sourdough

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: