# Manchester

Birthplace of Winterson. It drizzled throughout my two days there, all wet and all grey. As I turned around to take in the main street that was remaining behind, I thought it looked just like the picture on J.M. Coetzee's novel, Youth, except that the picture was of Nelson's Column in London, and here I was, in Manchester. Must be the English air.

__

Good news from the conference; the paper will be revised into two separate book publications, one of which I would be editor.

Good news from the thesis; it is shaping up very well, like never before, and I can now imagine a thesis at the end. That is not to say this is going to be easy, or that I will overcome my chronic whiling away of my time doing everything but the thesis.

Good news from me; well, I'm still on my supposed holiday. :)

Merry Christmas to one and all ~

Two letters and a long wank

Reading the Straits Times can be fun when you don’t take it too seriously. In fact, it’s a useful guide for teenagers to learn how their EL Paper One complaint letters should (or should not) be written, or for GP students to practice their logical reasoning skills (the exercises aren’t difficult). But read it too seriously and think it’s some moral guardian or gospel of truth and you risk turning into a mirror image of that newspaper i.e. obedient, craven, mediocre and infantile. 

Maybe these images have indeed been proliferating for a while, and the tiny island has turned into one huge reading room of serious Straits Times readers. 

But what exactly is so ghastly about it all? Try picking out any ST forum letter and unpick it, go through it with a red pen or something, e.g. and the two letters deserve to FAIL: 

ST Forum | Dec 11, 2008

Here are 3 worthy names

I REFER to Mr Tan Ee Kuan's response last Saturday ('We don't need new national 'narrative'') to Professor Kishore Mahbubani's article, 'Get to know Singapore's stars' (Dec 3).

Without wishing to get involved in the debate between the two [But why??? Or, why this… gambit?], I would disagree with Mr Tan's dismissive [Unnecessary value charge.] assertion that 'no Singaporean has approached the acclamation and international stature' of former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan.

In the mid-1980s, Professor Tommy Koh's name was making the diplomatic rounds as possible UN chief, but he refused to put himself forward when it became known that Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali was going to seek re-election. In fact, Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali specifically requested Prof Koh not to contest. [Mr Annan’s exalted stature was achieved after he completed his helm at the UN. Prof Koh might be a deserving candidate and might even have been an outstanding UN chief, but the fact that he has not been one invalidates the comparison. And to assert that eminence is earned just because Prof Koh’s name proffered but was told not to run seems to me duplicitous.]

A decade later, when Mr Annan was stepping down, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong's name was put forward. Despite appeals from many quarters, SM Goh decided not to enter the fray. [Invalid comparison, for reasons stated above. Further, each time the UN needs a new chief, numerous names are put forward, and many rejected. SM Goh might just as well have been rejected, no one would know.]

Singaporeans have made their country proud in their capacities at the UN. Ambassador Koh piloted two significant pieces of international legislation: the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (1994), and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992). Currently, Dr Noeleen Heyzer, Undersecretary-General of the UN and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, is making a name for herself and Singapore. [The invalid comparison continues. No one doubts that there are/have been capable Singaporeans at the UN – the fair basis of comparison is to hold up a Singaporean UN chief against other UN chiefs. But the UN chief comparison is only a gambit. The point is whether Prof Koh’s or SM Goh’s or other ‘capable Singaporeans’’ fine achievements are/have been deemed to be of ‘international distinction and acclaim’. Thus, Mr Tan’s initial argument remains unrefuted. It’s also worth reiterating the point Mr Tan was making – that it is no big deal that Singapore has yet a Nobel Laureate or UN chief or such like; if there are deserving names, they shall be duly recognized. But it is another thing to recommend large-scale PR campaigns to embellish that fact.] 

K. Kesavapany 


Director 


Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Or, 

ST Forum | Dec 11, 2008

Mumbai carnage: We must not allow harmony to be shattered by terror

I REFER to Monday's letter by Central Singapore District mayor Zainudin Nordin, 'Mumbai carnage: We must not allow harmony to be shattered by terror', and the report, 'Past terrorist attacks in Singapore'.

Mr Zainudin's comment that 'there will always be those who try to undermine our harmony, with persuasive arguments, purportedly based on religious teachings', and the recollection of past terrorist incidents invoked in me a sense of both security and foreboding. [Why the kneejerk response, unquestioning acceptance of an official’s remark, and the undertone of a guru invoking gloom and impending danger? It's unbecoming of a mature and thinking citizen, especially one from a first-world country like Singapore. The ‘sense of both security and foreboding’ is also a state of mind that is inherently contradictory – one negates the other.]

Security because in the past four decades since 1965, our tiny red dot has evolved from Third World to First despite the terrorist incidents mentioned [Enacts straw man argument and arrives at a logical fallacy – 1. How does a ‘tiny red dot going from third world to first’ provide ‘security’ (it doesn’t)? 2. Terrorist incidents and economic prosperity can go together, as Ireland, Great Britain, South Korea, and Israel have demonstrated. The repeat broadcast of national slogans and fantasmatical rhetoric are also redundant; I find it amazing that Singaporeans 1. never tire of repeating them, and 2 don’t realize the extent of their brainwashing.]

Security because the government machinery is continually fine-tuned to ensure progress, prosperity and stability. [This statement expresses utter naivete and is severely lacking in irony. Governments can create effective policies and favourable conditions for prosperity; they are unable to ‘ensure’ prosperity. Governments, however, especially with their ‘machinery’, can ensure progress and stability by keeping a sophisticated secret police, bankrupting opposition members, engineering an unthinking and docile population, turning the Straits Times into a PAP newsletter, and occasionally waving the Internal Security Act in the afternoon breeze.] For instance, the introduction of Total Defence in 1984, to get Singaporeans to take personal responsibility for, and be involved in, the defence of the motherland, [There’s a difference between 'motherland' and 'fatherland'. The former commonly refers to communist or more socialist-oriented countries, and the latter is reserved for those fascist nations that Hitler and Mussolini fantasized about. Singapore happens to be a country that would’ve made Hitler rather proud.] was a wise decision. [1. Why is this a wise decision? 2. How is this a wise decision? For all the fantasies about Total Defence since 1984, it has thus far remained, like notions of 'racial harmony', 'majulah Singapura', 'regardless of race, language, or religion', empty rhetoric and mere fantasy. We’re no more ‘totally defended’ than any other country that has yet to be tested in a real war. Consequently, we’re no more ‘totally’ defended other than that we keep telling ourselves that we are and we must, but without actually knowing why and what it means.] It was put to the test during the Sars outbreak, and we did well. [Total Defence was hardly activated during the Sars period, any more than putting our borders and hospitals on high alert, adopting repressive measures akin to imprisonment, downplaying the gaffe of calling unfortunate victims ‘superinfectors’, and finally imprinting the entire episode onto the national consciousness via the mass media, national education, and national day celebrations, as yet another one of Singapore’s glorious triumphs against The Insurmountable No-One-Has-Done-It But-Us-Odds. With the able leadership of our A-team of PAP cadres, of course. If anything, the economic downturn and empty shops during the Sars period highlight the failure of Total Defence, one of its objectives was to ensure economic activity continues amidst conflict. If all these are 'Total Defence', then anything can be 'Total Defence'. Very postmodern.]

The recent move to pool the resources of the five community development councils and five self-help groups under a new organisation called OnePeople.sg, under the chairmanship of Mr Zainudin, is a move in the right direction. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said: 'OnePeople.sg will reflect the ongoing mission to bring Singaporeans together as one people, regardless of race, language or religion.' [How and why is this a right move??? What has Mr Zainudin as chairman got to do with the argument? Why the uncritical acceptance of PM Lee’s statement just because he says so? How in the world does a 'reflection' of an objective contribute to that objective?!? May I recommend that to truly forge a nation that’s ‘regardless of race, language or religion’, Singaporeans have to go beyond bland sloganeering and actually begin to understand one another’s cultures, beliefs, and religion. The first step is to actually talk about these issues openly and freely. The next step is to stop using racial and religious harmony as an excuse for imposing control and censorship. The more one looks at it, the more Singapore's racial and religious policies serve precisely to stultify, to separate and to segregate.]

Why a sense of unease then? [Is there one in the first place? If there is, whose is it?]

Time and again, we read about political or racial upheavals in neighbouring countries and worry about when such incidents will erupt on our doorstep. [Of course you need to be reminded that all these democracy and liberty things are not good for you. Just don’t ask why it’s always Thailand and the Philippines and not other First World nations like France, Britain, the US, Canada etc and etc that can protest and prosper. Thus, constant harping about such neighbouring plights in your daily newspapers will ensure precisely that such incidents will not erupt on our doorstep!]

Another concern is the presence of selfish or fanatical Singaporeans who will not hesitate to pursue their personal agenda at the expense of racial and religious harmony. [Why is this a separate concern - it's exactly the same concern as your earlier concerns! This unnecessary and constant fear-mongering will only create the very same concerns that prompted your letter!]

What can we do to ensure that our hard-earned peace and harmony are not shattered by undesirable elements? [Why do you assume that Singapore's ‘peace and harmony’ is hard-earned? What exactly have Singaporeans done? But I can recommend some things that Singaporeans can do: 1. Cease support for Bush’s dodgy ‘war on terror’, nevermind that Singapore’d be left out of lucrative oil contracts in the Middle East, Singapore will also be left out of being one of Al-Qaeda's prime targets. 2. Lobby the US against exacerbating tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is the contemporary root of ‘Islamic terrorism’. While we're at it, try not to shoot our mouths off criticizing our neighbours ever so often that'd only further encourage ‘undesirable elements’.]

Every Singaporean must play his part by being ever vigilant and learning what Total Defence is all about. We must never be lulled into complacency. The Mas Selamat Kastari incident is a case in point [Logical fallacies – 1. Total Defence and vigilance are not the only things that Singaporeans must or can do, especially if Singaporeans don’t know what they mean or entail, and especially if none of the underlying problems would be resolved. 2. Refer to recommendations above. 3. Singaporeans are hardly complacent – they’re perpetually reminded that they’re not good enough, not bright enough, not employable enough, not grateful enough, and that it’s always all their fault. This is inevitably accompanied by constant rebukes and hectoring by the A-team ministers, and followed up by increasing the CPF withdrawal age limit, decreasing Union support, increasing the number of foreign talents, increasing courtesy/language campaigns, increasing GST, conservancy and utilities and transport rates, all at the same time… 4. It wasn’t complacent Singaporeans that led to Mr Mas Selamat’s escape – no one really knows who’s to blame, or what exact crime he committed – but Singaporeans do know he escaped from a detention centre. 'But how???' is in the minds of every Singaporean, who incidentally, spent weeks combing through the sprawling island for the missing man].

The media can provide more coverage on Total Defence and open up more opportunities for discussion. We must not forget that our state of well-being and harmony did not come by chance, but through years of able leadership, and the hard work and resilience of Singaporeans from all walks of life. [Any more coverage and discussion and Total Defence will become Total Indoctrination.]

Mr W. G.

[Mr W.G.'s letter can be summed up into two contradictions and one irrelevance - 

1. If harmony truly exists in Singapore, no act of terrorism will be able to destroy it. The word 'truly' being operative. In fact, it might even serve to rally a people and unite the country (This is of course not a wish for terrorismt incidents to take place in Singapore, or to happen to Singaporeans). 

2. If the Singaporean government is as capable as Mr W.G. makes it out to be, all of his concerns would have automatically been made redundant, along with the list of poor reasoning, logical fallacies, dodgy examples, half-baked ideas, and gratuitous reiteration of propaganda. The point I am making is that no government is perfect, incorruptible, or infallible - the more a government tells you it is, the more disbelieving you must be. 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' (Who guards the guardians?) is the question; and only true citizens have the answer.

3. Finally, Mumbai's terrorist attack is a result of the longstanding political and military tensions between India and Pakistan. It has nothing to do with fostering or destroying racial and religious harmony in Singapore.]

___

Cherian George pointed out in a recent essay that this state of affairs will persist because it is profitable; because essentially, media bosses (headed by former ministers and civil servants) and editors and journalists (seconded from our spy agencies) are more interested in profits and salaries than in news freedom. Or freedom for that matter – since corporations desire the monopoly of markets just as power craves for the control of society. That is why Singapore is such a happy family… it’s such sunny news everyday. 

But if the media abdicates (or is compelled to) its fiduciary duty of being the fourth estate, and becomes merely a propaganda platform for the government, the majority of the citizens, being either indoctrinated or inured to such an extent, naturally become, or choose to become, an inarticulate and unthinking mass. It is this point that I fault Cherian on two counts, one academic and one intellectual. First, profits and advocacy are not mutually exclusive - there are numerous examples of independent media that are profit-seeking and profitable and that fulfill their public duty. That none of them is found in Singapore is indicative of the real problem - i.e. the assertive web of legislation and the complicity of mercenary newspeople that lead to this current abysmal situation. Second, his conclusion is intellectually untenable. Pecuniary interests should never be a justification for authoritarian control, much less when the object in question is a medium of and for public conscience (and consciousness), much less for the ghastly picture of Singaporean society that has been wrought. Cherian’s logical extension would be to critique this state of affairs; it may be unfair to ask this of him, for to do so would be to risk becoming a mendicant professor, subsequently invoking the triumph of the will. But this is in itself an acknowledgment of the government’s totalitarian impulse, which, again, returns one to an intellectual/moral objection to it. 

dreams

For the past two or three weeks I've been having a lot of dreams in my sleep. S attributes it to the quietness of this village town. And quite right too, for the house is situated off the main road, and there's hardly any traffic or noise. It's also been a time of solitude. Days would pass without my knowing, without my stepping out of the house, and without my seeing another human being. Every morning after breakfast I'd read or write through the day. And soon it'd be time for dinner, which would be a quiet but nice enough do, a steak or a roast meat and potatoes, sometimes pasta, and usually with a bottle of wine, and coffee and chocolates afterwards. Then I'd sink into the couch to watch a DVD, and then I'd go to bed. When I finally switch off the lights after a bit of bedside reading, it's complete silence, complete darkness, and soon I'd be deep in sleep.

There's something about this present that keeps taking me back to a particular time when I was still in Singapore. During that period, my day would begin at 5 in the morning, and after a thorough day of teaching, I would, once or twice a week, arrive at S's house just in time to do dinner, the day's sweat and grime and satisfaction still sticking onto my shirt. Dinner'd be exactly the same stuff, a steak or a roast meat and potatoes, sometimes pasta, and usually with a bottle of wine too, and coffee and chocolates afterwards. Except there wouldn't be time for a DVD, for I'd be quite drunk and utterly exhausted by then, and many times I fell asleep on S's couch while the coffee was being made. Then, I'd wake up just in time to catch the last bus back, and get some sleep for the next day of school.

Those were happy times, one of my happiest, though it contained one of my saddest too, and that's why it was such a shuddering experience a few evenings ago when I put on a certain Vivaldi, one I kept playing during those times, and every hour came rushing back. And it's this past two weeks' combination of hermitude and deja vu that I began to miss teaching, and to wonder if I would've been happier staying on to teach and making it my lifelong vocation, instead of packing all up and leaving. And it's probably all these peacefulness and solitude and reminiscing - very conducive to tender emotional states - that brought the dreams. They came with all the weird scenes that dreams come with, but in those scenes would turn up my family, my best friends, teaching, and students, each taking a turn, like a revolving tableau vivant.

___

# Lincolnshire

Walking on these cobblestones, I would sometimes stop for a while and imagine what this town was like when the Romans came in AD45 and laid the first stones of the castle and the cathedral. A thousand years later, this town apparently became one of the wealthiest in England. And another nine hundred years later - that is, last night, I had a medieval glimpse of its bustle whilst on a stroll through the annual christmas market, with unusually cheery townsfolk in traditional costume peddling their traditional crafts, wares, and foods. And the old cathedral was all lit up, entirely golden and magnificent. 

One of my favourite writers had written about this 'great church brooding over the town', he who had lived not far away; paragraphs and paragraphs of brilliant images, luminous prose, words lighting fires. . . 

*

Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in silence, dark before germination, silenced after death. Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts, the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will embrace again.

Here in the church, "before" and "after" were folded together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his consummation. Out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light. Through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after knowledge, and experience after experience, remembering the darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after death. Then between-while he had pushed open the doors of the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the hush of the two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the beginning and the end were one.

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated.

And there was no time nor life nor death, but only this, this timeless consummation, where the thrust from earth met the thrust from earth and the arch was locked on the keystone of ecstasy. This was all, this was everything. Till he came to himself in the world below. Then again he gathered himself together, in transit, every jet of him strained and leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch.

-- D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

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. 

___

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? 

___

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.

___

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.

___

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." 

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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.