05.
‘i want to leave but by leaving love’
I wanted to leave but at the same time by leaving affirm my essential connection to people who matter in my life. The irony of parting is that it can pull people closer. when a star dies it shrinks first into a core before exploding into a supernova. such analogies though are bunk, as analogies represent one of the many ways in which we try to sculpt our experiences into some idealized representation.
The last day was great. dinner with family was beautiful, and ended with parents reminiscing about their old childhood memories and their tales of a different age and time where they were mired under real poverty and the colonial yoke. Maybe when i have time i should post some of those stories here because they are something i never want to forget. there was a nice sending off at the airport. preceding that, the whole last week was filled with a series of meet ups with friends and some good conversations.
The whole spectacle of leaving has actually made me more consciously aware of this ambiguous sense of ‘singaporean-ness’ that i possess. I feel that i have grown more singaporean over the past two years. I feel that i am one of the people that straddle two worlds (imperfectly) and that i can switch between two modes with a degree of ease. looking back, alot of my humour and thinking (talking cock, literally) seems to function in a very specific singaporean context. at the same time, i dont feel i am that limited by a kind of parochialism/provincialism that could possibly be a result of this. i say this with a dose of doubt, because it is hard to draw judgements on self. ultimately, i think there will always be a part of me that will feel more comfortable at home, and i think being singaporean is ultimately a sense of comfort, and not the aggregation of any measurable characteristics.
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i am in penn now. first day was crazy, jetlagged and exciting. lost luggages, locked out of apartments and many misadventures. things are alright now though. more on that to come later: need to stop this self serving waffling now and prepare for moving in.
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04. beyond the horizon
next week will hopefully be packed with encounters and meet ups. What Raymond Carver wrote (which i wrote down the last time) has been constantly surfacing in my mind (“I have always squandered”)- The best laid plans are tripped by the human aptitude for ineffectuality. I told conan today that i feel like i am squandering my days just waiting to fly off and go, given that these last few days are numbered and precious. He told me that this is an illusion: and that today is no different from any day two months or ten months ago.
Which is in a way true. yet, I feel i should be doing more with my time now than i usually do. this sense though, is too vague, too nebulous to take root. I can imagine i will leave in the way i always expected it to be: with me having prepared and waited a long time for the moment, yet leaving in a rush, door half shut, things scattered and thrown and hurriedly forced into corners and bags. with the preparedness of a watchman in wait and at the same time with the gasp of someone trying to hold back seconds from seeping through closed palms.
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too much mood control. been watching too many films and reading too many good books which unfortunately tend to chip off at one’s glass mirror of the world. eugene o’neill’s plays have been great, and so is jean pierre melville’s films. talking to a friend the other day, i came to the conclusion that my reading/appreciation of literature was foremost sympathetic rather than critical. I am deliberately losing my defenses, putting myself in a position to fall in love with works, letting them change me. Need to reorient perspectives. reading up on some critical theory, has been interesting. Ironically, hope I will fall in love with university, let it change my mind.
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03. leaving trunk
“The blues are mushed up into three different ways
One said go the other two said stay
I woke up this mornin’ with the blues three different ways
You know one say go “baby I want to hang up”, the other two said stay “
(leaving trunk)
Leaving this place in slightly more than a week. things to pack, loose ends to tie into knots, people to meet. The days pass by with a sense of waste (i may have just emotionally squandered the last 9 months) and i am happy to leave. Not to mention, there are many people whom i have taken for granted (family, some friends?) How does one say goodbye when goodbye implies an additional degree of separation? I want to leave but by leaving love and leave my measure of love behind.
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I think the band is finally done, after 6 years of dogged existence and renewal and lineup changes i think after 3 gigs this year we are finally moving on. it has really been quite a long time and it was fun. Hope to continue jamming in the states. probably going to buy a new guitar (have the eye for one currently) – anticipation.
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Went to vietnam and came back. Some thoughts:
one shouldnt travel with preconceived notions about the nature of travelling. One shouldnt be swayed by too much travel lit and attempt to impose a romantic lens over the whole travelling experience. one should not expect travel to be a source of epiphany. if such a thing occurs- it should be sudden and accidental. keep it simple, see the place. Do not impose your expectations on the environment. do not expect the place to be a reflection of your mental state or you will not actually see the place. dont let taking photos and camwhoring be a substitute for real exploration- the more pictures you take, the less you see and consider. if you and your friends take up more than 70% of the space within a photograph, you are a camwhore- you have travelled halfway around the world to gaze hungrily at pictures of yourself.
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02.
I am reading poetry again. Raymond Carver’s collection of poems a new path to the waterfall was the last thing he ever wrote, before succumbing to cancer a few days later. I think i have a natural fascination with literature that is written in the shadow of mortality, in the candle of death. Perhaps it is because such literature emphasize the urgency of the present, strips away the veneers of comfortable self-deception and opiate bullshit while asking the really difficult questions. What is life for? Raymond Carver answers squarely in the introduction: I have always squandered.
In the same book, tess gallagher quotes Milosz’s Ars poetica: “i have always aspired to a more spacious form/that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose/ and would let us understand each other without exposing/ the author or reader to sublime agonies”. Perhaps it is a measure of my lack of competency in writing, but i would tend to agree that both poetry and prose both have different and competing qualities, thereby implying both tend to have different degrees of suitability for conveying certain ideas. it seems to me that poetry is more suited to conveying the sense of a moment, the intensity of an image measured and framed into a painting by words (such as the famous red wheelbarrow). Prose on the other hand, is more able to convey the raw sense of an idea; a philosophical concept or a dilemma of a more abstract nature. For the latter, it strikes me that the need for clarity outweigh the aesthetic. straight talk works while too many metaphors in this case muddle more importantly, poetry requires brevity while certain ideas may require exposition rather than brevity for its adequate exploration. of course, this dichotomy is partly a function of my poor skill- i just find it more difficult to convey the abstract into a poem.
and really, this is to some extent why i havent written poetry for such a long time. i have always felt what i want to say could have been better couched in prose, better expressed with less consideration given to form and brevity. and as a question of effort- poetry requires more effort also. Milosz ‘spacious form’ is an ideal that resonates beautifully: is there the possibility of a synthesis? I have always felt that i should pick up poetry again. i have been encouraged from some quarters to do so. This merely hides the deeper question: what is there to write about?
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01.
What is notable is the changeability of self. I read through my old posts and disinterestedly i feel like i am reading the words of a different person or the appendage of some vast, complex and formless identity, like an arm to a body.
The joel of dispatches was concieved against the backdrop of national service. with national service he was raised like adam from dust and grime, and with the end of national service he lost his raison d’etre and ceased to exist, dying a soundless death, distilled into the cheap phonographic nostalgia of two minute soundbites and sensationalistic narration over beer, fries and the grubby hands and laughs that characterize most reflections about army life. in a twist of irony the joel of dispatches became a dispatch himself, a shot-out, paragraph long report from the past, written with urgency then and now viewed and measured leisurely yet strictly against a file, an archive of competing histories.
he was lonely with the loneliness of someone used to loneliness, so that it did not hurt him in some great way but merely limped behind him silently like another shadow. occasionally, it would knock on the door of heart, drowning out the heartbeats and demanding to be let in. He read and watched films not to plot them down on paper- their twists, tricks, circular devices and cleverly austere magic, but so that he could imagine their authors and feel the inner wall of their minds and see their great souls nourishing their great hurt. he was uncritical. he wanted to reassure the dead. he thought a universal problem was a better problem to have than an individual problem. therefore, he universalized his problems.
he was comforted by the lines he drew, forming a circle of protection on the ground around him. he rested on the twin language of both liberation and theology when he was tired. words like transcendence, love, resurrection, suffering, joy, communion, shine were the keystones of his arch. he carried a thousand little crosses, and when there was none, molded what he was carrying into a cross for posterity. he searched for redemption in ordinary things. he was therefore unconsciously religious even when he wasnt. he dressed everything he did into trinkets of beauty, as he still is doing.
he frequently felt older than his years, and by virtue of this knocked at least two years off his age. he learnt to cuss and swear (not that he needed much teaching), but this merely betrayed a deeper meanness that had swept into him. he did not think a thought a sin if he couched it in humour. to his credit, he did not speak to hurt, but to laugh. in his mind, comedy was a weapon against despair. he did not realize that words like weapon and despair had no place in the humdrum of life and irritated chatter of actual human contact. they were like weeds which could only grow strong in the mind. He did not realize that comedy did not exist. life was not a comedy. life was life and comedy was just another cracked looking glass.
he finally grew older, in spite of being younger than he was, and one day he finally left the army and the web of philosophies he had nursed from his experiences in the army that had grown into a beanstalk from a single bean. he suddenly had things to do – take a job to earn some money, make good on his promise to play the guitar. he suddenly felt busier than before, and he was happier because there was vitality in being spent and exhausted. most importantly, he had less of an edifice on which to romanticize. he became a speaker without a story. he grew old finally, died and was buried. another took his place, without fuss.
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