an ode to immortalization

and a short introduction.

Sower with Setting Sun, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony, and music inside me.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Even in the worst of my days, I find myself enjoying art of all kinds. I find myself reading poems, finding art pieces, loving what my friends write. In school, I never gave myself enough time to be slow. Slow enough to consume art, appreciate it, let my love for it replace my misery.

It’s of the utmost surprise to me, that my love for art began after my father’s passing. Even though death is the truest truth of life, an inevitability, we don’t realize exactly what it is, how it is, and how it brings to your door the harsh truth of life’s impermanence.

Maybe that’s why I crave comfort in art - because once it’s on the canvas, it lasts forever. Maybe if we could somehow pull our most treasured memories, the people we love, and spill them on to a canvas, put them in a museum, maybe death would shy away from them. Maybe our love would outlast us.

When I write words in a poem, I don’t write them just to understand what’s happening in the maze of my mind, I write to immortalize. I write to hope, that maybe if I dug up old graves and strung some ghosts around in poems, if I reached out my hand to a reader and asked them to feel what I have been feeling, maybe I wouldn’t feel so lonely anymore?

I apologize, reader. This is my first package of thoughts to you, and I didn’t even introduce myself. Often when someone asks me to introduce myself, I go blank. I don’t even know who I am, how can I explain myself to you?

However if you are asking for a current status on my identity, here it is - my name is Sim, I like being called Apollo, and currently I am trying to learn more about art history while I grieve my for my father.

This is the craziest sentence I have ever written. I wish that when my classes began a month after my father’s death and they asked me to introduce myself, I could have said this. How easy it is to write how we feel than to speak it?

When you say something, you have to stand there and watch how the listener reacts to it. Then you have to make excuses, take it back, or fear what you’ve said. However, when you write something, you abandon your thought, pass it on to another whilst freezing it in time.

Art is at a constant war with time; a war that it will always win. My father lost this war, you and I will lose this war. But the art we love, the art we make, it will survive us.

In school, I remember reading a poem called Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here’s how it went:

I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

People have been obsessed by immortality for centuries. Take monuments and this poem, for instance. Maybe if Ozymandias was a poet instead of a cold king, you and I would be reveling in the warmth of his words even after centuries.

Reader, since this is my first package of thoughts to you, I will keep it short, and end it here.

I leave you with Ozymandias, and a question - if you had the chance to be immortal, would you take it?

Thank you for being here, please look forward to more.