Asymmetric Symmetry

Two images struck me on the way to soccer yesterday. First one: an elderly man leaning on a tree on the road median, along with a walking stick. Waiting to cross the road. Second one: A row of cars stopped at the traffic light of a cross junction, 3 silver, 1 light purple, all new and shiney, stopped neatly in a row, waiting to cross the junction.

While the first image prompted thoughts of humanity and nature and how humans have always been leaning on and reliant on nature for its survival and sanity, the second image spoke volumes of the perversity of mankind and its eternal obsession with symmetry. Left and right, top and bottom, all things with their complementary opposites. (complementary opposites clearly represent an oxymoron representing Man's fear of true difference, this probably warrants an entire post on its own.)

If we could, we'd have turned the Earth into a massive cube.

Because we are unable to do that, we instead turn upon ourselves and try to make everyone around us images of ourselves. The things we cannot understand, we try to rationalise and mould into something we can. It has never occured to any of us that we could change ourselves to suit circumstances, and circumstances were never meant to suit us. If they did, then its called coincidence.

The end result is not the symmetry we desire, but repetition. Each individual thus becomes a fractal of a whole not splintered, but replicated endlessly. Like Poe's dream within a dream, we seek to become a miniature of the world as we understand it through pop culture and new media.

Since the destruction of the self is in effect the destruction of its image, true difference is shunned and discouraged. Who wants to see an image of himself destroyed or disfigured? Social relations then becomes the mutual maintenance of ego's in a bid to protect the self (not social) identity through the status quo.

Ang Heng