This side of paradise

November. Sunday. Salzburg. I enter the final year of my twenties. Evening, and I find myself wandering alone into a cathedral, where shortly, a Mass commences, and Mozart’s Requiem exults from above in full choral glory. 

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That day became an image that intermittently appeared in my mind, usually during my quiet moments. A few nights ago, out of no particular boredom I took out my notebook and scribbled down the dates, Nov. 1999 – Nov. 2009. My twenties. 

What was I like when I was twenty, what hopes had I held on to then, I wondered. How did those years disappear, one by one, from one into another, and into yet another, and the images came like trailers of a film. 

I divided the pages into years, and in rough chronological order scribbled down some of my lesser milestones and more significant days. When I finished I was rather struck. Some events and names stood out more than the others, like stars in the night sky, where if you concentrate long and hard enough, the stars will begin to take shape. Some people interpret their starsigns this way. 

How would I have foreseen those random acts and casual decisions leading me to that particular corner, to befriending this initial stranger, and then turning me into this unrecognisable person? The transformations have been variegated, intellectual, aesthetic, literary, political, unimaginable. Erase a phrase or a word from those pages, as if they hadn’t occurred – took two years to forget B (2000), or, Operation, entirely weak and voiceless (2002), or, off to Melbourne (2003), or, read Winterson (2005), or, X. (2006) – and a piece would be missing, and I wouldn’t be complete, I wouldn’t be me even, standing on this ground.

How would I ever be able to make sense of all this, other than to hold onto this firmament of a decade in helpless awe and amazement? 

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I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

This place does make one wistful

For most of us, we inhabit our lives without knowing how it'd turn out and where it'd lead. Some are brief but fiery and lived; some are born part precious metal, part pirate. Then at some unexpected gaps along our time we fall, and we fall in love, we fall out of it, yet, and we fall back in, we hurt ourselves, we climb back up, wipe away our tears, and we carry on our way, till we meet another whom we could again love with our all, and all that spaces within. All we ask and hope, is just to be loved in return. Sometimes, though, we can’t climb back up, no matter how we try; it was a different fall; and we can’t carry on like before. It seemed so simple then - you loved one like no other, and you thought you would see another day. You thought the two of you could be happy. But if it were all so simple how would fairytales have lived on?

# england

As i sat on the train rumbling out of Nottingham, a calm, reassuring comfort gradually surrounded me. It was much later, long after i'd gotten off the train, that I realised it was the comfort of language, of actually knowing what the strangers around me are talking about, of being able to let their their crisp and clipped sibilances and consonants, slip in under my own consciousness and my own thoughts, comforting like the familiar pillow you lie on after a long hard day to ward of exhaustion and the solitary night.

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It snowed late last night, or in the early hours when I was still asleep. When I opened the curtains this morning, the ground was wet from the frost that had begun to melt, little droplets trickling from the corner of the window. I can only imagine, from the remnants of white, a little here and a little there, how beautiful it would have been had I woken up in the night and peered out into the street, snow falling gently and quietly out of nowhere. Just like how you could fall gently and quietly out of nowhere, only to leave me the morning after imagining what might have been. And before long, you too would melt away, and I can only hope snow would come again.

 

winterson's desire

of winterson's many enchanting voices, schoolgirl earnestness, young woman's melancholia, a full bloom exuberance, or wry jadedness, this is probably the first time i'm hearing her speak in a cold yet dark voice, as if she were standing above her own dead body lain in a coffin, pronouncing her own death, delivering her own eulogy. it is a hypnotic piece of writing, one that can only be written out of recent wounds.

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Jeanette Winterson | Desire

Why is the measure of love loss?

In between those two words – love, loss, and standing on either side of them, is how all this happened in the first place: Another word: Desire.

While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Desire is always a kind of invention. By which I mean that the two of us are re-invented by this powerful emotion. Well, sometimes it is the two of us, sometimes it might just be me, and then I am your stalker, your psychopath, the one whose fantasy is out of control.

Desiring someone who has no desire for you is a clue to the nature of this all-consuming feeling; it has much more to do with me than it has to do with you. You are the object of my desire. I am the subject. I am the I.

When we are the object of each other’s desire it is easy to see nothing negative in this glorious state. We become icons of romance, we fulfil all the slush-fantasies. This is how it is meant to be. You walked into the room… Our eyes met… from the first moment… and so on.

It is safe to say that overwhelming desire for another person involves a good deal of projection. I don’t believe in love at first sight, for reasons that will become clear later, but I do believe in desire at first sight. Sometimes it as simple as sexual desire, and perhaps men are more straightforward there, but usually desire is complex; a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams, a whole universe of uninhabited stars looking for life.

And nothing feels more like life than desire. Everyone knows it; the surge in the blood, cocaine-highs without the white powder. Desire is shamanistic, trance-like, ecstatic. When people say, as they often do, ‘I’d love to fall in love again – that first month, six months, year’…, they are not talking about love at all – it’s desire they mean.

And who can blame us? Desiring you allows me to feel intensely, makes my body alert as a fox. Desire for you allows me to live outside normal time, conjures me into a conversation with my soul when I never thought I had one, tricks me into behaving better than I ever did, like someone else, someone good.

Desire for you fills my mind and thus becomes a space-clearing exercise. In this jumbled packed, bloated, noisy world, you become my point of meditation. I think of you and little else, and so I realise how absurd and wasteful are most of the things that I do. Body, mind, effort, are concentrated in your image. The fragmented state of ordinary life at last becomes coherent. No longer scattered through time and space, I am collected in one place, and that place is you.

Simple. Perfect.

Until it goes wrong.

The truth is that unless desire is transformed into love, desire fails us; it fails to do what it once did; the highs, the thrills. Our transports of delight disappear. We stop walking on air. We find ourselves back on the commuter train and on our own two feet. Language gives it away; we talk about coming back down to earth. 

For many this a huge disappointment. When desire is gone, so is love, and so is the relationship. I doubt though, that love is so easy to shift. Loving shies away from leaving, and can cope with the slow understanding that the beloved is not Superman or Miss World.

We live in an Upgrade culture. I think this has infected relationships. Why keep last year’s model when the new one will be sleeker and more fun? People, like stuff, are throw-aways in our society; we don’t do job security and we don’t offer security in relationships. We mouth platitudes about time to move on, as though we are doing something new-age and wise, when all we really want is to get rid of the girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.

I don’t want a return to the 1950’s when couples stayed together whatever the hell, but whoever said that relationships are easy?

Advertising always promises that the new model will be easier to use. And of course when you ‘upgrade’ to the next relationship, it is easier – for a while.

If you are pretty or personable, handsome or rich, serial relationships offer all the desire and none of the commitment. As sexual desire calms, and as the early fantasies dissolve, we begin to see the other person in real life, and not as our goddess or rescuer. We turn critical. We have doubts. We begin to see ourselves, too, and as most of us spend our entire lives hiding from any confrontation with the self, this sudden sighting is unpleasant, and we blame the other person for our panicky wish to bolt.

It is less painful to change your partner than it is to confront yourself, but one of the many strange things about love is that it asks that we do confront ourselves, while giving us the strength of character to make that difficult task possible. If desire is a magic potion, with instant effect, (see Tristan and Isolde), then love is a miracle whose effects become apparent only in time. Love is the long-haul. Desire is now.

An Upgrade culture, a Now Culture, and a Celebrity culture, where the endless partner-swapping of the rich and famous is staple fare, doesn’t give much heft to the long-haul. We are the new Don Giovannis, whose seductions need to be faster and more frequent, and we hide these crimes of the heart under the sexy headline of Desire.

Don Giovanni – with his celebrated one thousand and three women, is of course dragged off to Hell for his sins. Desire has never been a favourite of religion. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, Christianity sees desire as the road to the sins of the flesh and as a distraction from God.Islam has its women cover themselves in public lest any man should be inflamed, and jeopardise his soul. In Jewish tradition, desire ruins King David and Samson, just as surely as modern-day Delilah’s are still shearing their men into submission. Yet it would be misleading to forget the love poem in the Bible that is the Song of Solomon; a poem as romantic as any written since, that gives desire a legitimate place in the palace of love.

And quite right too. Desire is wonderful. Magic potions are sometimes exactly what is needed. You can love me and leave me if you like, and anybody under thirty should do quite a lot of loving and leaving. I don’t mean that desire belongs to youth – certainly it does not – but there are good reasons to fall in love often when you are growing up, even if only to discover that it wasn’t love at all.

The problems start when desire is no longer about discovery, but just a cheap way of avoiding love.

It is a mistake to see desire as an end in itself. Lust is an end in itself, and if that is all you want, then fine. Desire is trickier, because I suspect that it’s real role is towards love, not an excuse in the other direction.

There is a science-based argument that understands desire as a move towards love, but a love that is necessary for a stable society. Love is a way of making people stay together, desire is a way of making people love each other, goes the argument. This theory reads our highest emotional value as species protection. Unsurprisingly, I detest this reading, and much prefer what poets have to say. When Dante talks about the love that moves the sun and the lesser stars, I believe him. He didn’t know as much as we do about the arrangement of the heavens, but he knew about the complexity of the heart.

My feeling is that love led by desire, desire deepening into love, is much more than selfish gene social stability and survival of the species. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love blasts through our habitual sclerotic selfishness, the narrow ‘me first’ that gradually closes us down, the dead-end of the loveless life.

There are different kinds of love, and not all of them are prefaced by desire, yet desire keeps its potent place in our affections. Its releasing force has no regard for convention of any kind, and crosses gender, age, class, religion, commonsense and good manners.

This is bracing and necessary. It is addictive. Like all powerful substances, desire needs careful handling, which by its nature is almost impossible to do.

Almost, but not quite. Jung, drawing on alchemy, talked about desire as the white bird, which should always be followed when it appears, but not always brought down to earth. Simply, we cannot always act on our desire, nor should we, but repressing it tells us nothing. Following the white bird is a courageous way of acknowledging that something explosive is happening. Perhaps that will blow up our entire world, or perhaps it will detonate a secret chamber in the heart. For certain, things will change.

I don’t suppose that the white bird of desire is nearly as attractive to most of us as the white powder substitute with natural highs. Desire as a drug is racier than desire as a messenger. Yet most things in life have a prosaic meaning and a poetic meaning, and there are times when only poetry will answer.

For myself, when I have trusted my desire, whether or not I have acted on it, life has become much more difficult, but strangely illuminated. When I have not trusted my desire, out of cowardice or commonsense, slowly I have gone into shadow. I cannot explain this, but I find it to be true.

Desire deserves respect. It is worth the chaos. But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.

# Berlin

We sat, one Saturday morning in a spot along one of the many streets of Berlin lined with al fresco cafes, eating from a table filled with plates of bread, jam, sausage, and coffee, watching a small part of the world stroll insouciantly by, and L held, lightly and briefly, onto this scene with the tip of her cheekbones, and said, in her inimitably endearing Spanish-accented English, "This, is Berlin," she nodded to herself, looking thoroughly pleased with it all, "You must come back." 

*

I certainly will. Berlin is an amazing city of exiles and free spirits, and it is a city I would return to live.

# Dresden

The overcast sky of Dresden reminds me of photographs depicting the Allied devastation of this place in 1945. Some beautiful centuries-old buildings are still intact, so is the castle, and Augustus the Strong is everwhere, refurbished, repainted, reminded, commemorated. Visited the two famous collections of Dresden, the royal treasures, and the Bellotto paintings of Venice and this city. And F has been a wonderful host, guiding me through his city, it's amazing how much local knowledge he possesses. I've also have had to be on my best behaviour; first the dinner with F and his family, then with F and his girlfriend's family, both of whom made me feel generously welcome.

＃Prague II

In this old city that looks a postcard comes alive, a whole day of rain can be a joyous occasion too.

＃Prague

It was in Vienna that I learnt something about citizenship and the more primordial sense of belonging. Where do you come from, is a question I encounter a lot. Sometimes, I say Singapore, and sometimes I say Australia, depending on the mood, depending on which first comes to mind. Sometimes I would include both, which would invite more questions as to how that is so. But all these responses seem to be incomplete, and hence unsatisfactory. I think it is because I have not figured out where I belong. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to find out, some other times, you never get to know. A, who is from Mexico, insists that I will always come from Singapore wherever else I may choose to live. W, an Argentinian and fellow itinerant, disagrees. Home is where the heart is, he says.
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The old town square of Prague is like a vast museum, one that lets in the wintry chill, the overstretching sky, and the pigeons. It is filled with tourists, but strangely, they scantly want to congregate in the middle, preferring to mingle and admire from along the edges, where rows of cafes and restaurants form a border. Suddenly a group of Italian tourists started to clap and cheer: a groom was striding out of the Church of Our Lady of Tyn with his bride latched on his arm, and they were walking across the square, past the monument of Jan Hus, past St Niklaus cathedral, towards the Old Town Hall with that famous gothic golden astrological clock, leaving a trail of turned heads and smiling onlookers. She is the only figure in the entire landscape elegantly draped in the colour of snow.
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The medieval Charles Bridge over the Vltava river must be one of the most beautiful bridges in this world, if not the most romantic, not only because of the beauty in itself, the path guided by ornately decorated streetlamps and saints, but also for the view that you have just left behind, that still lingers in your mind, as well as for what is ahead, that is waiting unhurriedly behind the morning mist.

＃ Vienna II

It is hard not to be touristy here, as if when one is here, one is forced to be a tourist. You go in from one museum to another, to an art gallery, and to another museum. You think you want to see the Klimt masterpieces, only to find yourself queueing up for a rare Van Gogh exhibition at the Albertina that had just been brought in. And the museums are grand masterpieces of reliefs, friezes, painting, and scupture in themselves. I am fascinated by the self-portraits of Van Gogh, they seem to so vividly embody his turbulent personality, and you think it is only a piece of canvas with a few daubs of coloured oil! Then there are the cakes, the pastries, the coffee ... the coffee and the pastries ... if they could be described as having a bouquet like wine, and layered notes like perfume, that would be what Viennese pastries and coffee are - gradual blooms of chocolate, cream, hazelnut, vanilla, and then unexpectedly, that final, subtle burst of raspberry from hidden seams. By then, that indescribable and utterly unforgettable taste would have lodged always in the vase of your palate, just like a certain crystalline voice that I love. And on my last night here, in yet another capricious moment, I cut across the sprawling gardens and bought tickets to the Viennese symphony. It was, especially being in Vienna, difficult to resist a majestic number by Schumann, and, one of my all-time favourites, the Beethoven Pastorale.

＃Vienna

I'm rather overwhelmed by Vienna. There is nothing that I'd read or seen about it that had prepared me for all these opulence and grandeur that appear at every turn that I take. It's completely and gloriously unreal, this dream-like city carved out of white stone, marble, and gold. Vienna is unlike many other cities, whose essence can be captured in a snapshot from afar. Here, there is no one single defining monument to symbolise the city - they are plated across the land, with gargoyles, saints, and angels encrusted unto and among the countless roman pillars and rose-garlanded windows. One has to walk beside them to be able to admire these guardians of beauty, that twirl together Vienna into the epitome of an emporer's vision of his city as a single, shimmery piece of art. There's absolutely no reason for it to be this splenderously beautiful - and yet it is, and it's right here before my eyes.