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Taman Mini reflects the view that life is only the status quo—as though in every phenomena, every difference, there is only the everlasting.
The past does not stop. Over and again, we fail to recapture it in memory. Of course, we have history books and think that this is where the past is recorded as memory. But memory is the product of the present, and the present is not a station where memories pause, unchanging. This is why we often try to recall the past in other ways.
Tempo was born and changed the magazine scene. Previously, weeklies were like convenience stores.
The phrase "the desert of the real" conveys that ‘the real’ is the destroyed world, gloomy, fantastical, inexplicable through language, especially when viewed from the ordered world. In Indonesia, we are actually in that ‘desert’: with incessant floods, landslides and earthquakes.
The ondel-ondel, which people say used to be part of high-class ceremony in old Jayakarta, is nowadays part of the life of the impoverished, who know they are not in the limelight.
The Bible prohibits the faithful from making pictures of humans and from worshipping idols, as do the other two Abrahamic religions. The history of the Christian world has witnessed a few episodes of ‘iconoclasm’, movements to destroy statues: in the 8th and 9th centuries in Byzantium, and at the beginning of the 16th century in Europe, when the Protestants burnt statues and paintings in churches.
Maybe Marion does not view his relationship with the divine as a matter of belief in God. That relationship is more an acknowledgment of love–and love, even ‘love in a simple way’, is more astonishing than faith.
These days, truth—which makes an appearance every now and then—seems unable to touch ground. It leaves no trace.