My previous blog is www.mszeegy.tumblr.com. I planned transferring all my write ups from there to here but I'm thinking these few is enough. It'd be better if Icontinue on this one with newer posts
You can check out my old - and not transferred- articles on my last blog (www.mszeegy.tumblr.com)
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Saturday, July 2, 2011
DEATH
Death is a concept that has fascinated man since the beginning of time. You and i know that all living things die eventually. Death is indeed more inevitable than taxes, even though the English saying considers both death and taxes inescapable.
What is death?
Thing is, if I start to give definitions, I’ll type all night long and even exceed the word limit for this blog post. That is to say there is no specific meaning- apart from it being the end of something- or explanation of death or its need. We all have our different theories- and even hypothesis.
Death and dying are not things that we consider on a daily basis. Perhaps we confront death when our own mortality is directly threatened or when a loved one falls ill. Indeed it is innate in us all to cling unto life at all cost, AT ALL COST! We cannot deny our instincts to survive.
Further more, consider the ways in which people get caught up in stories of miraculous remissions of cancer and people being brought back from the brink of death. Our preoccupation with death is so perverse that it is continually reported by the media. Has LIFE afforded as much media coverage as DEATH?
Can we consider death then, not only as a state of being or indeed, not being but also as a form of symbolism? Talking of symbolism, The ‘death note’ is full of symbolism ranging from christian and roman overtones to great literary pieces such as Macbeth, Ceaser and Sherlock Holmes. There are different kind of symbols that stand for different things. A good example is the ‘apple’ which is a symbol that represent more than one thing: Knowledge; luxury; wisdom; joy; and/ or death.
Indeed, death has more connotations than we might at first consider. Take the religious perspective for example, death can in some religions be seen as the transition from one state of consciousness to another and not simply ‘The end’.
Death and dying also raise ethical issues like every other. Consider ‘euthanasia’, for example, and the debates which surround it. On the one hand we resist death at all cost; on the other, we choose to end our lives permanently.
Death is very much seen as a forbidden subject, an unspoken truth until through circumstances beyond our control we are forced to come face to face with it.
While death may be a taken for granted concept, it is only by unraveling its many mysteries that we can see how a complicated topic it is. One that often seem distant but gets one that is only a heart beat away.
The guy in the library
The guy seated on my right has white plug-in head phones which spat music in and out of his ears. I could make out without struggle the title of songs that played as he changed the tracks from his connected Acer laptop. Maybe it’s a music video he is watching but I’d rather not peek to find out. It’d be awkward.
This guy must be Brazilian or… Brazilian. That’s what I think he looks like.
On his blue shirt is a print of a skeleton skull with a pair of crossed bones behind it and over the skull was the word ‘DSQUARED2’. Good thing his shirt is short sleeved. I can see his fairly tanned ‘Brazilian’ arms. And he is also wearing a black D$G wristwatch.
Am I staring at him? I hope he hasn’t noticed.
I could hear his loud and sharp breathe among all other sounds, like his loud head phones and the whispering couple on my other side.
You’d see the top of his head from where i’m sitting, without a strain on your eyes, and you’d see only little hair covering it. I’d say he’d be totally bald in a couple of years.
He has a beautiful skin, looks soft and slightly hairy. And his fingernails are neat too.
He is not a fast typist from what I can see. He uses his left fore finger and his right middle finger to carefully types away on his silver laptop.
He has no ring on too. He’s probably in a relationship though. He looks to good to be single.
I remember a time
As the bicycle whizzed past me I was reminded of my young days long ago. In my estate where there were many children like me. We were around the ages of Six and Seven and we all went to the same school and after school.
I remember the time when an Islam cleric would cycle round our estate with his monkey on his back. All of us would come out and follow this man and his monkey around. We would watch as the pet jumped from tree to tree and carried out his master’s commands.
We all did not have the courage to move very close to the monkey, at least not me. My friends would offer him some bananas and I’d always thought that one day the monkey would yank off their fingers together with their offering.
USING OUR INITIATIVE
I am not saying that the social welfare scheme is a bad establishment, but it has given a lot of irish people - youths as far as I’ve seen- an opportunity to be lazy and not take responsibility for their lives.
In my home country - Nigeria- where the population of one county is outnumbers that of the whole of Ireland, there is no such thing as social welfare neither is there medical cards and all other freebies we have in this country.
In Nigeria, we create jobs for ourselves, by ourselves. Though that is supposed to be a shameful thing for the Nigerian government, it has given us that drive, that strength and initiative to survive without help. If you need water in Nigeria, you dig a well; if you need constant power supply; you buy a generator. With your own money.
Most Nigerians are self employed, that is the only way to survive, That was/is the way our parents could sponsor our education.
I think the Irish should think of other ways to survive and live other than draining the government’s purse. Yes, they are entitled to welfare, but money, no matter how much it is, will run out. It comes and goes- we all know that looking at the boom years from now.
Even that way, the youths will all grow to be innovative leaders in the future.
THE UNIQUENESS OF ART IN PHOTOGRAPHY
A lot of things come to mind with post modernistic arts, ranging from a digital aspect to extraordinary works like using real people’s skin to alter a doll’s photograph as Andreas Scholz portrays.
In his studio in Temple Bar Street, Co. Dublin, Andreas Scholz is showing me his fascinating work, one of which was the “Baking Barbie”. He says he never saw anything like it until he made it. “The idea is that you bake the Barbie in the oven, I don’t recommend this because it’s toxic. So when you bake it, it looks like Francis bacon’s [Anglo-Irish painter] distorted portraits of people.”
In a more diverse piece, he shows me a picture of Croke Park Stadium. The appeal was confusing at first because this stadium is real and he went to the stadium to take this photograph. But attending to more detail, it was made to look like a cartoon scene. Everybody and everything in the photograph looked like toys.
Andreas, at 21, had his first lesson about Photography in Germany where his tutor told him that he would never be a photographer. He then took up the challenge to prove her wrong. He made photography his career by taking the course in DIT and graduating with First Class Honors in 2009.
Andreas’ first work published was the ‘Blackrock Baths’ in the Irish Times in 2007. And again he experienced the enviousness of another tutor who didn’t inform him about it until weeks after it was published. “I don’t think she likes me” he says. “I legged it down to the national archives to find my photograph. At the time, one couldn’t go into the archives because there was no [computer] records.”
Born in 1981, Andreas moved to Ireland eight years ago from Germany where he grew up. He grew up dreaming to be “president of the united environmental agency”. “I thought something like that would exist. I love nature and want to help preserve it” he says.
Aiming to confuse people who take a first glance at Andreas’ work is not his only area of expertise. He is also into commercial photography and he works with models as well as people who like to be photographed. His work portrays sensuality. He shows me another piece of a father and his son, staring at themselves, naked.
Andreas is on the rise through current artistic developments. No doubt his work will be in the main stream in the coming years.
Razac Clothing Inc
Razac Clothing Inc, an exclusive distributor of Bordello shoes, has a range of shoes the class of which Desperate Housewives’s Gabby shops to console herself.
This black satin,pin striped and crossed buckle suits every occasion, be it your friend’s party or foe’s memorial.
One of the best ways of leading successfully is being stylishly charismatic, a lift not only underfoot but a graceful elevation of your chin and shoulders.
You’ve got nothing to lose; your heels can only lift you up. High.
His smell triggered a memory
There are many things I don’t like to remember even though I have the fear of totally forgetting them.
I don’t want to remember some days in my life but things I see and hear remind me constantly.
I don’t want to think of the people most dear to me but far from me, yet a lot of these deja vu(s) don’t help.
Today, it’s the smell. A scent so soothing to the nerves; the smell of leaves and seas and the earth. Funny I don’t remember the name of this smell but I remember vividly what it looks like and who it reminds me of.
It’s a small clear bottle with a turquoise blue cover, it’s neither round nor squared. It’s more inbetween- an oval with edges.
It reminds me of my mother. I remember the day, like every other day except yesterday, when she’d just finished having a bath and I was applying a moisturiser to her back. She had a very beautiful skin, not as tanned as mine or as pale as Michael Jackson’s.
We’d cream her back every morning, not because she had no hands, but because we all enjoyed it and she loved the bond between us- my mother and her three children.
We’d cream her back every morning, not because she had no hands, but because we all enjoyed it and she loved the bond between us- my mother and her three children.
“From side to side, and the top of my back” She’d demand.
Our hands were quite tiny so three pairs could do the job perfectly.
I think it was the day after she returned from her vacation to London. One of the things my mother would never forget to bring is perfume. She had brought a carton of different kinds of perfume, from London, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds to Elizabeth Arden’s Provocative Woman.
One of the perfumes, of which I can’t remember its name, is what smells off the guy seated next to me today.But I am paying no attention to him, just his smell.
I just want to close my eyes, enjoy this smell and take myself back to the days when my mother was alive. I want to relive the memory of her presence in my life just this once.
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