Curation

 Life move outwards in an ever widening circle. I remember the time when I was 15, and it started occurring to me that there would come a time when I would lose the connections that I had with my friends at school. We were there, and we would be seeing each other every day, and this was thought of as normal life. Their presence in my life was even something I had regarded to be permanent. Until the day came when it was not permanent, and we would write in each other's autograph books.

When you're a kid in a stable environment, you don't learn the real meaning of impermanence until later, until it's way too late.

Does life go in a circle or does it go in a straight line?

I thought about this because soon after I returned to Singapore I realised that I lived 3 lives in Singapore, in Snowy Hill and in Mexico and they almost had nothing to do with each other. I walked in a market that I had first visited as a baby and was just blown away. It was like the town square of “Back to the Future” which is eternal. But it's when the constants are juxtaposed against everything else that it throws into sharper relief that everything has changed.

Does life funnel outwards or does it funnel inwards?

Perhaps when I left for Mexico, I already knew this: this is the last time my horizons will be broadening. Eventually I will be confronted with the endless duties of adulting. I might have to clean up after my parents when they're gone. I'll have to learn everything from them because whatever I don't, will be gone forever.

How do I honour their memory when I have strained for all my life to be free from them?

For me, there is a bit of clarity. I have no descendents. There were some things in the past that I have cut myself off from and I'm glad I did. I'm done with theatre, I'm done with long distance running. I left on a high. I'm done with my ex, although that wasn't really a high. But the rest will still be a part of me and I'll have to reckon with what all that is, who I am.

Curation

Therefore what we have now is the task of curation. Some things will remain and some things will be gone. That is something that struck me on a few levels. Singapore is constantly changing: so many of the things we used to know are fading and will soon be gone, because Singapore cannot afford to hold on to all its memories.

I was talking to two friends of mine: one of them was grappling with his grandfather's antique collection. They had a lot of furniture stored somewhere, and it was costing them. You can't keep everything. Land is really expensive. Physical objects are prohibitively expensive because of how much space they take up. You could sell away or keep the most culturally significant pieces of furniture.

The point is that everything decays. Some things are preserved, but inevitably, something else is lost. The loss is inevitable. The state of the world as it exists today will decay, and you will never have it back in its original form. Some landmarks will be torn down, while others remain. So what is this process by which we decide which memories survive and which don't?

I also thought about how Singapore shophouses were indiscriminately torn down in the first postwar years, and a lot of people complained that it was a big shame. But I've lived in other cities were all buildings were cultural relics to be preserved, and it seemed that the older buildings choked the life out of the city, by preventing new structures from being erected over the old. In Singapore, the old and the new live side by side, and the old eventually gets phased out. We all have pictures of what Boat Quay was like before the Singapore River was cleaned up. And that may have been the iconic images of Singapore. But do we seriously want all the boatmen back in Boat Quay now? I'd be very happy for it to be what it is right now, which is a tourist trap.

So the thing that's been haunting me since I came back is that I am in the middle of my life. I am in the curation phase. I've become acquainted with my limits. I will no longer be able to hold on to everything I had in the past. As the years go by, things will be lost and forgotten, and the memories will grow ever distant. My sense of who I was as a teenager will be gone. In fact, people, as they grow old, morph into personalities which are quite distant from their younger selves.

I no longer have infinite horizons full of possibilities. Both my past and my future are limited, finite. What I have and hold in life is limited by how much I can juggle and keep in the air at each point in time.

When I curate, I look at each object: how I came to acquire it, what I thought about its value, how much I thought they were worth back then, and what are they worth now. Do pieces of treasure turn into junk? Does junk turn into treasure? Do I hold on to it because it reminds me of a past that, if I were to cut it off, I would lose something of itself?

I've come to the conclusion that inevitably something from the past will disappear. An antique collection will be too much to retain in its entirety. How do you curate so there's a higher ratio of treasure to junk?

Novelty

Then there was this issue of novelty in my life. When I was young, I used to have a novelty seeking brain. It seemed like a good thing at the time. It was fun to keep on opening new doors and looking through them: I don't know if my blog entries from way back are still around but that's a good indicator of that. But in middle age, that becomes a problem.

I could get stuck in a rut like this. I don't really want to open any new doors because I feel that I've maxxed out my capacity for new avenues in my life. I don't want to start another string of new memories. Maybe my brain doesn't want to learn new things. Or my brain feels that I should very carefully budget the new things that I get to learn.

And yet, when I deal with the old things, there is this drudgery, this feeling that I'm not moving forward. When I was younger, and thinking about what needed to be done in order for me to focus and concentrate on the few things that I could do well, I underestimated just how much discipline and focus I needed. And now it's taking a lot out of me.

Janus - the future and the past

At one point, “Mexico” was the future. It was funnelling outwards. It was me, standing on the edge of the cliff, looking down on creation. Singapore is my past that I barely have been able to reckon with, all the stories from my elder relatives I could have heard if I wasn't so intent on breaking away from them. I chose Singapore.

I am preparing for death. I am the last of my kind, doomed to extinction. Maybe I will think about feathering my nest and making things comfy for the next 20 years.

As a teenager I was obsessed with uniqueness. In a way that was the production of culture, like I wanted to make my mark on the world, even if it was just cheap thrills. And now some part of me thinks that I arrived with nothing in this world and should leave with nothing.

Do I leave a legacy behind or do I inherit one from my ancestors?

I see that I've touched on themes that somehow Google seems to be thinking about (at least back when search was the big thing.) Attention, memory, search, curation / filtration, cultural preservation.

There was this event where I saw a lot of RGS girls. I look at them and they look a lot like what they looked like in the 1990s, but I am no longer adolescent and they no longer make me horny. The 1990s RGS girls – do they have more in common with the RGS girls of today, or do they have more in common with their incarnations in the present, some of whom are mothers of the current RGS girls? If the 1990s RGS girls resemble the 2020s RGS girls, do they equally resemble the 1960s RGS girls?

I guess RGS and RI are just like the back to the future townsquare – they are constants that exist to just remind you how everything else has changed.