Comparisons between cross-cultural experience and the dreamworld
Many of you know my interests in the image as a form or way of knowing. Of course, the penultimate contexts for the kinds of images in which I am interested is the dream, but also the kind of fantasy states and "waking dreams" that fill our days.
I began reflecting on being here in this culture and society as a kind of dream world. Like the dream, there is little of what I see and hear that I make sense of. My environment is a swirl of images, many of them unusual or strange. The language conveys words and sounds which have as much meaning to me as words spoken in a dream. Images juxtaposed on top of one another, demonstrating a cacophony of form only the dream could create.
Like in a dream, there is the occasional familiar image, an English word on a billboard, or infants playing in the sand, or the movement of traffic on the street. But, like in a dream, these familiar images are often in the context of quite unfamiliar and strange images and contexts.
The English word on a billboard might be part of a larger message written in Vietnamese, or the billboard itself springs out of a complex of buildings that, from the outside eye, look like a maize of loosely coupled structures, hanging together by some unseen force.
The child playing in the sand is against a backdrop of a very busy street and sidewalk on which the pile of sand rests, and workers behind the sand pile moving in and out of a darkened entrance to a building, resembling more of an opening to a cave.
The streams of motorbikes, bicycles, trucks, buses, and pedestrians on the street, coming at each other, moving in and out of one another, as if schools of fish swimming towards and through one another in an ether that feels and sounds surreal.
People’s faces carry with them feelings of images within a dream, from the gleeful and laughing faces of young children seemingly with no care in the world to the weathered, worn, and tired visages of an old woman, sitting on the street with the traditional Vietnamese hat turned upside down, hoping to collect a few dong for her next meal. They could be characters in last night’s unconscious and darkened meanderings of the soul.
There is little here, in the language or in the customs, that I understand. Like with the dream world, we try to make these unfamiliar images familiar. We try to bring them into our day world, where rationality and reason prevail, try to make sense of them somehow within the logic of the day. When we do, like with dream images, we often distort the image, using language and forms of the day world to describe things that seem to have and use their own language and forms. We struggle to make familiar the strange, because that is what in the day world we do. But, in our urge to do so, we often miss or leave behind or overlook things about this other world. We bring away meanings from this world that are incomplete, tinged with the well-known understandings and frames of our waking life.
I am learning to try to honor the images that come to me from this other world that I am in. It is hard. Like our dream images, we so desperately want these images and forms to make sense to us, to conform to familiar structures of meaning. And like our dream images, they are so illusive and so easily slip away.
I don’t want to stretch this metaphor of the dream world too far. I know enough and understand enough of my surroundings and context to get by, to order a meal or to get a taxi to take me to and from the university, to buy supplies at the market. But it does seem to help illuminate the different realities I experience while I am here, as if awake within a lucid dream.
It seems like a helpful way to frame our understanding of the Other.
I began reflecting on being here in this culture and society as a kind of dream world. Like the dream, there is little of what I see and hear that I make sense of. My environment is a swirl of images, many of them unusual or strange. The language conveys words and sounds which have as much meaning to me as words spoken in a dream. Images juxtaposed on top of one another, demonstrating a cacophony of form only the dream could create.
Like in a dream, there is the occasional familiar image, an English word on a billboard, or infants playing in the sand, or the movement of traffic on the street. But, like in a dream, these familiar images are often in the context of quite unfamiliar and strange images and contexts.
The English word on a billboard might be part of a larger message written in Vietnamese, or the billboard itself springs out of a complex of buildings that, from the outside eye, look like a maize of loosely coupled structures, hanging together by some unseen force.
The child playing in the sand is against a backdrop of a very busy street and sidewalk on which the pile of sand rests, and workers behind the sand pile moving in and out of a darkened entrance to a building, resembling more of an opening to a cave.
The streams of motorbikes, bicycles, trucks, buses, and pedestrians on the street, coming at each other, moving in and out of one another, as if schools of fish swimming towards and through one another in an ether that feels and sounds surreal.
People’s faces carry with them feelings of images within a dream, from the gleeful and laughing faces of young children seemingly with no care in the world to the weathered, worn, and tired visages of an old woman, sitting on the street with the traditional Vietnamese hat turned upside down, hoping to collect a few dong for her next meal. They could be characters in last night’s unconscious and darkened meanderings of the soul.
There is little here, in the language or in the customs, that I understand. Like with the dream world, we try to make these unfamiliar images familiar. We try to bring them into our day world, where rationality and reason prevail, try to make sense of them somehow within the logic of the day. When we do, like with dream images, we often distort the image, using language and forms of the day world to describe things that seem to have and use their own language and forms. We struggle to make familiar the strange, because that is what in the day world we do. But, in our urge to do so, we often miss or leave behind or overlook things about this other world. We bring away meanings from this world that are incomplete, tinged with the well-known understandings and frames of our waking life.
I am learning to try to honor the images that come to me from this other world that I am in. It is hard. Like our dream images, we so desperately want these images and forms to make sense to us, to conform to familiar structures of meaning. And like our dream images, they are so illusive and so easily slip away.
I don’t want to stretch this metaphor of the dream world too far. I know enough and understand enough of my surroundings and context to get by, to order a meal or to get a taxi to take me to and from the university, to buy supplies at the market. But it does seem to help illuminate the different realities I experience while I am here, as if awake within a lucid dream.
It seems like a helpful way to frame our understanding of the Other.
posted by John at 7:47 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home