Surfing The Channel

Posts Tagged ‘Maninbo’

The memory of a place is always based upon the people who live there.  Even in cases where someone will go out into nature to escape from human civilization, like in the case of Thoreau, or the Buddha, the emphasis is still on the absence, and the enlightenments that come are based on the lack of people more than the presence of nature.  This is all to say, people like people, because like attracts like.  So when there is an opportunity to travel to Singapore, enjoying all the live arts and entertainment, pop, classical, and electronic music, along with excellent restaurants like these, it’s highly recommended to take the trip.

Not only are there amazing sights, smells, and tastes, there are also amazing people.  It’s a fantastically creative city state, with generations of artists making new work all the time.  The old is revered and novelty is welcomed, and there’s a sense of balance in all of this that is rather splendid to be part of.  Local talents are often dazzling, and there are also a number of celebrities, artists, and intellectuals that make this a regular stop.  You might run into the likes of Ko Un, the South Korean poet who could very well win the next Nobel Prize.

His extraordinary body of work is informed by his practice as a Buddhist monk in the 1950s.  He has also been very active in working for democracy in South Korea, and has been imprisoned, as well as tortured.  In 1980, he began Maninbo, an epic poem written about everyone he has ever met.  The title means 10,000 lives, and he is near completing 4,000 of these.  The idea came when he was in solitary confinement, and conceived of remembering people, including famous people and fictional characters, as a way of keeping his sanity.  The poems are a testament to the interconnected of lives, histories, and nations.