And She Is.

The city stands, charmingly bona fide in it’s consistency. Despite it’s people, with their capricious moods and inherent desires that shift and change by the moment, she stands. There is nothing for her to anticipate, nothing for her to fear. The people simmer inside her, going on about their lives, falling into place as gears well oiled for the continuity of the city. Fed upon the fear of failure, most eventually sold to the attractiveness of the well-worn route.

She is quite the eclectic beauty, not so much her own, as she is a cheap imitation of the best from the metropolises that precede her. Copies of all the things in all the places she adores, a cacophony of striking features to make something else altogether.

Somehow, Singapore feels more then anything like a pre-adolescent child trying to find herself, very much afraid of many things, and begging for acceptance and love. She tells her people to stay; ‘I’m trying, I’m trying. Be patient, wait, and you will see.’

The people are bonded to her because she is a kind provider, not altogether unconditional, but kind, nonetheless. She is the woman you could have lived without, but there is so much about her now that you must have. The little trinkets of efficiency, of regulated conservatism, of humdrum bourgeoisie comforts. Of clean air, acceptable weather, sanitary streets, toleratable temperaments.

The city has balance and it has rules, written, but more importantly impressed upon the soul of the city. The people take from the emotional character of the architecture of the land, just as much as they strengthen it’s disposition. What the city is, is so much what the people are. Their souls make hers, and her essence nurtures their characters.

The island is a place of one sole, driving function. To live. The only city perhaps, of the Orient that does not have it’s 21st century condition romanticized. Like an exciting experiment caught in its rungs, doctored and edited almost too stringently, and eventually turning out a little too perfect, which is to say, not perfect at all where life is concerned. She should have been allowed to flow, to change, within laissez faire conditions.

Socially, she is bereft of any sense of the organic, indiscernible from any product her bio-polis may invent. Human, yet not quite as natural as you would wish she could be.

There is nothing about her from which to romanticize, every image conjured inevitably sinks into a sort of warm depression, like the eternity of a sleepy afternoon in the middle of May. And the places that are striking, whose images ring in your mind, do not romanticize the city. They idealize instead, the lands from which they were copied from.


The city has but one character, and that is subdued.

xoxox