38: all these things that i've done

Another head aches, another heart breaks
I am so much older than I can take
And my affection, well it comes and goes
I need direction to perfection, no no no no 


Help me out
Yeah, you know you got to help me out
Yeah, oh don't you put me on the backburner
You know you got to help me out 


And when there's nowhere else to run
Is there room for one more son
These changes ain't changing me
The cold-hearted boy I used to be

Yeah, you know you got to help me out

Yeah, oh don't you put me on the backburner

You know you got to help me out

You're gonna bring yourself down

Yeah, you're gonna bring yourself down

Yeah, you're gonna bring yourself down 

I got soul, but I'm not a soldier

I got soul, but I'm not a soldier [...]



----

I should really start committing to post-school runs on top of mugging - they're great for emptying your head of worries and preoccupations (also, for divesting all the pudginess from those muffins :P) Every point is a source of marvel at how far you've come and an enticing challenge of how far you can still go.

Also I feel like a recruit now, what with the haircut. Oh well consider this an enlistment in the mugging army!

----

and, to continue an obsession with moths and lightbulbs and candles:



the lesson of the moth
Don Marquis

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

-

I found this while looking for a poem from No Other City - something about light bulbs and reading in the dark. Shall find it again tomorrow!

Expectant. I think of living life with a slight forward tilt, stumbling nose first into the future's perfume, letting instinct muzzle a way through when reason fails to see. After all, only hindsight is 20/20...

41: ordinary

ordinary
Aaron Maniam

I always wanted to write a poem about nothing. But
no, you said. Every poem is about something. Tut
tutting me you launched into a long description
of the significance of the ordinary - even a prescription
for the chemist on its everyday paper and
plain, ordinary writing. Bland
boring bored just like me. But I didn't want
to celebrate or elegise. So I was blunt

and wrote a poem about nothing.

I sat and thought of being at home, nothing
to do nothing to say (and enjoying it) nothing
much to remember, really.

Sitting on mother's lap, old trite cliched
hackneyed image but still a comfort. Nothing
much else.

Train journey through Ted Hughes country:
no wicked winding wind no streak of thunder
no lightning applause no moors whispering my name.
Just grass and sibilant leaves
and the train's piston's eternity.

Nothing particularly memorable about the
conversation either - random words
interspersed with silences we didn't
have to try to fill. Not the stuff
of speeches, really, and sometimes
we don't need words to let us down.
Some things best unsaid unthought unbeen.

There's a certain comfort, restful
helpful salve. in nothing. Those
moments people don't write poems about don't
think of don't talk of don't remember:
which hover around hearts, brushing softly,
softly as we forget to forget them.

----

Climbing out of a rut is way easier if you know where you're going. Then after that you have to worry about being turned into roadkill by those who are speeding along...

...the week is as featureless as a desert. A pebble (rough? brown?) tumbles in the desert in sand-blasts, until it becomes the same motes of nothing which abrades it.

I guess I wouldn't mind a quieter world after all.
(That's partly the problem too, ain't it? Not minding versus wanting. Passivity gives a horrible feeling of a lack of agency. Yet to struggle too much against fate is to let these chains cut deeper into your skin.)

I don't know.

Turn thee / unto me with mercy, for I am desolate and lost.

42: between

Between Forgetting and Clinging To
Yong Shu Hoong

Why do I not keep journals? Because I am convinced
if the memories are worth preserving, I can easily
stall their fading. But lately I've started to wonder
if my mind could last that long. I begin shadowing
my father for symptoms. Even his father, at 90,
could not be indicted with memory loss. Perhaps
the curse of amnesia does not run in this family.
What's worse is the incapacity to forget - how it takes
three days to wring out all thoughts of work
while touring volcanoes. Or perhaps never -
wretched episodes from history clinging to me
like sand and humidity. I remember the glee expunging
files from diskettes, cloning emptiness until I'm left
with a bounty of space itching to be reassembled.
But in real life, I continue hoarding every shard...
until the stars and clouds haul me in, to where
I stand with pieces of rhymes and dreams in orbit,
utterly lost over what I should fling to flames.

----

1. Wow - that must be a nice capstone to months of studying for IBO. But of course that metaphor isn't quite enough; these are people who won't settle for stasis.

2.
words
Arthur Yap

words have sometimes a way of stilling themselves
& then, no, we have a way of stilling words
in a way to still ourselves:
a choice of being still
& quiet to be still.

words need people to fill their blanks,
quick eye-flicks across the page:
a page of contained dimensions
housing a pharynx
that, from edge to edge,
is still,
still as a minute glottal sphinx.
-
I have a huge problem with being concise. Funny how I have so much to say about a span of two years - by comparison, my stint here seems pretty normal. No, what strikes me about it is not its normalcy, but how much of an ordeal it was. Not to say that it was a horrible two years of pain and suffering (it wasn't - friends, young and old, and the occasional fruition of effort do make the slogging worth it) - but a large lesson that taught me much. (But did I learn?)

When you're able to write about something, you can probably come to terms with it. Still its memory for ever. I'm a bit too greedy, I guess, trying to reflect about everything? Yet to settle for less seems reductive. There's a slight difference between that and being discretionary, I suppose. Perfectionism is an annoying trait when you don't have the means to grasp your goals.

3. The #1 reason why the F+TCM blog was started was to ask ourselves if we could find one thing to remember, to cherish?, every day amidst the tedium of studying. We'd consider that to be quite a blessing. Well we aren't staying there every day (or at least I'm not - sigh I'd much rather do so actually. Needa focus!) so it isn't really the photojournal that I dreamt it to be, but finding one thing to share or be thankful about is a close approximation.

Also, we get bored with studying sometimes.

4. I think I sorely need the reassurance that whatever effort I'm pouring in isn't going to waste. (Especially if it's on other people?) Or, at least, I need to be magnanimous enough to learn from my mistakes. I guess the two things I am extremely bad at are coming to terms with things and avoiding their reprise...

and I am too easily intimidated by the thought of work. Need to learn to chill and take things one step at a time. Not just in acads, but in larger projects that aren't just about me.


One sunset at a time, Prelims is coming!! I haven't sat down to work towards something big in ages (since chem, I suppose) - for all the grumbling we have against As, it is a rite of passage, I suppose. 


Let's see how tomorrow goes :P


5. I should start an MSWord poetry anthology! Like a personal one in which I amass swathes of poetry I've enjoyed. In fact I need to start curating loads of things: insights on my lit texts, GP..."The man who has no memory makes one out of paper." (Littoc) I'm not a one-hit reader, unfortunately...


6. Arthur Yap's antho "A Space of City Trees" is familiar ground - the poet plays with syntax a fair bit not unlike Cummings, but his major achievement is in striking metaphors that paint and limn in words. Which is every poet's job, I suppose. A little like some strands of photog, where you make the commonplace unfamiliar or exciting again. Or that you spotlight something small and not commonly thought about, in a new sheen. and Yong Shu Hoong's antho "From within the Marrow" has this conversational yet searchingly contemplative tone that can smith out foreign landscapes / familiar scenarios and use them to expound on some emotion or thought. Not easy if you tend to inadvertently alienate your reader - great writers should draw readers into the story world rather than leave them out of it. (the poem up there is hardly his best - it's just what I happened to think about)


The most loved poems aren't just the ones with clever craft; they're also the ones which you can relate to. Like you've found someone who knows what you're thinking and completes your sentences for you!


in the quiet of the night
Arthur Yap

in the quiet of the night
when alert ears pulse sound
i can hear again the words,
the poet i was earlier reading:
he is one person i understand fully.
i understand he is a poet
& i understand his poetry.
i even understand my own knowledge
of this privacy which is public literary study.

the words will move on more swiftly
than tomorrow will be now. & i will
know, in reading again,
i do not know him
or any other, or myself, or that any poetry
is the public transaction that it must be.
& it must be private ultimately.



6. That’s why families are so important. Other people walk out the door and they’re gone!
Extend that to friends, and the statement retains its validity, to me at least. You know you'll see them again; or even if you don't, you've known them, which is a consolation.


7. Time does heal some scrapes - I wrote a longer post yesterday while trying to finish my RIJ documentation with the same lack of inhibition, but alas. Now, one night later, I think: it's not that all bad...


8. I cannot resist! One more:



when last seen
Arthur Yap

three things he said & her reply
rang with domestic despair.
there he lurked, practicising his cruelty.
too suddenly her sadness overwhelmed
&, behind familiar things, a new keen
hate & that, subsiding, erased
her sadness. her regret & shame
seemed to flow through her fingers;
the prepared vegetables definitely tasted
too oily; her snakes-&-ladders emotions
the chequered dishcloth. three times the drain gurgled
& her request rang with clarity.
there he lurked, practicising his plumbing.
the snakes & ladders slithered down,
carrot ends & chillie seeds & onion roots.
as he got up she threw the dishcloth,
his face the draughtsboard. she saw distinctly
a softening of his features &, stepping forward,
shed all her tears into the sink.

9. Gonna leave this poem on the windowsill of my mind like a votive candle that whispers, in morse flickers, a silent communion with its own depthless reflections on black glass.

[...]

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

10. Speaking of candles, here is one passage that shows Forster at work! (still haven't quite warmed up to the story, but his stylistic capacities have long been proven). I suspect it to be thematically important; clutching at literary straws here, perhaps. One-third through now!

They are dark caves. Even when they open towards the sun, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the circular chamber. There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit: the walls of the circular chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaid with lovely colours divides the lovers, delicate stars of pink and grey interpose, exquisite nebulae, shadings fainter than the tail of a comet or the midday moon, all the evanescent life of the granite, only here visible. Fists and fingers thrust above the advancing soil — here at last is their skin, finer than any covering acquired by the animals, smoother than windless water, more voluptuous than love. The radiance increases, the flames touch one another, kiss, expire. The cave is dark again, like all the caves.

11. The more I use WP the more enamoured I am with its cleaner layout and fonts. Hmm I might jump ship if this intensifies :P As per point #5 I'd welcome an enticing outlet to curate memories and readings in.

45: only lines

only lines
Arthur Yap

should i also add:
here are only lines
linked by the same old story.
the same basic plot
in which they are grown

should add
little doubt the field is only green
the sky the same old blue
in the presence of my eyes,
your preference
(though not mine)
should see for your own eyes
and if you can laugh
care with some concern
it is because (like me)
you need lines
to add up this same old story

----

"The poor man's paradise - is a little peace." (Streetcar)

I could go on and on and hammer words into the mulch but I would gain no ground and whatever life was here, is buried alive.

48: anchor

1. Support our "band"! http://fengandthecoffeemachine.wordpress.com/
Also, like us on FB :D

2.

When all the world is spinning 'round 
Like a red balloon way up in the clouds 
And my feet will not stay on the ground
You anchor me back down


I am nearly world renowned 
As a restless soul who always skips town 
But I look for you to come around
And anchor me back down


There are those who think that I'm strange
They would box me up and tell me to change
But you hold me close and softly say
That you wouldn't have me any other way


When people pin me as a clown
You behave as though I'm wearing a crown
When I'm lost I feel so very found
When you anchor me back down


(repeat 3rd verse, then 1st)

3. Finished another round of filing in anticipation of Prelims prep, though what prompted this thought was consolidating the cards accrued over the months. Then I realise how much I appreciate order. So that I know where everything is, that I know it's safe somewhere (as you already know my room is a warzone).

But more than that: these are steadfast reminders, the place[s] no map or heritage guide can reveal. How much does it take to aggregate a person? The contents in a room of one's own? (I have little personal effects to mark me) How thin one's existence can be, unless it's stapled to the earth, heels dug into some sort of purpose. I'm getting tired and a nagging guilt of having neglected studies is gnawing at me, though. Maybe another way is knowing that you are connected with many other sheets, fluttering in the winds of change, every invisible ripple of motion keenly felt. The last two words make a nice phrase - it appears both in HK and Remains!

4. I admire Philo's strike-a-pose, distance-from-self, critique-self, strike-another-pose approach - in the eyes of a computational theoretical-biologist (not mine la) it's a brilliant iterative approach that brings us ever closer to approximations of the truth! (of LIFE) I fervently hope that all theoretical discussions eventually have some practical use, however - or at least, can advance our ways of thinking and hence impact practice in a meaningful way. Else there won't even be a medium in which to bear the mental reverberations of the exercise, and all voice will be lost in the hermetic. Realist speaking here!

5. also I really like this sentence, from Where Else, Really?:
Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean.


Sometimes you just have to hang on and wait for the ebb and flow to die down a little so that you can clamber on to an anchor, to safety


and since we're on this:
...the wind blows a milkweed puff and two seeds do not fly.


6. There's a lot to do in these forty-odd days! Chem results are back for most and people are posting minor improvements and stuff. Good, but could be much better. Hope we can make them major by Prelim's arrival. Shan't bother about Math till Wed. Lit is tomorrow which will be a sharp splash of cold water to the face. Ah well come what may, all springs reduce their currents to mine eyes, / That I, being govern'd by the watery moon, / May send forth plenteous tears to drown the world! - kidding la 

7. Way too much sea/wind imagery here! I sound as if sailing the oceans is a mortal fear of mine. Which it isn't. Kite flying is perfectly fine with me, and staring at the sea's scurries is pretty therapeutic. But yes, the caprices of nature are strong; we can at best change our tilt in response to the paths of the gyres, nothing more

49: without a word

(this is a very long and indulgent fanboying post - be warned)


1. Just finished A.S. Byatt's Possession! (it's pronounced bye-ett. edit: by "just", I mean 2h before the post time. gosh) Which is a minor victory considering that it's the longest novel I've read in ages (507) - now really doing anything febrile is like working with a film camera that fails to spool/wind so that everything becomes exposed on the same frame - dreamscape and reality and fiction are melded into one, you become caught on the wrong side of the glass and so on, caught in story...but this is a book that will yield much to the patient, constant reader. Possession is wrought on so many levels - that of literary scholars and the figures whose shadows / glows they bask in, of biographers, of love, of letters (the sender keeps the copyright, the recipient, the letter), of artifacts...it is a heady book; overwhelming, sensorily, to behold (so many pages of letters, diary entries and poems all styled after Victorian writing) and intensely demanding of one's ability to read (Vict lit is no joke - with words like "tergiversate" springing up everywhere), yet still exciting - it is, at its heart, a mystery novel, apart from being a Romance (a very tragic one, too - letters sent, but never read by their intended party...) A work of undeniable erudition - so this is what happens when those who do EL/Lit studies for a living + on the side end up writing novels!

Well I must admit that the reading wasn't easy - I underestimate the number of pages dedicated to the poems letters diaryentries (one chapter ran 45 pages of Ash-Christabel correspondence. FORTY-FIVE!), and being in the front 40% of the book (historically a difficult part of any reading for me) that was very trying on my patience. And I fear most of the Vict-styled poems' artistry is lost on me. Interesting to note, though - Ash is loosely based on Robert Browning (the same guy who gave us 'Two in the Campagna' - and, surprisingly, 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin'!) and Tennyson, while Christabel is supposedly mirrored after Rossetti ('Aloof'!)...hmm if you ever feel like burying the book in some crevice of your bookshelf and never restarting it again, reading out the poems sorta helps

It's very entertaining to see how much the book owes its roots to the traditions of Victorian novels - I think the ending is thematically clever but a wee bit contrived; anyway a tree splits in a storm and impedes the antagonist's escape, oh and did I mention that he was busy grave-digging and the storm happened to start brewing then, why yes I seem to have neglected telling you that the buildings' descriptions are very telling of their inhabitants' characters and struggles, and by the way everything seems to be righted ("write-d"?) in the younger generation...you know where this is going, don't you!

and, a source of private mirth: all the references to Hamlet (even Lear! A dog was named after one of the dogs in Lear. And the usual Shakespearean tragic-hero-determined line from same play: "I am tied to the stake, and I must stay the course"), that pre-Raph painting of Ophelia which was supposed to be part of the era of paintings where Byatt drew her characterisation from, the fear of "what dreams may come", things dreamt of in philosophies...

also it's a bit like HBW / Waterland where two stories eventually braid into one, with the present-day drama echoing the long-dead Victorian one. Ah this leads me nicely to this quote-dump. which my ill-disciplined fancy of words will not predispose me to spare you:

For when you get the feeling that life is starting to mirror art far more than it should (and that, somehow, the exigencies of a book can somehow explain away your life)...

Somewhere in the locked away letters, Ash had referred to the plot or fate which seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but those of others. And it is probable that there is an element of superstitious dread in any self-referring, self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognizes that it has got out of hand, that connections proliferate apparently at random, that is to say, with equal verisimilitude, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, not controlled by conscious intention, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist intention, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the 'free', but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to some--to what?--end. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. 'Falling in love', characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Roland was troubled by the idea that the opposite might be true. Finding themselves in a plot, they might suppose it appropriate to behave as though it were that sort of plot. And that would be to compromise some kind of integrity they had set out with. (420)

For uncertainty and how it bears down on the shores, wears down the fundaments of the known with the weighty expanse of the unknown (and this wasn't even narration; it was from a diary entry):

Every inch was painful - I think uncertainty is maybe more painful than any other emotion, it both drives one on and disappoints and paralyses, so that we went on in a mounting kind of suffocation and bursting. Every large dark patch - a gorse bush with a rag caught on it, an abandoned worm-eaten barrel - were objects of terrible hope and fear. (375)

For a description of wind, which, for once, isn't watery (ok who am I kidding it's wet wind all the same):

Our house is built of granite, like most of the houses on this coast, long and low, with high pointed slate roofs and pignons. It stands in a courtyard surrounded by a high wall, to create a space of quiet inside the wind, as much as to keep out anything. Everything here is built to stand in the streaming winds and beating rain off the Atlantic. The slate is more often glistening with wet than not. I love it also in the summer, when it can shine in the heat. Our windows are deep, and high-arched, like church-windows. Our house has only four major rooms, two upstairs, two down, each with two deep windows, on two walls, to provide light in all weathers. Outside also is a turret, with a dovecot above, and a place for dogs below. Dog Tray, however, and my father’s brach, Mirza, live indoors. Behind the house, sheltered from the Ocean, is the orchard, where I played as a child, which then seemed infinitely spacious and now is cramped. It too is walled with a wall of dry stones and huge sea cobbles which, the peasants say, “spend” the wind, breaking its force among innumerable holes and crannies. In storms, when the wind is in that quarter, the whole wall sings, a stony song like a pebble beach. The whole of this country is full of the song of the wind. When it blows, the people plant their feet more firmly, and so to speak, sing into it, the men deepening their bass, the women raising their tones.

And lastly, for an ode to reading itself (I really, really like the bolded paradox):

There are readings — of the same text — that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are — believe it — impersonal readings — where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark — readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. ...

Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash's voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader. (471)

This was the same book that gave us the character Roland that followed "the movements of Ash's mind, stalked through the twists and turns of his syntax, suddenly sharp and clear in an unexpected epithet." (you feel like some vulnerable woodland creature snaking through tall grass, doing Lit - which happens a lot) The same book that gave us trenchant, resonant quotables such as these:

• All of us have things in our lives which we know in this brief, useful allusive way, and neglect deliberately to explore...
• But poets don't want homes, - do they? - they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds...
• Like that of the undersides of high clouds hiding the light that suffuses their steely grey with a borrowed brilliance...
• So it is often in this life. We become consistent and orderly too late, on insufficient grounds, and perhaps in the wrong direction. (Larkin: "An only life can take so long to climb / clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never...")

There's nothing to lose but a week of your reading time (okay that IS no small deal), and I've probably pulped it for all the quotables that it's worth as above, but do, do read it if you can spare the time after As! It's the kind of book that reminds you why you like reading so much. Makes you feel like going to the London Library to find the spot where Roland habitually sits. Find a comfy place where you can read a book this long (the MRT is not one of them). Oh and last shot at fanboying: it actually has a Gatsby reference! Hee

We too remake our world by naming it
Together, knowing what words mean for us 
And for the others for whom current coin
Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool,
And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun,
Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now
Particularly our sun...

2. Wow I really like Birdy. Sure it gets a little over-the-top but it bespeaks a power that is very impressive for a still-schooling 16-year-old artist (and you wonder what YOU're doing with your years of existence...) Just great voice and great piano...

Her cover of 'Skinny Love' inducted me to the song and Bon Iver (which did a super nice cover of Bonnie Rait's song...okay save this for another time), and her cover of  'People Help the People' adds a listen-ability that I probably wouldn't find with the original artist...

also: 'I'll Never Forget You' is such a nice song to fall asleep to! (happened twice already)

Be warned - lower your playback volume a little:


Sigh the next time I see anyone off at an airport this is going to play in my head


Well it's quite a suitable song for the moment considering how I managed to um, catch some bug from Nat and get some annoying viral sore throat that has been giving feverish nights (offset, thankfully, with copious amounts of sleep) and refuses to make up its mind as to whether it will turn for the better or the worse. Every swallow or spoken word hurts and you feel like passing through the day nodding and shaking your head, aye, nay, - but then it isn't as bad as the times where someone seems to have snatched away your voice and all you can manage is a pale imitation wheeze. As if a string broke somewhere and it never sounds...This reminds me too, too much of Jeffrey McDaniel's 'The Quiet World'

-

Verse 2
God knows what is hiding, in that world of little consequence
Behind the tears, inside the lies
A thousand slowly dying sunsets
God knows what is hiding in those weak and drunken hearts
I guess the loneliness came knocking
No one needs to be alone [...] 
- 'People Help the People'

The strings bit after the second chorus (2:16 onwards) is so stirring and tender - seems like I have no lack of listening material while working now, whee

3. Nice round number to the start of Prelims now - it's quite a scarily small number, actually. Now for those roll-sleeve moments a la Promos preparation, sans the phantom of Os or anything (phew). 9pm SFL haunts, RPA dinners, Raja block sunsets, communal dinner - that's the part of this Minor Inconvenience that I will choose to remember!

We must come to grief and regret anyway, and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities... (Possession)

Easier thought than done.

53: and on another day will be the past

1. TRIPLE SHOT WHITE MOCHAAAA. it tastes even better than the Hojicha thingie at SBux now - add even two shots to the latter and you get something that tastes like shots, shots and more shots / burnt otah

and most importantly, it WORKS

2. My card / work backlog is moving! I hope to tear away from the debauchery that was the weekend in full soon. Counting 26/8 as 0, today is Day 54 to the start of Prelims...it's a long trek to the top! also: NOTES. And I need to revisit Clayden soon, on top of H2 stuff - things are slipping away too fast for my fancy

3. Waking up is an interesting experience - there are instances when, on waking up, I struggle to recall what day it is (huh Friday? oh wait JUNE HOLS YEAAAH), and whether it is a good thing that the sun is already basking the room in motes of light. Or whether I should have woken up 1h ago and already be at some MRT station by now (oops)

Even more amazing is how your memories / arrested thoughts are restored to you, slowly, like warmth perfusing a numb limb - how did I fall asleep? what was I doing before this? which page did I stop at? where am I going now?

also, most importantly...Did I Just Miss My Stop?

4. The parallels in Possession are amazing! Like threads intricatedly patterned into tapestry. Every random scrap of the Ash / Christabel correspondence is tethered to some other event (pats on the back if you can find them!). It gets heavy at times, yes, but it's still quite enjoyable as a (very long) ode to reading and a "mystery novel"...

also: to my dear Lit teachers (especially my Paper 5 one! - the first swath of text):

-


“I read Leonora Stern’s essay ‘Venus Mount and Barren Heath.’ “
Maud hunted for an adjective to describe this work, rejected “penetrating” and settled on “very profound.”
“Of course it’s profound. But. It worried me.”
“It was meant to.”
“No, not for that reason, not because I’m male. Because.”
“Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects—all the time—and I suppose one studies—I study—literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes—mediaeval gloves, giants’ gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac’s gloves, the sea-anemone’s ovaries—and it all reduced like boiling jam to—human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body—and language—all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair.”
Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, “And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It’s really powerlessness.”
“Impotence,” said Maud, leaning over, interested.
“I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn’t the point.
We are so knowing. And all we’ve found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we’re imprisoned in ourselves—we can’t see things.
And we paint everything with this metaphor—”
“You are very cross with Leonora.”
“She’s very good. But I don’t want to see through her eyes. It isn’t a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don’t.”
Maud considered. She said, “In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose—to imagine—he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely—but not in the large plan—”
Roland wanted to ask: Do you like that? He thought he had to suppose she did: her work was psychoanalytic, after all, this work on liminality and marginal beings. He said instead, “It makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they saw the world. What Ash saw when he stood on perhaps this ledge. He was interested in the anemone. In the origin of life. Also in the reason we were here.”
“They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them.
Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures—”
“And we don’t?”
“At some point in history their self-value changed into—what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. Now or then.”
She closed The Great Ventriloquist and leaned over the ledge on which she was curled, and extended a hand.
“Shall we move on?”
“Where? What are we looking for?”
“We’d better start looking for facts as well as images. I suggest Whitby, where the jet brooch was bought.”

-

5. This reminds one of relativistic views of language which contend that everything is caught in a messy semantic web where to define one word is to invoke many other words, each with their own difficult, hard-to-reduce definitions - it's a wild goose chase! How do you define "in"?

6. Compare the difficulty of describing sensory experiences across the five faculties available to us - how much poorer smell seems to be. Also interesting: how difficult it is to convey notions of scent

7. But other things are simpler and need no confabulation: thank you! such a pleasant surprise (massive understatement here)

man when life is threatening to shore you up and batter you into dust, it's nice to have some beacon to keep you from getting completely wrecked

someday I'll go on an imaginary field-trip and spam sea-related books: The Shipping News! The Sea, The Old Man and the Sea (gulp), MOBY DICK, maybe Rime of the Ancient Mariner (...gulp)

8. we are running out of tomorrows. half-wondering what's it like to write farewell cards now

not with prudence, but with daring

Well truth be told the previous post ALSO took 1.5h, so it was nothing less than short either - oh well:

1. I need money! To fund my reading and (eventually) my camera. Shall consider tutoring during weekends or something, though I don't know how that works logistically. And this is a character flaw (?) but I don't like charging...

2. Serendipity is walking into Kallang Leisure Park to wait for friends and finding a 2ndhand book sale just sitting there! And finding the 1990 Booker Prize winner (A.S. Byatt's Possession) along with two other interesting titles (Paulo Coelho's first book, The Pilgrimage, as well as Pulitzer-prize winning memoir, Angela's Ashes - an unusual addition to the reading diet if you will)

2ndhand books have their own quiet appeal, cf. Barnes' essay:

A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it. Old books showed their age: they had fox marks the way old people had liver spots. They also smelt good – even when they reeked of cigarettes and (occasionally) cigars.

But of course the best thing about such sales is that you never know what you're going to find - what titles you may stumble upon, what you can find between the pages (my haul from Cambridge had train tickets and bookmarks!) and what you can find ON the pages. I'm a sucker for annotated texts - it gives a rare insight into some other student's struggles to apprehend a text. It's best when you find frustrated comments in the margins that you can sympathise with! (also: you won't catch me selling my dirty copies - they are way too dear to me)

I realise, though - pushingbooks kinda died (bought three titles with $4 from some random sale in Changi Village! two of them being Macbeth and Henry VI pIV - hoho) so any more visitations to such sales will be pure coincidence. They used to rent stalls in flea markets to sell off cheap direct-from-supplier firsthands and even cheaper secondhands. I've had the fortune to meet them twice (2nd time in Tampines) but have never seen them since T_T

Also, if you still need convincing as to how interesting the experience of purchasing a 2ndhand book is: http://bookdedications.wordpress.com/

Though I can't actually bear to write on a book to be gifted, so.

3. Very belatedly I realise that a novel's journey from page to screen is actually quite convoluted in terms of creative vision - there's the screenwriter, then there's the director/producer to translate screenplay to film! And there are loads of screenplays for movies I've watched / want to watch soon in the Esplanade library, which is gonna make for some interesting post-As reading. Though it's a bit hard to imagine screenplay, I'd like to see what sacrifices, what intermediary forms existed during the process of transmutation.

4. Actually I went there today to try to finish off Possession, but as you may have already guessed I didn't make much headway with that! Read a manga version of R3 (it clipped off the 4.1 line "But shall we wear these glories for a day?" and truncated some monologues! WHYYY), Christopher Durang's absurdist comedy Baby and the Bathwater (I laughed enough to disturb neighbours, oops) and some labour of love chronicling Singaporean cinema from 1902 - 2006 - written, unfortunately?, by a French film researcher. I'd much like to watch S'porean short film works, actually - this must be an artefact from the days when we were panicking over Homeward, hehehe

Interesting word: lonelinesses

5. And about Possession - Byatt wields the language beautifully! Don't expect Robinson-esque extended metaphors though (that's probably unique to her, which is not a bad thing). But well-crafted metaphors confined in a single line work well too ("Brevity is the soul of wit" - Polonius, from Hamlet!)  I am afraid that my explanting of these lines will cheapen them, uprooted from their contextual soil. Maybe I'll hazard one. She blushed. Red blood stained the ivory. 

So...so far it's about two literary scholars each trying to uncover the private lives of a particular Victorian poet, and, to nobody's surprise, the two poets they are studying maintained previously undiscovered correspondence! Expect a book themed on literature in the style of 1984 Booker Prize shortlist Flaubert's Parrot, filling, brimming, overflowing with letters and stories written by the two poets. But expect, also, (and I am not apologetic for this), the long, meandering style of Atonement, since both constantly invoke the past, reimagine it and are conscious of their storytelling, in the sense that the act of chronicling and piecing together the past is relativistic and necessarily, to some degree, futile. (cf. Ending and sorting out a version of our story that stands up to examination) Maybe it's a bit like Waterland too, in the sense that it requires patience and a fair bit of wading through (right now in Possession I am stuck in 30 pages of epistolary exchange! Writhe writhe) 

I am aware that the above paragraph is going to drive some people away, but hey give every book a fair chance will ya! Anyway it seems to give a strenuously verisimilitudinous (EIGHT SYLLABLES) picture of Victorian-era writing, which isn't a wasted excursion. (Cucumber sandwiches! Again! Thanks arh Wilde) With that level of detail one must be patient, I suppose - it's the same with Dubliners, which I hope to restart in the not too distant future. Anyway almost all novels have their tracts of situating, which of course are dealt with with varying degrees of success (Passage is a little overbearing but still okay, Atonement pulls out almost all the stops, Housekeeping probably beats everyone, not by brevity, but by poetry) 

Also I realise I have Passage to finish - guess I'll read that too as a break from Possession. 

I want to quote more, but I realise a lot of it is from the Vict poets' exchanges. Oh and SPOILERS!

the poets are fictional! How Byatt can dream up these lives amazes me. Their knowledge of Shakespearean plays (Hamlet and Lear references!!!) is interesting, and their grasp of poetry is astounding.

From the epigram:

And if at whiles the bubble, blown too thin,

Seem nigh on bursting - if you nearly see

The real world through the false - what do you see?

A work of erudition, yes, but I'm waiting to see if it bears up as a gripping work of fiction too.

6. Letters: A form of narrative that envisions no outcome, no closure. [...] Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going.

Imagine one day if you become famous and there is a posthumous interest in your entire life's correspondences. They'll bother your descendants (if any) or friends, ravage your blog, your cabinets, the rooms of your own which you thought you locked up forever, your letters. They will know your character. (Lear: "You know the character to be your brother's?"  (1.2.62)) That is pretty scary. But if Abeland had destroyed Eloisa's marvellous constant words, if the Portugese Nun had kept silent, how much the poorer should we not be, how much less wise? To burn everything (somehow I am thinking of Ruth and Sylvie! Or maybe even Veronica, though her story is less interesting) is to exorcise one's personal demons, yet it denies the world of memory. And memory is the only route to immortality...Not like it matters to you, when you're dead.

Would you want your letters diaries posts writings to be kept? or shall they be secrets you carry with you to the grave?

7. Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying. (Possession)

I see literary criticism as being forever damned to walk in the shadow of another person. (and usually it's a dead person, which makes it all the more sad since one is) mired in the past. When I speak to people about Lit and they ask about the uselessness of it all, as well as how one can over-read an innocuous description, I am reminded of how Lit eventually is a personal exercise of interpretation, much as the ironing out of one's views on lift should be. Yes, the vocabulary to articulate one's views can be codified (here be metaphor, here be roman a clef, here be metonymy), but there's always, also, the terra incognita of a text that only we ourselves can map out (here be dragons).

But anyway, about shadows...a very valid concern has been raised, too: if literary theorists are so good at dissecting texts, why can't they do something useful with that intimate knowledge of how imagined swords can draw real blood? Well you're probably pretty tired of this, but it's like asking a physics professor to replicate a motorcycle stunt. I wonder, though, what is the literary parallel of the physical dexterity needed to pull off such a feat? Experience? Competence?

Anyway literary scholarship (or, on a more simple level, trying to write my H3 essay, which I dare not elevate with any such label) is very draining. I don't deny that it's rewarding though, if you can loose an arrow into the text and line up all the pages in a way that offers a new way of seeing, then congratulations! But of course some books were crafted to deliberately frustrate, to refuse the path of least resistance. Which I surmise is the point of the books I'm examining anyway. Or you get so darn lost, and some sheep chew up the ball of yarn you've been unspooling behind you whilst you were in search of the minotaur. Now it's dead, and so will you be if you don't find your way out after being submerged in story.

And at the end of the day what does the essay do? I don't want to make some cursory remarks about how they fit some trope (I am not a stamp collector!), and I don't want to hoist some complicated psychoanalytic theory in the vain hope of finding something new to say about them (I am very suspicious of any Freudian / Lacanian readings now). Finding some personal response is easy, though I have to saddle and tame it in words.

And now that the whole of Possession seems to be about this cumbersome and even possibly futile search for truth, I am certain that I need to read more to avoid being forever caught in only a few writers' visions. (and there are some writers whose visions are worth being temporarily ensnared in! all the exotic imaginings of landscapes which you could actually verify the veracity of, in person)

8. I forget to say that I dreamt of Hamlet last night, which is a first! (hasn't happened for Lear, MoV or R3). There was some other dream involving RC and I was in uniform and there was an argument which we eventually resolved that involved something about the idea of hierarchy, rank and chains of command, but I don't think it very symptomatic of much for now, heh.

9. It's the second half of the year! Actually I wanted to post something like this on 28/6, considering that it was post-CTs and I have only two months left of being 17 / before Prelims. Okay well now for the obligatory self-deprecating rant on CTs (you can close your eyes and go back to sleep now, or you can humour me and read this - who are you?)

9a. my 17th year of existence was not easy (I sound like some old fart oh dear) though by necessity and choice I shall be proud of my mistakes and minor victories against life! Rawr. Sad that the 18th year has to open with an exam (a GP exam, at that!) I have a horrible talent of screwing up when it counts. And I have <60 days to change everything.

9b. How hard is it to rebuild a life? Haha that casts the net too wide - how am I going to reteach myself BCMLGP. Bio wasn't too bad this time, though I need an efficient way to chunk 30 entire topics' worth of keywords (I really don't like playing this sort of game). Chem...I need to avoid plateauing and to constantly keep my mind nimble with this to solve elucids. And I need to be more disciplined with learning H2 conditions, as well as concepts I take for granted (I spent quite some time figuring out +/- electrodes and fell for quite a few tricks).

And I'm way too complacent. That showed for Lit, never had enough time to develop a consciousness of the novels that lets you rattle quotes like they were in your blood - you know for all the blogging I've done I realise that I am very bad at writing short pieces, or essays, at all. (this post is so long already? Shoot...) The time ratio on my essays was a dangerous 2:1 (it's supposed to be 1:1, kid) but I wrote horrible pieces for both essays. I can't do anything about them now which is such a sinking feeling but you didn't come here to listen to this (where did you come from?) so never mind

I'm not J1 any more! J1CT1s were much simpler (can you imagine? only SIX topics for Bio? Har har har) and I managed to scrape through even with seven days of straight mugging - and even then I finished all my math and even blazed through the 06-09 compilations, categorising everything and learning how to eat from any, every plant (read: solve every question type) in the vast vegatation that is Math. This time I spent even less time on that exercise. I guess regretting the time spent on SATs / camps is a stupid move and doesn't do anything. Well I'm not debilitated by this, whether it's a matter of prudence or foolishness isn't relevant either. I have to find some way to improve (can you hear Lucille whining beside you?)

9c. I can regret nothing (and I must own everything in my past - ouch), and I will not regret the time put into helping people! (if they can so grace my time with them with such a compliment - I hope I didn't confuse) After this week I hope to start early and avoid some preventable deaths. Having once tutored English and realising the frustrations of the language / subject I feel a more urgent need to start earlier. Grammar rules are tedious but they're the least of your worries when you're doing creative writing...and such abilities are nurtured by consistent hard work, not crash-coursing.

Of course I must help myself, but I won't forget you after I clamber out of this mud pit. Or hey, you can school me into getting out of this rut too.

Only this time the difficulties are multiplied - this is a team game, then. Grr prelims and As you are just an inconvenience standing in the way of my happiness, and once we find a way to dismantle your intricacies...

9d. one particular rant - this is probably one of those contradictory and self-defeating perfectionist traits, but I can't bear to write banal points in essays and always end up spending too much time aiming at too high, too flighty a conclusion, which I eventually don't have the time / mental stamina to place the capstone on anyway. You probably need to bear in mind how high you want a tower to be, in order to lay the appropriate argumentative foundations, but you definitely don't build from the top down...

9e. I want to know all the Romantic poets / 20thC poets inside out. Prac crits will surprise me no more! Haha pipe dream I know, but trying will be so exciting

10. I have decided that I am wholly incapable of following a set order in a to-read list and that I'll just maintain a floating one offline. Greed is a good thing when it comes to reading, I suppose. The last time I truly read voraciously, I was still in shorts. RI and RJ were still separate. And (ironically) I wanted to do Hist over Lit.

11. I wonder: how much of Singapore is self-invented and therefore (naive?) artifice? The Merlion and Sentosa is probably our crowning example. Our image as a Garden City came in great haste, at a great price, if No Other City's poet-chroniclers are to be believed. So is MBS by that coin (darn, that acoustic toilet bowl is a lot of fun). Then again, the grass is always greener on the other side, isn't it? Landmarks like Taipei 101 were also constructed in the same spirit of "self-invention". One can only envy the population sparsity of great swathes of America only if they don't mind the loneliness and desolation that it can bring (ct. Singapore, where a kopitiam is rarely >2km away from you). I took the long way to Esplanade today (a bus! from outside my house! discovered very belatedly too) and passed by much of East Coast, and hundreds of roadside food outlets that I will descend upon like a locust swarm after As - and I realise how much of Singapore I have left to explore. How can I claim to be tired of something I don't know? To borrow from Joyce (from Ulysses! Can you imagine reading that! Not anything soon, no, not before As; maybe during NS): longest way round is the shortest way home.

 

12. Though: I want to bustle through the world on a shoestring budget and see things for myself. Write shoot eat, expecting every moment to be [my] next. (Ulysses again! Maybe Joyce isn't a bad idea) Ho and Wong have an idea for post-NS wanderings; well it's too early to be certain of anything but it's a nice thing to aspire towards or think about. So is sleeping on the couches of the flats of people who will be so kind as to harbour a wanderer for a while (all you overseas-bound friends, don't forget me k)

13. I know I don't deserve all this warmth and lepakfests after a horrible showing at CT2s but to the people who made Thursday's Carnivorous lunch / evening of total debauchery, Friday's baddie-ing (Friday's training, even!) and buffet-ing (we promise to make them go bankrupt the next time), Saturday's guttering and epic bookhunting as well as Sunday's epic crawl along the bay / crash-course in photog technicalities (now I swallow whatever intimations I made earlier grammar rules being easy :P) possible - thank YOU!

14. darn can't stop thinking about how hard it is to write poetry - and to pretend to be two people, writing poetry, in a time that isn't your own...I paint so thinly, as though my words were unlit stained glass that requires a flood of light from beyond and behind to illuminate and enliven it, and there is no beyond and behind.

15. Now, what I said about long poems...it'll take some time (and some experience) before I can sit through The Waste Land or anything long, Greek and epic, but I guess it's a learned appreciation that requires a somewhat different expectation. I like bite-sized, CAD-sonnet-length poems that deliver that  one thought or emotion, often reflected in fractured glass, yielding so many images to the mind's eye. Just as longer novels tend to ramble on their scenic descriptions or move slowly, longer poems have their own idiosyncracies and endearing traits, I suppose.

Possession highlighted an interesting Wordsworth poem ("Tintern Abbey"), which is the longest poem I will ever quote in my short life thus far. I shall spare you the agony of reading it here (I need to do something about the design in this place!), but read this at least:

      These beauteous forms,                                          22

      Through a long absence, have not been to me

      As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

      But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

      Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

      In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

      Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

      And passing even into my purer mind,

      With tranquil restoration:--feelings too                 30

      Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

      As have no slight or trivial influence

      On that best portion of a good man's life,

      His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

      Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

      To them I may have owed another gift,

      Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

      In which the burthen of the mystery,

      In which the heavy and the weary weight

      Of all this unintelligible world,                                  40

      Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,

      In which the affections gently lead us on,--

      Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

      And even the motion of our human blood

      Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

      In body, and become a living soul:

      While with an eye made quiet by the power

      Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

      We see into the life of things.                                    49

The context was to know something "by heart". An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream. So maybe one day you will meet someone that bleeds poetry! 

So: O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth! (Hamlet, 4.4)

It seems to be a matter of great textual importance that Hamlet dallies in his actions - that will be where our tales fork, then. Why haven't you read Hamlet? Who are you? (and I can't resist posting this: 

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

which, believe it or not, was Ms Kuang's favourite poem, at some point in time. Ooo)

----

if you aren't going to read Possession (here, I forgive you - joking la), at least read this children's story! (meant for adults too, as always) Looks like Byatt also published these tales (ostensibly written by Christabel) in a separate volume, which you can read here: http://extras.denverpost.com/books/chap57.htm

-

And he laid before the tailor three things. The first was a little purse of soft leather, which clinked a little as he put it down. The second was a cooking pot, black outside, polished and gleaming inside, solid and commodious. And the third was a little glass key, wrought into a fantastic fragile shape, and glittering with all the colours of the rainbow. And the tailor looked at the watching animals for advice, and they all stared benignly back. And he thought to himself, I know about such gifts from forest people. It may be that the first is a purse which is never empty, and the second a pot which provides a wholesome meal whenever you demand one in the right way. I have heard of such things and met men who have been paid from such purses and eaten from such pots. But a glass key I never saw or heard of and cannot imagine what use it might be; it would shiver in any lock. But he desired the little glass key, because he was a craftsman, and could see that it had taken masterly skill to blow all these delicate wards and barrel, and because he did not have any idea about what it was or might do, and curiosity is a great power in men's lives. So he said to the little man, 'I will take the pretty glass key.' And the little man answered, 'You have chosen not with prudence, but with daring. The key is the key to an adventure, if you will go in search of it.' 'Why not?' replied the tailor. 'Since there is no use for my craft in this wild place, and since I have not chosen prudently.'

Then the animals came closer with their warm, milky breaths that smelled sweetly of hay and the summer, and their mild comforting gaze that was not human, and the dog lay with his heavy head on the tailor's foot, and the brindled cat sat on the arm of his chair.

'You must go out of this house,' said the little grey man, 'and call to the West Wind, and show her your key, when she comes, and let her carry you where she will, without struggle or alarm. If you fight or question she will toss you on the thorns and it will go ill with you before you come out of there. If she will take you, you will be set down in a bare heath, on a great stone, which is made of granite and is the gate to your adventure, though it will seem to have been fixed and unmoving since the making of the world. On this stone you must lay a feather from the tail of the cockerel here, which he will willingly give you, and the door will be opened to you. You must descend without fear, or hesitation, and descend farther, and still descend; you will find that your glass key will shed light on your way if you hold it before you. In time you will come to a stone vestibule, with two doors leading to branching passages you must not follow, and a low curtained door leading on and downwards. You must not touch this curtain with your hand, but must lay on it the milk-white feather which the hen will give you, and the curtain will be opened silently, by unseen hands, and the doors beyond it will lie open, and you may come into the hall where you shall find what you shall find.'

no place on this canvas

This is a retry at a shorter post - I just spent 1.5h typing a long manifesto about how H2 Chem should be reviewed, and I have neither the time nor the ease of mind to finish it now XD So, real quick list of thoughts I had been working on writing before I followed a loose thought down an alleyway and got lost in the boroughs. Consider this a preview of the long post that is to come after CTs!

1. Raja block coffee = GODLY

2. RCSC room = best place to nap in RJ

3. I really like teaching people (chem)! Notemaking too. Maybe I'll help with bio/math if it isn't too complicated. But notes again? That will take some time...

Bother me as much as possible - I love to be of help.

4. That said, it's your fight - if you don't want to help yourself, I can't do much. Please please please take some ownership of your own learning - or at least, your grades.
The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous (Edward Gibbons)

5. It's rare to read emails that present themselves as such stirring calls to action, helps if someone believes in what you're doing (reprise of older post)

6. Likewise: I think OL is a brilliant idea and I love the idea of being able to deconstruct complicated ideas and selling them to the layviewer, but we need to be sure that we're value-adding and not parroting. Or that we have sustained output. Or that we are acting in a way that maximises the accessibility of our lectures, content-wise. I hope that we don't get distracted by volume and gimmick (thus far, I have happy reports!) Having such a messy? Chem lecture structure that is hard to mine for usefulness is greatly upsetting. So is finding that the lectures can sometimes become mere dictations of lecture notes.

7. Even for the flaws and obstacles that we face, working in OL has this liberating feeling where ideas are welcomed, crazy ones especially, and you can do practically whatever you want! and there's always someone (regardless of age) who can help you along, give you feedback and chow down on food, glorious food with you. The support and enthusiasm is amazing

8. I need to read more Hist / Econs. Now.

9. It's a nice feeling when you learn something new from your friends and vice versa. Realised that Nat and Ho have always harboured a liking for reading and Lit - I'll see what recommendations I can give, after CTs / As! and convinced Hongyi to at least like Singaporean poetry (enamoured by Jeffrey Lim's "The Hanging People"). I've only started to borrow poetry anthos from SFL out of impulse to have some quick literary bites to calm myself down / take a break from stuff this year - and it's been great! Currently thumbing through No Other City (yes, it's that A.Pang-edited antho from years past) which makes for great MRT reading / reading during a busy period

10. Anyone that has stared out at Yishun-Khatib while on the NS line would be familiar with what Ruth keenly feels and details in Housekeeping about the lake in Fingerbone - I wonder, is it possible to have a Singaporean port of such a story? (We don't have enough "country" to produce Wordsworth and Romantic poetry though, as NOC affirms)

Anyway: I wonder if Nat, Ho and I are up to the challenge of curating a complementary visual version of a poetry anthology. One picture for every poem, avoid prosaic token stock image shots. NO INSTAGRAM. (right-click poetry? Naw)

11. A Passage to India -  hmm, I'm patient enough to read through it for now; it isn't as debilitatingly slow or preachy as The Age of Innocence (sorry Wharton) and I salute Forster's skill in presenting the unfamiliar in a way that does not alienate the reader but rather invites them to enter the story's realm. Will have to read further to tell if it's great, then

12. I must reread Between Stations!

13. More people should visit the Art Room! The diversity of media they have there is amazing - all the card-making tricks you thought of, writ more beautifully. You don't need me to tell you that the paintings in there are scary cool

14. Birdy - odd stage name, but amazingly powerful voice

15. After H3 is done I shall chart Singaporean lit for myself, and offset journeys into our literary past with Romantic poetry / the more foreign sorts: Rilke? Maybe give Pamuk a second chance. All the Russians: Chekhov, Nabokov, Dostoevsky! Eventually, classics from the Greeks too. And all the supposedly eminent playwrights novelists poets of Europe: Strindberg? Even Shakespeare's contemporaries: Jonson, Marlowe. Seneca? More Shakespearean plays. Some obscure American novels. Maybe some Barnes/McEwan/Swift if I eventually feel like it (exhausted their good titles already), or the H3 title rejects. then there's Gan's list. and The Stuff I Always Wanted to Read; archetypally, The Life of Pi. i think i'm too greedy but this is SO TANTALISING

16. Similarly, all the major philosophers as a starting point. Even though people have warned me that Hume writes in a horribly convoluted manner - and I have discovered belatedly that Foucault is pretty hard to read too.

17. I feel horribly unprepared for CTs. Yes it's not prelims and it's not the end of the world but I can't fight this unsettled feeling. I shall do what I can, I suppose.

18. I have amazing teachers! I can't tell you how awesome they are in words. Partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I want to grace this with a proper post

19. HAMLET > R3 (but I shan't complain; R3 > Winter's Tale)

Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the
readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't
to leave betimes, let be. (Ham, 5.2)

20. I think I really can't thank (most of) the people around me enough for spurring me on to get better at things / to approach things more critically  /  bringing out the best in me / challenging me to do better / believing in me however minutely small the window of opportunity was open / trusting me enough to help them. I know this is cheesy and all but it's on the top of my mind right now so here goes: for being a part of me and my life, thank you! Juniors, peers, seniors alike - I am an amalgamation of your criticisms, encouragements, nonsensically-slurred mid-afternoon banter, hysteria with mouths  half-full, adventures, but also your fears, tears, hopes, dreams.

21. And in this time of CTs especially I am grateful to everyone who helped me along with Math and offered me a little space in their mugging hideouts for me to sink roots in. and who can forget FOOD - I hope I've started well in paying off whatever amount your kindness has indebted in me. You didn't need to do anything or care but you did anyway. And to me that is profoundly moving. Thanks again

22. I can't help but feel, though, that your vision of heaven is an exclusive one in which I have no place. "As Coriolanus banishes Rome rather than passively suffer banishment..." He is not alone in favouring this.

Or. A boat, unmoored, will be carried away, by the tides, into the sunrise, overnight. Or. Since I don't seem to be figured in, I'd rather  that the deed be completed - erase every trace of my footsteps, every impression of me. I know my place, and you've left no place on this canvas that I can be in. Better to drift and find somewhere else to be, than to be some wretched spectre smudged into half-remembrance, forever caught between non/existence. Or. Let's revise that. I hope never to be the one to slam that door, though I think you've already closed it.

Or. I know that isn't possible, that there's no real undo, that there can only be brighter exposure to bleach out prior frames. No deletions, no unspooling. But still one can always approximate. It seems that you want to have little to do with me any more; so what now, I'm no longer necessary? needed? well I don't expect to be (little axiom in organisational work: no one is indispensable. Unless there's a dangerous dependence.) since that's way too self-flattering; what surprises me is how easily you chose, how easily you chose not to bother. To discard everything as if it's all worthless and trivial. As if it's token. I don't want to accept your coin and owe you anything if you find that this exchange is such a chore, such a bother, such a nuisance anyway. Take thy fair hour...Time be thine, / And thy best graces spend it at thy will! 

Maybe it is, maybe it betokens the fact that I've been living a huge lie. I was foolish to believe. Maybe I'm dead wrong. Or. Maybe I'm right, or I've articulated what you thought of anyway, and I will just be / already am somebody you used to know. That meant nothing in your eyes and never will. Eventually I will be nothing; no hearse will mark or stay me. I'll make my exit. Until then, I will be...Here?


I don't know, and I don't want to know.

Or.

I don't want to see, and I wish I couldn't either.

alarum

Out, out, thou strumpet, Fortune! All you gods,
In general synod take away her power;
Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends! 

---

When was the last time you did something you really enjoyed? Something that you were actually excited to start on, something that could keep you up just before you sleep, potential and promise uncoralled, unbridled, set free? I'm very sure studying for (H2) Bio isn't one of those moments, but this is merely a temporary inconvenience, I convince myself...

Anyway some fast thoughts before I spend a night mulling over Chem (I tried putting headings, but the paragraphs kinda elide / segue into one another, so uh, good luck reading?):


Hamlet was GOOD. If R3 is a psychological study (a very flat one, I insist), Hamlet outshines it in this respect. And there's a subplot! Haha not like that in itself is meritorious, but it keeps things interesting. This is the  one Shake play which I didn't mind continuing to read (Lear took two weeks; even without annotating, it was a bit difficult to sit through the very long Act 3). And considering it's the longest Shake play, that's not bad! In contrast, reading A Winter's Tale felt like wading in molasses (I never got past 1.1) Also it's interesting to not have relied on footnotes (this edition has everything compacted into an appendix, behind the text) - definitely the finer points of the wordplay have eluded me, but it's rewarding to have to wrangle the meaning out on your own! And give yourself a pat on the back for actually understanding a passage / recognising epic foreshadowing in 2.1. Guess my experiences MOV/KL/R3/Ado/Macbeth (the only five Shake plays I've read or watched - I insist that Winter's Tale doesn't count) didn't amount to nothing :P

Oh and the best part of the reading experience is finding those famous lines - the entire "To be or not to be" monologue, framed in context, in 3.1, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy", "To thine own self be true", "The Lady doth protest too much, methinks", and the brilliant exchange in 3.2.337-372 (give or take a few lines) - GO READ IT! those familiar with WH will also chuckle a little when they realise how someone names flowers instead of birds when they go stark raving mad, hehe. Though obviously just reading the text is a reductive representation of what the play can give; after CTs I'll go and watch a film version. (after rereading it...with footnotes!)

Between Stations was great, but I'll save the magic for another post since there's much to say! I see glints of CAD poems everywhere. I think one attraction of studying lit / being well-versed in it is that if you know the literature of a country or culture, you may know the place and its people more intimately. These are wild dreams, but imagine if you could start gushing over some work from Rilke, Tagore or what-have-you poet / novelist / dramatist or blabber in drunken stupor a monologue or opening passage that has been firebranded into your memory - perhaps, instantly, the distance shrinks, the bird is in your hand. Attention arrested, sluice gates opened. Or another variant, the piece written by the peregrinating poet (you can tell I really like that word), describing some landmark, some scene that makes you want to visit it, to check if fact can stand up to fiction.

Okay lah it's kind of sad that I have a pretty bad picture of Sing lit, let alone all the wisdom faithfully stored up and reproduced, in quaint little boxes, through my mother tongue. Guess I'll have to start from home! I maintain that there are entire generations of thoughts, sentiments, memories shored up on the coasts of a nation/culture's literature that will never wither, their odd shells clapping into fierce undying persistence little pockets of water that gives a lovely trinkling sound, or parches the papery throat of a wanderer lost at sea for a tad too long...oops got distracted by the telling of the story, haha. Anyway when I finally get down to doing this, I'll start with Arthur Yap; the first Singaporean poet I ever read (i THINK) - did an analysis of this in S2, posted this in wordsmiths on 1/4/11, and now "the wheel is come full circle  / I am here." (Lear):

a circle
Arthur Yap

the kingfisher is said to fly so fast
it seems to be chasing after its own cries:
so the singer singing very loudly
appears to be chasing her own ears:
the deft tuck of the plastic surgeon
the former face is left in aberration:

somewhere
allthetime chasing:
the puppy after its tail,
the end after the beginning,
all sorts of ends for all sorts of means,
the crime to fit the punishment,
a Meaningful Arrangement of life
after a meaningful arrangement of fiction,
dry spasm for wet tears,
public grief for private traumas:
allthetime unending:

images unlimited:

dreams & reality pte. ltd.:

no directors, no operators:

all major & minor shareholders.

-

and who can forget?: “There is no future in nostalgia and certainly no nostalgia in the future of the past.” I wonder if BKC had this line in mind when he wrote (one of his anthologies, After the Fire, features a painting by Arthur Yap, so that isn't too distant a possibility) Somehow I think of eels from Waterland here - their habits of returning to their birthplaces to die

Maybe it's a sign that one's getting old - I am belatedly rediscovering the beauty in things I've come across in sec school - or maybe Fortune likes to mock us with the turn of her wheel. The opening lines of this post were from Hamlet! Arr, tragic heroes, self-invented or no ("Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception." (Oranges, Winterson)), rally against yer fates and Fortune's caprices! Anyway...memories and experiences resurface, dredged up by the spokes that send spray skyward with every revolution...it's like living life backwards, sometimes (I am thinking of "The Scientist" - Coldplay) One pretends to be able to intimate a pattern amidst all the chaos. But these are just wishes. Nice line I've recently discovered: "A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone." (Frost)

I think we cannot understate our control over our lives - to use an example, yes, friendships fade, sink, submerge, but much agency still lies with us as to how much we bother to fight this decay. I guess as we continue onwards, borne forward ceaselessly into the future (take that Carraway!), there are ways to anchor oneself, or at least, maintain that slender thread of communication. Throw out a beacon (or radio! "This is Kindly Light calling Manchester, come in Manchester, this is Kindly Light.") in friendly salute, our repeated exchanges one more strand braided into the net we cast to catch some sliver of past time. Who was it that said that the future mirrors the past? (I really wish I could answer that). I am thinking of Mr Lee's chosen excerpt now: "even if broad seas lie between us..." So post-As is mare incognitum (or, more playfully, "Here be dragons!") - I'm sure we won't drown! Though seasickness (caused by too much unfamiliar motion, no less) is possibly on the agenda - I think now of whale-watching and Bjorn the Merlion :P And I'm pretty sure people benefit from a change of horizon, swatch of sea or atmosphere.

Seachange - Wiki: "a poetic or informal term meaning a gradual transformation in which the form is retained but the substance is replaced, in this case with a marvellous petrification". Give a person half an eternity and a library / the world and there'll definitely be much reason to 刮目相看, by the end of it (most marvellously, there is no fathomable end!). I see the attraction - it's so tempting to buck the trend, pack up and go, adjust the sails and let the tradewinds hoist you to some location that you cannot possibly determine. Illusion of control? I'd see it as a tempered perspective of what we can do - obviously we cannot possibly hope to completely dismantle the disc of chance (and if we insist to be stuck at the hub, like Stevens...), but we can capitalise on what is given to us.

If there is such a thing as a word hedonist, then I stand as one with the others, unashamed. ("seachange" was highlighted to me by Between Stations; it originates from The Tempest! Which I shall read after CTs, too. For a moment I thought it was some made-up term). For instance, I've only recently realised that destiny (fate) is related to destination (endpoint) / predestination - that parallels the life-as-journey trope pretty well? So the next time you see the phrase "destined to meet", appreciate how apt the hidden metaphor is


And I'm still abjectly musically illiterate, but just as you could modify chords by nudging a pitch here or there, encoding some emotion in the shifts, the same goes for words and their prefixes/suffixes. At the moment I am particularly fascinated by corporeal, ethereal, funereal, surreal - all variations of reality that cater to everyone, from the pragmatic to the airy-fairy and the macabre among us.


Last of all I leave you with one of the most gentle sounding words ever:



limn verb (used with object)
1. to represent in drawing or painting.
2. to portray in words; describe.
3. Obsolete. to illuminate (manuscripts).


"The afternoon light limned the room in watercolour" - aaaaa I cannot do justice to this mot juste, this word which has conveniently yoked together the desire to know, to capture, to convey, to preserve what is transient. I think I've just wrecked its awesomeness with that sentence, so I dare you to do much better.

Well so much for staying here a little while before starting on Chem - it's been a pleasant few days past. First time in this year I've gotten 8h of sleep for a week - record! (today is going to be the exception), ran first 14K while the sun set (it's horribly lonely, yet pretty interesting - after a while you can't see much and the only proof of your existence is the heave of your lungs and the dull thudding of your heart/feet), survived some really horrible sinusitis (I should stop sleeping with the aircon on, wasted today afternoon sneezing away), began the life of a Raja Block mugger-hobo (consider it practice!), started on Passage (Forster's writing holds much promise!) and uh, did some Bio? I have the whole of Math/Lit to start on which is pretty bad, but I HAVE A GC NOW yay! It's a start. And then there's Chem which I should work on now. I don't know how I'm going to distill order out of the mess that is H2; just because one knows it doesn't mean one can teach it well. And I'm pretty bad at conveying basics - I run out of steam making notes / questions because I worry too much about definition / detail questions, yet I know the most rewarding/difficult challenges in the subject aren't about memorising keywords, but lie in discerning the course of a reaction, telling exactly how A and B can smash up to form C (or whether it'll even go, and by how much).

I think too much in parentheses =_= will have to discipline my writing soon, corral it up nicely (little horsies from Lilliputt! Yeah if only I could hold a pony in my palm too) and saddle it, since it's just about the only way thoughts can be recorded and reproduced. Or not - words aren't exhaustive (you kid yourself if you believe that), and there's always the involuntary memory associated with the five senses that Proust loves to write about. Someday I shall buy madeleines, eat them and see what I remember :P though perhaps a lot of other foods already contain some memory. Somehow I think of Hamlet: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count / myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I / have bad dreams." (2.2) How myopic and self-deluded we can be sometimes (does this feel like someone from The Little Prince? Heh)

Speaking of nuts: bringing nuts / snacks into the Raja block requires one to be prepared to feed squirrels / monkeys / KOALAs. Well uh the local wildlife is pretty interesting, and it's nice to have people to mug with / bother with questions. I can see its attractions as compared to the SFL now, though I do like it all the same, especially during promo/chemo mugging period last year.

Last: Much has been lost in translation here (from Greek!), I suppose, but the premise of this poem is pretty relatable:


Ithaca
C.P. Cavafy (1863 - 1933)



When you set sail for Ithaca,
wish for the road to be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
an angry Poseidon — do not fear.
You will never find such on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, and your spirit
and body are touched by a fine emotion.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
a savage Poseidon you will not encounter,
if you do not carry them within your spirit,
if your spirit does not place them before you.

Wish for the road to be long.
Many the summer mornings to be when
with what pleasure, what joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time.
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase the fine goods,
nacre and coral, amber and ebony,
and exquisite perfumes of all sorts,
the most delicate fragances you can find.
To many Egyptian cities you must go,
to learn and learn from the cultivated.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your final destination.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better for it to last many years,
and when old to rest in the island,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to offer you wealth.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful journey.
Without her you would not have set out on the road.
Nothing more does she have to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

-

I'm not very patient, but I guess I have to learn to be. Or at least I need to stop being so perfectionist and get some stuff done, instead of trying to catch everything in one fell swoop. A recent communication has buoyed up this truth:

I want to include as much of it as possible - but first, to be able to structure it in such a way that once the first lesson goes online, it already looks complete. Any other lesson will only add to the topic the same way buying a new book will add to your bookshelf - eventually the bookshelf will look more and more populated, but let not the very first book be one lonely part of a trilogy, lest the other books are never published.

Rare are the things in life that are calls to action (alarums!) - and I realise I sound like a workaholic here, but reminders as to why I do the work I do are always welcome! Today I discovered that my S4 notes had filtered down and spread, it's nice to know that you may have made someone a little less scared / a little more assured, even if you will never meet the person / again