wireless souls for sale

i sold off my 3 year-old thinkpad to a secondhand shop this afternoon. it's as if a dear friend had died, and it's all a little saddening. i bought it while in uni and it wrote my thesis (where would footnotes be without this humble gadget?); and then and after, the myriad of trials and computations i've subjected it to, it has come to be closer than a friend (it even talks to and smiles at my friends).

but a macbook has come along (though i'd intended to get an Xseries thinkpad), and while i'm still getting used to host of new functions and meanderings, i'm beginning to like it. it's such a loaded concession, an acquired taste of sorts on the one hand, and i-don't-actually-know-why-i-like-it-but-i-seem-to-do on the other. i hope i'll continue to like it, and most importantly, i hope there'll be no problem!

i don't understand technology. it's meant to convenience our lives, it's meant to relieve us of our daily and physical drudgeries by making everything smaller, quicker, easier, and cheaper. yet, we spend more time with it solving and resolving problems - much of which created by itself no less, we spend more money buying the various electronica and spend even more money upgrading and buying even more of them. we amass these cheaper and faster gadgets more and more, at faster and faster rates, and end up with lesser money and even lesser time. handwritten letters, arguably personal histories and amateur artworks are near-extinct, even though everyone i know delights immensely and ineffably in receiving such scrolls. now our emails live as long as we remember our passwords - that is, not very long.

sometime ago i contemplated cutting myself off from this frenzied, technological conspiracy - cancel my phone and internet lines, use no more computers, and just get by with pen and paper. perhaps one day...

and till then, i fear for the things i love - poring through the morning papers, it's sounds like the sounds of rustling leaves; books thick with creamy pages and pages of wonderful prose and another world; letters lovingly-crafted, folded and sealed, received two weeks late and kept forever. what would the world be like when a heartbreak is nothing more but a harddisk crash, reformattable, disposable?
__

Across the gate, your face. You can't come any further. I have to go through. The latch is light. Yes, open it. It was not difficult.

Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

- Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods.

love letter for myself

early december night, and cars and people no longer haunt the streets. the streets glint with after-rain, the dark wraps round me like an overcoat. i walk through the quiet and the cold, past one streetlamp after another, midsky aureoles of orange glow through my restless gaze, reluming the darkness in-between. i feel tender. silence rises and falls, footpaces slow, heartbeats soften, i feel all tender. has it been a year already. innocent nights like this tarry between endless possibilities and one rejection. has it been a year already. that one rejection breaks into a million coloured pieces, the pieces pierce and sear, the night broken. what is one year amidst eternal time, when one time, it all will end? i walk on. in such light, what is the cold when you can watch the rain fall? i walk on. what are teardrops when there are books of laughter?

i walk on my wound.

what is one love when you can love another stranger.

hello from chiang mai

it's not that i don't wanna update but for the past 2 weeks each time i remember and try and update the blogger website doesnt budge from the sign-in page.

and for the last 2 weeks i've been in the northern part of thailand, either hanging around or going places. lazy languid days that i've love-hate sentiments toward; and i kinda miss the books in my room.

it's hard to be by myself here, which was the main reason why i came here - it's almost impossible to have some peace and quiet in singapore. but chiang mai's afflicted with the bane of almost every developing (if not developed) city - chaotic traffic and its generous fumes and noise. it's the exceptional hospitality and friendliness and politeness of the thai people that's making my stay here bearable, and traffic smog notwithstanding, still a less frustrating affair than being in singapore.

p.s. i'll post pics of my US and thailand trips when i get back. i know i know, i promised the aussie trip pics way back in june and they're still nowhere posted. been very busy in school but that's over now.

welcome back o slacker me.

nyc hello

finally reached this sepulchral city, especially when after a 4hour drive from 5am in the dark dawn from washington dc, the first rush upon entering the city was the skyscrapers revealing even more skyscrapers. a raving madman called me a 'fucking nigger' (he must be colourblind). i love this city.

and i'm buying too many books. i bought 2 additional luggage for them.

and i've got six more days here. help.

hello from vermont

the flight wasn't as bad as my previous long-haul ones, thanks to a short and smooth transit (at frankfurt, whose airport reminds one of being in a communist cell - all black white grey). i could even, immediately upon touching down at JFK, rent a car and start on the road - which is nothing until one remembers that the US do their cars left-way (i.e. the wrong way). so whenever i wanted to signal my turnings i switched on the windscreen-wiper instead, and had the tendency to ever so inadvertently veer to the right. a few times i actually turned into the wrong side of the road. luckily oncoming drivers were either slowing down or stationary or generally forgiving. and i could even do parallel parking. a few times. wow.

anyway, drove up to new haven, checked into the hotel, and went round to yale university to have a look (why else would i want to go to new haven- its otherwise neither new nor haven-ly). but oh, yale, what more can i say?

and then this morning, a pop over to hartford, centre of connecticut, and visited one (yes, one) museum, but it did hold genuine artworks of the old masters. and then back on the road, a brief stopover at smith college (sylvia plath's alma mater), and now at brattleboro, vermont, a really small pass-by town that for some reasons became a mini-mecca of counterculture and aging hippies. i've no complaints coz that means bookshops and coffee, lotsa (as far as the size of the town goes bookshops and coffee, and real bookshops and real coffee. i was in this really quaint oldbookshop and immediately knew i had to buy a john knowles and jamaica kincaid. yes, divine revelations do occur in bookshops.

I'll be in this town for 2 nights and shall enjoy the crucible-esque ambience, and then on to waterbury to visit the ben&jerry's confectionery. lotsa other places to go, i'll update when i can.
___

i see that my verbiage has returned. the wonders of being away from school, away from singapore. the places that i've been to so far - airport, streets, laneways, shops, restaurants, cafes - are so filled with dignified silence, that even with a nasty jetlag i feel at rest.

p.s. my last day at school was, to my relief, uneventful. i was not reduced to a torrent of tears, and no one committed suicide. neither did the school building collapse into ruin. but the students were very sweet - they gave cards, photographs, wrote lil notes of thanks and well-wishes and scrolled them like a testamur (really microscopic ones). one class wrote theirs on a tee-shirt and slipped it over a pink (I.Absolutely.Do.Not.Know.What.That.Means) stuffed bear-or-some-such. i'm truly thankful and grateful of course, and I've read all their messages, little gestures that are more than anything money can get.

It's never farewell

Tomorrow is my last day teaching, and I rather write something about it now than after, what with the vivid and certain hindsight and the heavy sense of closure. One and a half years have seemed decades and decades, and there’re too much to say and too many thoughts. But I certainly leave with the fondest and dearest memories. I’d never put in such consuming energy into my endeavours before in my whole life; and yet I awoke every early morning eager to start the new day. The students have been an immense joy to teach, even if they could be utterly exasperating at times. They certainly have taught and inspired me more than I could ever them, and much as I’ll miss them and think of them often, I look forward to they all growing up and stepping out into this big, big world of life and its all, and scaling great beautiful heights. This part of my life has been nothing short of a precious miracle, and in years and years to come, I’ll always remember a boy who grew up wanting to be a teacher and whose wish eventually did come true.
___











但愿你的眼睛只看得到笑容
但愿你流下每一滴泪都让人感动
但愿你以後每一个梦不会一场空

天上人间如果真值得歌颂
也是因为有你才会变得闹哄哄
天大地大世界比你想像中朦胧
我不忍心再欺哄但愿你听得懂

但愿你会懂该何去何从

-王菲-

First Loves

i was thirteen and freshly-weaned from a staple of enid blyton, and grazing for books to read. this sense of loss and wandering only became clearer in retrospect. i remember chancing upon a row of christopher pike novels in the school library and immediately took to the books' characters who themselves were teenagers. but otherwise i was (and am) not a fan of mystery/horror/thriller trash.

one of the wonders of a library shelving real books (so too a bookshop, for that matter), apart from that the books could be loaned for free or a small fee, is that one never knows what one would find, even if one doesn't know what to look for in the first place. and indeed, not knowing what one seeks sometimes leads to surprises, discoveries, and for the better. booklovers, like don juan, would always find a beauty on the shelf.

it was during one of those aimless wanderings i came upon a novel, First Loves, by a local author, philip jeyaretnam. just like a teenager, i felt the protagonist Ah Leong's emotions, yet without being fully aware of it still. just like a child poring over an illustrated storybook, vaguely following the story and conjuring up imaginings only a child with near-non-existent conceptions of the physical world can. i was after all, just stepping into the beginning of the beginning of adulthood.

the things we read once upon a time sometimes come to rest at the end of our consciousness, not as forgotten relics or aimless dust, but as returning motifs of particular scenes, specific sensibilities, that subconsciously steer our base emotions, from which physical actions are wrought upon. the opening lines of First loves is one such, and in the many passing years after, there have been numerous times i walked home in rusted evenings and thought of Ah Leong:

Evening brought the breeze, channelled by the concrete blocks, blowing across Singapore. Evening set the birds chattering, as if desperate for one last word before narkness silenced them. Evening bought light, flooding the corridors of the concrete blocks and lining the roads. The daytime of tinted windows and air-conditioning was giving way to the night-time of flourescent tubes and halogen headlights. White then red flashed the cars speeding past on the road outside Ah Leong's window.

Across the country televisions were coming on and video cassette recorders plugged in. Husbands greeted wives and changed channels. Children greeted mothers and clamoured for dinner. Ah Leong stood at the window and looked out, trying to fix all Singapore in his gaze. ...
___

my reading, like the mind that guides and feeds on it, has matured and developed in seriousness (though the greatest spurt by far was in the last three years - as always i'm a late-bloomer, if ever), and literature has become my religion of sorts (if we refer to writers as creators not unlike gods, then it is not too hyperbolic a metaphor). and First Loves is a rare gem of local literature. the zeitgeist is captured lightly yet surely, and Ah Leong is a quintessential singaporean male teenager finishing school, enlisting into national service, drawing his first pay cheque, falling into his first love ... i've re-read it some three, four, times, at different stages of my life, and each time i take in an overlooked detail, i take with me a new sensibility, and re-connect with it; each time i marvel at my sendipitous find in that humble school library. and along with that musing returns memories of evenings of various colour, memories of myself as the naive young boy who was always in a drifting dreamworld of his own.

scripts

it's been an exhausting week, eversince that madrush of a tuesday, and the exam scripts came in, and i been marking and marking and marking, clearing up to 40 scripts a day. it's the tedium, it's the indecipherable scribbles, the frustrating grammatical errors, it's what i'm earning my living for, at least for now and another one week. and the scripts have all been marked, on top of filing a report on the students' performance. i'm drained, but satisfied at a hard work well done.

i do love my job.

you shouldn't have doubted my ability and willing ness to complete the work. i gave you my word and you should have taken it and trusted me, because i thought you knew me better. for the past one and a half years i have not put in so much, slogged so hard, stayed back and up so late, spent out of my own pockets, earned such a pittance, only to squander it on a last-minute cop-out. I'd said i would, and i would. i absolutely love what i'm doing and i cant love my job anymore than i do now though i would if i could.

i could be swamped with a million more scripts and they'd be nothing next to your galling doubting countenance.

S.

i could not even imagine my past; and when i think of it now, it seems to be showing me the life of some other persion. and that other person is what i repudiate; my whole 'self' is someplace else ... when i think back ... to all the delirium of my then self ... i seem to be observing the obsessions of a stranger, and i am stupefied to learn that that stranger was myself.

-- e. m. cioran
___

S left yesterday for a new job in the uk, and i'll miss him terribly. from being my politics tutor as an undergrad to being my phd supervisor, he was also always a friend. and to think it all started so serendipituously. it was my first day in the city, just off the plane, and poking my yet-enrolled nose around the uni and signing up for courses and tutorials. "fresh off the boat!" he said, when he spotted me scribbling my name onto one of the notices pinned on the wall. i had signed up for his tutorial.

that was four years ago when i was living a different and previous life; who'd have known how S, with his encyclopedic mind and formidable intellect, would deeply indebt me, would come to be someone who'd play an important and transformative role in my life.

the past year that he was marked an extraordinary deepening of our friendship. a particular incident had to happen that scuppered everyone's aspirations. at his most distraught and frustrated moment he had said, "something good must come out of this." and indeed there were happy endings. the past year had been an incredible one with S, with our once or twice weekly cook-ins, generous wine and coffee and music and conversations. to say i'll miss him and i'm sad that he's left is to put things mildly.

hopefully to better verse and voice

i like the fact that this blog exists. a handful of friends and a few fingers of students know about it, and i want to keep it that way. i'm a very private person, not very lively and certainly not loud and going by developments over the years, these traits look set to persist if not deepen.

most of all i like the fact that i'm writing for myself and no one else and i'll make sure this credo remains. i need an outlet to write, and i realise i type better than i pen and i need somewhere to store my writings that can be accessed and added wherever and where else perfecter than the Net?

the torrential downpour last week was an experience that only drove home this point. i had a brolly but no matter, i was soaked, my bag was soaked, my books (to kill a mockingbird; naipaul's essays) were soaked, my mont blanc pen got lost amidst the wet flurry (i cry), and my notebook that i pen thoughts in occasionally was reduced to something that can only be described as watercolour impressionism gone mad (the artist, incidentally, had used only one colour - montblanc blue).

the books should be fine, maybe after a few years the pages would be straightened out (if only gay people could be restored like that, hallelujah, but would they want to? restored to what?). my notebook's a new one, having recently filled out the older (and by far the most precious) one, so the damage was little. i can always re-write my thoughts and second drafts are usually better versions.

my greatest loss was the pen - not because it is expensive (it is), but because it has sentimental value and my name engraved. it is like possessing a first edition of a beloved novel by a favourite writer - beautiful, well-made, poetic, timeless. these are rare qualities in our ugly, gaudy, commercial age where today's fashion is tomorrow's trash. these are qualities that varnish objects priceless. i'll certainly buy another to replace the loss, but identical to its predecessor it may be, beloveds have only one life, one death, and another would never be the same. and especially writing instruments, that for me with a literary disposition and aspiration, they are rich in tradition, history, and symbolism. it is a pen and not a pen and not just a pen especially a well-made pen of vintage. i'll find an occasion to justify a new buy, and mark a new beginning. hopefully to better verse and voice.

on that hopeful note, here's One Art by elizabeth bishop:

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

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.
___

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.
___

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
___

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
___

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

___

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?

mexico

___

19.12.2006. cancun. westin. sunrise white beach. christian. margaritas. chitchen itza. on the road to merida. vancouver girl. presidente intercontinental. plaza mayor. catedral and endless calles. paseo de montejo. cafe la cabana. hycendas. robert & arturo. guadalajara. holiday inn. city of roses. swirling pigeons. catedral 1618. mariachis. plaza de la liberacion. tlaquepaque. jaliso. tequila. alejandro. tequila. writing in the dark. mexico city. sheraton. alameda central. palacio de bellas artes. cafe caffe. rene. monumento a la revolucion. paseo de la reforma. museo n.d. antropologia. i love rufino tamayo. antonio. christian. and the endless shots of libreria. i watched: vitus. welcome home. one summer. the wedding director. i read: winterson. hollinghurst. vidal. suskind. burroughs. calvino. marquez. ozick. winterson. 07.01.2007. singapore.

there is only the present and nothing to remember

How does one play word games when the rules and outcomes defy language; and when they route to the heart, how can words ever suffice? Who else but i can hear my own heart break within the seeming stoic slats of my ribs, hear its reluctant, plaintive echoes in the lonely hollow of my chest? They say a metaphor is a leap of imagination, a leap off reality. But heartbreaks make their pain and sorrow felt in all its searing glory. And heartbreaks leave me and me alone to pick up the scattered shards of silent aftermath.
___

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could we go on? How could we ever get up and off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember.

-- jeanette winterson

redbean

finally, the phd

routine and what i thought were life's little permanancies died the day i finished NS, and when not long after, i emerged from the hospital with a part of me - physically and emotionally - lobbed off, i've rarely been able to see my life past one year's horizon. tasmania, melbourne, NTU - first as a student then a salaried yuppie, and then now at the school where i'm teaching, it had and has been difficult to flip through an annual calendar, and plan for a foreign year. it's ironic because my introverted and indolent temperament naturally craves for the prosaic, the settled, the humdrum. but i repeatedly find myself hurled out there frantically rifling for yet another still ground in the shade. fate or subconscious masochism many times i wonder. simply, why? but i imagine otherwise, like holding down a 9-5 office job in a swanky skyscraper down-swanky-town like every one else and i develop convulsive reservations and worries about my sanity and happiness. so the choice (or, the no-choice) is clear. and so when this morning, when the news that my imminent phd candidature, that has hitherto been wavering tenuously between obstinate destitution and/or effortless perdition, has been awarded a scholarship, i was so relieved i couldn't feel it. and it is only just, a day past, that i realise an eternity of three years has been sweetly sequestered off my checkered life.

couldn't we live forever without running out of occasions?

i havent been posting because of school so that's a good thing. all my energies are channeled and spent there. but i've not stopped writing - am still ruminating in my trusty notebook (of the papyrus variety), and though even the entries there are dwindling in content and frequency, my impromptu aphorisms remain in my head. when i've time they'll appear somewhere for personal posterity. which effectively means during the june holidays.

meantime, i'll take a short cut - and put up something not mine (but infinitely better). so here're some more mark doty, whose poetry have masted my sail past a recent high surf. and not only that, the shiver down my spine, the undulant wave of visceral orgasm. . .

from Chanteuse:

... that is how i would describe her voice,
her lyric that becomes, now, my city:
torch, invitation, accomplishment. my romance
doesn't need a blue lagoon standing by...

as she invented herself, memory revises
and restores her, and the moment she sang.
i think we were perfected,

when we became her audience,
and maybe from that moment on
it didn't matter so much exactly

what would become of us.
i would say she was memory,
and we were restored by

the radiance of her illusion,
her consummate attention to detail,
--name the colors-- her song: my Alexandria,

my romance, my magnolia
distilling lamplight, my backlit glory
of the wigshops, my haze

and glow, my torch, my skyrocket,
my city, my false,
my splendid chanteuse.
___

from The Wings

don't let anybody tell you

death's the price exacted
for the ability to love;

couldn't we live forever
without running out of occasions?

piccies

tell me where they end

it's in the early mornings that i can better imbibe poetry and its exacting images than i can read prose, maybe because the mind is newly minted, the air is cool, and time is still asleep. of late, i have also been turning to poetry as amulets against me.

from Storm Warnings

Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

-- adrienne rich

there's this class that i teach all 3 subjects to, and i cannot say enough how much i've been enjoying the lessons with them. i see them everyday, sometimes twice a day - cheery, precocious, bright fifteen year olds naturally interested in anything anatomical and petulant.

i love this mark doty - the final stanza is heartrending -

Fog Argument

1. Jade

Of course I know it ends.
I know there's a precise limit

where salt marsh gives way
to fogged water's steel.

But from here, from moor's edge
where the tide pond

doubles the swallows,
it doesn't seem to;

blonde acres
vanish at the rim

into the void,
a page on which anything

might be written,
though nothing is. What I love

is trying to see
the furthest grassy extreme,

that fog-marbled horizontal...
Rippling strokes, a few high dunes

hung on the edges of the page
like Chinese brushstrokes,

barely there, and out
on the far shore

the sea gone a clouded mint,
gone without edges, horizon erased,

a single silken exhalation
the color of mown grass,

unripe persimmon, gooseberry,
juniper, sage, green shadow

in the hollow of collarbone,
love, i know, it ends,

you don't have to remind me,
though it seems a field

of endless jade.

2. Beach Roses

What are they, the white roses,
when they are almost nothing,
only a little denser than the fog,

shadow-centered petals blurring,
toward the edges, into everything?

This morning one broken cloud
built an archipelago,
fourteen gleaming islands

hurrying across a blank plain of sheen:
nothing, or next to nothing

--pure scattering, light on light,
fleeting.
And now, a heap of roses
beside the sea, white rugosa
beside the foaming hem of shore:
brave,
waxen candles...

And we talk
as if death were a line to be crossed.
Look at them, the white roses.
Tell me where they end.