Last Saturday, when world outside was too unsafe to go out into, and I was likewise unsafe for it, I brought out my stash of "sick-reading" - Calvin & Hobbes, Pearls before Swine, Dilbert.
Nothing too wordy, you see, for such times. For I am persuaded that this worse-than-usual flu episode was made even worse not only by Sumatran brews, but by reading too-long bond documents in a too-cold conference rooms and continuous all-parties calls all week for deals that threatened to launch, or not.
I love forests and trees but whenever I sleep with a fever I always dream of this:
So, when Pearls Before Swine became too heavy and cynical for a headcold, I turned to Jimmy Liao, and was drawn deeply yet again into his magical world of colours and achingly human poetry.
A year ago
I began to notice
that my sight was slipping away.
I sat home alone
and felt the darkness settle around me.
(translated from Jimmy Liao: 《地下铁》 The Sound of Colours)
In Liao’s bittersweet telling, a blind female narrator ventures forth into the subway, searching for an unnamed something or someone. It quickly becomes clear that nothing can restore her eyesight, but acquiring vision is another, more heartfelt, matter.
A year ago
I began to notice
that my sight was slipping away.
I sat home alone
and felt the darkness settle around me.
(translated from Jimmy Liao: 《地下铁》 The Sound of Colours)
In Liao’s bittersweet telling, a blind female narrator ventures forth into the subway, searching for an unnamed something or someone. It quickly becomes clear that nothing can restore her eyesight, but acquiring vision is another, more heartfelt, matter.
Written in Chinese, the story is set in Taipei, but it could well be any teeming, multi-ethnic city. At each subway station the girl alights onto an imagined landscape; dolphins frisk at one, clouds drift below another.
Liao pays subtle homage to some of Modern Art’s great colorists; there are visual references to Matisse, Mondrian, Chagall and even Escher’s monochromatic dreamscapes as she descends and ascends, again and again, tap-tapping out the new terrain where memory and wishfulness intersect.
There are none so blind as those who would not see.
(all graphics from The Sound of Colours, by Jimmy Liao)
An Aside:
According to one dictionary -
timbre: noun, the colour of sound.
I miss the pizza there.
Liao pays subtle homage to some of Modern Art’s great colorists; there are visual references to Matisse, Mondrian, Chagall and even Escher’s monochromatic dreamscapes as she descends and ascends, again and again, tap-tapping out the new terrain where memory and wishfulness intersect.
There are none so blind as those who would not see.
(all graphics from The Sound of Colours, by Jimmy Liao)
An Aside:
According to one dictionary -
timbre: noun, the colour of sound.
I miss the pizza there.
