if i were to remember my youth

I would have to call up both the age and the year, like two sides of a doorframe, before I could enter the memory room. Which is difficult and confusing because the year begins in the beginning of the year (pardon the tautology), and my age begins at its end (not my fault either). Then there are 365 days in a year, 24 hours in a day. That's a lot of hours to remember, memories to store. Yet when I call up the age and the year in my mind, what appears are just that few fleeting images in blurry black-and-white and sepia. What are they, these few lines? 


18: on the cusp of adulthood, opening my eyes to life beyond my sheltered, provincial life. 19: clubbing like crazy, lapping up all the attention accorded to the simple fact of my youth. I was a bastard to someone and broke his heart. 20: feeling like an adult already, suddenly, yet life put on compulsory hold. 21: the first time I heard my heart break; I celebrated my birthday with my 3 best friends from secondary school, all of whom are still my best friends today. 22: consolidating life, anticipating with excitement my (then) future. 23: I lost my voice and a piece of my self; and for better and for worse, I met somebody; left the country and tasted freedom for the first time. 24: Melbourne, books, politics, intellectual life, academia, literature, Jin, Melbourne. 25: Singapore, and for the first time, I feel confident, really confident. 26: my first suit, my first job, my first paycheck. 27: if there is one year I would nominate as the year, it would be this year, when art and politics, love and life created a new alchemy of me. 28: happy exhaustion, and an indescribable devastation. 29: departure; a new life. 

My roaring twenties. Gone. I passed my 30th in Melbourne quietly and alone, and everyday has been just another day since, and that's good in a way. 

There's something that's been constant throughout these years: my obsession with these three tracks in Faye's 1998 concert CD. For the past 14 years I listened to them at least every other day. Time will pass. I will get old. But her voice remains eternal in these songs: 約定, 紅豆, 我願意. 

mid-year catch-up

I really cannot believe it's been so long since my last entry. Where have all those five months gone? Almost forgot that this blog exists too. And I'm glad it does. It's been so long. . .  so much. . .  all these years. . .  

I don't really want to record my life here in all its chronological humdrum and minutiae. Yet I don't want to forget. How does one re-present one's everyday life, in essence, in emotion, in a few silvery lines? Poetry is one answer. The question is, can I write it?

I was in Singapore last November for ten days, of my own accord and to catch Faye in concert. Had a great time catching up. Too little time on that island, too many friends on that island. It was almost four years since I left, so much changes, some things never change. Shopping malls, noise, crowds, streetlife and language, the heat, a particular heartbreak. But it felt like a holiday. Then this February I unexpectedly had to go back for a while, and this time I stayed for two weeks. Caught up with the same people and some more, the same and different Singapore. Because of the suddenness in which I had to go back it didn't feel like a holiday, more like being sent back, I didn't enjoy it as much. 


I couldn't shake off the fact that you and I were back on the same island. Back to five years ago when I couldn't bear to stay and had to leave. I paid you a visit. To see what it's like where you live. To stand at your front door and imagine what it's like beyond that door, beyond that impossibility that has become of us. It was once possible, I really thought it was, and all those times, I was thinking of light-filled mornings waking up to you, the quiet happiness of a life together. I placed a hand on your door and imagined it was your arm I was touching. Then I left.

__

Glad to get back here, and there you were, and you said, in your voice that I once described as rich drops of liquorice: 'I can give you a proper hug now.' R, for taking me on this bright road of this country, so much of which has been so much colour and light, thank you. 

If there's something I could write about my teaching of this third year soci subject this semester, it would be the forging of a friendship with this particular student, RB. I've always been very close to my students, which is rare in university these days, and which is why I treasure these students-turned-friends so much. Their eagerness, naivete, intelligence, frankness, youth. But this student became a friend quite unlike any other, who constantly surprised me with his till-then-unrevealed intelligence, maturity and sensitivity. Youth flowers only once, I told him, and footfalls will always echo in the memory. 

Winterson was in town last Friday, and I got her signing a lot of books. Mostly mine and many for friends. Jeanette, will you write something for RB, a boy of twenty, full of passion and rage? And she wrote into my old copy of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. RB's eyes welled up when he opened the book and saw the inscription -

"To RB: use the passion that you feel. Don't let the rage turn on you." 

RB makes me remember my youth, when I was twenty, makes me want to be twenty again. I don't remember thinking a lot of thoughts. I remember the blur of blur of noise. Young me in a hurry. The world at my feet. Invincible me. 

For a wonderful semester, where I've learnt from you as much as I've taught, watching the edges blur, watching you mature. 

Gave him a signed copy of Art Objects too. His graduation gift. A book that profoundly changed the way I read, thought, and most importantly, felt. Hope this book will lead him to other books that will come to be his private waterfall and wine. 

There is one more book that has been very important in my life, one that'll always be my compass and guide, bible and cross, talisman and light. It'll be his twenty-first birthday present. 

I realise I always give books that I love to the people that I love. I guess books are the only things I know a little something about. Books are the only things that seem worth giving, worth gifting. Literature lit up new worlds, lifted me out of my own tiny one. Hopefully those words, lighting fires, will light up my loved ones' too. 

J, I just want to say thanks again for the gifts and thanks, for the first time, for your w. 

. . . and the true path was as lost to me as ever

when you cut in front and lit it as you ran. 

See how the true gift never leaves the giver:

returned and redelivered, it rolled on

until the smile poured through us like a river.

How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!

I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

-- "Waking with Russell", Don Paterson

__


Adrienne Rich died recently. A few years ago when I was going through the darkest period of my life, she had one stanza that gave me immense comfort. Reading through her collections lately, I am again reminded of how great a poet she is:


If I could let you know --
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
-- look at the faces of those who have chosen it. 

2011

A year of waking up to thoughts of you. Thoughts of those sun-lit days of long ago, days brimming simply and seemingly with undoubtable promise, diamond-bright moments where time had no meaning and every breath was your name. When I thought two people could never have been happier, with you and by me, partner to partner. A year of long afternoons of grief and staring blankly at the light pouring in through the leaves outside my window, and dappling my bed, and my body, bathing in this softly, slowly fading pool of light, forgetting about the hours slipping past while thinking in wonderment how the last five years have gone by, just like that. A long, silent, still, stagnant year of mornings turning into afternoons turning into long-drawn, cold, quiet nights filled with little else but this indescribable, harrowing, pain-wrought alchemy of sadness, helplessness, exhaustion, and crushing, crushing, loss. May next year be a better and happier one. And for all.

__

It takes forever to forget the past. And then longer again to see that forgetting the past is a vivid illusion. ...

In my mind, I said: 'Conor is gone, but the Lord is here. My life will pass and I will never taste a kiss on my mouth again.'

-- Andrew O'Hagan, Be Near Me

heavenly questions

How could I say we wanted nothing else

And nothing less and nothing more than this,

To find each other's spirit's melting point

And changing states, never such nakedness

Between such two, my bluest veins to kiss,

Never such certainty, the selfsame quest

Not to possess, but to be known; to know;

Not needing it confirmed, confirming it.
And in a place arrived at on our knees,

He tugged my face to his, as if he took

His own life in his hands; all gentle ways;

A lifelong quest for you; and won't let go

Unless you leave your fingerprints on me;

A gaze returned, the softest counterblow;

And gathering my hair in gentle fists,

Persuasion's force with no one to persuade,

Only persuading hairpins from my hair,

Their falling on the floor, a plunder-gift;

And nothing lost, but found and found again;

And not conquest, but everything in play

Given, not taken; taken anyway,

And not to keep in any case; but kept;

Possessed, but not in order to possess;

Selfsame, self-owned, self-given, self-possessed,

And all in play. But conquered nonetheless.

-- Gjertrude Schnackenberg, Heavenly Questions

__

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gavel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

-- John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

why.

why.

why is the measure of love loss.

why is the measure of us love.

love.

loss.

measure.

why.

wintersong

Thinking about you fills me with an incredible sadness. Beyond these words, beyond words, a firmament of grief.

pal o' me heart

At Swim, Two Boys is I think the most wonderful novel I've ever read. A tender tale of Doyler and Jim, an epic story of Ireland and love. Vivid, lyrical, glorious prose. Very. glorious. prose. Very heartwarming, very heartbreaking, and very, very beautiful.

*

'Do you miss him?'

Doyler sighed, and with that breath spilt all the tide of his loneliness and fears. 'I miss him, aye,' he said. 'He was pal o' me heart, so he was. I try not to think of him, only I can't get him off my mind. He's with me always day and night. I do see him places he's never been, in the middle of a crowd I see him. His face looks out from the top of a tram, a schoolboy wouldn't pass but I'm thinking it's him. I try to make him go away, for I'm a soldier now and I'm under orders. But he's always there and I'm desperate to hold him. I doubt I'm a man except he's by me.

*

It is hard not to fall in love with Doyler, with this gem of a heart, with this breathtaking declaration of love.

王菲 | passenger

We pass an overhead bridge. There are more to come. It is such a straightforward journey, we shall arrive before we know it. I am sitting in your car, listening to the songs playing on. We are happy. Then the first lamplight. What are you thinking about? That singer has a happy voice. Sitting in your car, listening to the songs playing on. I as not unhappy. Those white clouds has a tinge of sadness; the blue sky a bit of grey. I am to be reaching home. I as the first passenger of your car. I am not unhappy. The sky is now blood red. The stars are now silver and ash. And where is your loved one now?

memory like a prayer

Memory does not fade. It can be put away, it can be discarded. It can be forgotten, it can be remembered. Like a story from somewhere, flashes across time. Long ago re-appearing like this moment, like this night. Don’t say a word. Let the final scenes of the movie fall away. The traffic from the city streets quiet down. The last of the evening in your breath. Don’t say a word. Don’t let go of that evening, embers on your lips. In the blaze of the moment, the architecture of your face, cleft, scar, the ash-blue tincture of your eyes, memory does not fade. It remembers, like separate worlds meeting. I leaned over. Like separate worlds meeting. Don't say a word. Let the night be quiet. I leaned over. I kissed your lips and pledged myself forever.

Wintersonian love

The woman I love rode this way, carried off by horsemen. If I do not find her, I will never find myself. If I do not find her, I will die in this forest, water within water.

*

It was Winterson who showed me something about love and passion. She revealed to me something of love’s nature. Love's nature and its exacting, beautiful forms through an exacting, beautiful prose. She showed me that love is exacting and beautiful. To Winterson, a precise emotion seeks a precise expression. Yet, she renders the ideal kinds love that many of us will precisely fail to attain, offer, and experience. Hers is a love of biblical proportions and Elizabethan tragedy powered by lyrical intensity. But is that not love? Yet, if we all lived and loved by Winterson’s standards, we might well end up mute and miserable, if not shattered. I understand that love is not the same for everyone; we love in our own ways and in the ways that we know. Instinctive and natural, we all can love as long as it’s true. Winterson demanded truth, and courage, and her language possessed a power and an intensity that helped me decipher my own feelings.

So that when I met you, her language became a language of recognition.

So that when I met you I felt you were my destiny, and this feeling has not altered.

When I met you, I found myself at a loss, and at a loss for words. I found myself chasing after the myriad echoes of your sounds. They were like butterflies. A bar of music. A run of colour. A line of poetry. Gone.

When I touch you, my fingers don't question what you are. My body knows who you are. You are a pattern to yourself. You are known and unknown to myself. You are a shape I understand. You are a private geometry that numbers mine. You are the place that I am. You are a stranger, a strange that I am beginning to love.

In your face, in your body, as you walk and lie down and eat and read, you have become the lineaments of love. When I touch you I touch something deeper than you. This touches something in me otherwise too sunk to recover.

Love without thought. Love without conditions. Love without promises. Love without threats. Love without fear. Love without limits. Love without end.

All human love is a dramatic enactment of the wild, reckless, unquenchable, undrainable love that powers the universe. If death is everywhere and inescapable, then so is love, if we but knew it. We can begin to know it through each other. The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire.

So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.

The woman I love rode this way, carried off by horsemen. If I do not find her, I will never find myself. If I do not find her, I will die in this forest, water within water.