an image

winterson once wrote that there're 3 endings to any story: revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness. her stories have always been bounded within boundaries, trapped in desires, and told stories within stories within stories. and it is precisely only from within such walls and fences and ceilings that her characters could break free and flee: in Sexing the Cheery, Fortunata escapes by cutting and retying her rope as she descends her castle of mutable ceilings and shifting floors; in The Passion, Villanelle transcends the realities, if not fixities, of her mortal worries by, like and unlike Christ, opening her webbed feet and walking on water.

but what about happiness?

it is said booklovers are romantics and they are so because they read books in search of lost happiness. and because true happiness is unfixed its devotees never cease their pilgrimage. winterson's readers are no different. yet when they come to the ending of each winterson the variable of happiness so integral to the function of fiction has become a non-issue, overlooked, forgotten, read into non-existence.

but has the element of happiness in fact disappeared?

in Written on the Body, Louise's appearance at her unnamed and ungendered lover's kitchen window is real but illusory, precisely because for illusions to exist they have to first be real. to be able to grasp the significance of that window scene is to sense the significance of Literature. that illusion is framed into a sort of permanence when the lover ends thus the story: i do not know if this is a happy ending but here we're let loose in open fields.

this is where the story starts.

it is too for those of us in search of happiness - this is what happiness is - in these open fields we glimpse the first ripples of a rainbow - that otherworldly arc in the sky, empty space and coloured points of light - an illusion, an image, imagic, magical.

obdurate fact of surrender

i've always thought it impossible to feel sad with the music of vivaldi. after all, his gloria - a tabernacle of sheer exuberance held me up during one of the darkest hours of my life, comforting, poulticing, healing the raw wretchedness of my skin, flesh, and bones. then i heard a most gnashingly poignant, cinematic, quietly devastating pane of violin music, an andante cushioned between the first and third movements of his b flat major concerto, and it felt like one had just emerged from the blind, deaf depths of oceans, cradling the nacreous oyster, cradling the mother of pearls.
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at the centre of himself, a man cannot choose whom to love. he can choose how to live and can honour the truth of himself where he may. but he cannot choose whom to love ... the heart will always have the last word, and when the word is love we can recognise, we can respond, we can submit and we can try to ignore, but we can never choose. love is not a matter of choice but an obdurate fact of surrender.

-- andrew o'hagan, Be Near Me.

hello long time

the entire semester last i used the english textbook with them only once, during the first lesson and then i decided to abandon that and sourced materials from newspapers and novels. they got used to that; and once it slipped my tongue what i shouldnt have mouthed, that english textbooks are useless. but that of course shouldn't be taken too literally; and there's a whole qualification behind it which i omitted. now i'm no longer teaching them and in comes the new teacher and gets the textbook back in action they're all howling for blood. i'll miss them of course. on a brighter note, the former classes that i've returned to cheered and roared and this should probably be the closest i come to being a celeb. this is my final semester in teaching and i must and i will inspire them all.
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p.s. i havent disappeared but something's wrong with this blog i havent been able to update it via my computer.

sydney

started on my second leg of my australian 2-city grand prix this morning. left st kilda and landed in sydney just after noon. i don't reckon i'd see much of this city that has nothing much to offer (as far as my preferences and temperaments go) - i even had coffee in starbucks today. STARBUCKS. that'd be travesty in melbourne. i'll spend the coming days in galleries, museums, bookshops, maybe a day trip to canberra to visit the galleries, museums, bookshops there.

i'll write more, especially about melbourne, when i return, and pictures too.

ah melbourne

2nd day in melbourne. lovely weather. divine coffee. weeping with joy and nostalgia with every breath.

Thank you for this story

If, decades on, there is one image of you all to remain etched in my mind, it would be your raucous laughter, fresh and plangent as if I had heard it just now. I have always held that the best things in life come unexpected and unplanned; and some of the most lasting of things too – encounters brief but fierce, and whose echoes remain long after due farewells. Ours is one such chance encounter. Right from the beginning, I knew that I’d only be with you for a semester of five months. We weren’t supposed to meet, for I was originally allocated other classes. But I was a convenient choice, if not a risky gamble. Thus, a sequence of unplanned, unexpected, random events culminated into my becoming your teacher for not one, but three subjects.

Naturally, our English lessons, by sheer importance and copious interaction hours, formed the bedrock of our relationship. It is with this notion – that I’d only be with you briefly, that I abandoned all conventions of the English language lesson – the dreary, mechanical, unhelpful grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension exercises – and instead strove to develop in you two bases: a love for the English language; and a passion for the endeavours that you undertake. To do that within such time limitations meant I had to abandon the textbook and assessment books and other some such nonsense. The beauty of the English language cannot be found amongst those sterile pages; and assiduously preparing you for one mid-year examination wouldn’t make you love the language an iota more, nor would it prepare you for a role in this powerful play called Life. I wanted to make sure you’d grow to appreciate the beauty of language, if not, then at least know that there is much, out there, to love.

So the gamble, indeed a risky one, became the gambler, and grammar took a backseat. Where can good poetry and prose be found? I suppose in all the readings that I’ve given you, each one from a master in the language: Shakespeare, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Nabokov, Coetzee, Winterson, Mark Doty, Muriel Spark, Carver, Hemingway. And to provide some soft comfort along this daunting journey, we enlisted the help of local writers: Catherine Lim, Philip Jeyaretnam, Colin Cheong, Alfian Sa’at, whose stories you appeared to have enjoyed immensely. To make sure you don’t feel alone in this seeming cruel, isolating world of teenhood, we read The Catcher in the Rye, and of course, the utterly indispensable and wildly popular The Teenage Textbook and The Teenage Workbook. Not great literature, the last three, but they sure grabbed your rare attention. They got all of you to read. And I'll never forget the times you all chanted poetry with someone standing on his desk clapping out the rhythm. That was electrifying.

But all that I’ve given you are only a foretaste of the wide, almost inexhaustible platter I hope you’d discover on your own in the years to come. Just don’t stop looking. Where can knowledge and wisdom be found? Where can beauty, passion, life be found? Amongst the few places that you would have to discover on your own, in Literature, and most of all, in yourselves. You remember the movie Dead Poets Society, where the boys’ teacher Mr Keating quoted Walt Whitman:

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

The stories that we tell ourselves and our loved ones, are what define our humanity, are what comfort, console, and ennoble our lives. And do live your own lives, for if you don’t, others will. And they would steer it to places you don’t want to go, and where it might be too late to return. And you wouldn't be happy. Chart your own paths, take the roads less travelled; find the passions that would obsess you for a lifetime, where those obsessions would become your guiding stars and keep you safe and sane. I hope you have enjoyed the stories and have been elevated by them, and I hope as this powerful play goes on, you too will contribute a verse, just as you all, by being yourselves, each human and divine, have contributed one to mine and enriched my own. I could not have asked for a better and more lovable class. Thank you for this story.

silence is salvation

silence is a virtue. in this inane world of crazy relentless noise, the silence once begotten freely and in abundance has become an elusive lover that has to be courted and caught.

silence is a virtue.

silence is a virtue that i love. and when silence crawls into my crazy life of abundantly capricious fancies, silence is no longer simple virtue. silence has become salvation.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

-- t.s. eliot, in Preludes
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an attempt to finally sit down and fill up my ipod with albums i rarely listen to but ought to and think i would like to has renewed my love for dido. as with all music i dearly love, hers bring me back to a distant arcadia that had bloomed, once upon a time, in a farrago of light.

my lovers gone
his boots no longer by my door
he left at dawn
and as I slept i felt him go return no more
i will not watch the ocean
my lovers gone
no earthy ships will ever bring him home again
bring him home again
my lovers gone
i know that kiss wil be my last
no home his song
the tune upon his lips has passed i sing alone
while i watch the ocean
my lovers gone
no earhly ships will ever bring him home again
bring him home again

-- dido, my lover's gone
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the irony of resorting to music as a net to reclaim silence is, unfortunately, not lost on me. unfortunate, for to be able to claim insanity in a world gone mad is, but bliss.

saigon

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before i procrastinate further - ho chi minh city 6-8 april. it was meant to be a getaway but i fled to the wrong city, from one noisy to a noisier one. being three days i didnt do much. being saigon, couldnt do much either. it's a city rushing to progress, to modernise, to get rich, and somewhere amid its hurry it lost its way and lost its soul. it's not hard to see what it would be thirty years from now: just look at singapore.

no wait, it is looking at singapore.

did the usual landmarks' visits, there was this temple whose religion (cao dai) counts shakespeare and victor hugo as amongst its saints, had some really good food and coffee, and finished two incredible books by sontag and kundera.

红豆

还没好好的感受 雪花绽敷的气候
我们一起颤抖 会更明白 什么是温柔
还没跟你牵着手 走过荒芜的沙丘
可能从此以后 学会珍惜 天长和地久

有时候 有时候 我会相信一切有尽头
相聚离开 都有时候 没有什么会永垂不朽
可是我 有时候 宁愿选择留恋不放手
等到风景都看透 也许你会陪我 看细水长流

sweet chimera

i had once wished for a day to be like the rain out there - i was on the train gliding through the silver falling gauze. i loved that particular rainfall; beneath the smoken sky it was pellucid, expectant, here to stay. and for it to stay i wished. i wished not to arrive at my destination, for beyond the trellised windows held a sweet chimera. it was a surreal sight where i could see where i never was, and i felt light, felt like a traveller on a foreign land, felt like it didn't matter where i ended up as long as my heart eventually led me home.

only that destination up-ended and dented destiny.

that was in january, a month where new hopes for a moulted life are triggered like fireworks to sparkle the raven stubborn sky. and after the fierce few seconds what then? what else but the return of the night. just as not all dark need light, not all time need be present. my time sank, my time vanished, and april came. how do i feel now? why did i imagine things would be different simply because time had passed? there were moments i thought i hated you. i thought i ought to. then again, who was i angry with but myself? self-acrimony, the most lethal dose of anger, garoting me from within; the dormant pain, of injury, of anger, the strains of indignance rising like a dark tchaikovsky.

couldn't you love me for more than a night?

one more night. how tempting. how innocent. what difference could it make, one more night?

couldn't we change our hearts the way we change our nights?