Why do you labour?

Come, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labour for that which does not satisfy?

Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.

Isaiah 55:1-3

affair with words

Found this in my phone. Nicole said I should write more- I do write, except they are mostly snippets while on the go. I store them in some secret cupboard and forget about them. Until I unearth them again - in this case, five months later since November last year. Am quite pleased with the find, rather like finding dusty coins under the bed. Or greeting familiar friends in the form of thoughts that once flitted through my brain. Here goes.

- 

I have a secret obsession with words. I write them with calligraphy pens, type them with a vintage typewriter shipped from 1941 Canada, read them in solitary whispers on my bed. 

I roll them around my tongue, under my breath, in imaginary mental conversations. I like them too much to spill them out on the ground, in front of people who waste them. 

Words are potent, like drugs. The more you abuse them, the less effective they become. 
Some people are addicted to the sound of their own voice. As though they were stones cast to fill a void, ringing and resounding in the cavernous emptiness. But those are just echos- the shadows of words that have no real substance.

Sometimes words become disconnected from your voice. When that happens they become powerless, or merely peripheral- like noise. The disconnect happens not between the tongue and the throat, but deeper- between your mind and your conscience. They cut your teeth before cutting your heart.
 
Sometimes the disconnect happens when the felt has not found its way into your consciousness. In those cases it is not your fault. We are all searching, blundering, through the darkness, for a rope that will draw us out. Sometimes we take shortcuts - clinging on to another's rope - instead of finding our own. That is known as a cliche. It may be degrees away from what we truly feel, but it is within easy reach. It gets us out onto safe terrain quickly, but we don't realize we left a part of ourselves behind. That part which is your own, your voice, your unction, your beating, bleeding humanity.

Words are precious, so they are spare. I taste them, so well that sometimes the moment passes, and they are left unsaid. 

They become heavy, in those moments when the shadow falls on their demise. They stayed with me, and died in me.

Stillborn. 

he walked in

he walked in

when the early afternoon light was warming my room. 

in my drowsy state of sleep I thought my brother had come home. 

my throat was sore, nose congested- all I knew was I felt unusually sleepy after breakfast and prayer. 

He walked in and stood on the right side of my bed and bent over, lightly touching his forehead to mine. 

His hand was on my arm, as though checking my temperature 

I did not have the fever. His palm was warm against the crook of my arm. 

Sleep pulled up over me again like a blanket. 

I woke up in the dream, aware that someone had just come into my room, and I had proof (a tweezer in my hand?)

I woke again, in the exact same position on the bed, with my room as it was in the dream. 

The sore throat was gone. 

Seed.

This seems to be a season of articulation.

My architecture professor once taught me that logic should be projected to its natural conclusion. That meant that if I was studying certain phenomena, say, the premise that rent is related to the dynamism of a city, I should follow that course of thought right through to its final manifestation. Or if I thought that the constant reshaping of the Singapore River to straighten its boundaries was a psychical and physical reflection of Singapore's obsession with efficiency, could I draw out that line of logic and project its future form 50 years down the road?

Another way of looking at this is to consider a seed. I've heard it said that humans often over estimate what we can do in a day, and under estimate what we can get done in a week. To further that thought, we often fail to estimate what is the accumulated outcome of 365 days of thoughts, choices, actions and words in a year. Every day exists in seed form: it is the microcosm of a lifetime of accumulated actions. Boredom is a state of unfocused activity, which leads to aimlessness. Stagnation too, is a form of non-action.

That makes me question the way I choose to live out my days. It makes me wonder about the weight of each moment, which I am often unconscious of. I live in an uncharted fashion, depending on the amount of energy I have to expend. Work occupies so much of my time and energy, after which I feel like I just want to hide in my bed and recuperate. Other instincts wrestle for my attention - the desire to maintain friendships, to explore and do something exciting, to make and create something with my hands, to attend some event or watch a show that could inspire me, to spend time with family.

What would be a more conscious way of living? (It's difficult to avoid sounding like a tree-hugging hippie.) The main components of life are unlikely to change: the cycles of work; ties of friendships and family; interests which are always relegated to the extra-curricular. So surely what must change is my attitude towards each of these things; or the way in which these are carried out, through a process that is more life-giving. It is rethinking the value of the 'mundane'- a word splattered with pessimistic undertones of ennui. It is questioning and finding purpose for the everyday, in its most predictable and banal sense. It is seeding my goals within the soil of the everyday, and realizing that gratification is a fruit in its season. It is enjoying work, and not treating it as a necessary evil. It is appreciating the simplicity of daily rituals, and being grateful for the small.

Otherness.

Strangeness alienates. But it also fascinates. Without the concept of the other we have no concept of our self. 

So in a sense we are all strange to each other. In coming into your space and encountering your thoughts, I discover the alien. The unexpected. Isn't that what conversation is? A series of random tosses that always ends up different from the linear ping pong that goes on in your head. Part of that is because one can never fully anticipate what the other is capable of saying, thinking and articulating. 

So friendship is this weird game of ping pong. Where the tables are constantly shifting. But that line remains. That line between your court and mine, where your half and mine meet. 

Mystery is essential to maintaining a true friendship. If I fail to surprise you (at turns by bits of information, humour, stories and sparks of personality that you did not perceive in me previously), it means I have become predictable and stopped growing as a person. There is no space of otherness for us to meet and spar at anymore. The tables are removed, so to speak. Old couples are romanticized as being able to predict their other half's next word; at knowing their pasts and the way he or she would react to certain news. But if that really were the case they'd all be bored to death. 

Otherness is an essential space. It is the gap within which we are fully ourselves. Our inner desire to be understood leads to the shrinking of this space, while our contest to maintain truth inwardly stakes the boundaries. Within these poles, our terrain is negotiated. If we expand this space by revealing too little, empty loneliness creeps in. But if we give up our preferences to rote responses, if we cease to be other, we lose our selves. 

#2AMTHOUGHTS. 

SF vs NF Ramblings.

Woke up. Read a bit of victory in the wilderness. Got distracted. Read a friend's blog. Thought about the many things to write about. Tried to switch on laptop to play insanity workout video. Computer did not boot. Did insanity workout on ipad. Showered. Had breakfast. Shipped imac into my room. Figured out how to backup my computer. Transferred things from my computer to the imac. Took 2 hours. Set up Time Machine on my laptop. Has been syncing for the past 2.5 hours, and it's only 60% done. Transcribed an interview. Pottered about on taobao.

Is that how an SF's blog would read like? In essence? (Assuming here a lot more run-on sentences like haha omg and then the computer took damn long to boot I almost died waiting so save me already because I have verbal diarrhoea)

And an NF's?

Wilderness. That has been going on so long I'm not sure what to look out for anymore. How would the ending of the status quo look like? I have no grid to imagine it with. It has been almost a comfortable place. That's the problem, isn't it? I'm constantly dealing with almosts- I'm almost okay. I'm almost certain I'm in the right place. I'm almost sure it's coming to an end, and that all of this gray matter has been for some purpose, yet unrevealed.

(Taking a seemingly random, unexplainable leap in thought)
Reading Ayn Rand has jarred something deep within me. It started with an appreciation for her craft. The way she writes is so logical, so precise, and so calculated that reading it feels effortless. The narrator is invisible - but what flows from her pen are sentences that are palpable. It's equal to being inside the protagonist's head and heart; feeling the torment of Francisco's struggle, digging in the pits of Dagny Taggart's emotional strain (that's what love is, the pits.)

Reading Ayn Rand's guide to writing fiction, and appreciating the expert magician's adroit grasp of subject matter. She knows her tools, and she lays them out with such clarity and perception it makes me believe I can do it too. After that, I launched into the heart of Atlas Shrugged- and one particular paragraph caught at my throat.

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

It's like traveling with a kin on a journey, and finding out mid-way that you were heading in different directions all along.

What exactly is sin? If a creature with no knowledge of good or evil ate of a fruit - what exactly was 'wrong' about it? How could he know? Was he even capable of reason?

I started asking persons whom I thought had the answers, and one who gave me a specific definition for sin - a lack of trust in God.

Much to say, and too little time - have to continue in another post to give this tangle its due.

Rags.

Spent hours cleaning my room today. There's been a spate of renovation around the house, digging up dead dust bunnies and immortalizing insects onto the walls by painting them.

Anyway, my table was covered with dust and I ran out to the yard to grab a rag from the rag pile. Came into my room, and as I was wiping the slate clean I was hit by this memory. Of a lady I met in China, who worked as a kitchen cook. She was six months pregnant, and she had a toddler constantly running around the kitchen as she prepared meals. You can imagine the state of hubbub the kitchen was constantly in, with oversized woks and pans capable of dishing out grub enough for twenty.

Someone in the adjacent kitchen (yes, there were two separate rooms) screamed out for a rag to wipe the hob with. Seeing a white rag stashed between the edge of two pots, I grabbed it and started moving towards the other kitchen. At least, it used to be white before being splattered with brown dirt marks and absorbing a perpetual yellow stain throughout.

The cook came rushing after me and said, "No no no, not that rag!" And stuffed a deep brown rag into my hands instead. "This, is for wiping the baby's face."

I was flummoxed, but I hope it didn't show on my face. That yellowed, grubby rag was for wiping the baby's face ?!?!?! (The exclamation marks were quite literally exploding in my brain like National Day fireworks.)

So today, I was cleaning my table. I was thinking about the pile of rags in my yard, all of which are considerably clean, unyellowed, and possibly quite useful for cleaning many a child's precious face.

Who would have thought a rag could get one so soddy sentimental.