ohne frage sehr charmant

{ February 9, 2013 @ 9:56 am } · { Books, poetry }
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It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon – I write this from my desk at home. It’s a lazy Saturday today, and I’m back in Singapore for Chinese New Year – the first Chinese New Year I’ll be spending at home in a long time! I’ve flown back from Kuala Lumpur to do it. The first week of management trainee training was all last week: it’s been intense, and busy, and somehow quite satisfying. I don’t doubt that at some point I’ll crash and be massively exhausted and miserable and cranky and all that jazz, but for now, I like living alone again, and I like the intensity of the pace that they’re forcing upon us. There are twenty of us in the class, and we’ll all work together at some point: I look forward to getting to know people.

But for now, despite what I’ve said about the pace of the workload they’ve dumped on us, I’m chilling for a bit. (I’ll get back to researching the rubber glove industry later tonight.) It’s pouring outside. I’ve written a little in my diary, snuffled around a little on Bloomberg (I’m so ignorant, it’s utterly terrible), and yesterday I finished reading Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. It was a good book. It took me a fair amount of time to read – this is partially because work rotation and recently training has left me with too little time to read, but it’s also partially because it’s a painful book to read. Heller builds us an utterly depressing, dark, distressing picture, but he builds it with such subtlety that you realise this is the hell that 90% of us will live. It’s the agonising, small-minded pains of the office, the people one is afraid of, the relationship one has with one’s family, the impossibility of living with one’s self. Bob Slocum, the narrator, never evokes any kind of sympathy – but the thing is, neither does he evoke pity, or empathy, or hatred. It’s grinding, is what it is, the sense of futility and rage and self-questioning… Part of it is that Heller is sheer genius at depicting the tiny conversational torments that people put each other through. And oddly enough, I get a certain amount of cynical pleasure out of reading it.

I’ve got quite a few books on my list of things-to-read (it’s a pity that the training looks set to absolutely destroy my free time reading, though I suppose there’ll always be opportunities to get a few pages in here and there), including Rubicon, by Tom Holland, The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa, and Hemingway’s Moveable Feast. Other than that? Well, there’ll be dinner tonight, of course, with family and all that jazz – it’ll be good. Chinese New Year makes me happy – and call me shallow, but I’m looking forward to my new dress. *grins* It’s nice for a girl to feel pretty sometimes, no? And perhaps a drink, later. To end off, here’s an excerpt from my diary, from a few months back – it’s amusing, how true it still remains. My love for drinking remains undiminished:

a minor meditation on wine, women and song

…wine requires the least explanation. It is one of the truly uncomplicated pleasures – a minor enough drug, but simultaneously the elixir that takes us all different ways, depending on our proclivities and our moods, and the quantities which we drink. I have seen it provoke amorousness, belligerence, verbosity, philosophy, truth, exuberance, joy, sorrow… the ease and lassitude it gives me, though, are all the more valuable for being such a generalised state of well-being. I do not exaggerate when I state that I owe almost all my happiness, these dog days, to the judicious application of alcohol.

Women – or men, if one’s fancy runs that way, or both – are a rather more complicated proposition…

And if all that doesn’t take your fancy, then here’s Herbsttag, by Rainier Maria Rilke. One of the most exquisite poems that I’ve ever read.

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird Es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

And because I can, I attempted a translation:

Lord: it is time. What greatness, in this summer!
Now lay Thy shadow across the sundials
and loose Thy winds across these meadows.

Command the last fruits to quicken,
give them yet two more southerly days.
Urge them to final fullness, speed
the last sweetnesses into the heavy wines.

For he who has no house now will build no house, now
For he who is alone now will thus remain alone.
He will wake, will read, write longing letters
And will walk the avenues, thence and back
Wandering restless as the autumn leaves drifting.

mizu no naka no bagatelle

{ November 4, 2011 @ 12:32 pm } · { Books, London, music }
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Currently in Combibos, having eaten a brunch that might have destroyed an artery or two – scrambled eggs, bacon, fried toast, potato rosti. I feel massively guilty (to be scrupulous, though, I didn’t actually finish it. Ate about half of everything and then shoved it away. If I’d eaten it all I might have had a semi-involuntary semi-bulimic moment of forcing it all up again, I think) but it did taste pretty good, and in my defence, it’s both lunch and breakfast at once.

I’m supposed to be thinking about Aristotle and akrasia, which is one of my favourite topics ever, but for now I figured I’d talk about the trip I took to London and the past few days! What follows is the stuff I wrote on Tuesday, in London and on the way back to Oxford.

**

I write this in the very indulgent café in the Victoria and Albert, with a very indulgent cup of Darjeeling and slice of carrot cake, midway through a very indulgent day in lovely London Town. The day kicked off with a rather mad rush to the train station, though through no fault of my own – the bus was late! – and then sleepytimes on the train down. Getting off at Paddington, I was reminded of what E.M. Forster once said, terribly poetically, about trains:

Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return… and it is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.

These are not my exact sentiments, of course, and train travel has rather lost something of its savour in this age of jets. I can’t quite feel the same way about airports, alas. But I do feel for cities, very intensely: I love Oxford, that is true, but there’s something about dipping into the slipstream of people in a city that makes me feel like I’ve regained a little balance that wasn’t quite there before. Sitting on the tube station and listening to a pair of small German children count out money (ein-und-zwanzig, zwei-und-zwanzig), catching a pair of Japanese businessmen talking fast and furious in low voices (Dare ga warui? Doko ga ikenai?), getting off at Liverpool St station to wait for Erin and then ogling all the city people clattering past me in their business attire, all serious with poppies pinned to their lapels and their smartphones clutched tight in their hands and their shoes going click-click on the pavements, the young men in their slim jackets and the older men with the double Windsors at their throats, the young women arm-in-arm and the ubiquitous coffee cups everywhere.

Lunch with Erin was delightful and conversational, and the king prawn pasta with a tinge of chili was definitely nommy! Even if I don’t apply to Hiscox (given that I’ll need a work permit, meh), I’m glad I met her: she’s really fun and great to be around. She also recommended this juice with pear and spinach and ginger, which made me feel very healthy and good about myself. Shall experiment with juices in the future, maybe! Though admittedly I have not got a blender…

After that, I took the long way round on the tube to the V&A so I could doze off my post-lunch coma, then startled awake at South Kensington and went flying off onto the platform just as the doors were closing. Skittered off to the museum and went straight for the postmodernism exhibit, which was fascinating because it was a broader view of postmodernism than I’ve had so far, and it’s also a broader view than most people hold, I think. When postmodernism is brought up, a focal point is always Warhol, always the theories of reproduction and mass manufacture, but then again there’s a lot to think about when we talk about postmodernism! Ultimately, I’d rather forgotten that postmodernism was a response to modernism and modernism’s grid-and-order ideals, and the exhibit (which featured a great deal of functional stuff, like teapots and furniture and so on) reminded me that postmodernism was more than just performance and shock value. There were these particularly lovely two prints that were columbaria of architecture and houses, with the little people bowed and moving about beneath. The provenance was Soviet Russia, if I’m not wrong. Another thing that particularly appealed to me was this work by an artist who took out a billboard in New York saying ‘PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT’, which is such an amazing line. (On that note, though, it did remind me of this SMBC comic about nihilism.) I feel I’ve had a good dose of culture and I’m quite happy about that.

It’s been a good few days for me! Last night I went to watch Patrick Wolf (for the fourth time this year, and before you laugh at me, I must say I didn’t intend for this to happen, it just happened somehow. *grins*) at the O2 in Cowley, and it was so much fun! Fell in with a bit of a funky crowd –flamboyant gay boys, I always meet cute flamboyant gay boys at Patrick Wolf concerts, and also a boy who’d been behind me and Tabs in the queue in London at the last concert! That was quite funny because I didn’t recognise him, and two hours in, he turned to me and blurted, “I borrowed your umbrella at the last concert!” and my reaction could only have been described as, “Oh. Oh! OMGLULZ.”

We had a bit of a chat about body mod and horror movies (and The Human Centipede, heurgh) before he started! Sad that Jayson and Jay had to leave halfway, but the concert itself was awesome: he sang lots of songs from the old albums: Wolf Song, the angry roaring of Tristan and The Libertine (! love that song), the impeccably romantic-destructive Damaris and the pang-inducing Bluebells, but also all the crazy happy stuff off the new album, like the crazy-cheesy Bermondsey Street and the super-upbeat The Falcons. He is such an impeccable singer. If I’d heard Lupercalia first, I doubt it’d have been my taste, but I got into his work about the time of The Magic Position and now I’m rather attached to him, haha. It was a long concert! My feet were in agony at the end of it, but it was totally worth it.

(You know, after seeing the whole thing about postmodernism and the bricoleurs, I’m very tempted to try to apply that approach to poetry – taking a whole lot of lyrics and other bits of poems and stitching them up to make a new poem. It’d be problematic re: copyright and re: creativity, but again, surely the whole point of postmodernism is to challenge what it means to make art? We shall see!)

Prior to that, of course, there were three intense days of OxIMUN 2011, where I co-chaired the ASEAN committee with the lovely and amazing Athena Sharma (kisses to you, baby!), who was everything I could have dreamed of in a co-chair. The mesh in our working styles and our general personalities was perfect: and ASEAN 2011 was literally the tightest, most well-bonded committee I’ve ever been in, as a chair or as a delegate. Loved the lot of them My flatmates will attest to the fact that when it ended on Sunday night I was rather… deflated, is the word, I think! I was certainly horribly sad that it was over, especially since it’s been a long time since my last conference and therefore a long time since I last felt this kind of MUN atmosphere. Shoutouts also to the amazing people on the secretariat, who made all this possible. I know they must have worked like horses to make sure everyone had an intense and fantabulous three days!

Going to watch Sakamoto Ryuichi tonight, though first I’m going to have dinner with Cao Lei and Mich, and then maybe we’ll hit up a bar afterwards. The decadence continues!

*

On the train back to Oxford now, after the amazing that was Sakamoto Ryuichi. But before I jump to the concert: dinner first! We ate at this gorgeous place called Yoshino, on a side lane off Piccadilly Place with a misleadingly neon sign announcing ‘SUSHI’. I rounded the corner and let off a loud ‘AH HAH!’, incidentally startling the cute Italian guy who was coming round the corner at the other end. Oops. It was a yummy dinner, though! I got the yuki set, and so did Cao Lei, which was full of nommy, happiness-inducing goodness, along with hot sake and matcha ice cream at the end. Solid dinner, to accompany the shopping I’d done earlier: wagashi at Minamoto Kitchoan and a merino wool sweater plus heattech camisole at Uniqlo. I tremble at the thought of sitting down to do my bills at the end of this week… but nonetheless it was a solid and well-done dinner!

After that, we had a bit of a speed walk (more like run, really), having underestimated the amount of time it’d take us to walk from Piccadilly to the South Bank. We nearly didn’t make it in time, but we did: and in doing so, I had an opportunity to prove to myself that I am indeed still capable of the hundred-metre stiletto sprint. After getting there, I collapsed into my seat and settled down for what proved to be a mindblowing concert: the fast-paced dramatic music was especially moving and beautiful. I swear there were moments where I didn’t breathe till the song came to an end. It was fantastic, although my tastes are a little too plebian for the slightly more avant-garde bits. I like my music melodic. To round off the shopping spree, I bought myself a CD of his music! Looking forward to listening to it, mm. I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes piano music. The other person I’d love to listen to in concert is probably Joe Hisaishi. A glass of wine and some chat, and here I am on the train, on the way back to quiet Oxford.

**

Shall get back to my essay now, I think. Hopefully the feeling of having eaten far, far too much will go away in a bit.

the rape of mr. smith

{ July 28, 2011 @ 2:43 pm } · { Topic-specific discussions }
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In the following lines, a lawyer cross-examines the unfortunate Mr. Smith, a robbery victim. 

“Mr. Smith, you were held up at gunpoint on the corner of First and Main?”

“Yes.”

“Did you struggle with the robber?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He was armed.”

“Then you made a conscious decision to comply with his demands rather than resist?”

“Yes, but – ”

“Did you scream? Cry out?”

“No, I was afraid.”

“I see. Have you ever been held up before?”

“No.”

“Have you ever given money away?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And you did so willingly?”

“Look, what’re you getting at?”

“Well, let’s put it like this, Mr. Smith. You’ve given away money in the past. In fact, you have quite a reputation for philanthropy. How can we be sure that you weren’t contriving to have your money taken away from you by force?”

“Listen, if I wanted – ”

“Never mind. What time did this holdup take place, Mr. Smith?”

“About 11 pm.”

“You were out on the street at 11 pm? Doing what?”

“I was just walking.”

“Just walking? You know it’s dangerous being out on the street that late at night. Weren’t you aware that you could have been held up?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?”

“Let’s see… a suit. Yes, I was wearing a suit.”

“An expensive suit?”

“Well – yes. I’m a successful lawyer, you know.”

“In other words, Mr. Smith, you were walking around the streets late at night in a suit that practically advertised the fact that you might be a good target for some easy money, isn’t that so? I mean, if we didn’t know better, Mr. Smith, we might even think that you were asking for this to happen, isn’t that so?”

——

So how many of you are laughing?

Because I’m not. It’s a humorous, even ridiculous scenario, isn’t it? But you’ll all have realised by now that The Rape of Mr. Smith isn’t about robbery. It’s one of the best and most powerful evocations of the ways the law – and our culture – chooses to blame the victims of rape (victims who are overwhelmingly female), and I can’t think of anything more worth re-blogging. I won’t belabour you with my own thoughts – I don’t think I can add more to such a succinct and pointed piece – but I’d love to hear all your opinions.

P.S. I found this from a pdf (the home site is www.menendingrape.org) but I don’t think it originally belongs to them – if anyone has any idea of its provenance, I’d love to know.

loafe with me on the grass; loose the stop from your throat

{ July 20, 2011 @ 3:40 pm } · { poetry }
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I’m back home in tropical Singapore, and it is a beautiful balmy evening, with my windows thrown open and the fan whirring quietly at the foot of my bed, sending the warm air moving across my skin. The slight breeze it creates tempers the humidity of the air. It is still substantial enough to be a genuine embrace, a lover’s charming reassurance against the body, but it is no longer the deadweight it can sometimes become, in the dull blaze of daytime. These nights are an irresistible inducement. They make me languid and sensual and delighted with the world.  I sleep with my skin bared to the evening air, in defiance of the mosquitoes which plague my homeland, and it’s worth it, to lie in bed with my laptop propped open, listening to the quiet hum of the occasional motorbike going past, looking out at the next block of flats where a light is on in someone’s kitchen, feeling the old and worn sheets wrinkle and smooth themselves as I roll over and nuzzle my face into a pillow, itself worn and old and well-washed, well-loved.

I am a child of the tropics. I was born to its lazy glory, the beat of its sun and the interminable chirrup of the crickets at night, shrilling their hearts out in the rampant grass. I was born to heat and its dog days, its sweltering weather. One of my favourite pleasures back here at home is to take an incredibly hot shower – so hot it turns the skin a sharp, angry scarlet, so hot it’s almost unbearable – because it makes the ambient temperature wonderfully cool in contrast, and it allows the body to adjust to a comfortable in-between, a warmth that is just enough to turn one sultry and not enough for discomfort. I love lying here on my bed and just thinking, letting my body relax while being immensely aware of it at the same time, luxuriating in the midst of the environs it was made for. In Oxford – and I’m not saying that there’s no charm in curling up beneath your blankets when the wind howls across Trinity Garden Quad, but it’s just different– I would never do this. Too cold! Whereas here, where the warmth and the heat eases the body, gentles its tensions and spreads me across the bed, sprawled and alive and feline with languor.

My internship is going reasonably well, but I can’t help feeling the pangs of nostalgia for the previous summer, where I lived some of the most wonderfully meaningless days of my life. I lived like an animal, like a river otter – sleek and slender and contented and with no complicated purposes in life. I rose early to run six kilometres and then I ate and read a book (an intellectual otter, perhaps!) and then I swam in the afternoon, lap after lap with the sun blazing down benevolently, and then in the evenings I read and ate and slept again. Those were such delicate, delightful days, hazed now with that summer sheen, the heat melting the edges of the days so that they became one blur of sybaritic, solitary bliss. I was dreamy and unhurried then, and though I say I lead the life of a happy creature, I was still more than animal, perhaps, because it is the human intellect that allows one to derive the meta-delight of such pleasures. It is not only that I am young and strong and supple; it is not only that I am an intelligence and a sensualist, a mind and a body exercising their functions for no other reason than joy – it is that I am a hedonist and I am capable of – I am allowed to! take bliss in such things. And being a hedonist, I can derive a secondary pleasure from the enjoyment of such pleasures itself, and then take pleasure in that, and in doing so bring myself to a multitudinous and recursive happiness, an infinite regress of yearning and satiation…

There are poems which express the beauty of such moments  – the indescribable moments of Sehnsucht which take possession of the soul – far better than I can. Two of those poems are Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas, and Leaves of Grass, by the incomparable Walt Whitman. I have cried hot and helpless tears at both of these poems, more than once, and if you asked me why, I don’t think I could have told you then. I don’t think I could tell you now. But there is defiance in it! I defy life to beat the romanticism out of me – I defy my own cynicism and the creeping, quiet, stony days! I am still young, and I will stay alive as long as I can still read Thomas or Whitman and feel moved to weep. And there will come a day when this body loses the firm attractiveness of young flesh, and perhaps there will come a corresponding, darkened day when my mind is dulled by the humdrum. and a day of despair for when I can no longer feel yearning. But I say that day is not today: today, I will read Whitman before I go to sleep, and I will leave you all with this, a pair of excerpts from Leaves of Grass:

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you
reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess
the origin of all poems

…

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from
your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or
lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent
summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and
gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and
plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart…

…

timshel

{ June 5, 2011 @ 1:10 pm } · { Books }
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This has been a good term, though unfortunately deficient in work. Neither ethics nor quantitative economics are stirring subjects, alas – the bulk of my intellectual stimulation this term has been from reading. And by far the best things I’ve read this term have to be Steinbeck’s seminal works – Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. I am thankful and warmed by the fact that I can still understand and read and cast myself at the feet of my books.

Why bother with philosophy? I demand of myself, setting down Grapes of Wrath yesterday, after closing the book on Rosasharn nursing a man dying of starvation, her own stillborn baby still fresh in my mind. None of the philosophers I’ve read thus far – not Nietzsche, not Kant, not Aristotle, not even the master himself, Plato – none of them manage to philosophise about human nature with as much fluency and lucidity as can be achieved in a passage of the best literature. It’s literature that realises philosophy, especially ethics, that immeasurably complex study of humanity and how we reach out for each other, to hurt or to hunt or to love…

From Steinbeck’s Nobel acceptance speech:

“Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about… he knew that understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being… he is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. 

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe passionately in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

How not to fall in love? How beautiful the sentiment is! Literature makes life real for me, I think, which is why I am a compulsive diarist, a compulsive writer. Sometimes things don’t seem real to me until I’ve written them down… I was browsing my diary, and this is an excerpt from the day I finished reading East of Eden, several weeks ago:

 

“Today I read Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and did almost nothing else. I read from two pm to six pm, broke away to cook dinner, went to watch Call of the Wild with Matti, and then came back and read all the rest of it. It gave me back joy and it gave me back erudition, and these gifts were accompanied with something that felt akin to relief; something that I might name gratitude.

It has been a painfully long time since I read a serious novel – a novel that wasn’t afraid to be both a novel about ideas and a novel about men and women. It has been even longer still since the last time I let myself sit down and drown in a book, wholehearted and willing. Oh, I’ve read lots – I think it would honestly hurt me to not read – but I’ve not read with this kind of immersive intensity for a terribly long while.

Part of it may be that it has been a while since I have met a book that desired that kind of determination from me. The last book I read before this was Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I read that over a period of five nights or so, going through a bit and then a bit again, night after night before sleep. And that was fine. It was a conversation that could be put on hold and resumed and put on hold again. Many, many books – and even many very good books – are precisely like that, and perhaps that is the kind of book that is best suited to us today. East of Eden, however, is the sort of the book that allows for you to respond with that kind of wholesale-or-nothing passion, and I am glad, glad beyond belief.

I’ve missed this pleasure. Part of me was quite probably afraid that I’d lost it – reading and writing are skills that have a disturbing tendency to decay without use – and hence the gratitude, the burgeoning relief, that I can still give myself so wholly to this kind of delight. It is a very tiring kind of ease, because it takes discipline to commit yourself to caring about these people. It takes some strange strength to love Cal Trask, and it takes some unusual effort to know his sins in your mind and in your heart. This was probably what Aristotle was getting at when he explored catharsis, and I don’t think I agree with the common definition of the word, but it’s as good a name as any, for this singular and unique fulfillment.”

 

I didn’t read Grapes of Wrath quite the same way – I read it piecemeal but blazed through just over half of it yesterday. Between the two I think I preferred East of Eden, but perhaps that might be at least partially because of how I read East of Eden in comparison to Grapes of Wrath. Both of them are beautiful and stirring novels, although very alien to me. The characters – these hardened men and women, these creatures of the earth, raw and tough and tied to the soil – what would I know of them, being a city child? And yet, as I said – the words make them accessible. The words make their being something that I grasp, something that I can understand and relate to, and the words make their miserable existence something to be attended to, something to be grasped and celebrated and mourned and emulated.

It makes me feel, very keenly, that I have a long, long way to go as a writer and a poet.

was unfamiliar

{ April 29, 2011 @ 9:18 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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I’m very restless today, I think. Perhaps I’m particularly susceptible now, in that slightly fragile, not-quite-settled state between leaving Berlin and arriving in Oxford; rationally I know I really ought to be revising for my politics collection (after the sheer disaster that was economics today, alas!) but I’ve just spent the evening reading Patti Smith’s autobiography, Just Kids. I must admit, I’m reading it not because I’m a fan of Patti Smith, but because I’m a fan of Robert Mapplethorpe, and they were famously close, and it’s quite intriguing to see how Mapplethorpe fit into her life. And of course, because I can’t leave well enough alone, it’s not enough to read a book – it’s imperative to doubt the narrator and to wonder what she isn’t telling us, what she’s chosen to gloss over – because how could you not? How could anyone not gloss over parts of a life, a long and well-worn, well-lived life?

I’d seen Mapplethorpe’s works online before, run across him when I was in what I think of as the Rimbaud-Mishima-St-Sebastian phase of my thoughts (a period which I doubt I’ve ever fully left behind) and I was fortunate enough in Berlin to see an exhibition of his works, at c/o Berlin. It was fantastic – his work still shocks today, even in an age where there’s so little left of sexual titillation, where sex is such an desensitised topic. And frankly the arrangement of the exhibition was fantastic. A room of S&M images and a room of flowers right next to each other, leading into each other – both of them photographed with the same intensity and exquisite precision. The closest I can say: those images were about turning the body into a flower – making the sordid and the violent easy and graceful, and doing the same for the flower, diffusing through it a weight and gravity that had its own power to shock. Lovely.

Another lovely thing (the world is so full of lovely things! why should I have to think about comparative government? I ask indignantly) – I went to another museum, the V&A this time, and I saw the exhibition on Aestheticism, the (rather unimaginatively titled) Cult of Beauty, and I adored it, just as I adored the rococo/Baroque palaces that we toured in Potsdam. Though strangely, out of all the opulence, the fine attention to detail, the repeated peacock motif – the thing that drew me the most were Aubrey Beardsley’s precise and intense black-and-white drawings. I’ve always known him as the artist who did the drawings for Wilde’s Salome, of course, but this was the first I’d ever seen of his other works, including a wonderful early work called Siegfried, titled for the hero of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The Salome works are famous and rightly so – cruel and avaricious and freakish, curiously perverse but simultaneously vital (incidentally that reminds me that I did start a poem on Salome once, and should really go unearth it at some point), but his earlier works are full of fantastic and fantastical detail. Mmmmmmm.

(You know, as I read through my previous posts, I realise that I could actually start a tag called “S&M”. I don’t know whether to be amused or disturbed by this.)

Also, the other day I met up with the awesome and amazingly talented Ayla (Mehtap) Omer to watch a performance called The Goodbye Library, which was part of the London Word Festival. A quick shoutout: if you are at all interested in gorgeous art, please visit Ayla’s FB page, which is here, and which features her beautiful canvases inspired by synaesthesia, which is the experience of seeing colours when one hears music or sees letters. She’s one of the most amazingly talented people I know – I love you lots, Ayla-tan! We had a magical evening, as she so aptly put it, and The Goodbye Library was great fun – artsy and tongue-in-cheek (loved the songs by Emmy the Great – who was very pretty, I couldn’t help but notice – about the Sweet Valley High Wakefield twins, oh god, that’s a concentrated and hilarious dose of nostalgia for sure) and in all honesty, just a little bit hipster, haha.

But it’s always inspiring to see people who are serious about their music/poetry/performances. It was intriguing – I was watching a poet read, and I was far enough in front that I could see his copy of his book trembling; his hands were shaking and shaking and shaking and that’s an image that I took away, the knowledge of confidence and its antithesis. Things like these always fire me up while at the same time, a little paradoxically, making me feel a little less adequate as a writer, because I’ve always failed to take myself seriously enough. And if I can’t take myself seriously enough, how can I expect my poetry to take me seriously?

And speaking of poetry (and yes, yes, apologies on the rambling, my mind seems to be on autopilot today), I have been memorising lots of it lately, and I thought I’d share one of my favourites:

The Illiterate, by William Meredith

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar, but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feelings for the words
Which keep him rich, orphaned and beloved?

And truly, the most achingly delicious part of this is that the whole thing is given such poignant structure by the fact that this poem might very easily have been titled The Inarticulate instead (in my opinion, anyway). Draw your attention back to that first line, that simple beginning, “Touching your goodness, I am like” – that beginning which reveals the whole poem for what it is: a metaphor, an extended one, so reminiscent of Nietzsche in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, where he points out:

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colours, snow and flowers, and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things… Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

This was one of the first things I ever read from Nietzsche; at sixteen, I think it snuggled up in a corner of my brain and never really left. It’s one of those pieces of writing where I continuously take away different things. At one point, while I was steeped in postmodernism and epistemology, it was a heady reminder that language might as well be truth and very crucially contributes to it in certain ways. For a while more, I saw it as a clever exercise in irony, in and of itself, that Nietzsche spends so much time ranting about the invalidty of metaphors and then proceeds, in his crowning paragraph, to hammer his message about the truth home… through a metaphor about coins.

And, for the now: despite the fact that Nietzsche was making a different point – but truly, isn’t that a beautiful thought when taken in tandem with Meredith’s poem? The double layer of the inability to read and the inability to speak – to receive from and to give the truth to another person – and yet, through that very metaphor, how accurately Meredith grips at the emotional heart of the matter! How surely he makes us understand that metaphor is a perfectly valid way to the truth!

I realise I spend most of this blog rhapsodising. Well! there are worse ways to think and to write, I’m sure.

carey get out your keys

{ March 18, 2011 @ 11:37 pm } · { Oxford, poetry, Topic-specific discussions }
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If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from university, it’s the art of putting my life away neatly, but no matter how many times I do this modernistic wrestle with cardboard boxes and parcel tape (accompanied by the mental soundtrack of ‘Oh my goodness why do I have so much stuff?’), I reach a point in the evening where I get unenviably maudlin and slightly unhappy. It’s completely irrational, of course, and the knowledge of that saves me from a complete descent into angst, thank goodness. I realised rather recently that for all my ferocious and sardonic opinions about politics and literature and people and life in general, I still reserve the sharpest and most self-deprecating cynicism for myself, accompanied by a minor dose of self-deprecating humour to keep the cut from stinging too much (just enough to metaphorically kick my own arse out of whatever mood I’m working up to). It’s a good way to live, I think.

For instance, I’ve been shoving stuff into boxes all evening and trying to put stuff into the space at the top of my closet, wearing a mopey face and singing along with Gackt (slightly off-key, I can’t help it, do I look like a baritone to you?) and thinking of Norwegian Wood (which I will talk about in half a moment). This litany of cheerfulness and joy was interrupted by my intermittently working on a prose-poem entitled such tenderness, Sebastian. (Fwinn, if you’re reading this, it’s your fault for sending me a postcard with Rimbaud’s face on it: you totally reminded me of how much I adore his prose-poems and in doing so completely set me off.) The central theme of this poem is ‘Sadists have it all wrong, I realised – the strongest power, my friend, is suffering.’ So you can tell, it was a happy poem.

(Incidentally, though – it’s good work, even if I do say so myself. I’ve been writing a cycle of poems about Sebastian since forever – and I’d got quite stuck. The re-read of Rimbaud was just what the doctor ordered, though it must be noted that I still only have a meagre three pieces which even deserve to be called poems, and that pales in comparison to the number of ideas I have and the myriad facets of the Sebastian mythos, alas…)

And then as I was sorting out my papers, I found my owl necklace! Sandwiched between a set of notes on Sartre and a set of notes on legislatures – the brown one which I had given up as lost, and then my face went from : ( to : D! in half a second, and I put it on, just for the whimsical pleasure of knowing it was hanging around my neck again. At that point, it struck me as rather amusing, the speed with which one’s mood can change drastically – and how tiny the change which brings it about!

The moral of the story is: don’t take yourself too seriously. Also, I think I’d quite like to be an otter, and kalamata olives are yummy.

But non sequiturs aside – it’s been a good, if busy term. When is it not? Economics has been an uphill climb, as always, but comparative government has been fantastic – so much so that I’m very tempted to write a politics thesis in lieu of a module. It’ll be something on Southeast Asia, and hopefully I’ll get the topic sorted in Trinity term and then I’ll get to go home to Singapore over the summer and snuffle out primary sources. Comparative government’s been great partially because the debate is live for me in a way that philosophy isn’t – don’t get me wrong: I adore philosophy and would die a painful and wilting death without it in my life: but while I have the intelligence to follow and argue for the philosophical debates, I doubt I have the insight to make significant advances in what sometimes feels like an intrinsicially theoretical subject – however, as Emily and I were discussing today – it’s not philosophy’s fault that it’s lost relevance to modern lives – it’s the fault of modern lives that we’ve lost touch with philosophy. Though, Emily, if you’re reading this: surely even in older times, such as the Victorian era that you were talking about earlier – philosophy was still very much the preserve of an elite set of intellectual and upper-class people? To refine the earlier statement, it’s perhaps a side effect of the cultural implications of democracy: that suddenly something is worth more or more applicable or just better if it’s applicable to, understandable by, and a concern of everyone rather than a subset of the population (which automatically renders most of the humanities kaput, as pointed out earlier in the day…)

But politics! The pertinent, immediate questions of how we organise our lives – the historical reach and impact of the theories and ideologies that dominate us and ride the collective minds of man, those immortal questions of rulership, by the one or the many, the limits of our emotional empathy and our collective identity, those thorny issues of empowerment and oppression. Mmmmmmmmmm. You’ll never convince me that political theory and the study of politics should be entirely empirical, despite the case of science envy that the humanities seems to have contracted, and despite the fact that the wonderful Matt Williams (Wadham DPhil, my tutor this term) made the theory and methods of comparative government far more fascinating than I’d originally expected it to be. (The metastudy of the study of politics, mmm.) But politics without a normative component is politics without the crucial deliciousness.

Anyway, I thought I’d discuss Norwegian Wood, but perhaps that’s a post for a day in the future, when people have watched the movies and are less chary of spoilers, and when I’ve re-read the novel itself and can do proper justice to the issues. (One word: sex. Sex sex sex sex sex, everyone’s favourite topic, no?) I just have to say: Matsuyama Ken’ichi has my heart forever and ever and ever and ever! He was wonderful as an actor, just as brilliant as the last couple of films I watched him in (I loved him in the Death Note adaptations, of course, but also in Ultra Miracle Love Story) and quite probably even better. He’s not conventionally handsome at all, but there’s a scene in the snow where just looking  at him makes me want to squee and hug a pillow (or him) and roll around, smiling all the while. His expression, his smile – impossibly adorable.

That being said, the movie portrayal of Norwegian Wood made me feel terribly inadequate as an Asian girl. I feel I should be porcelain-cute, have massive emotional and psychological hangups about sex, and speak an octave higher and say ‘ne?’ at the end of every sentence. Also, I’m glad to realise that I haven’t lost all my command of the Japanese language… Also, when the movie ended and I realised I was still in England instead of in an Asian country (specifically, Singapore, or even Japan), I had a thoroughly disorienting moment. *laughs*

And speaking of other countries – this time next week I will be in Berlin! There are no words for how much I’m looking forward to that! Expect lots of rambling about it!

(the (poetry) is in the parentheses)

{ March 9, 2011 @ 2:29 am } · { poetry }
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(the (poetry) is in the parentheses)


There are two girls sparrow-perched on the lawns, on (a day when no one else is out)

a day undecided about rain

 

One is propped (tenderly) on her white elbow

(which creates a charming angle) against the line of her body,

 

One is a coffee from costa’s, brown dress skwirled with cream,

She is bending over her friend, they are speaking (of happiness)

Their bare feet are set close together (like a cluster of noontide dreams)

 

There are two beautiful girls sitting out on the lawns and (they are in the pose of lovers)

 

– Written for the inaugural Trinity College Arts Week Poetry Prize, where it took first prize. Including the title, it hits the word-count ceiling of a hundred words; comments and criticisms are always keenly appreciated! Tell me if you enjoyed it and (especially!) if you didn’t!

I now understand the masculine Eros

{ January 26, 2011 @ 12:38 am } · { Topic-specific discussions }
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“and I marvel at Socrates for having remained virtuous in view of an Alcibiades like this.”

This is a quotation from Sacher-Masoch’s seminal work, Venus In Furs, which I have just finished reading. It’s been a long and exhausting day; going from the labyrinthine, human game called politics to that mathematical sonata called economics, and then to the opaqueness of a language I have yet to bear down on (German, if you’re wondering), and Sacher-Masoch has been an excellent close to the evening.

(To provide the context: Sacher-Masoch is the man who lends his name to our term, “masochist”, much as de Sade lends his to “sadist”. Venus in Furs is the best-known of his works and one of the few available in English, a novella from the work entitled The Legacy of Cain. I leave you to realise what such a work might just be about.)

An intriguing work. All the better because it failed to satisfy, in the end – the book ends with Severin ‘cured’ of his desire for torment – in fact, earlier, he brandishes his own whip at a young woman in his household and she scurries away, and it’s so terribly trying. There are two brilliant moments in Venus In Furs – or perhaps, one moment that is crucial and another moment that is a monumental success and a failure all at once.

Let me talk about the latter first – the brilliance and the failure occurs at what is ostensibly the novel’s climax, where Alexis, delineated so lovingly as Apollo, as Alcibiades, as the young, the potent, the vital – where he whips Severin, while Wanda (the eponymous Venus) watches and shivers in delight. It’s brilliant because it is the height of Wanda’s cruelty, the height of her brilliance, and of course visually I think it makes a fantastic image. Alexis is described as beautiful, feminine. Wanda, is, of course, a goddess, with all the boldness and voluptuousness that that could ever imply.Visually, though, Severin is possibly the most masculine – austere, stern, an ascetic, lined face – but part of Sacher-Masoch’s intrigue is that he never clearly delineates power as masculine or feminine. Feminine power is cruelty, but in the descriptions of Alexis’s power and personality we get a clear sense of the masculine as well: and Alexis shares the same cruelty as Wanda. It’s an excellent visual and intensely layered – but why do I think it a failure?

Possibly because I feel Severin should have succumbed. Surely, surely, if Sacher-Masoch intended to write a treatment of masochism, then the true climax would have been for him to receive pleasure under Alexis’s brutality just as he took it from Wanda. In seeing Alexis as an extension of Wanda – in taking pleasure in cruelty itself, without the protestations that he was in love with Wanda – surely that would have been the epitome. That it didn’t happen felt a little like Sacher-Masoch retreated from the brink, and what is an author for unless it is to take us right over the edge?

(Of course, Sacher-Masoch doesn’t do this. And it intrigues me – how much of the current view of masochism – sub-space and complete surrender, and so on – is influenced by what we have come to define it as? If we take Sacher-Masoch as an early authority (and of course, that brings us to the question: this is a thinly veiled roman a clef – how far can we trust this man’s view as representative, if at all?), then how much of the pleasure of masochism can come from fighting it? As Severin did?)

Though my favourite moment, in comparison to this, is the part of the novella where I obtained the quote which I opened this post with – with Wanda driving through the park, lashing the horses, and then, arrested by Alexis – both of them, Wanda and Severin alike, arrested by the recognition of cruelty and force. Mm. Severin’s grudging, envious, desirous detailing of Alexis, his physical charms and his undefinable charisma – and Wanda, whom we will never know (because Severin is a biased narrator, a flawed narrator, of course), the lioness and the lion meeting and the slinking creature as the third, the discordant and unifying note in the picture, neither comfortable as prey nor strong enough to be predator. The perfect moment, filled with potentiality. Fantastic – and incidentally, rather reminding me of one of my favourite quotes from Kierkegaard: “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”

Masochism and its portrayal – fascinating. Venus In Furs will occasion a re-read, I can tell right now that my opinion isn’t particularly fixed. It’s intriguing because I’ve never read The Story of O, which is held to be the other classic in the masochistic literary canon, and I’ve never read anything by de Sade (which I will remedy just as soon as I screw my courage to the sticking point – not to mention scrounge up the time). What I have read is Gordon, by Edith Templeton, which I didn’t feel quite the same appreciation for. Perhaps a re-read is in order as well… though I never really managed to empathise or even sympathise with the title character. And I read the first chapter of Sadopaideia because it was attributed to Swinburne (who has, in my opinion, written some excellent poetry and some excruciating crap), and all I can say is, I hope it wasn’t actually Swinburne because that would bring my opinion of him awfully far down. That’s as far as I got with the literature concerning sadomasochism, alas – though Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains does discuss it. It’s peripheral more than anything else in that, though, so I hesitate to address that, much as I love Isherwood.

Incidentally, if there’s anyone who borrows from the same dynamic of psychological pain, it’s Mishima Yukio. (Who was very taken with the mythos and the idea of St Sebastian, everyone’s favourite martyr. St Sebastian himself is also very interesting: I could talk about him for ages, but I shan’t bore everyone right now…)

I leave on the note that I began on (a note which will have to be elaborated someday, since this is one of my particular pet topics), which is that often-ignored aspect of Plato’s characterisation of Socrates; the characterisation that fascinated Foucault in The History of Sexuality: Socrates as the seducer and philosophy as lure.

Socrates, speaking in Alcibidiades I, one of the disputed dialogues of Plato:

“The fact is, that there is only one lover of Alcibiades the son of Cleinias; there neither is nor ever has been seemingly any other; and he is his darling,—Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete.”

For Demas – I Too Am In Love

{ June 7, 2010 @ 11:57 am } · { one-shot, poetry }
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For Demas: I Too Am In Love

A short week later, I received an answer from my pastor
I imagined it on a late-night flight across the continents, high above the earth where He once walked
And I saw it arrive, my name in prosaic pen on plain paper
With its remonstrance neatly sealed within.

*

Yes, it’s true, Father, I have left the church.
(I wish I could tell you how much I needed to do it.)
I am sorry for your distress but this decision is irrevocable
Why have I chosen to turn my back on Him? you ask
My answer is only this: Demas.

Does my reply make no sense, Father, do I see you frowning
in that stern, gentle way of yours? Perhaps this will be the better answer:

Imagine me, sleepless and alone. I have just read II Timothy 4.10:
For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world
Imagine me, mouthing the words: love God more!
than this present world, than everything, with my eyes wide open in the night
while the present world and God both go on, unawares

I tried for a long, long while, Father, to summon that courage, the strength
to abandon the melting twilight and the night-chilled sunshine. To tear away the sweet hold the sherry-air has on my soul
for that mysterious personage behind every dust-mote in the gloaming.

For a long, long time, I asked myself, Father: why did Demas do it?
He had bravery enough to remain steadfast in Paul’s time of imprisonment.
Easy enough to leave at a time of real peril
rather than waiting to announce his departure, to be castigated by the words the apostles have left behind

But perhaps that is the shape that such courage takes?

This, then, is my affirmation – a gesture of kinship
extended to him as I dream here, in this town’s stony beatitudes.
I dream as Demas did – uneasy, still, but free.

*

What was it that he loved about the present world?
It must be much the same as I love, surely.

He wakes and is warmed by warmth
Wool, the early morning, love

He sits down to breakfast
Maza, fresh-baked, and amphissa olives

He touches the bread to his mouth
No, he feeds someone else first, laughing

Both of them tangle in the glowing, forgiving air, or possibly it is their souls that touch
saturating the fine print of Demas’s fingers,
which find their answering grooves on a pair of smiling lips.

*

I can sleep here, now, amidst the solemn colleges,
my back to his chest, on a single, narrow bed. I can close my eyes
and let myself listen across time:
the soft impact of lips to fingers, to palm,
to the strong, sure wrist, the sunburned shoulder.

And here, now, I can show the present world
The unabashed tessellation of our sleeping bodies

Uncaring, my lover acknowledges no gods, Father. Not the one you believe in, not the one that I was taught. He demands only one thing:
That our cupped hands be the wine vessel for our sacred, mortal love; that all else is to be left as sediment in the bottle.

*

You must be disappointed in me, Father, much like Paul was with Demas. Much like Demas was with himself, I think.
There he is now, darting past Thessalonika’s walls at night, fleeing
The untroubled calls of the merchants, rolling up canvases and putting up their wares for the night
Time and again he goes back again, taking this road, any road, leading back to Rome.

And yet I can see him turn back, full circle with the sun. I can see his face, wracked and determined at once
He takes slow, measured steps. He wanders through the waking streets
And then he pauses at the temple. He stands under the open sky, the vault of the temenos

Finally he offers a silent, agonised prayer to
– ?
Whoever will hear it. Then, he goes back.

He is climbing the stairs, avoiding the creak, pushing the door open gently. He is lifting the covers, and at the last:
He is coming home. He is being, he is there.

How could he have known? And yet, I like to hope that Demas knew.
I want to believe that he led not the life of bliss, but that he felt each cataclysm
like a private earthquake juddering through the bedrock of his soul.
As Christ cried out on the cross of wood and despair
He closed his eyes and wept – he dropped his quill –
The ink spread across the parchment like blood
From a crucified palm, like faith
From an uncertain soul.

*

But wait, you say to me. Such a small thing, II Timothy 2.10
This one line, an unworthy trigger for the fired bullet
That is apostasy. Already I can see you arming yourself
With alternatives and explanations, but I ask you, Father:

What matters, if not these things?
What can I embrace, if not that which is small enough to be gathered in my arms?

It is the small things which compose the glimmering doubt
that strolls across my heartstrings, as the students whirr past.
They are a flock of faces and books, and it is here
That I have found both the present and eternal
The bright, laughter-drunk and young, here they pass forever,
in endless cycles of short years.

It is here that I have found that which I hope Demas was able to find:

In his rooms, in someone’s arms,
in Thessalonika.

*

I have not the fortitude or the patience to wait for the second coming.
I do not ask your forgiveness, Father, or even for your understanding.
I merely seek your silence. Allow me to cleave to my Thessalonika, let my present world pass with me.

You see, in the years to come, someone will find Thessalonika once more
And he will answer me,
As I have answered, thus.

(In reply to Kristin Fogdall’s poem: Demas, In Love With This Present World)

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