Through a fresh pair of eyes

Andi's unabashedly upbeat post "Mourning for me?" on 17 August compares two rainy days: the day she started composing the post, and her third day in Korea, a year ago now, when she went empty-handed looking for a temple in a park. A lot has happened in between, punctuated by the two epiphanies she describes so vividly. And she wonders about the nature of seeing.

When does a place become familiar? Can we mark the transition between the wondered unknown and the commonly overlooked? Today, with the question of mourning in my heart and a rainy summer day, I felt as if I were just arriving again, able to see some of the things I had stopped seeing. The color of the sky when it is cloudy. The smell of the dojang this evening, the feel of the vinyl-like floor. The chill of the air-conditioned office when my clothes are wet. The city's ugly concrete, its neon, its awnings, the daily rise and fall of the market, the squirming modernity under the heel of a country-side way that internet, handphones, cars, and the IMF can't destroy, though they can change it. To see all of this for even a moment--to see it as I saw it when I first came, really absorbing it, really seeing it rather than allowing my eye to skim while my head is full of wool--is to find the point between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Both of those require some idea of what should be seen, some comparison between a place not here and here.

I'm sorry I can't link to it directly. Something about my firewall setting means that very occasionally I can't access javascript, and Andi's is one of the blogs that happens to. So I can't access comments or trackbacks on her blog. Were I not such a technological ignoramus, I'd have sorted it out by now.

And on the subject of comments, someone told me they had a problem posting theirs here. I'm very sorry about that. It's great to have comments. You don't have to be a blogger subscriber to leave your comments - just select the "post anonymously" option lurking way under the brash blogger log-in stuff. Although it will summarily entitle you "Anonymous" you don't actually have to be anonymous if you don't want to: you can always leave your name, email and homepage details in the body of the comments if you like. The comments box accepts html.