ASUPER-TIDY city: streets and buildings looking like they are just off the page of an architecture book. Lined-up trees, an endless stretch of green. Here and there, bright red bougainvillea cascading from the walls of the flyovers, or between the tree trunks, like a floral arrangement at a Japanese wedding. Huge lawns trimmed back like an athlete's hair before a race. And left and right, billboards displaying unlimited luxury, countless objects and brand names...
An Indonesian visiting Singapore will be as disturbed as a Russian in the mid-19th century seeing the Crystal Palace.
Yes, this comparison may be a bit exaggerated. But Singapore in the 21st century, like the Crystal Palace built for The Great Exhibition in the 1850s, is virtually synonymous with the word “progress". Particularly in a region uncomfortable with “being backward" and uneasy with modernity. Indonesia at the beginning of the 21st century is of course very different from Russia in the 19th century, when the majority of the Russian population lived in the interior, poor and illiterate, under the power of the Tsar who muzzled all. Compared to that, Indonesia these days is much more free and prosperous.
But, like Russia at the time of Chernisevsky and Dostoevsky, today in Indonesia people are still wrest-ling with how to answer which is the better future: the “progress" symbolized by the Crystal Palace, or something that is probably more muddled, but at least more passionate, more free, than a Singapore.
An envious Indonesian will commonly say how boring that city is: “I could only stand staying there for four days, and then I wanted to leap out like a dolphin". But an Indonesian fed up with the mess that is Jakarta-a city ruined through bad leadership and corruption extending right to the streets-will view Singapore as a model of effective government, orderly life, glittering prosperity.
Yet, facing the Crystal Palace, facing modernity as “progress", there will always be those full of admiration and those who are hesitant. The Crystal Palace itself, built in 1851, was a glasshouse-like construction, a building covering 76,000 square meters of Hyde Park. Within this architecture of steel frame and glass, the like of which history had never seen before, was exhibited the progress of various countries, especially England. Everything was fine, impressive, and, of course neat and tidy. The entire edifice proclaimed optimism about the world in the future. One and a half centuries ago, the Crystal Palace was so awe-inspiring that pictures of it were even pasted in village shacks all over Europe.
In 1859, Chernisevsky, who later become known as one of the fathers of the Russian intelligentsia, went to London. He saw that edifice with his own eyes. At the time, the Crystal Palace had already been moved to Sydenham Hill. But this did not diminish Chernisevsky's awe, and it seems he returned home with his head full of that awe.
In 1862, he was arrested by the Tsar's police. In his stuffy cell, before he was exiled to Siberia for 20 years, he wrote a novel, What is to be Done? If the novel seems rather clumsy, this is because it is more like dreams born in the midst of Russia's depressing state of primitiveness.
In one of the dreams, a character called Vera Pavlovna takes the Crystal Palace as a model of the future. In the new era to come, people will live in huge buildings with apartments, workplaces, communal eating places, and recreation centers. People will ful-fill their daily needs collectively, through industry and agriculture that uses modern technology. Everything will be orderly. Even emotions and sexual life will be arranged by the organizers. “The New Russia" will be completely free from tension, both politically and privately.
Nowadays we can laugh at Vera Pavlovna's dream. Nowadays we cannot imagine a modern life that is also collective, without any competition and conflict. What we often hear about is life almost entirely governed by the rule of work, administration systems, and the striving for success, so that even the relaxed world of living is under pressure. But we have to forgive Chernisevsky: he had never experienced a society like this. He came from a stifling, conservative environment; from a tyranny that was basically the anarchy of those who ruled. The modern, the bright, the neat and tidy like the Crystal Palace was to him a glorious alternative.
But at the same period as this, Dostoevsky wrote Notes from the Underground, taking a completely different view. Its character looked at the Crystal Palace and saw over-reaching pride. In that building, everything had been measured with “mathematical exactitude", he said, and “every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided'. Where is freedom, if this is the case? Gone. In front of this reputedly indestructible crystal construction, the character in this short novel says that ‘one cannot put one's tongue out at it on the sly'.
When such elementary freedom does not exist, is tidiness of such importance? In Singapore, I would say “no". That kind of life merely hides chaos, which perhaps contains human creative energy. But in Jakarta, I would scratch my head and answer: “Hmm..."
Goenawan Mohamad
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