Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Evolving Recollections... Can a contemporary evolving love outlive the temporal context?

I was recently reflecting on love evolving with time as our recollections of our past relationships evolve over the years...
As I contemplated on the sad reality that my dear best friend Munch2 (ben walter) died tragically at the young age of 27 in December, I realized that although I am still his contemporary as of now and think of him as my contemporary, what happens when I'm 60 someday, will I still think of him as my peer, my contemporary?

Can a contemporary love retain its temporal contexts if people step outside their relationship to time? If parents lose a child, I think their relationship to their child is still relatively the same in their evolving memories especially as we consider that parents often think of their grown children as being perpetually much younger even if the parents should be their 80s and the children in their 60s. However, what can we say of a friendship defined by a contemporary generational context? If someone dies as a grown adult defined by a stable concept of self-- if such a thing exists-- perhaps the contemporal relationship can exist between the dead and the living assuming that the other living individual's identity is also at a constant, stable state. However, in my opinion, Munch2 was still at the brink of true adulthood... a peaceful plateau of self-actualization and I can say at this point, I am at a similar stage. We were ephemeral contemporaries in our self-actualization and our generational experiences although I think that in true love, there exists a knowledge and recognition of the eternal core of one another's unalterable personalities, motivational drivers, and potential. If I feel that I can predict the achievements he would have obtained later in life and the evolution of his thinking given his extraordinarily gifted talents, interests, personality and temporal contexts, can my love and memories evolve to contain him in my temporal contexts?

Can I contemporize a temporal, ephemeral relationship where one individual continues to grow but the other is at a static stage? Or would there be a day when I'm in my 80s, that I would think of him as a grandmother fondly looking back at him suspended in time as a young adult forever young and beautiful, a rosebud frozen by a premature winter? Or will I look back and see him as I once did when I was in my 20s because our relationship is a temporal experience? When I'm with my family, I often find myself slipping back into the shell of my former self... my relationship contexts mostly remain the same. Of course, there are major events in life like going away to college and living away from home afterwards that have altered my relationship and some perceptions. Given that we can often slip back to our former relationships within old, non-relevant contexts, perhaps, it's possible that I will never think of him from a grandmother perspective on a much younger individual but rather as my contemporary as we once were in our shared temporal existence. Since munch2 was a couple years younger, I will always think of him as younger and his death doesn't change that. I occasionally wondered after my paternal grandfather passed away how his wife, my grandmother thought of her then older husband? My paternal grandfather was just a few years older than my grandmother but he died ten years ago when he was in his late 70s...now my grandmother is in her mid 80s, does she think of her husband as "older" than she still or younger now?

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Poem: Pepperminted winter mist lingers

peppermint oil frosted winters
bottled in purple tinted glass
acid burnt suede after midnight
sculptures of metal sprawled out
rolling mercury across the floor
we fumbled for a mercurial moment
sunday afternoons by a bench
at the charles river watching the sunset
counting hours silently before a
dreaded working monday begins
embracing each other tightly
we were an island together
stranded in a strange universe
your face, a picture of innocence
pale below a stoic cap of copper brilliance
a porcelain child i wanted to protect
eyes wide as a baby stare up into white space
heavy with loneliness and pain
teetering between empty giddy giggles
and silence and eyes shut
your eyes were always blank those days
a wall i could not touch, enter
i was lost in your suffering
tiptoeing on a dorm's rooftop
we watched the 4th of july fireworks
a Chinese-born American, a Brit
sharing an American experience
gulping down little bottles of booze
with two other friends
summers simmered forever
a delicate blend of melancholy beauty
laugher echoed across the years
wish i could go back
and save you
love burns like acid
nothing but fuzzy memories
textures of dreams left
writing to your screen name
a face grey and unlit now
i pretend you'll write back
a knock on IM after midnight
you're halfway across the world
a day away in time
you should be up now
i could almost think
it's you
no--
but you're gone.

by Janet Si-Ming Lee, March 23, 2006

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

The March of Spring, a winter season has passed...

Yesterday was the first day of spring. An entire winter season has passed since Munch2's passing on the first day of winter December 21st. Time marches quickly... March will soon slip into April. The days are not quite distinctly warmer -- it has been a warmer winter to begin with. The sky is still gray.

The Chinese have memorial days on the two equinoxes of the year where they visit the cemetery to pay their respects to their loved ones and have a picnic above their graves. My family held theirs on Sunday at the Forrest Hill Cemetery where my paternal grandfather Yung Chak Lee is located. It's nice that asians keep the dead in their lives, their ancestors in their minds. Typically we bring lots of Chinese dimsum and pastries, pork with crispy skins and sit and eat there. There are often many Chinese families there in the spring and fall as well visiting the grave sites of their loved ones. It's funny that even in the afterlife, there are still ethnic communities clustered together... a little Chinatown community for the dead.

It would be strange and sad to visit Munch2's grave in England some day... just a name on a stone and know that somewhere below, he sleeps forever under winter snows and all the seasons of the years. I haven't seen him since 2001 when he graduated... five years ago. I had hoped i would see him alive again. I think of a quote that I read somewhere as a child... "If we knew when and where would be the last time we would see a loved one again, our partings would be more dear" or something like that. The last time I remember saying goodbye to Munch2, we were on Main Street near Kendall Square MIT area. We held hands and I cried thinking when would be the last time I would see him again. I held his hands in my hands wet with tears for as long as I could while thinking of that quote. He seemed rather antsy, eager to start the next stage of his life that left this Cambridge behind. I watched him for as long as I could still see him... his bright copper hair fading into a dot around the bend and underneath the aisle of trees. Maybe there was another goodbye afterwards where I last touched him but this goodbye I remember best. I thought then maybe I'll see again in five years? Who knows? I didn't know for sure that moment would be the last time.

The crocuses should be out soon... I'll have to keep my eyes open for the signs of spring...

Friday, March 03, 2006

From Dust to Pixel Dust... our pixelmatter lives on in cyberspace...

I was contemplating today on that old phrase "from ashes to ashes, from dust to dust"... currently, with the growth of websites that house information even from the mid 1990s, it's strange to think that our pixelmatter may live on in cyberspace long after we do physically. From dust to pixel dust... fragments of our old selves live on on other sites and if anyone continues to add information or commentaries to postings, there is a new generation of ideas and sentiments that continue to thrive long after we're gone.


I googled the web for any previous postings by my dear Munch2 and found his previous postings as long ago as 1995 when he was just a 15 year old pioneer of the web and a photo of him (see photo on the left) in a Kidlink class. It's so precious and bittersweet to see his photo then and hear his youthful idealistic voice again in these postings on kidlink:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Subject: File: "KIDART PXBENWAL"

|=|----------------|=|
|=| THE KIDLINK |=|
|=| PHOTO EXCHANGE |=|
|=| PROJECT |=|
|=|----------------|=|
|=| Coordinated by |=|
|=| Ben Walter |=|
||
|=|----------------|=|


1) Who am I?
My name is Ben Walter, and i'm 15. I live in the outer reaches
of civilization in Cambridge, England ;-> I love music,
reading, computers and going to see movies. I'm a DeadHead
(or as close as you can get to one stuck over here :->); that
is I love the Grateful Dead. I'm about 6ft tall, and I love
wearing brightly-coloured tye-dye shirts. I guess typical
clothes for me are jeans and a t-shirt (tye-dyed of course!)
with the odd silk head-band thrown in for effect :-> No
60s retrospectives here folks! *grin*



2) What do I want to be when I grow up?
I'm not entirely sure what I want to be. I certainly want to
carry on working on the Net; I love the Net and all those on it.
I'd think to carry on working the KidLink community and help
it to expand. I'm really entranced with the whole idea of
a global community of kids. It's the sort of thing most
people are only dreaming of, but it's happening now and
we're a part of it!


3) How do I want the world to be better when I grow up?
I would like to see people learn to understand each other
more. I would like to see people treat each other as they
would treat themselves, and realise that they aren't alone.
I'd love for people to understand different ways of thinking,
and learn to respect them rather than ridicule or criticize
them.


4) What can I do now to make this happen?
I think that the KIDS project is working on this right now. It's
getting Kids all around the world working together and learning
about each other. There is a big difference between learning
that there are however-many-million people living in, for
example, Russia, and talking to a russian child, learning about
how they see the situation. It makes people see how events around
the world affect real people. For example in the recent uprising
in Moscow I knew people who actually were in the city at the time.
It wasn't just a crowd of blank faces, hell, my friend could have
got hurt..


//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\ > ben@tsunami.demon.co.uk <
\ bjw@gnu.ai.mit.edu
In the land of the night \ ben.walter@lambada.oit.unc.edu
the ship of the sun is drawn by The Grateful Dead. \//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//\//
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

As I am copying this message and including his old photo... I have dispersed his pixeldust into the web world for the duration of this site and his kidlink site. One never knows how long one's words will last online. Online sites converge into one in mergers and acquisitions... sites go out of business... new website redesigns replace old pages. I discovered that munch2's website "bwalter.org" is probably going to be down someday. I thought of buying his domain and so that I never see it replaced by someone else's information. instead, I could pay a tribute to him on that site. If more people comment on these messages and his words proliferate, he lives on in the pixeldust, his words echo forever in cyberspace.

There's so much beauty in him that I see again when I read this message -- all that idealism I saw when he was passionately engaged in mudding in the first day of the MIT class we took together so long ago. Hmmm... 6 feet tall-- I never knew he was that tall and never knew he loved tie-dyed shirts although I can imagine that he did as a hippie visionary of the X generation. Or is that the Y generation? I believe the Y generation starts in 1978.