On The Street... Liyana

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't
- Marilyn Monroe

In a way, you've got to think sometimes as to why anyone does anything outward apart from the essentials. You know, like apart from getting food, getting shelter, attending to other basic needs, what drives us to do things other than think and watch and let everything pass by, never interacting anymore than we basically need to?

Like with clothes. At the simple end of it they're there to cover us up, perhaps to the elements, perhaps from dirt and dust and all that. I guess you could also say on an animal level that they're there to help us attract someone else to us, like a piece of some peacock-like visage that we have to construct because we don't naturally have a visage like that. But apart from that, and people do dress in more than basic ways for other reasons than to attract someone else, certainly, the question is still... why? Why else dress or style yourself?



Maybe there's this fundamental need in life to find out who we are, to establish that, to state that, to project that, to make it clear to everyone else that "this is me". Like claiming a mental territory. This is me and this is mine. And once that's done, I suppose it becomes a metaphor. Like, all those pieces that we've put together - the complex puzzle pieced together over time - it needs reading. Each piece can mean or represent a certain thing, but not literally, metaphorically.

So people can read what they want from that. Some people can bounce stares and looks off it, like light than never permeates and make up some preconceived or presupposed meaning; or they can say "there's something deeper going on here. What is it? What does it mean? I need to find the truth of what I am seeing."

"And why?"

Singapore