IS MAKING ME VERY PHYSICALLY ILL

THE AVARICE THE MEDIOCRITY THE HACKNEYED ASPIRATIONS AND CLICHED EXISTENCE ALL POINTING TO A HELLHOLE PLATITUDE PRETENDING TO BE A COUNTRY IS MAKING ME VERY PHYSICALLY ILL.

what kinds of forevers are we looking for

would we not love knowing it would end, or would we love nevertheless? do we, love nevertheless? the love could end, but is it pronounced "death"? the dead lives on; we keep them alive. that's what make doomed lovers immortal. lancelot and guinvere, tristan and isolde, romeo and juliet; fallen souls with burning hearts. but why do we keep them alive; what was that incandescent moment that tarried between the two hopeless flames like - fallen souls of burning hearts - before they immolated, fire into fire, swirling ash flakes into shimmery dust motes, into fairytale tragedies snowing eternally in our minds. was it not that furnace of a moment of theirs, that we searched a lifetime on frozen lakes to bear? and yet we love not, knowing it would end. so what kinds of forevers are we looking for; the brief yet true and eternal, or the living long dead?

speak, memory

Through the window of that index
Climbs a rose
And sometimes a gentle wind ex
Ponto blows.

-- vladimir nabokov

fraudulent walls

when the cool evening air felt so fresh and light as it never had been for a long while, i wondered if those longstanding, gradually-built-up barricades and walls had been erected for nothing. but they had to have served a purpose - that they existed in the first place could not be for nothing. or was it only in this particular presence it was but defenceless? walls protect - not only those who set them up but also those kept out. but after getting so acclimatised within these reassuring confines, a reality of its own kind surfaced, fortifying itself while slowly nudging out the original reality - the real-er one. this was one such occasion this vaporous, formless breath of fresh air - yours - seeping through these dividers of realities with such ease and candour shattered that dichotomy and struck a tremor into the heart of these confines, tearing down not just barricades and fences and walls but also realities and false securities and that nerve-becalming confidence; enacting instead an invisible mirror compelling me to confront fears and false-confidences in their nonchalant faces. this was one such occasion i fervidly wished you would be walled away from this me.

65

tis phil's birthday (he turned 65!), and i had phoned him with my wishes. apart from the few letters and emails, it's the first time we spoke since i left. my ears could not but ripple to his voice, with all its old-world genteel charm that could only bespoken by a kindly, congenial don. one of my most vivid images was of bumping into him one rainy and grey morning on my way to class, and he off somewhere, wrapped in a black aquascutum trenchcoat and wing-tipped oxfords, a black silver-handled, silver-tipped umbrella swinging by his fingers, cutting a very elegant, very patrician figure. his gently wrinkled face broke into a wide smile when he saw me, and asked how i was, tilting a little his whitely-mopped head. this was to be a recurrent gesture of his, reserved for any student who passed his way who said hello. and it was this little nippin of his time off his footsteps wherever they were heading no matter how hasty, that endeared him to us, quivering voice and all.

...loved; life; London; this moment of June

i had been renting dvds that, unintentionally, turned out to be rather british, like the english patient, being julia, closer, pride and prejudice. it was the last that got me pulling out austen's trope where i had left off a year ago and finished up the final bits. and because of that i'm very inspired to pick up dickens again. ahhh. past one week saw me on a novel rampage, finishing up in earnest winterson's oranges, the powerbook, rereading desultory bits of the passion and written on the body and reread her art objects in its entirety. when my mind's more settled i'll tackle art and lies. i tried reading it a month ago and i just couldnt get into it. also finished (finally) mrs dalloway in rather quick fashion, simultaneously reading her diaries. pulled out nabokov's lolita and started on it today - a most funny, sardonic book i must say - i think i'm gonna enjoy this one.

had browsed at kino earlier far longer than expected, lately zooming into (or starting from) 'W' for you-know-whos, and working my way down the alphabets. i went back to naipaul and after a long spell of wispy winterson; his lean, exacting and introspective prose (not to say ms winterson arent these, but she's different) offered ambivalent sentiments. i'm not so much into plots as themes now; in fact i think novels should abandon plots totally and simply focus on telling stories. it sounds contradictory but it isnt - stories and plots overlap but are not the same things. use language to tell a story, or use stories to elevate language? maybe it depends on which you prefer or privilege so it neednt be so stark but i am beginning to believe the obsession with 'plots' submerge both stories and language. if a story is internally coherent a plot-of-sorts will naturally follow. so its no wonder i'm not a fan of detective novels. where's the joy of reading about a murder if you already know one is going to happen? anyway, i should like to avail myself to more victorian and early 20th century works - somehow i never tire of the former, while the latter ones are a recently-acquired predilection.

the cafes in singapore are going mad. one has too much space indoors and too few tables, the rest are blasting music till kingdoms come. it's bad business sense and bad for my state of mind. so i wrote a note and before leaving, stuck it onto the coffee mug: please do select appropriate music and turn them down to suitable levels conducive for a confined place like this, so that the baristas would then have no need to compete with it and the expresso machines and shout atop their lungs above the din, making being in this establishment unpleasant, even intolerable. ohhhhhh yes i am allergic to noise.

and i loved mrs dalloway - i love virginia woolf:

.... they love life. in people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

listen to her rhythm! poetic, dolce, and light; and the alliterative decrescendo - ...loved; life; London; this moment of June. it was vivaldi cascading on violins of words.

whose stories; and who tells them?

this is a world of stories, without which it is not a real world. a world without dreams and fantasies and miracles, is not the real world. you do not have to will them to life, let them remain sapphire steeples and emerald spires, edifices in your imaginations as alive as the thousand expirations in one relucent night. one day though, they might just awake stone-hard, precious-glittering, testaments of once-upon-an-imagination. the least you can do is not demolish... - because the ensuing rubris will be an inverse tribute to their reality. there is a world from which atlases and maps are drawn - inadequate, abstract, but of course, real. we have forgotten that the world's first Atlas tumbled out from a story: passionately beheld in the grecian heart, carrying this weight of the world, and from which many other stories tumbled forth. so authentic these fables, cloud-high skyscrapers and invisible (global) economies graze on it. there is another world that resides in the heart - diminutive, frivolous, and naturally, unreal. but it is truer than anything in this world. it has always been. does it matter whose stories and who tells them, as long as there are stories to be told?

falling nights

1 dec 04.

"You seem rather quiet..."

What did you expect me to say? I didn't want to (and couldn't) peer aimlessly into your mind. I'd rather you let me know how you feel, what you think, and how you intend to... With you i feel defenceless and weak. I cannot bring myself to indulge in mind games and flirtatious banter. Because you remind me of a past. You remind me of a forgotten stab-wound whose scars have almost healed. Would you remember your promise to have a meal with me over the weekend?

but to what are they connected?

when i left ... i thought i was running away. running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. i thought i might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. and then i saw that running away was a running towards. an effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way. but what good are destinations without journeys? i did not wander into this quiet village following a trail of norms and conventions and easy acceptance. truer was the opposite. for better or for worse, without quite knowing what next would come, it was one of countenancing people's thoughtless doubts, defying their flippant assumptions, defacing and obliterating their timorous condescensions. it was one of proving myself and showing them wrong. i do not know what other villages there are, but i keep the faith what has, will still; that hopefully there would arrive a hamlet, where the coin is not money but emotion, where i shall relieve my every and all, and live with just ink on my hands and sunlight at my feet. there are people who tell me that i am cut off but to what are they connected?
___

realities nonetheless

the raindrops generously plattered onto the moving window panes, spraying mercurial lines that cracked and jagged, windblown diagonal, before blurring away as if a life went spent; many lives spent; in its place new splatters. i had philip glass in my ears, and it lifted but calmed my spirits, so much my mind became pellucid. i saw us in the car, me looking out to the flashing rows of trees, lampposts, the more reluctant buildings. and i thought how you could become a lover that never was; i was sure you had, at some points in time shared this exact sentiment; how time and distance apart, we extracted the same memories and reconstructed similar fantasies, that then became realities of sorts, even if fragile and ephemeral; but realities nonetheless.

p.s. i've always been ambivalent about the outside world this window presents. but in time to come i think i'll start missing those hours and days and nights sitting by this window, looking, contemplating, imagining; the numbness as well as the inspirations; the quiet time with myself.