Monday, June 27, 2011
this cage will set you free
sometimes i wonder about the things i choose to discard and the things i choose to keep...in front of me, hanging from my shelf is a used tea bag, dry and intact held up by the pit of a delicious flat peach i ate one night while working on a paper. i think the beauty of the pit and the long darkening string and somewhat frumpy resigned teabag is in the struggle, my shelf being the cliff, the string being the life line, the teabag and the pit being unfathomable counterparts to each other. it's always in motion, the slightest displacement of the pit would destabilize the arrangement, the teabag would fall and all there would remain for someone to see would be two abject components of a summer refreshment. green tea and peaches ephemeral and forgotten. maybe keeping them alive, in the most tenuous, even crude way is a mistake. the drafts of the air conditioning makes the teabag sway gently, left and right sometimes giddy sometimes tired. there is something so innocent and playful about them, something so deadly compelling. some time they might end up as forlorn creatures in a garbage heap somewhere in a sea, but for now they are dance mates, traveling far from their homelands, creating music right here.
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Freedom is such a volatile idea, isn't it? Which do you consider freer, the pit because it isn't hanging or the tea bag because it has freedom to enjoy the wind of your air conditioning? Aren't they so dependant on each other to enjoy any kind of freedom? Is there freedom in loneliness or is it the actual cage?
ReplyDeleteLovely piece Samiah, you give life to objects in such a rhythmic way
i love how you say they are dependent on each other for any kind of freedom. when i was writing this post, maybe around an hour ago i realized the reason why i had such problems posting at all was because this journal lacked a genre. and genres are restrictive, exclusive but a game, to ever enter any game at all, there must be something to struggle against. (forget all the stuff i say against rules, those still apply outside of this comment).
ReplyDelete:) thank you for your sweet, true comment.
Sometimes, cages are our freedom... Your first line made me think: Hmmm... so, by keeping people close to us and loving them, aren't we encaging them? At the same time, don't all of us, lovers of freedom, love loving and being loved? However much space you give a loved one, you still restrict them in some way or the other... So, do we want freedom (and loneliness) or a cage (and love)? Personally, I'd prefer the warm confines of love than the cold emptiness of "freedom"... but where do we draw the line so that love doesn't smother and loneliness doesn't leave us afloat on nothingness? Talk about lines getting blurred... :P
ReplyDeleteIndeed! Like Vincent said, your descriptions are so beautiful that I can very easily picture it all... the dead and motionless but functional pit and the freely and gently swaying teabag that isn't exactly doing anything other than existing... So, is love -- like the pit -- our anchor AND loneliness -- like the teabag -- just a dry and reasonless existence? I am losing my line of thought and I know that I am miles away from your article but these are just random thoughts triggered by your post... :)