be read silently, deciphered in the reader’s head while all the time exposed to the sight and the uproar of the fireworks. Like subtitles at the bottom of a movie screen. The juxtaposition of the quiet and the racket.
Scenes of repetitions, of persistence necessary for a glimpse at the amplitude involved here. A poem on images of sustained man-made violent eruptions. On the inescapable that is intrinsically linked to the nature of the phenomenon. Rhymes perhaps to underline the governing force of echoes characterizing each evening.
Words in an effort to render how much impressed I am every year. From the apparent peacefulness of an entire population to its thunderous skyrocketing manners. How amazed I feel, standing in the midst of a paroxysm. Caught by the magnitude of an auditory and visual outburst that blows away any preconceived idea on behavior I have. Left there, shaken by the persevering ferocity of the pyrotechnics. By the quantity. By the fierce rate of recurrences. Wondering what is being said, what’s the message. What’s behind the hysterics plastered all over the sky. What’s that communal endeavor, that stretched instant of ardent togetherness, detonations all over the place answering each other like long and loud shouts night after night. Moments of rumbling communion, flashes of self projected unto the darkness above, so many, so much, that midnight becomes as bright as day. The rumbling and crashes, what do they hide. On their mega-sound waves, what do they tell us. What part of life do they claim. What do such vociferous statements contain. This extensively loud collaborative ear-piercing happening, how deep does it run inside the soul. The mammoth flamboyance, what would its meaning be, what does it augur. What are its promises.
Not having the answers, I think a poem about questions (but without question marks) that could be shown against filmed scenes of fireworks like some thin filigree contrasting with the excessive turbulence on view could succeed in stating the scope of my puzzlement. Maybe. Maybe.
A moving collage of flares and blares with queries and a focus to test if it’s possible to make it louder, longer, brighter. To write directly on the material of time to see what happens next.
laolao
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