mexico

___

19.12.2006. cancun. westin. sunrise white beach. christian. margaritas. chitchen itza. on the road to merida. vancouver girl. presidente intercontinental. plaza mayor. catedral and endless calles. paseo de montejo. cafe la cabana. hycendas. robert & arturo. guadalajara. holiday inn. city of roses. swirling pigeons. catedral 1618. mariachis. plaza de la liberacion. tlaquepaque. jaliso. tequila. alejandro. tequila. writing in the dark. mexico city. sheraton. alameda central. palacio de bellas artes. cafe caffe. rene. monumento a la revolucion. paseo de la reforma. museo n.d. antropologia. i love rufino tamayo. antonio. christian. and the endless shots of libreria. i watched: vitus. welcome home. one summer. the wedding director. i read: winterson. hollinghurst. vidal. suskind. burroughs. calvino. marquez. ozick. winterson. 07.01.2007. singapore.

there is only the present and nothing to remember

How does one play word games when the rules and outcomes defy language; and when they route to the heart, how can words ever suffice? Who else but i can hear my own heart break within the seeming stoic slats of my ribs, hear its reluctant, plaintive echoes in the lonely hollow of my chest? They say a metaphor is a leap of imagination, a leap off reality. But heartbreaks make their pain and sorrow felt in all its searing glory. And heartbreaks leave me and me alone to pick up the scattered shards of silent aftermath.
___

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could we go on? How could we ever get up and off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember.

-- jeanette winterson

redbean

finally, the phd

routine and what i thought were life's little permanancies died the day i finished NS, and when not long after, i emerged from the hospital with a part of me - physically and emotionally - lobbed off, i've rarely been able to see my life past one year's horizon. tasmania, melbourne, NTU - first as a student then a salaried yuppie, and then now at the school where i'm teaching, it had and has been difficult to flip through an annual calendar, and plan for a foreign year. it's ironic because my introverted and indolent temperament naturally craves for the prosaic, the settled, the humdrum. but i repeatedly find myself hurled out there frantically rifling for yet another still ground in the shade. fate or subconscious masochism many times i wonder. simply, why? but i imagine otherwise, like holding down a 9-5 office job in a swanky skyscraper down-swanky-town like every one else and i develop convulsive reservations and worries about my sanity and happiness. so the choice (or, the no-choice) is clear. and so when this morning, when the news that my imminent phd candidature, that has hitherto been wavering tenuously between obstinate destitution and/or effortless perdition, has been awarded a scholarship, i was so relieved i couldn't feel it. and it is only just, a day past, that i realise an eternity of three years has been sweetly sequestered off my checkered life.

couldn't we live forever without running out of occasions?

i havent been posting because of school so that's a good thing. all my energies are channeled and spent there. but i've not stopped writing - am still ruminating in my trusty notebook (of the papyrus variety), and though even the entries there are dwindling in content and frequency, my impromptu aphorisms remain in my head. when i've time they'll appear somewhere for personal posterity. which effectively means during the june holidays.

meantime, i'll take a short cut - and put up something not mine (but infinitely better). so here're some more mark doty, whose poetry have masted my sail past a recent high surf. and not only that, the shiver down my spine, the undulant wave of visceral orgasm. . .

from Chanteuse:

... that is how i would describe her voice,
her lyric that becomes, now, my city:
torch, invitation, accomplishment. my romance
doesn't need a blue lagoon standing by...

as she invented herself, memory revises
and restores her, and the moment she sang.
i think we were perfected,

when we became her audience,
and maybe from that moment on
it didn't matter so much exactly

what would become of us.
i would say she was memory,
and we were restored by

the radiance of her illusion,
her consummate attention to detail,
--name the colors-- her song: my Alexandria,

my romance, my magnolia
distilling lamplight, my backlit glory
of the wigshops, my haze

and glow, my torch, my skyrocket,
my city, my false,
my splendid chanteuse.
___

from The Wings

don't let anybody tell you

death's the price exacted
for the ability to love;

couldn't we live forever
without running out of occasions?

piccies

tell me where they end

it's in the early mornings that i can better imbibe poetry and its exacting images than i can read prose, maybe because the mind is newly minted, the air is cool, and time is still asleep. of late, i have also been turning to poetry as amulets against me.

from Storm Warnings

Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

-- adrienne rich

there's this class that i teach all 3 subjects to, and i cannot say enough how much i've been enjoying the lessons with them. i see them everyday, sometimes twice a day - cheery, precocious, bright fifteen year olds naturally interested in anything anatomical and petulant.

i love this mark doty - the final stanza is heartrending -

Fog Argument

1. Jade

Of course I know it ends.
I know there's a precise limit

where salt marsh gives way
to fogged water's steel.

But from here, from moor's edge
where the tide pond

doubles the swallows,
it doesn't seem to;

blonde acres
vanish at the rim

into the void,
a page on which anything

might be written,
though nothing is. What I love

is trying to see
the furthest grassy extreme,

that fog-marbled horizontal...
Rippling strokes, a few high dunes

hung on the edges of the page
like Chinese brushstrokes,

barely there, and out
on the far shore

the sea gone a clouded mint,
gone without edges, horizon erased,

a single silken exhalation
the color of mown grass,

unripe persimmon, gooseberry,
juniper, sage, green shadow

in the hollow of collarbone,
love, i know, it ends,

you don't have to remind me,
though it seems a field

of endless jade.

2. Beach Roses

What are they, the white roses,
when they are almost nothing,
only a little denser than the fog,

shadow-centered petals blurring,
toward the edges, into everything?

This morning one broken cloud
built an archipelago,
fourteen gleaming islands

hurrying across a blank plain of sheen:
nothing, or next to nothing

--pure scattering, light on light,
fleeting.
And now, a heap of roses
beside the sea, white rugosa
beside the foaming hem of shore:
brave,
waxen candles...

And we talk
as if death were a line to be crossed.
Look at them, the white roses.
Tell me where they end.

for the four of us

for the four of us best friends from those days, the sea would claim a significant site in our teenage memories. often we would take our bicycles and head over just as the morning quiet began to disappear, and the sun rose and whitened the sky. sometimes if we were utterly bored we would collect and ride in the bright noon day, the searing reflections from the waves tempting us to jump through them, which once, twice we really did. then we would sit on the sizzling-hot granite breakwater while our clothes spread out to dry. or we would climb the coconut trees and pick its fruit, competing to be the first to crack the husks. the beach wasnt teeming with people and eateries the way it is now, and its sunsets, with the returning tranquil and the occasional dives of seagulls across the orange clouds, were ineffably beautiful. there was a particular spot that had an abundance of palm trees, and from where we sat, its leaves would frame the flaming expanse of sky with sky and its defiant-appearing crescent partner, descending onto the jutting overland in the distance, before being gently engulfed by it, the dark quietly taking over. what remain of those vivid, blazing images soaked in our dilating irises are now sepia snapshots tinged with nostalgia. all five years we never tired of those trips - perfunctory pilgrimages made almost daily, a ritual of our friendship with the sea. without anyone's realising, the lapping waves and the sandy steppes had partook in our conversations, eavesdropped on our secrets, watched us grow up and apart. if we were to return to the sea now after so many years, we would find ourselves alone, awkward and forlorn with the other three, the once-familiar and cherished living like phantoms in our collective and uttered reminiscences. some years ago, we met there for the last time, after not having done so for some years already, each busy living our post-teenage life of freedom and worry. we didnt plan it to be final, of course, such prophecy absurd. but meteor showers were forecast a few minutes after that midnight and we felt it would be fascinating to lie once more on that familiar slab of uncomfortable granite, relive old dreams and share new ones. then there was one long moment, where out of nothing our chatter fell away, and thought-filled silence hung between us, as if paying a homage and bidding a farewell to all that had gone before, and laying them to rest. what more could we ask, when there would be old dreams to live on and new ones to look for? that last night in front of the whispering sea, we hushed our wishes together, yet, alone, under the silvery shooting stars.

obsess my mind

i contemplate the different futures i could arrive at and before having so much as taken a first step i continually re-write them. the only result thus remains, an unwritten future. not too long ago and for not too long a time i had my life laid out a predictable straight-line. i craved for uncertainty and some riot. now that i am in a thrall of incertitude, i am torn between time past and time future, and from which the paradoxical conditions of torpidity and stasis emerge, hijack, and obsess my mind.

___

'it appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space. the material point can hardly be conceived anymore.'

-- albert einstein

'what am i? atoms. what are atoms? empty space and points of light. what is the speed of light? 300,000 kilometres per second. what is a second? that depends where in the universe you set your watch.'

-- jeanette winterson

more books

as if i were subconsciously storing up food for the cold months; but the recent additions in the last two weeks (including a mega spree just now to my shelves were quite conscious choices:

john fante, ask the dust

don paterson, landing light: poems

vladimir nabokov, lectures on literature

helen vendler, coming of age as a poet: milton, keats, eliot, plath

paul auster, brooklyn follies

kazuo ishiguro, the remains of the day

philip larkin, required writing

philip larkin, further requirements: interviews, broadcasts, statements and book reviews

n.k. kleinbaum, dead poets society

t.s. eliot, the waste land and other poems (2nd copy, this with frank kermode intro)

nadine gordimer, get a life (because she nobel laureate and i thyroid cancer patient)

kingsley amis, lucky jim

william faulkner, light in august

martin amis, money

philip roth, the professor of desire

ted hughes, collected poems

david remnick, ed., wonderful town: new york stories from the new yorker

john gardner, the art of fiction

thomas hardy, the mayor of casterbridge

thomas hardy, under the greenwood tree

truman capote, answered prayers

mark batty, about pinter: the playwright and the work

john fletcher, about beckett: the playwright and the work

virginia woolf, mrs dalloway (i couldnt resist getting another copy, this time hardcover)

gertrude stein, three lives & Q.E.D.

sylvia plath, collected poems

mark strand and eavan boland, the making of a poem

david lodge, the art of fiction

jeanette winterson, tanglewreck (for my little cousin)

virginia woolf, the common reader vol. 2

shakespeare, the tempest

jeanette winterson, written on the body (for mrs chan whom i'm meeting on tues)

raymond carver, where i'm calling from

raymond carver, call if you need me: the uncollected fiction and other prose

omg.

i used to think i could control my book purchases. but while reading woolf i had an epiphany (she does have that kinda effect) - that for as long as i read books (i'm addicted i'm obsessed) i'll always find new things and names and directions in them that will lead me to further and more and even more literary touchstones, lighthouses, glittering pearls. at this moment if there's one reason for me to continue living it is quite just so i can continue to ravish these rapturous pages.