Monday, 29 September 2008
We are not a sentimental people, my family. We are not big on holidays or weddings or funerals or romantic symbolism or displays of affection in general. People will say, “oh that’s so sad!”, and I’ll have to explain that just because I don’t get a present on my birthday or on Christmas doesn’t mean that my family never gives me things or provides for me, because they do, and what they do is a whole hell of a lot already. My family’s logic tends toward the “ritualistic and symbolic gestures cheapen regular day-to-day actions and responsibilities” camp.
To wit: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and special events are like signage, signaling to us special places in time that require special actions, just as road signs signal places in roads that require (or prohibit) special actions: “yield”, “no turn on red”, “buy presents”, “cook a turkey”, et cetera.
Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, believes that such signage on roads creates an artificial system in drivers’ minds causing them to take cues from the signs instead of from reality: “All those signs are saying to cars, ‘This is your space, and we have organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you.’ That is the wrong story.” Rejecting the signage means you no longer let it do the thinking for you, and you take matters into your own hands. You think for yourself.
So Monderman removes signs, traffic lights, road markings, lane divisions in towns and villages, and by making the roads seemingly less safe, he forces drivers and pedestrians to become more aware of each other, thereby making the roads safer. Says Monderman’s colleague Hamilton-Baillie, “Essentially, what it means is a transfer of power and responsibility from the state to the individual and the community.” And it works, provided the environment is correct: Monderman does not plan to bring this to downtown city throughfares, and I imagine it would have disastrous results if implemented in Manhattan.
Similarly, our method of rejecting cultural-norm celebration at first appears to be perilous: how do we express ourselves, our love for one another, if not on Christmas with gifts, or Valentines Day with chocolates or birthdays with cake? Well . . . we do it when we feel like it, how we feel like it. It’s more complex that way, but it’s not so hard. And like Monderman’s plan, our rejection has its limitations. While Christmas and birthdays are largely private, familial affairs, the Fourth of July is in my town much more of a community event: the parade passes by right in front of our house, the whole town is out, barbecuing and boozing, and our general abstinence from celebrating arbitrary days does not apply. When the community gets together and parties, we party.
Maybe we overthink our traditions and sentiments, and in so doing, kill them. But does that preclude us from enjoying life? Or does it free us from seeing life in terms of our traditions and sentiments, and instead allow us to see life for the amorphous, unpredictable, unstructured experience it is?
And why did I keep the bracelet on for so long?
Why did I cut it?
September 29th, 2008 at 03:09
I cut mine off right away because I knew that, as had happened with other things in the past, the bracelet itself would become my link to the experiences I had at Pukkelpop, rather than the actual memories. I knew I would be obsessed with keeping it on, in order to keep the memory of the festival alive—as if the bracelet would help me remember it better (that’s what my Facebook albums are for!). When someone asks me about Pukkelpop (actually no one ever asks, they’re so sick of hearing about it) I didn’t want to wave my wrist about, flaunting the proof of my adventure, I wanted to have to relate what made the experience great. For me, the bracelet itself would have subsumed the festival to become more relevant in my mind: like a second-order simulacrum of Pukkelpop.
Beautiful coloring, Ian! You must be drinking some wild coffees.
September 29th, 2008 at 05:34
My personal stance on holidays is not that different from your family’s (though i do like the traditions to some extent).
I don’t know why you kept the bracelet that long. I probably would have stashed it somewhere (and then lost it to find it again sometime later unsure of it’s significance) or taped it into a sketchbook.
That must have been some amazing music festival…
September 29th, 2008 at 07:52
if you kept the bracelet, and sent it into a lab, they could have put it under super intense heat and pressure and gave you back a diamond! pukkelpop diamond!
also, maybe you just cut it because you were tired of having a bracelet tan. the answer doesn’t always have to be so profound.
September 29th, 2008 at 08:57
God damn it I hate materialism and gift giving, also holidays in general except for the time off.
I barely care about picture based memories, I keep anything important in my head and even though I’m retarded and it gets scrambled somewhere between my brain and mouth when I’m trying to tell some one about an experience, at least I remember it. Selfish, I know.
Also this is definately one of your most colourful strips no?
September 29th, 2008 at 11:54
Nate: Yeah, we’re an obsessive bunch, huh. And it’s true, the bracelet took on a lot of weight after a while. After I cut it off, I hung out with some of the Prague kids, and one of them commented on its absence, saying that it was weird that I didn’t have it because she’d never seen me without it. But then the moment passed, and that was that. It was like a haircut; after a minute it didn’t matter at all.
And thanks, re: the colors!
Renee: It was a great festival, completely enormous yet extremely well-run, great lineups, and I was with a bunch of my best friends!
Heather: But then I would just covet the diamond! Maybe I would put it on a ring and get a crappy ring tan! It would have been all for naught!
Frank: One of my Czech ex-dissident profs. told me that under the Soviets, he’d never write anything down because it was too dangerous to have physical evidence of anything. So nowadays if he writes something down, he won’t remember it at all.
He’s rewired his brain in crazy ways. Me, I don’t trust my head to hold on to anything, so I’m probably doing the exact opposite of my prof. and training my brain to never remember anything by writing everything down.
And it is quite colorful, yes. I’m pretty happy with how this one came out.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:39
Beautiful comic Ian!
I don’t really remember when I cut mine off. In fact, I don’t remember where I was, what I was thinking, or why exactly I did it. About all I do know is that it’s currently in the bottom of a very messy drawer, and that I cut it a bit after meeting someone here that had attended the 2006 Pukkelpop and was still wearing his band. I recall that while it had great sentimental value, as soon as I was no longer around friends who were familiar with the event or had also attended, I really didn’t want it to be noticed by anyone or to come up in conversation. I’m usually a sentimental person, and I like to keep mementos of things, but I find that when something is really significant to me, I don’t really like to share it with outsiders. When something of that nature happens to me, at first I like to talk about it; after enough time has passed, and I’ve “moved on” from what happened, the memories become much more personal, and talking makes me frustrated and depressed. I think the most frustrating aspect of significant events of this nature is facing how you haven’t changed, or at least not in the way you expected. After Pukkelpop, and the summer, I felt incredibly changed. I still do, certainly, but at this point I can no longer feel the difference as I did then. Instead of an almost tangible impact, it’s just a vague feeling now. When I speak to people about Pukkelpop now, I usually just describe where it was, what bands played, maybe who I was with, how well it was run, etc. Afterall, that’s really all there is to say on the matter to someone who doesn’t know anything about it, or my friends, or my past. Describing such a significant event always on those terms, never really having reason or chance to express the significance of it, but still being reminded of the significance everytime the innocent question of “what’s that ribbon for?” came up was just too much. Of course, it was a gradual thing. I don’t know if I even really could express this when I cut it, but I realize it now. Maybe it was just a way to combat the gradual dull of the impact of it. Instead of letting the experience be debased into some superficial repetitive conversation piece I just cut it off. Or maybe it was just that the experience had ended, and that I would rather banish from my everday thoughts to those of nostalgia and flashback.
I still have my big Pukkelpop poster on my wall, so I guess having the reminders around me isn’t the really the issue, so much as having to explain it to outsiders, as the ribbon would inevitably require.
October 1st, 2008 at 09:36
Interesting take on it, Alex. I wonder if it’s less significant for me now than it would have been had I taken it off earlier. It came up quite a lot in conversation over the last year, and I may well have just started thinking about it in terms of the oversimplified sound bite that I would end up using. Maybe the memento made me forget. Agh.