La Société des Flâneurs Sans Frontières

When Senoo Kappa was working on his Indian Sketch book in India, he once asked many locals to describe Mahatma Gandhi in their minds, to his surprise the majority described Gandhi as someone tall and big, and it was to their surprise when Kappa showed them the photo of the short and skinny brown man.

Somehow we all tend of summarize people and image them to have a physical appearance corresponds with the characterized résumé, just like that we are all opt to keep selective memories about our own experiences. As Walter Benjamin said, memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

I always wonder what’s the image of Karl Marx in other people’s mind, especially in the west. For many years there was a beard-shield Karl Mark on the walls between classrooms in the primary schools and high schools I attended. Of course he was never alone, there were always Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao by his side. Sometimes the party was ever busier, with Maxim Gorky and Confucius facing each other across the corridor, and occasionally Albert Einstein and Mencius. The everlasting question I had for Karl Marx was what did he do with the beard when he drank soup?

Many a time when I tell people that my first two years in college was spent on Karl Marx, I see they roll their eyes – Marx, at best a visionary, insensitive thinker with immense works, look at what happened to the Soviet Union! Well, that’s maybe justified. But at least Karl Marx introduced to me a different world, and to many people who still talk to me today, such as Walter Benjamin, whom I might still get to know one day ever without Karl Marx, but because of the Marxist hat he wore there is an incommunicable comradeship between us…

And through Benjamin I got to know Charles Baudelaire who invited to his world of absinthe and impressionism critics, and Marcel Proust with whom I sat down and shared the petites madeleines dipped in tea, and Bertolt Brecht together following by his Good Person From Szechwan… I could go on and on and on, just like the game of Chinese Rings or Tower of Hanoi.

Someone wrote a book about the art of small talk, where the author suggested the most time-tested icebreaker when you are introduced to be someone is to ask that person how he/she got to know the introducer. I am always more interested in where do people first learn about Gandhi or Marx or Benjamin, and what do they look like in their mind.

Benjamin never finished his Arcade Project, about architecture in Charles Baudelaire’s Paris, speaking of hopeless procrastination! Several years ago, a friend of mine, after many years as an expat engineer finally decided to go back to school in Paris to study architecture, pulled out a copy of newly published unfinished The Arcade Project for me, at the last dinner we had before his departure. We never saw each other again. Three days ago he died of brain tumor in Paris. Maybe he can say hello to Walter Benjamin for me now. May they have a good time together there.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 23:49 and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.