words unshared

A moment to decide

2012-01-19T14:06:00.001-08:00

I find it hardest to deal with situations where there is more than one right answer. The existence of a third, competing option dilutes the simple dichotomy of yes and no. It casts doubt on the absolute nature of the other two options. It brings too much possibility into the picture, and with it the seed of unpredictability. The only mechanism to deal with unpredictability is conjecture. And with conjecture, there is doubt.

Life gives us choices, and we make these everyday, though I don't ever seem to become better at making them. I choose my paths only with the alacrity borne out of desperation, the seconds ticking down till life pulls the trigger. In these moments where forks in the road turn into crossroads, I am utterly derailed; my thoughts fly off the curving tracks of consequence.

Law like Love

2011-07-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Live love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

_______________
W.H. Auden

The momentum of a moment

2011-07-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

You know how glass shatters when it encounters a violence it has no hope of absorbing, how the shards twinkle when the surface erupts in horror as breaking point is reached, how they throw off a sudden confusion of coloured lights that is the trauma of becoming unwhole. It strikes from the darkness, this memory that is not mine but which hurls at my consciousness a force of emotion which must have been yours. It is a living source of hate which has accumulated only density and impermeability through the passage of years, a rock hardening under the weight of time, unable to forget itself into non-existence. It hurtles through the shadows and the the scenery of a past blackening in its wake, and it brings to the surface of my mind a force I cannot withstand. It breaches the back of the mirror with a momentum unchecked by your forgetfulness or my forgiveness, the brutal momentum of a moment that was yours and another's and not mine, and as I look into the mirror my reflection and the calm around me are thrown into motion, a thousand silvery shards throwing the face of my own fear back into my flesh. Perhaps the pain will drain itself out when the blood stops flowing. Perhaps I can wear my broken face into the happiness and the future we imagine. Perhaps not.

Switching sides

2011-05-20T11:39:00.001-07:00

I wish I had something more to say but I've already used all the words I know; the problem with me not being a good speaker is that you're not a good listener. You don't have the patience to hear me attempt to attempt to articulate the haziness of my emotions in a vocabulary I am unfamiliar with. You don't have the understanding to see past the own distorted image you have of yourself. You move in a world inhabited only by your own fears and doubts and your warped, overblown sense of pride. When you battle against me you only end up fighting against yourself, because I am always on your side.

Can't you see it? Do not mistake me for one of your shadows and carve away at a dignity that has you as its soul and centre. I fight for you, why do you cut me down?

Liability

2011-02-12T19:11:00.000-08:00

How long before long will we learn
that love is a cause and not a consequence
how soon, how often will we teach each other
that love is not a defence but an element of the crime.
How many times will you say I need to know
that love is a lie I don't need to believe in:
how love is your excuse, my justification.

How quickly will I come to admit to myself
that love lies not in the heat nor in the moment
nor the hand bringing down the knife
but in my guilty mind that compels the blade
to darken the night with my heart's bleeding
into a pool so dark I see your reflection:
you walking away, saved by your omission.

You had no duty to care: I had done all the assuming.

Looking forward

2011-02-09T09:36:00.000-08:00

When the world my heart is rending
With its heaviest storm of care,
My glad thoughts to heaven ascending,
Find a refuge from despair.

Faith's bright vision shall sustain me
Till life's pilgrimage is past;
Fears may vex and troubles pain me,
I shall reach my home at last.

_______________
Charles H. Spurgeon

What you do not know

2011-01-07T16:35:00.000-08:00

You are more important to me than you know it.
You are important in the way I know the morning will be clear, and it will be quiet;
in the way my feet find the ground.
You are important in the way my voice comes to me when I command it,
and in the way your laughter follows my joy.

You are important to me in the simplest of ways.
I do not find you in the clouds, nor the stars:
you are none of these
but the quiet endless arch
on which these lights and colours hang themselves.
You are the silence and the stillness
on which poetry speaks and music resounds.
You are the page on which no words need be written
for meaning to be spoken.

In this sort of comfort,
there is no meaning to be hidden
no strings still attached
nor feelings left unchecked.
In this sort of silence, and under this sort of sky,
I have no words left unshared.

Freedom

2010-11-28T14:08:00.000-08:00

We are pendulums swinging across the arcs of our days; we give each other momentum and let each other fall. Sometimes we swing and we catch each other, and then we intertwine and loop dizzily in space, and we draw the circumference of each other's lives; we chase each other along the same orbit. But we always forget that when we finally find each other across the void of string and space, the momentum stops also; and then we disentangle, we swing away from each other and spin again in equal and opposite directions, no circle too large or too far away from the other, and then we are free agents once again. We are free to love and to hate, but we are free most of all. At the top of every arc we are free most of all.

My mistake

2010-09-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

I could not bring myself to say it; I would not allow myself the possibility of failure, nor introduce the moment when I would no longer be master of myself. I could not say it; I could not ask the question gilded with hope and with doom, and in failing to ask it I had failed. For nothing else but your affirmation is failure, and failure is everything but the shape of those words forming, with precious slowness, like silver in the air, like the peal of a bell.

More or less openly

2010-04-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me, but one sometimes forgets. And of that life too I shall tell you perhaps one day, the day I know that when I thought I knew I was merely existing and that passion without form or stations will have devoured me down to the rotting flesh itself and that when I know that I know nothing, am only crying out as I have always cried out, more or less piercingly, more or less openly. Yes, let me cry out, this time, then another time perhaps, then perhaps a last time.
_____________
Molloy
Samuel Beckett

Heart's fire

2010-04-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

There're certain things you can't bring to admit to yourself, certain memories that are ageless and changeless, locked away like a prisoner within a circle of heart's fire. These are the things that have sculpted you, formed you into the person you are; you see it in your hands, your eyes, the shape of the words that come from your lips. These are the things that dance like fingertips across your visions of the present: the twitch of recognition, of recognizance, of recollection that flickers across your face like the shadow of an osprey, like the shiver of water as memory blossoms slowly upon the pool of your consciousness.

The answer of the hills

2010-03-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.
_________________
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

But somehow I think all that doesn't quite hold true these days; one man's pain is all too often another man's pleasure, and this is the schadenfreude that is woven into the texture of all relationships. It is the double entendre that echoes behind all men's laughter, like a silent chuckle hidden into the darkness behind one's palm.

Poison hands

2010-02-25T07:31:00.000-08:00

In life we don't always get to choose our friends, but we must always be careful of the crazy ones, those whose planes have fallen trailing smoke from the sky, and who emerge from the wreckage and the flames crawling like a man unborn – half-crazed, fractionally alive, somewhat unwhole, and only partly friend. It would be folly to reach out to someone who wants nothing more than to pull you to the ground, or to hold the hand of someone whose fingers are leaking poison.

Life as we know it

2010-02-16T05:15:00.000-08:00

Some evenings when the sky turns golden and the clouds begin to lift, you can feel a strange sense of uncertainty as the day peels away and the sky is revealed to be a starry, cosmic emptiness, and you can feel the way the bits of the world are clinging together for dear life, for a sense of validation under the vaulted heavens. You can feel the way stuff swirls around in the air, undetermined, like the dust in the cosmos that isn't yet a comet or a planet or a star, and you begin to think about the way people lean on each other like a vast perfect circle of dominoes, each bearing the weight of the whole human world, a burden of entirety and of infinity. You think about how we place our woes on each other's backs and watch the generations topple with a rattle, and how anguish has been perfectly balanced in a world where we accept one another's grief so they may suffer our own. For in an unblemished world we would have no need for companionship, nor to lift each other from the dirt; life would not be as we know it.

Choosing directions

2010-02-01T20:18:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you sit back with a heart full of expectation and you wait, and life with all its colour and sound and bright lights whizzes by and surrounds you with a million thrilling opportunities and glorious promises, and you simply sit back in the knowledge that when the time comes, the right current will release you from your moorings and sweep you into an ocean where you can part the waters and walk on the waves, where every footfall wells up with a little shimmering pool of your destiny. And on that ocean there will be nothing on the horizon but clouds shaped in every form of your fancy.

Sometimes the current doesn't come and you continue waiting for the waves even as the sky grows dark, feeling the tug of the water on your hands, on your feet, refusing to yield to what is not irresistible and inexorable. Sometimes we forget that we must immerse ourselves in the water and choose a direction in the dimensionless deep before the current can find a hold, before life will take an interest.

Strange directions

2010-01-22T19:55:00.000-08:00

I think two of the things that defy complete human understanding are perhaps religion and human behaviour. I completely fail to comprehend the schizophrenia of some attitudes and personalities, and if people conducted themselves more rationally and consistently the world would probably be a much easier place to live in. We must remember that beside the straight and narrow path of our own lives, other lives run parallel to our own and if we choose to veer in strange directions and cut our passages across the course of other lives, we do more than throw dust in their faces; they may well mistake our paths for their own.

Possibilities

2010-01-17T04:27:00.001-08:00

It's quite possible, actually, that we don't understand each other at all, that the sentences we hurl like javelins at each other miss their mark completely and come apart in a flurry of mistimed, misused words. It's possible also that the conversations were built on misunderstanding and so began to fall apart, like all formations without foundations, an unfinished work erected on dangerous ground. But times have changed and possibly I have changed. I am no longer willing to pull in one direction and trust that you will pull in the other, to keep whatever has been built in balance. It is possible that planting one's feet firmly, that standing one's ground, that being down-to-earth have become cliches. It is possible to step away, to walk off and let the towers lose their balance and crash mightily to pieces, because the persistence of gravity will be the only force left when I let go.

What a day

2010-01-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes life just conspires in little ways to make you ridiculously happy, a kind of happiness that comes not with the calm satisfaction at what life gives you, but the sort of delirium when life gives you exactly what you want.

An opinion

2009-12-29T04:12:00.000-08:00

When people say they want to express an opinion, they often do one of two things: they start with a general ambiguous feeling about the issue, then shroud it with sentences in a bid to weave some sort of coherent argument from the initial emotional tic, or they arbitrarily choose one side over the other and work themselves into a genuine frenzy trying to defend their stand.

What irks me is the fervour that people have about opinions and their ardent need to have one, to stick their personal flag into one hilltop rather than the other, to stand convinced of something. What has so frequently been forgotten nowadays is that there's no real need to live life with our minds made up about everything; it's not so much the hardy worthlessness of those vapid, stale opinions that naturally come with discussions of tired, trite issues, as it is the worthless hardiness of the notion that not having an opinion is an indication of a weak and ignorant mind. It's a notion that indicates not an opinioned person but an opinionated one. When we abuse our freedom of thought in this manner, we do a disservice to ourselves and contribute only to what is petty and partisan in society. In my opinion, it's alright not to have one.

Knowledge

2009-12-15T21:12:00.000-08:00

I often wonder about knowledge.

To have knowledge is to discover, to discern what was previously unperceived, and perhaps the parts of the word itself carry a warning about the nature of such a realisation – that the moment one comes into knowledge of something, one crosses a line, one steps over an edge into an unfamiliar darkness the dimensions of which only slowly become apparent, a "ledge" beyond which gravity loses its certainty and after which we may be free to fall.

To have knowledge, then, is to subject oneself to considerable danger, to the whim of fact that may come either as a dawn of realisation or a discovery that plunges one into an abyss. This is because hope lies in the indeterminate, the ambiguous and the unknown. It is curiosity that places us at the rim of the precipice, yet ironically it is also hope that makes us take the step into space.

To want to have knowledge is therefore a leap of faith. We stand at the threshold with our hearts wildly beating, our breath faltering, our souls rigid as the firmness of faith fights our fear of falling, and the struggle might lead to a standstill if it were not for a lingering doubt in all things human. We fall forward finally with the weight of a question mark on our backs.

Falling, is therefore about the loss of innocence, and if we fall what rushes toward us with the violence of reality is then the hugeness of consequence, the inevitability of The End because ignorance is no longer a defence and the one invisible force we can believe in turns out to be gravity. It is about Adam and Eve, but it is also about Abraham and Isaac.

Knowledge, then, is as much about knowing the lines we are about to cross as it is about knowing the truth. To have knowledge is also to know the ledge we cannot step over: the dreams we should have never have lived in, the memories we should never have lived out, the words we should have left unshared. We will fall hard and fast when we step unknowingly over that ledge, if we do not have the faith to walk on air.

Hong Kong

2009-12-10T23:42:00.000-08:00

Edith Wharton once said that if we all stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time, and I guess that applies to our trip to Hong Kong. The first thought that probably came to my mind when I arrived was that Hong Kong was somehow a real city, founded firmly on the strength of capitalism and the principle of laissez faire, the buildings arrayed and aligned according to the will of the invisible hand rather than governmental edict. After the somewhat regimental nature of the past two years, Hong Kong provided a stark contrast with its unfettered lifestyle and freewheeling rollercoasters, though the unrelenting push of market forces did seem to take its toll on pedestrian walking speeds and general stress levels amongst the population. Still the food was good, Ocean Park was great, Macau amazingly glitzy and the company awesome, so the trip overall turned out splendid :)

On the other hand, I think the rollercoasters in Hong Kong prepared me well for the reeling and lurching of my first few driving lessons.

The flowers of the field

2009-12-02T04:42:00.000-08:00

Life has been familiar, comfortable and commonplace in a thoroughly satisfying way, with none of the edginess, disquiet and desperate pursuits that characterize so much of our time. This must be what a happy retirement is like, where time and freedom are synonymous with each other and life is a handpicked assortment of people, places and events, filled with enough decadence and laughter to put the past into perspective and enough convenient surprises and fulfilled expectations to make so much of the future worth looking forward to.

All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.

- 1 Peter 1:24

Choosing life

2009-11-25T19:48:00.000-08:00

I think I've seen it quite often in the past few months; we shouldn't let emotions get the better of us, especially the bitter, acrimonious feelings that tend to turn people into sullen and petulant beings. We assume that all thoughts and actions emanate essentially from character and personality, but all too often forget that caustic and resentful sentiments and behaviour in turn have the insidious effect of corroding the bits of goodness in people, leaving behind what is acrid and acerbic, like something gone bad.

Two of the greatest tragedies occur when a person's expectations are incongruent with his abilities, or when the circumstances that life deals to him are incommensurate with the potential that nature has endowed him with. But the protagonist in either case need not be a tragic hero, like a Macbeth drawing arms against morality and destiny, nor like a Miltonian Satan falling further into a darkness not of the Deep but of his own creation. A person of real ability would take life into his hands, and not crush it, but shape it into a design of his own choosing.

These days

2009-11-17T01:40:00.000-08:00

I think it's a mistake to accept life's banalities without discrimination or discernment, to let those prosaic insipidities accumulate like a descending mist of tiny, indivisible and irreducible errands, slowly filling up the bracket of each day, the hours devoured by the trite, the tedious and the trivial. Consciousness is a disposition too complex to be concerned with what is stale and vapid, and what takes over when consciousness melts away is the same insentient, obtuse oblivion that keeps the clouds afloat and gives worker ants their zest for labour.

Sometimes colour seems to drain from the world, especially in moments like these when the streets are filling up with rain and you can't tell the hour of the day by the shade of the sky, and time spends itself in the slow, steady count of one to twelve. I spend it on the piano, with a book, or in thought, during days like these when the world is washing out to sea in the rain. Thankfully there'll be no space for banalities in the next few months, because life has been too good for that: life, which we should speak of only in the present tense, and though we may wave to the past and at the future, we must remember to spend our time in the present doing more than waving. I also remember you, for life reminds me about you, and you remind me about living.

How shall a man be purple?

2009-11-13T02:48:00.000-08:00

When Florus was deliberating whether he should go down to Nero's spectacles and also perform in them himself, Agrippinus said to him, "Go down": and when Florus asked Agrippinus, "Why do not you go down?" Agrippinus replied, "Because I do not even deliberate about the matter." For he who has once brought himself to deliberate about such matters, and to calculate the value of external things, comes very near to those who have forgotten their own character. For why do you ask me the question, whether death is preferable or life? I say "life." "Pain or pleasure?" I say "pleasure." But if I do not take a part in the tragic acting, I shall have my head struck off. Go then and take a part, but I will not. "Why?" Because you consider yourself to be only one thread of those which are in the tunic. Well then it was fitting for you to take care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no design to be anything superior to the other threads. But I wish to be purple, that small part which is bright, and makes all the rest appear graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make myself like the many? and if I do, how shall I still be purple?

- Epictetus: The Discourses, How a Man on every occasion can maintain his Proper Character

Today

2009-11-09T02:21:00.000-08:00

Freedom is a word spelt in three letters, and fittingly enough, in capitals. The date had always been approaching, but in fits and starts, sometimes magnified out of proportion by occasional spells of euphoria or delusion, sometimes shrinking back into microscopic insignificance when seen across the vast distance and darkness of sleepless 50 km road marches. There is no need nor reason to sentimentalise the experience, because it swayed between banality and burnout, but letting these two years lapse without having taken notice of those odd moments worth remembering would have been a waste, for there were people worth appreciating and events worth reliving.

We are all in search of lost time; we are all looking for the threads that used to bind the most ineffable moments of our lives together, and what we cannot regain we have to wait for, and we wait in the hope that what we cannot find, someone we have yet to meet will return to us with smiles and kind words.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only..." - Charles Dickens

The Night Shadows

2009-11-07T21:55:00.000-08:00

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is preferable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

- A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Frozen air

2009-11-06T01:38:00.000-08:00

He had been sitting in his room for too long, his thoughts and dreams hanging silently around him like balloons, some growing soft under the weight of the stillness and drooping in midair like overripe fruit, some already shrunken and shrivelled on the floor, when a sudden breeze pushed open the windows and batted at his kingdom of frozen air, releasing at once the turbidity of his life in a liberating rush that sent the balloons dancing across the room and out from the window, upward and outward at the invitation of the sky, a constellation of colour that vanished at last into the expanse of glowing blue, the disappearance of dreams looking for their own dimensions.

Perchance to dream

2009-10-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

He had always believed there had to be a place somewhere for all the thoughts that had been thought and then thrown out, the ideas scrutinised and swept away; he had imagined a sort of cave where the dreams dreamed and ditched shook off the dust and breathed themselves to life again, or an immense plain where grand passions lived and forsaken endured without end, where everybody's lives were bound like ribbons soaring and cascading at the end of meaning's kite. For him, the past was painted at one end of the sky and the future at the other, and in the present were the endless succession of dreams he lived in and would live out, every one of them, for as long as it took, and then for ever.

A manifesto of faith

2009-10-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

I have read nothing more gracious and true than this for a long time; it is nothing less than a proclamation of how to remain faithful to self and to God in a world with enough curiosity to ask questions but not enough fortitude to answer them:

"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God; who hath saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began."

- 2 Timothy 1:7-9

On Roth and Kundera

2009-10-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

Philip Roth writes the most amazing sentences; he threads together sparkling strings of words that throw off lights and colours at once bizarre and wonderful, comical and tragic, laden with meaning but flashing with the odd gleam of the absurd. His fiction is unashamedly fictional, his narratives never missing a turn for the comic, the tangent of the tale never missing a beat and never missing a trick. Milan Kundera’s works, in contrast, are more allegorical than absurdist: his novels describe worlds where gravity is literally defied, where weight and lightness are inverted, and humanity is shaken to pieces by the laughter of angels and devils. While it is the fertility of Roth’s imagination that imbues his plots with a delirious comic energy, it is the poverty of Kundera’s world that leads him to create meaning, through his own fiction, out of a past that was harrowing and a future that is forbidding.

The dark overtones Kundera paints, tied to the shadowy history of his country, give his tales of joking angels and children’s islands an unshakeable sense of realism that is too painful to be absurdist, too ironic to be comic, and yet too empty to be ironic, too laughable to be really funny. Yet the laughter in Kundera’s novels has nothing of the halting, awkward Pinteresque quality, like a bad joke that falls flat. On the contrary, it is a laughter as otherworldly as it is tragic, “real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide…bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad…and we laugh our laughter to the infinity of laughter…O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter; to laugh is to live profoundly.” This is the sound that is heard in “the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all words with its jangle.”

Insistent and exigent in Kundera’s novels is an element of self-awareness that subverts all comedy, “the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch”, the metaphysical recognition of one’s own misery that gives litost its torment. Kundera’s characters refer to themselves as Sisyphus, and the boulders they roll up the hill are the burdens they bear for each other; in his novels there is nothing of the scorn that Camus argued would surmount any fate, that would allow us to “imagine Sisyphus happy”. His characters do not laugh with joy. It is the madness of their laughter that gives their laughter its madness.

The time of our lives

2009-10-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Some things I've begun to realise: that living life at a walking pace, living from day to day wholly in the present, without a foot in the past or a hand reaching for the future, is infinitely better than chasing sunlight around the globe and inhabiting the darkness at the brink of a horizon. This is not only the best way to live, it is what life is, the only thing; nothing else is real. We have to live in the sunlight that comes upon us with the inevitability of life itself; we have to live with it, and nothing immaterial can stand up to its dazzling, effulgent glare: the figments of imagination, the ghosts of the past, all exorcised in a single incandescent affirmation that the world is all that is the case, and anything that is not radiant with the immediacy of life we ought to hurl into the fire. The pipe dreams, the hopes held out, the promises unrelinquished, the implications and the inferences and the infelicities are all like ashes in one's mouth, and the sounds of our laughter and wailing should echo and roll away from the single point that is the now: life lived on the knife-edge of time.

When I say

2009-10-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

When I say I miss you, it will not be
for the whisper of petals too thin and tremulous
to stay silent about beauty. It will not be
for the trees that hold their arms out
for love, and try to bridge their distance
to the sky. It will not be
for the recurrence of wind and water
or the moaning of the birds
saying they have seen it all.

When I say I miss you,
it is for the silence of the stones and the shadows.
It is for the sediment of age,
the gathering of rain on windowpanes
and the absence of dust on the things
you smiled at.
It is for the howls and the sounds of struggle
that echo across the gap
from pen to page.

It is for the moments when you vanish
from the gaps within the crowd,
for the old habit of thinking you will
reappear, when you are already
receding with distance and in time:
for the last wave,
the last smile, before you
drop from sight.

Lifetimes

2009-09-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

He was going too quickly
when she wasn't looking;
he loved the rush
and she adored sunsets,
the trajectory of two lives
like lines in the sand,
ending in right angles.

Perhaps it was
curiosity in the eye,
or hunger in the belly;
maybe it was
love in the heart
or poetry on the mind.
But life has not been harsh
to those who die
with an eyeful of beauty.

We are fools in love,
fools in hope and hatred;
we are fools with time to spare
and innocence to lose.

We make fools of each other.

We are foolish to learn
what fools are like:
that life has fooled us all,
and in death we become

the greatest fools of all.

Dirge without Music

2009-09-27T06:10:00.000-07:00

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
_____________________

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
______________________

Words like these make me remember why, amidst all the articles, essays, dialogues, critiques and treatises in the world, a poem can be the most important thing of all.

Ishiguro

2009-09-27T05:43:00.000-07:00

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels begin as if with no story in mind, and finish with no end in sight. His narratives hold nothing more than a drift of banalities, the latency of meaning slowly revealed by the accumulating welter of broken thoughts, fractured recollections and fragmented moments of awareness that hazily reflect a crippled and riven world. His characters stand distant from one another, fumbling at the meaning of each other’s sentences, reaching out clumsily and desperately for the companionship of another human being but finally unable to find sincerity, interminably subverted and thwarted by lapses of understanding and lengths of awkward Pinteresque silences. But amidst the anguish and anticipation of human interaction, nobody remains unaware of the indelible influences of age and change in a world that has quietly left them behind. In the last pages of Ishiguro’s most recent novel, he leaves no space even for catharsis; there is no sense of direction nor even the finality of death. Meaning and memory ebb away into an endless vanishing point: “I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up… The fantasy never got beyond that — I didn’t let it — and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”

The imprecision of metaphor

2009-09-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

You are the only person I cannot respond to with any pretense; you make me laugh out of your delight, reveal my thoughts because you want to know them, and forget my direction because you are heading another way. You cause the pages of my books to empty themselves of meaning, the chatter of Plato and other ghosts to fall silent; you make the questions of physics and politics grow strangely distant, and literature more and more terribly beautiful. You are the imprecision of metaphor that sets poetry free. I cannot think of you without the world slowly growing perfect; I cannot respond to you without recourse to poetry, and it is a strange thing to be writing about you. It is like writing about inspiration.

And so it goes
and so it goes
and so will you soon, I suppose.

Of another age

2009-09-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Music is perhaps best listened to rather than talked about, but I suppose what enchants me most about Chopin's music is precisely this quality of emotional purity that language cannot grasp and that words would only tarnish. The melodic curves waltz into view without presumption or presentiment, perfectly attuned to the volatility of the composer's emotions, switching with capriciousness between fragile, iridescent cadences, and the mad perpendicular rush of octaves, somehow bound together in a unity of form that is as immoderate and improbable as life itself. As Rubinstein observes, "All over the world men and women know his music. They love it. They are moved by it. Yet it is not 'Romantic music' in the Byronic sense. It does not tell stories or paint pictures. It is expressive and personal, but still a pure art. Even in this abstract atomic age, where emotion is not fashionable, Chopin endures. His music is the universal language of human communication."

The works of classical artists dominate our imaginations for the brief moments they are heard or read. Goethe's poems occasionally seem to linger far too long in our minds for comfort, like the consciousness of another age bridging history with the leap of a sentence. These works are timeless not only because genius transcends time, but because values are enduringly universal; they are the representations of a culture mankind has left behind in the sweep of history, but they are also the abiding echoes of an element of human nature that individuals have forfeited in the wake of progress. In Goethe's own words, "Everything nowadays is ultra; everything transcends, in thought and in deeds. No one knows himself anymore, no one understands the element in which he moves and acts, no one the material with which he is working. Young people get stirred up much too early, and then are carried away by the whirlpool of the times...thereby only to persist in mediocrity." We can do no worse than to allow the sentimentalism of another age to grace the quotidian existence of modern living.

Between being and nothingness

2009-09-17T21:27:00.000-07:00

The Sorrows of Young Werther
________________________
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I honor religion, you know that, I feel it is a staff for many weary souls, refreshment for many a one who is pining away. But — can it, must it, be the same thing for everyone? If you look at the great world, you see thousands for whom it wasn't, thousands for whom it will not be the same, preached or unpreached, and must it then be the same for me? Does not the son of God Himself say that those would be around Him whom the Father had given Him? But if I am not given? If the Father wants to keep me for Himself, as my heart tells me? — I beg you, do not misinterpret this, do not see mockery in these innocent words. What I am laying before you is my whole soul; otherwise I would rather have kept silent, as I do not like to lose words over things that everyone knows as little about as I do. What else is it but human destiny to suffer out one's measure, to drink up one's cup? — And if the chalice was too bitter for the God from heaven on His human lips, why should I boast and pretend that it tastes sweet to me? And why should I be ashamed in the terrible moment when my entire being trembles between being and nothingness, since the past flashes like lightning above the dark abyss of the future and everything around me is swallowed up, and the world perishes with me? — Is that not the voice of the creature thrown back on itself, failing, trapped, lost, and inexorably tumbling downward, the voice groaning in the inner depths of its vainly upwards-struggling energies: My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? And if I should be ashamed of the expression, should I be afraid when facing that moment, since it did not escape Him who rolls up heaven like a carpet?

Philosophy and religion

2009-09-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

I think the best philosophical works exhibit not just the rigour of logic and reason but also the creative vision of original thought; it is in the largesse of the philosophical imagination that brilliant new solutions to old problems emerge, often in the dimensions of startling new paradigms that are the manifestation of genius. Yet the deepest questions of philosophy are borne out of the same source as our simplest but most profound human concerns — questions about meaning, identity, God and values — and this is where the philosophical and literary imaginations converge, in the common vein of human curiosity and wonder.

The philosophies of so many thinkers seem to return again and again to the concept of God, whether in their metaphysical, ethical, aesthetical or epistemological works, tussling with the hypothetical existence of a deity that is both a philosophical problem and a solution. For Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, philosophy may be human reason acting on its own to discover truth, but theology is human reason acting in the light of divine revelation. Yet both his teleological arguments and St. Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God in Proslogium fail to establish a logically unassailable basis for belief; later-day thinkers like Hume and Kant dispose of them with ease. A number of philosophers devote many pages to anti-theism, lashing out tirelessly at the walls of every establishment and doctrine fortified by a faith in God. Nietzsche goes so far as to build his philosophy in Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the onslaught of his atheist jihad, indicting mankind with the crime of a “slave revolt” that has inverted master morality, a misdeed manifested most dramatically by a suffering God on the Cross. Hegel blames Christianity for the alienation of man from the realisation that he has an infinite value as a part of the Absolute.

But for every philosopher seeking to falsify the notion of God, there seems to be another whose philosophy validates the necessity of a deity’s existence. Berkeley’s dictum of “Esse est percipi” leads him to postulate the need for God as an omnipresent observer; interestingly enough, even Kant admits the need for a supersensible agency capable of ensuring we can achieve the “summum bonum”, or the highest good. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he proposes that “the highest good is possible in the world only on the supposition of a supreme cause of nature”, and that this is God. Hegel himself was a Lutheran, and it surely cannot be denied that his theory of the Absolute Idea in his Phenomenology of Spirit, as Mind comes to realise itself, sounds decidedly panentheistic.

But such philosophies perhaps will always face the charge that what they lack, they leave to God, and possibly there is some truth in the argument that our imperfect minds are unable to grasp what might easily be comprehended by a higher-order intelligence. Thus in the matter of God's existence, I prefer Kierkegaard’s philosophy, established on a refutation of a paradox described in Plato’s Meno. For Kierkegaard, the leap of faith can only be taken with a teacher’s assistance; unless the learner’s nature has been transformed through an act of divine grace he cannot perform it. In Philosophical Fragments, I believe he depicts faith for what it is, in its most honest and accurate expression: “But in that sense is not Faith as paradoxical as the Paradox? Precisely so; how else would it have the Paradox for its object, and be happy in its relation to the Paradox? Faith itself is a miracle, and all that holds true of the Paradox also holds true of faith.”

It is probably this version of the defence of religious faith and the existence of God that Wittgenstein refers to when he comments, in an illuminating and typically inspired use of analogy: “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”

The question of philosophy

2009-09-16T05:55:00.000-07:00

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves, because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes the highest good.

- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

The past two years

2009-09-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

Now that the toils and trials of these two years are slowly coming to a close, perhaps it’s best to record a little of what I remember from those long and unusual days before they begin to fade away in a blur of green and brown. The past two years have been nothing less than a chapter of my life, and I’ve emerged from them none the worse for the wear, perhaps still slightly bewildered by the force with which it tore into my life, swept it from the comfortable tracks of a smooth, beaten path, left it literally spinning into the deepest reaches of another world, then whisked itself completely from my life with the same familiar, careless, violent rapidity with which it kicked over my closeted world.

Reflection upon any period of time that has gone by is always susceptible to tricks of the mind, to lapses in memory and the rosy glow of nostalgia; the hard edges of even the most trying and difficult times are somehow rounded and smoothened by the unconscious recognition that those episodes need only, and will only be experienced once. We have all gone through those events, one by one, like active spectators in a protracted and hugely tiring movie, wrenched ourselves through the Orwellian Physical Jerks of fitness training and foot drills, embraced numbers for names, gawked at the monumental and impregnable nature of Ministries and insuperable bureaucracies, guzzled the numbing Victory Gin of heavily-subsidised, diluted beer, chanted the indistinguishable slogans of Parties and assorted establishments, even adopted a Newspeak-like jargon of unintelligible unintelligibility. We have all gone through these things, or rather they have passed us by, our bodies performing the actions requisite of the present, our minds still haunted by memories of the pleasant past, or inhabited by intimations of a brighter future.

Accompanying the string of events that has transpired over the past two years has been a long chain of curious, remarkable human beings, some of them with whom I have fallen away, fallen apart, fallen out. Many of them, though, have remained, and become far more than just acquaintances, and their companionship has been absolutely uplifting, their presence steadying in times of shakiness. By learning about them, I have learnt a great deal from them, in particular the nature of social worlds I had never heretofore been exposed, about vastly dissimilar definitions of success, priorities and goals, diverse attitudes and perspectives, and frequently hugely different sets of values; it has often been nothing short of a glowing alternate paradigm of life. Values, however, are the creeds that we live by, and it is important to be discriminatory about what should be our own values without being unnecessarily critical about those of others.

The end of this year, closing in as surely and as congenially as the prow of a boat bumping gently into the docks as it returns from sea, is undoubtedly a welcome prospect, not least because it augurs the recovery of a familiar lifestyle and social environment. Some aches and pains linger on, naturally, from the journey, some of them the traces of old regrets from a long time ago that coalesce every now and then. I will always be rueing some missed opportunities. But for now, only the happiness attendant to the experience of emerging from the thickness of jungle foliage after a partially-failed navigational exercise, compass in one hand and clenched fist in the other, upon a well-used and strangely familiar road.

Falsifying Popper

2009-09-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

Karl Popper’s theory of falsification, most fully developed in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, seems increasingly to me like an offshoot of philosophical scepticism, disguised as a solution to the problems of scientific induction as described by Hume. It is a sort of exercise in negativity, a kind of deductive process carried out backward. Like Cartesian doubt, it partakes in casting a pallor of uncertainty over science and scientific progress; unlike Cartesian rationalism, Popperian falsificationism ends in an empty, destructive scepticism with no foundationalist follow-up. In any case, falsification itself seems to fail the test of philosophical doubt. Scientific theories are subjected to repeated tests not only to ensure the veracity of conclusions, but also to limit the effect of unwanted external influences upon general experimental results — disturbances occurring during measurement, impure substances, the dirt on a Petri dish and other, frequently unforeseeable but possibly highly-damaging experimental anomalies. Methods of measurement, observation and experimentation themselves are surely also theory-laden, and therefore subject to a certain degree of uncertainty. It is not difficult to see how methodological falsification falters in these respects in a similar manner, because experimental tests conducted to falsify a particular hypothesis leave themselves open to doubt to an equivalent degree; one might say they become theories in their own right, requiring repeated experimentation to verify their own negative hypotheses and limit experimental error, and perhaps consequently falling into the same inductivist trap that falsificationism was originally invented to avoid.

Poohism

2009-09-02T21:44:00.000-07:00

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

- A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Jar of wishes

2009-08-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

You lie hidden somewhere within my jar of wishes, buried in the layers where the old dreams lie, in the detritus of fading, failing things: between the faltering shine of foreign coins, of silent stained marbles and broken immobile toys, within a collage of dated stamps, old movie tickets and dented badges. I have built buildings and planes upon this foundation of lost limbs and other half-constructed things, and in the crowded troposphere of my jar, cities breathe and blink. But you are the pattern of my dreams, the twinkle of the constellations that continue to glimmer and glow, though the lights in the cities may be slowly fading, the marbles losing their lustre and the coins their gleam — even as those dreams go out one by one, like fireflies in a jar.

Recriminations

2009-08-08T06:21:00.000-07:00

This has been one of those weeks that leave you in a sort of bewildered stupor, uncertain and unsettled in a way that makes it thoroughly impossible to see how the bits of your life ever once fit together in a pattern that used to make some sort of sense. Sometimes it's difficult not to become inhabited by the echoes of the past, to extract yourself from those memories which are in themselves utterly inextricable from the reverberations of regret, from the silence of unasked questions and unbegotten answers. Patience isn't always a virtue; it's possible to have waited too diligently and too persistently, for a season of ripeness that has in fact slipped past already, past the time of blooming and withering, and those missed opportunities lie festering and rotting on the ground with all the putrefying condemnation of regret.

Values and reason

2009-07-31T06:16:00.000-07:00

I've recently begun to find the relationship between values and reason certainly a topic of some interest. Reason must be tempered by values, but at the same time values need to be in sync with rationality. Reason roaming unchecked, untethered by values that moor it to a standard of morality, is a dangerous proposition, while an unexamined emphasis on values, without reason to gird their significance, is an unaccountable and unjustifiable indulgence. Yet some things remain beyond the compass of rationality; it is true that certain areas of life or achievement cannot be fulfilled by the strength of reason alone. Happiness, for one, does not quite seem to fall within the ambit of rational pursuit. Happiness may remain elusive despite the most well-reasoned, thoroughly-executed plan to acquire it; no one can guarantee the presence of that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Values, then, are what make men happy — the ideas and ideals of friendship, loyalty, fairness, equality, love etc. Perhaps, more accurately, values may then be defined as those notions that not only are able to make men happy, but which men are able to justify through reason. Reason assuages our conscience. It relieves our guilt at feeling happy.

First They Came

2009-07-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

by Martin Niemöller
___________________

In Germany, they came first for the Communists
And I didn't speak up
Because I wasn't a Communist.

And then they came for the trade unionists
And I didn't protest
Because I wasn't a trade unionist.

And then they came for the Jews
And I remained silent
Because I wasn't a Jew.

And then they came for me
And by that time
There was no one left to speak up.

Innocence

2009-06-26T03:27:00.000-07:00

your apologies fall
like alphabets from the sky—
light, loquacious, and
ridiculous.
and I'm sorry
that you're not more apologetic;
the auguries of your
innocence have a way
of making me feel
ashamed.

so I pick up
your guiltless excuses, and
patch in the holes with them,
paint the walls of my world with
your faultless smiles, and
gird my doorways with the
strength of your convictions.

for it is
the license of naivete
to love,
and the naivete of love
to lie.

_____________

Sometimes I think our values are products of our experiences, so perhaps we should be more receptive to the idea that as our lives change, our values can develop as well. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, even if you don't like the drink. It may well turn out to be an acquired taste.

She Walks In Beauty

2009-06-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

by Lord Byron
_____________

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Things fall away

2009-06-14T03:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, in life, you stagger on with your arms full of the things you want to hold on to, when it is obvious that the extent of your embrace only encompasses that much, and the clasp of your arms reaches only so far.

But your dull recognition of this sad fact only begins when things start to slip and tumble from over, under, and between your arms, and the rest of the items still wrought in your grasp reorientate themselves to fill in the gaps left by what fell away. And then you are aware of nothing but the burgeoning, unbearable lightness that is left in your clutches, and you heave and ache with the grievous weight of a vacuum in your arms, while the entire world is running out to sea around you.

And still you stagger on like a dismantling doll, bleeding from the holes left behind when parts of you came off together with the pieces of your world that fell away, disintegrating into the backwash with a final whispering hiss, that is the last breath of loss.

The poem that took the place of a mountain

2009-06-12T02:53:00.000-07:00

by Wallace Stevens
__________________

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wasteland

2009-06-07T02:33:00.000-07:00

And it woke in me again, like a pathogen that was insidious and insistent and invincible, a chimera reawakened; and all I could sense was the roar that plumbed the unknown depths of an abyss that quaked and shuddered from somewhere within me, and that slammed the blood in my ears with a tidal force threatening to obliterate every barrier and boundary.

But in the wasteland that I inhabit, there is only a silence that the swirling and the sound fail to conceal, and amidst the detritus of my world are the wide and winding inroads you have haunted for so long. You may not know it, but it is blood that wells up, like the inheritance of the dusk, from within the cracks in my heart that meander after your every footfall.

Constancy

2009-05-19T04:15:00.000-07:00

I've always appreciated change, the relentless force that pushes life onward and outward in all directions and deviations across the mercurial pattern of days. But the truly valuable things are those that endure, insufferably, in a slow and stately manner the ebb and flow of every whim and inconsistency — the threads that remain unbroken, the roots that dig deeper with time into the impoverished soil of modern living, and that bind together with an unaccountable firmness what is effete and inebriated, like the grasp of God's hand.

Proslogium

2009-05-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

The Ontological Proof
__________________
St. Anselm

Truly there is a God, although the fool has said in his heart, There is no God.

AND so, Lord, do you, who do give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you knowest it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe. And indeed, we believe that you are a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no such nature, since the fool has said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalms xiv. 1). But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak—a being than which nothing greater can be conceived—understands what be hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist.

For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another to understand that the object exists. When a painter first conceives of what he will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding, but be does not yet understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made the painting, be both has it in his understanding, and he understands that it exists, because he has made it.

Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.

Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

AND it assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being you are, O Lord, our God.

So truly, therefore, do you exist, O Lord, my God, that you can not be conceived not to exist; and rightly. For, if a mind could conceive of a being better than you, the creature would rise above the Creator; and this is most absurd. And, indeed, whatever else there is, except you alone, can be conceived not to exist. To you alone, therefore, it belongs to exist more truly than all other beings, and hence in a higher degree than all others. For, whatever else exists does not exist so truly, and hence in a less degree it belongs to it to exist. Why, then, has the fool said in his heart, there is no God (Psalms xiv. 1), since it is so evident, to a rational mind, that you do exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is dull and a fool?

Perplexity

2009-05-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

Recent events have made me feel that my command of language is slowly slipping away, and I feel a creeping suspicion that this really is the case. I vaguely remember Wittgenstein’s description of language as a net, and his thesis that the reason for all our philosophical quandaries and conundrums is our imperfect use of the language, or the imperfections of the language itself, as his analogised “net of language” becomes increasingly knotted and convoluted. And perhaps what may be gathered as a corollary of this theory is that our command and use of language is important in ways far more significant than how effectively we are able to communicate with others; it also determines and restricts how well we are able to describe, to comprehend and understand the world to and for ourselves. If this really is so, then what happens when one’s command of language truly begins to deteriorate, when the pieces of rope that constitute the net itself begin to fray and fall away—does this mean that one’s understanding and knowledge of the world is correspondingly diminished? When the shape and sound of familiar words become the only things well-defined about them, and the reins of long sentences slip impetuously from the grasp of my pen, the world becomes a little more inscrutable, each book a little more unfathomable, and my mood far bleaker.

Road rash

2009-04-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

He did not remember how well he knew the place until his feet adopted a familiar tread, an almost youthful gait that he took a moment to recognise; along this particular stretch of road his feet forgot that they were clad in sturdy business shoes and not the worn, tatty sneakers that had long since disappeared, but which his feet remembered fondly in feel and form and fit. It was that junction again, with its streaking headlights and streaming exhaust hurtling in perpetual counterflow, the growling of intentions poised in cross-purposes across a ten-metre square of intersection that buzzed with tension and expectation. He had long memorised these details, but as the last synapses of recollection congealed in his mind, something else washed up from the cluttered sea of his memory — and what coagulated around these minutiae was not a hollow, echoing continental despair, but merely a terrible and utterly impervious anguish that had hardened and ossified like a scab around a bloody eye. He saw once again what the place had really meant to him, what the rules of the little red man who governed this crossing of paths made possible: it was the pocket of time that the junction created, a bubble of opportunity given an impeccable alias but which never was long enough for him to muster the courage to exploit, not even with a fleeting wave or a tentative greeting, before the green man burst into brilliance to wave time on its way, and the traffic exploded into motion and barrelled past him with the full bellow and bluster and violence of life.

"How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"

2009-04-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

"If someone believes that he has flown from America to England in the last few days, then, I believe, he cannot be making a mistake.

And just the same if someone says that he is at this moment sitting at a table and writing. But even if in such cases I can’t be mistaken, isn’t it possible that I am drugged?”

If I am and if the drug has taken away my consciousness, then I am not now really talking and thinking. I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming.

Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining", while it was in fact raining.

Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain."

- Wittgenstein, MS177

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." Tractatus, 6.431

Passing time

2009-04-05T04:18:00.000-07:00

Something that I sense very acutely nowadays is the passage of time, the unbearable subterranean creep of the hour or the desperation of seconds flinging themselves off a ticking watch. There's something about being ill that tinges everything with a hint of unreality, like the ripple of noumena hidden beneath the surfaces of objects; things pass in slow motion through the fog of fever, and the structure of each hour melts into the slide of seconds across the glowing tangent of twilight through my window.

My pace of reading these days has dropped spectacularly. I find myself rereading sentences and phrases to make sure I understand them accurately, then begin to consider areas I disagree with the author and tap out these reasons on my laptop in a time-consuming, laborious process that I feel myself strangely compelled to complete. It is so difficult to tell what is right and what is wrong, but sometimes when we hit upon words that seem to explain an enduring truth, perhaps time itself slows and stops at the borders of these pages.

Second thoughts

2009-03-15T02:12:00.000-07:00

When visiting a bookstore or library, I am sometimes overcome by the sheer amount I have to read just to obtain a competent knowledge of various issues and subjects. Much of the social sciences can be characterised as giant debates between the intellectual luminaries of the field who each propound their conflicting theories, while subsequent authorities on the subject knit their individual theorems into the original thesis to remedy loopholes, rectify errors or fend off rebuttals. The social sciences alone are afforded the exclusive luxury of argument without end, of debate without resolution, and what fascinates me most of all are not the suppositions nor the surmises, but the paradigms of thought that colour each conjecture and set off trains of thought barrelling in opposite directions—the postmodern-ironist, the social-traditional, the scientific-rational, the neoromantic-spiritual. In particular, the postulations of philosophy—the Republic Plato dreamed of, Hume's self-devouring empirical logic, which Kant attempted to repair through a transcendental doctrine of elements, Hegel's phenomenology of spirit—often appear to me as flights of the imagination powered by rational thought. The analytic method of philosophy applied to the practical world manifests itself in the field of law, for example in the division between legal positivists and natural lawyers, between originalists and living constitutionalists. The questions of philosophy which intrigue me associate themselves naturally with the fundamental concerns of law, as the inquiries of ethics and morality flow easily into the doctrines of legal and political philosophy. Each book is kaleidoscopic and variegated; the ending of each leads me to the first page of another.

Opportunity

2009-03-08T01:33:00.000-08:00

It disheartens me somewhat when people of obvious ability and the maturity to couple that aptitude with due diligence and humility fail to get what they so clearly deserve, and their merit is unaccountably unseen and passed over. Globalisation has thrown the gates of opportunity wide open, and it is the responsibility of those gatekeepers to cast a percipient eye over the hopeful multitude that waves anxiously and shouts ambitiously at each opening of opportunity, and pick out the hand that holds a qualification which speaks of real quality, amidst a sea of certificates.

True meritocracy—the culture of fostering an elite without the taint of elitism—must be regarded not only as the key to individual betterment, but also the cornerstone of societal advancement, and a fertile intellect not afforded the best conditions to flourish and heighten inevitably impedes the overall growth of the social establishment. What was missing in the archaic and anachronistic aristocratic ages was opportunity; what globalisation makes possible today is also opportunity; and what we owe the aspirants of tomorrow is again—opportunity.

Over the hill

2009-02-28T07:34:00.000-08:00

As the days march unremittingly toward that two-decade signpost only a couple of months from now, my eerily creaking bones suggest that perhaps it's time for a change in outlook and mindset for what lies beyond the white fences of adolescence; some recent experiences I've had tell me that I need new perspectives for direction, and that the hills past that signpost go unpredictably up and down. What I've read about in books ostensibly exists in colours beyond those pages of black and white, and the culture of academia is often too quixotic for a world not satisfied with hypotheses and best-fit curves, that has little patience for lengthy arguments or esoteric trivia, and which seldom comes equipped with rounded corners, safety harnesses or security features.

Half-full is the same as half-empty, and vice versa; the important thing is finding water to fill up those glasses.

Four Quartets
Burnt Norton
____________
T.S. Eliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden...
________________

It's late and I have to go soon, but something's not packed: I know I haven't forgotten anything at all, on the contrary; I'm missing someone.

Perlman

2009-02-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

-Victor Hugo

_____________

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.

- Bertrand Russell

when flowers gaze at you

2009-02-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth
_________________

Sometimes I lie down in my room, watching how old things lean in familiar ways—the stack of years built in birthday cards, the shelves of gifts sagging with sentiment, the different phases of faces mapped out in yearbooks, the faces of different phases caught in photo frames, greetings and farewells and apologies pressed between pages—and I think about the things that never had time to settle in, of relationships that never died but merely grew dormant, and feel the edges of the past curling in as the future unfurls itself.

Things and thoughts

2009-01-27T04:51:00.000-08:00

Things and thoughts have been rushing by too quickly these days for me to plaster words over them, to cement them into the permanence of prose; life has been a breathless string of conversations and commotions, the kind of semi-confusion that barges in from all quarters when the future shakes you by the hand as the past taps on your shoulder, the strange meetings with people you know but don't really like, and those you like but don't really know—that sort of January where the new year comes tumbling noisily through the door and you stand by the side waiting for things to compose themselves, for the talking to cease and the dust to settle.

I relooked at some old books recently, and felt strangely disaffected by C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and increasingly unconvinced (not at his conclusions, of course) by the process through which he tries to prove God's existence through the "Law of Human Nature" that compels men toward moral behaviour. Lewis is incorrect, I think, when he merely condemns other moral systems by viewing them through his own understated moral paradigm, in his effort to prove a "real Right", that "we all do believe that some moralities are better than others". He is inaccurate when he attributes the folly of witch-burning to a lack of knowledge (a "matter of fact") and not "differences in morality", but does not lend the same intellectual courtesy to the roundly-reprobated "savage morality" or "Nazi morality", which, if considered in the light of that same distinction, might yield the conclusion that all "differences in morality" can perhaps be attributed to differences in "matters of fact", that there merely exist informed and uninformed "moralities", the corollary of which is the queer consequence that the term "differences in morality" becomes a rather meaningless phrase. He is further erroneous because the "moral progress" as we conventionally understand and that Lewis so eagerly espouses in his book would then become hardly possible, only an improvement in our factual knowledge about the world.

Romeo and Juliet

2009-01-24T05:06:00.000-08:00

Act II, Scene VI
_____________

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

Anna Karenina

2009-01-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

from Part 8, Chapter 13
by Leo Tolstoy
_______________

"Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant, that alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?

"Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and living on these blessings, like the children I did not understand them, and destroy, want to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an important moment of life comes, like the children when they are cold and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than children when their mother scolds them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me.

"Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief thing taught by the church.

"The church? The church!" Levin repeated to himself. He turned over on the other side, and, leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.

"But can I believe in all the Church teaches?" he thought, trying himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his present peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those doctrines of the Church which had always seemed most strange and had always been a stumbling block to him.

"The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?... The Atonement?..."

"But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has been told to me and all men."

And it seemed to him now that there was not a single article of faith of the Church which could destroy the chief thing—faith in God, in goodness, as the one goal of man's destiny.

Under every article of faith of the Church could be put the faith in the service of truth instead of one's desires. And each doctrine did not simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine seemed essential to complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that made it possible for each man, and millions of different sorts of men, wise men and imbeciles, old men and children—all men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings—to understand perfectly the same one thing, and to build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is worth living, and which alone is precious to us.

Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. "Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a rounded vault? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it as not round and infinite, and, in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a firm blue vault, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it."

Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to mysterious voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly within him.

"Can this be faith?' he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness. "My God, I thank Thee!" he said, gulping down his sobs and with both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.

Tonight

2009-01-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

The best place to reflect on things is in the back of a taxi in some distant hour of the night, waiting for time to lengthen and distance to contract, for the miles to be consumed by minutes, and considering how old familiarities echo and reverberate noisily down the converging hallways of shared histories.

It is strange how things you have always wanted to hear can be implied in words you never wanted said. For sheer coincidence, blind circumstance, inconceivable chance and a strange coalescence; for conspicuous contradictions and concealed concurrences; for the mad moments, for the long conversations and the lengthier goodbyes; for the sheer lateness of the hour—the night has never been darker, nor the stars as bright, tonight.

For last year and the next

2009-01-01T00:28:00.000-08:00

When the day breaks over the river ford where Jacob has been wrestling through the night, his adversary dislocates Jacob’s leg with a strange touch in the hollow of his thigh, leaving him clinging to the other man in sudden weakness. The long tussle in the dark ends not with Jacob in a position of rivalrous dominance, but in the pose of reliance and supplication. It is not an unfamiliar situation for Jacob, who was born clutching at Esau’s ankle as they emerged from their mother’s womb as if in an effort to be first-born, who found deceit to be the only method to gain his father’s blessing, and who was consequently hounded to desperation by a powerful brother who swore to kill him. The story of Jacob is the tale of a man grappling interminably with the ineffectual strength of his mortal arms against the implacable fate of second-place.

The struggle of Jacob with the unidentifiable man in the dark is a mutual exertion; the man struggles also with Jacob in the intimacy of wrestlers, two bodies in the image of each other clashing indistinguishably by night. Implicit in the conflict was the closeness of the two combatants; the sole means of victory was not to let go of the other. When the day broke and the wrestle came to an end, the man conceded victory to Jacob, not for the strength of Jacob’s arms, but for the vigour of his will and his fervent resolve not to let go of his foe until he had blessed him. In the pose of supplication, Jacob became victor in the pronouncement of God: “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” Israel, or “the one who strives with God”, refers to a struggle where victory lies not in glorious conquest but in persistence itself, and where triumph is received not in a stance of dominance but in the posture of a prayer.

In 2008, a year of few alternatives, I’ve nonetheless had many experiences, not all of them positive or meaningful, but some of them truly revelational. Thanks of course to my family, which has so often been the quintessence of persistence. I’m also profoundly grateful to the people who haven’t changed in the ways that matter most to me, despite the time passed and the distance gathered, who nonetheless know in silence the words I leave unshared.

Christmas

2008-12-26T02:47:00.000-08:00

A better Christmas than I could have dared to imagine, or hoped to have had.

For the will of God will never lead you where the grace of God cannot keep you.

Duino Elegies

2008-12-23T04:51:00.000-08:00

The First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
__________________

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for—that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes—the springtimes needed you.
Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
(Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal.
Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on;
even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself,
as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.
Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough
so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring,
objectless love and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?"
Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us?
Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and,
quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.
For there is no place where we can remain.

...

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to leave even one's own first name behind,
forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever,
and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

The Serenity Prayer

2008-12-18T06:26:00.000-08:00

by Reinhold Niebuhr
__________________

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.

Amen.
_______

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars.
The deeper the grief, the closer is God."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Comfort

2008-12-15T20:04:00.000-08:00

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling:
"In the desert prepare
the way for the Lord;
make straight in the wilderness
a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all mankind together will see it.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?

To whom, then, will you compare God?
What image will you compare him to?

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?

"To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?" says the Holy One.

Lift your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one,
and calls them each by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.

He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.

Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.
___________________
Isaiah 40

The comfort Christianity provides to the troubled modern man lies not only in the breathtaking promise of eternal life and perfect bliss for the believer at the end of time and all earthly things, but also in the rousing sensation of gratitude for the here and the now, through the poignant reminder that there exists a single reason for contentment that renders all other dissatisfactions hollow and worthless. In times of tribulation, agony and intense suffering, Christianity teaches us not to be sorrowful but to be grateful; this is the sudden astonishment of joy Christ bequeaths to his follower in his moment of misery.

Identity and Violence

2008-12-13T19:15:00.000-08:00

In his book "Identity and Violence", Amartya Sen describes the dangers of identity-affiliation, arguing that the politics of global confrontation is the corollary of religious and cultural divisions in the world. He declares that "underlying this line of thinking is the odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning", and this false but commonly-held notion is in fact irreconcilable with the less discussed but much more plausible notion that we are "diversely different".

In a nutshell, Sen argues that we have "inescapably plural identities", and that the hope of harmony in the contemporary world lies to a great extent in a clearer understanding of the pluralities of human identity, and in the appreciation that they cut across each other and work against a sharp separation along one single hardened line of impenetrable division. This line of divisive identities, Sen concludes, tends to "crowd out...any consideration of other, less confrontational features of the people on the opposite side of the breach, including, among other things, their shared membership of the human race."

Sen's ideas about identity and violence are fascinating and uniquely paradigmatic, but I find it difficult to concur with the notion that the removal of classificatory priority that "[places] people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes" will lead to the end of the cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts. He makes reference to numerous examples of such conflicts, including the situations in Rwanda and the Congo, the aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity, and Israel and Palestine, all of which "continue to experience the fury of dichotomized identities ready to inflict hateful penalties on the other side".

Sen states, quite reasonably, that the same person can be, without any contradiction, "an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist...a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle...", and any of these categories can influence and be used to describe this person. This list of characteristics seems to me to be manifestly carefully chosen. Central to what I think is flawed about Sen's argument is the presumption that religion is just another category that can "move and engage" a person, inasmuch as a shared occupation such as carpentry or a common interest such as fishing can. Religion is powerful and influential on the human psyche and on human life in a way that requires little elaboration, not least of all because it makes authoritative decisions in so many other classifications, or identity-affiliations, that a person may belong to. A deep believer in the Islamic, Christian or Buddhist doctrine, may naturally have to be classified in a huge number of other distinct categories apart from religion, by sheer virtue of his faith — as a vegetarian, a conservative, an anti-abortionist, an ardent opponent of euthanasia, the death penalty, stem cell research, in vitro fertilisation, homosexual marriage etc. All these are categorisations that ostensibly can have great import on a person's decisions, and significantly impact his life. Religion subsumes so many other classifications under its doctrinal wing, and it would be simplistic to treat it as merely another membership category.

Sen laments the "neglect of the plurality of our affiliations and of the need for choice and reasoning [that] obscures the world in which we live", arguing that "many of the conflicts and barbarities of the world are sustained through the illusion of a unique and choiceless identity". He emphasises the folly of imagining that we have little choice over our identities, labelling this a "conceptual disarray", and concludes that "the prospects of peace in the contemporary world may well lie in the recognition of the plurality of our affiliations and in the use of reasoning as common inhabitants of a wide world... What we need, above all, is a clear-headed understanding of the importance of the freedom that we can have in determining our priorities." Sen's statement makes compelling clear his secularist assumptions, and perhaps reveals also a lack of understanding about the forceful authority behind religion — the belief in an omnipotent God whose word it is a sin to disobey, and whose laws and commandments are the highest authorities and the most transcendent truths. The "freedom that we can have in determining our priorities" must be tempered by religious doctrine, and stilled if it conflicts with divine decree. Followers of faith, once they come to hold their belief, see conservative values as truth, not as choice. The "broad commonality of our shared humanity" must retreat with head bowed, as with all earthly things, once the divine will has been broached. To ask devotees to embrace the glorious "use of reasoning", and the freedom to disregard categories in which they believe the anointed single right answer has been authoritatively chosen by an entity higher than man, is in effect to require them to cast away their original faith in favour of a secularist ideology. Sen's description of the painful illusion of "choiceless singularity" when applied to the religious theme therefore approaches a contradiction in terms.

convalescence

2008-12-11T02:05:00.000-08:00

People come and go like visiting doctors; they meet you with smiles, give you hope, feed you a dose of the best medicine, then leave you with advice. And a while later, you fall sick again.

Above All

2008-12-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

Above all powers, above all kings
Above all nature and all created things
Above all wisdom
And all the ways of man
You were here
Before the world began.

Above all kingdoms, above all thrones
Above all wonders the world has ever known
Above all wealth
And treasures of the earth
There's no way to measure what You're worth.

Crucified, laid behind a stone
You lived to die, rejected and alone
Like a rose, trampled on the ground
You took the fall, and thought of me
Above all.
______________

Perhaps what strikes me so deeply and uniquely about this song is its last line — how one so mighty, and clearly above all earthly powers and kings, could take the fall for another so clearly unworthy, and consider him above all.

This is what sets God "above all". This is also how imperfect Man is made perfect by God alone.

the infidelity of memory

2008-11-23T06:18:00.000-08:00

Between the failure to remember, to reconstruct a face beyond the afterimage of memory, and the failure to forget, to erase the burning intensity of a presence in my mind before it sears into permanence, into a black irreparable void still smouldering angry orange at the edges; in between these failures — hell lies in between.

Love Songs In Age

2008-11-19T07:55:00.000-08:00

by Philip Larkin
_____________

She kept her songs, they kept so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter -
So they had waited, till, in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

On blogging

2008-11-15T05:20:00.000-08:00

When blogs begin to degenerate, they start to crumble into a sort of sad incoherence; dismembered snatches of song lyrics, aimless remarks, passionate half-formed ideas, paltry meaningless little secrets find themselves clumsily strung together by a confused mind still spinning from life's brutal banalities.

Nothing reveals empty lives better than such blogs, lives cluttered with events that unfold themselves like the plot descriptions of boring movies no one really wants to watch. These blogs remind me of the windows of apartment blocks at night, each little lighted square clamouring with activity, the messiness of lives banging about within private cubes neatly stacked atop each other.

I used to keep a diary, but I soon found that I was more enamoured about actually penning something down than I was interested in the things about which I was writing. The entire activity began to grow pointless, and more than a little saddeningly solipsist. Still, the need to write things down persists for me.

More blogs than I have cared to read have been written for the reader; this one is for myself, not so much to be read but to have been written.

2008-11-10T02:51:00.000-08:00

Only God really matters, after all.

political birdwatching

2008-11-08T06:03:00.000-08:00

To prevent this blog from slipping into mere political birdwatching, here's a little poem I wrote just for fun, not so old but rather distant already:

Friday Night
____________

I sit in a movie theatre
watching
the tumble of popcorn from careless fingers
the sizzling of fresh Coke
shaken, not stirred
and the tremble of sound effects through the seats.
the way the light ripples through the darkness
peeks between the intimacy of shadows
and paints the angle of a reclining arm
on a shoulder soft with familiarity, and
the accuracy of fingers finding each other
and weaving in the shadows, made daring
by the dark.

I sit in a movie theatre
and feel nothing but regret
as James Bond saves the world with girl in hand,
bravery personified,
and the credits roll.
the lights come on
and my failure is glaring—
the timid slowness of my fingers,
still two inches from your hand.
_____________

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
- Edna St Vincent Millay

On "Change We Can Believe In"

2008-11-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I'm something of a contrarian, but as Obama fervour washes over the world, with its cries for hope and change ringing out most resoundingly from the voices of the young, he seems to appeal less and less to me. The calls of "Yes we can!" and "Change we can believe in!" now sound like empty, populist political slogans. I was a rather ardent Obama supporter myself during the Democratic nomination race where he pitted himself against the powerful Clinton electoral machine, but as his popularity burgeoned and culminated in his triumphant speech a few days ago, he became less an inspiring figure to me than just another politician.

I think what most appealed to me about Obama during the elections was his uniqueness, and the characterisation of him as a man battling against the odds--the lingering phantoms of racism, the massive campaign funds of the Clinton team, the years of experience of Hillary Clinton, the pugnaciousness of John McCain, the immensely popular and dominant conservative right--through sheer force of willpower and intelligence. I should have welcomed his final crowning on November 5th much more than I do now; somehow, in victory the man seems diminished somewhat.

It is the call for change that has emotive power, and the sheer audacity of hope that stirs men most deeply. In times of peace, progress and wealth, society is sunken by satisfaction. Churchill was booted out most unceremoniously from office immediately after leading Britain through the hell of war; the British public evidently thought it was time for a change. No one remembers the years of unprecedented economic prosperity under the Bill Clinton administration, only Monica-gate; hence, enter George W. Bush.

Obama will need to keep electrifying the public if he wants to stay popular and dispel the notion of the incompetent black man. Fortunately for him, the world is in a state of tumult and by the very nature of the ongoing crises and the reshuffling global world order, requires and will implement change to survive. The continuity of progress and upward GDP trends belie the rapidity of social and economic flux. Most presidents don't fulfill their electoral promises anyway because they fly in the face of economic realities; the ones who attempted to (aka Bush's profligate spending and tax cuts) threw the country into disarray, as Greenspan rather snidely but correctly points out. Certainly, I think there exists change we can believe in, but most of it will be set in motion by unstoppable global forces and developments; the real task for Obama will perhaps be how well he leads America in coping with that change.

2008-11-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

But I'm glad he now leads the free world anyway. Though I had a bad week and I hope he makes everyone's lives better. Yes he can.

De Profundis

2008-11-02T02:40:00.000-08:00

I continue to be fascinated by Oscar Wilde and his aesthetic credo; how it irrevocably and irresistibly colours his perception of life, death, art, man and God.
__________________

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . .

When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, - waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.

It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. . .

I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true. Shelley and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also is the most wonderful of poems. For 'pity and terror' there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain. Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect, can be said to equal or even approach the last act of Christ's passion. The little supper with his companions, one of whom has already sold him for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend coming close to him so as to betray him with a kiss; the friend who still believed in him, and on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house of refuge for Man, denying him as the bird cried to the dawn; his own utter loneliness, his submission, his acceptance of everything; and along with it all such scenes as the high priest of orthodoxy rending his raiment in wrath, and the magistrate of civil justice calling for water in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of innocent blood that makes him the scarlet figure of history; the coronation ceremony of sorrow, one of the most wonderful things in the whole of recorded time; the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of his mother and of the disciple whom he loved; the soldiers gambling and throwing dice for his clothes; the terrible death by which he gave the world its most eternal symbol; and his final burial in the tomb of the rich man, his body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though he had been a king's son. When one contemplates all this from the point of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme office of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without the shedding of blood: the mystical presentation, by means of dialogue and costume and gesture even, of the Passion of her Lord; and it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass. . .

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

"Approved by Barack Obama. Paid for by Obama for America."

2008-10-31T19:37:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama doesn't need any more people to endorse him, especially a non-American, but I have to say, this 30-minute infomercial is amazing--well-delivered as always and frankly quite unimpeachable:

living, in a way

2008-10-24T06:00:00.001-07:00

The only things that still hold any meaning for me now are words--words, the stuff of argument, the little gleaming beads we try to string together to weave unbroken strands of meaning in our lives, those tiny carriages linked witlessly together in trains of thought, trundling aimlessly in no direction--words, falling silently and implacably into place, one after another, in the deliberate, hopeful fashion of the hopelessly lost.

Nowadays everybody I come across seems to be familiar in some indefinable way; a stereotype, a half-forgotten habit, a recognisable tilt of the shoulders, ripple of hair. When memories walk past me laughing and smiling and joking to themselves on the streets, and I turn back to stare in disbelief, time and distance and age and circumstance contrive to halt me from across an insuperable inch of pavement. My only recourse is to sit down sometimes, usually at night, stringing together mismatched words that bounce and skitter in the shadows across my page.

The Seven Sorrows

2008-10-19T01:24:00.000-07:00

by Ted Hughes
___________

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

2008-10-10T07:42:00.001-07:00

I watched the second round of US presidential debates and was left feeling distinctly unimpressed by the on-goings; neither candidate made use of the opportunity to propose new and original solutions to the unprecedented challenges in economic and national security matters. There is only so much that can be said about McCain's "bomb, bomb Iran" song or complaints about Obama's lack of experience. Both tire very quickly.

But I must say that Obama was right on the money about the invasion of Iraq, when he questioned why America entered into a war that had nothing to do with terrorism. In my opinion, the real issue is that terrorism is fundamentally an amorphous, ill-defined term; a distinction must be made between the activity of terrorist organisations (such as Al Qaeda) and the threats posed by rogue states, a la North Korea and Iran, and this is something the Bush administration failed to do before storming into Iraq. Ostensibly, the 9/11 attacks were engendered by a shadowy organisation that has its roots in no single country and that consequently cannot be wiped out by an attack on a particular nation in the manner of the Iraq war. The US blundered headlong into a full-scale invasion on the basis of rumours and unfounded nebulous mutterings about weapons of mass destruction, aiming to take out a dictator that they deemed was a threat to the world. What they essentially did was to make a dubious association between Saddam Hussein's regime and the source of terror, and to breach the country's sovereignty on the grounds that they were seeking to deal a death blow to terrorism. A country (even a dictatorship as distasteful as Iraq under Saddam) is not a terrorist organisation, and to illegally barge into its borders with guns blazing in an all-out military invasion will clearly result in the demise of innocent civilians, the deaths of whom can never be justified. Looking for weapons of mass destruction, they found none. Looking to wipe out terrorists, they killed mostly civilians. They were looking for trouble, and mired themselves in swamps of the stuff.

It may be uncharitable to judge the unfortunate Iraq war in retrospect, but the war resolution was demonstrably wrong in principle, unnecessary, ill-targeted and a ham-fisted method to root out entrenched terrorist elements--facts that should have been identified even before the first American bombs hit Baghdad. The experience of the past eight years has proven time and again that the Bush brand of American internationalism has been an abject failure, and it is troubling to hear echoes of this failed policy in McCain's speeches, particularly in his derision of Obama's openness to diplomacy.

If You Forget Me

2008-10-04T06:55:00.000-07:00

by Pablo Neruda
_____________

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips
to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
_________________

Neruda: "Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long."

US elections

2008-10-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

I'd like to express my distinctly non-partisan views on the state of the current American electoral contest; more accurately, on Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain's choice as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. My opinion has been burgeoning for a while now.

So much distaste was expressed over Senator Barack Obama's campaigning style when he first took the stage; he was branded as a silver-tongued showman with little experience to back his calls for change. According to Republicans, he was more a celebrity than a statesman, more canny with words than with action. Ostensibly, the derision from the Republican camp died down when Senator McCain revealed Governor Palin as his vice-presidential pick, because Governor Palin demonstrably brought new meaning to the term "celebrity politician". Support for the Republicans went through the roof. The McCain train with Sarah Palin waving from the windows barrelled past the Obama campaign trail.

There is one difference between the two that makes all the difference. Through his debates and speeches Senator Obama has shown his Harvard law school credentials to be more than just paper qualification, while Governor Palin has shown herself to be exactly what the Republicans once derided Senator Obama as. Senator Obama has intelligence to compensate for inexperience; Governor Palin has nothing but her two-year stint as governor of Alaska and her time in Wasilla (a small town with a population of 7000) as mayor to support her pretensions to vice-presidential glory.

It would be a travesty to the principles of meritocracy and democracy if this woman were to be elected as vice-president of the world's most powerful and influential country. Voters should have heeded the signs when she responded, "What exactly does the VP do?" to rumours that she would be selected by the Republicans. Now the hockey mom has gone one better with her infamous reference to the proximity of Russia to Alaska as her foreign policy experience, her evident lack of knowledge about McCain's background ("I'll get back to ya!"), and the pathetic response to a question about the financial bailout plan ("It's really all about healthcare reforms and job creation."). Everybody's prone to a verbal gaffe or two, but these are not merely slips of the tongue. This has nothing to do with lack of oratorical skill. Sarah Palin is lacking in another department. And as a CNN reporter put it, should the Republicans win the election, the fact that Sarah Palin is one 72-year-old's heartbeat away from the top job in the land is a terrifying prospect.

Watching the presidential debates between Obama and McCain, I was somewhat impressed by the latter. Watching Sarah Palin disgrace herself, her campaign and the entire Republican camp on national television, I began to question McCain's sanity for choosing her as vice-president.

No one, man or woman, should cast a vote for the hockey mom, particularly in view of the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead for America. She would be a worthy heir to George W. Bush. Hardcore feminists too should think twice before voting her into office; I'm no misogynist but I'm clearly no fan of stupidity either. Not voting for her does not approximate to chauvinism, but voting for her equates to insanity.

Someone must stop her. Hopefully it will be Joe Biden, in the coming vice-presidential debates. She must be stopped, in the interests of global progress, peace and prosperity. Maybe even the Singapore government should intervene.

since the majority of me

2008-09-30T06:05:00.000-07:00

by Philip Larkin

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways,
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of minorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.
_____________

Larkin's poems are frosty, delicate things. They are inspired by the chilly incipience of understanding, the cold clarity that comes with age. They are kept from freezing by the heat of remembrance.

There is a distinct memory that arises every so often, untrammeled by time. I did not discover its significance until I turned it round and round in my mind and realised I could not have asked for anything more in that moment; I would have given up anything for it but it was given to me freely, as all surprises, gifts and truly good things are.

2008-09-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

Just had a good laugh when the Formula One television commentator referred to the amount of "autumn leaves" littering the track.

Clearly the winds of westernisation have effected seasonal change in Singapore as well.

2008-09-26T05:35:00.000-07:00

The deepest remembrances of all are the quiet ones, the moments of stillness that linger after the laughter and the tears, placid and silent and immovable as rocks on a riverbed. The unspoken understandings through looks exchanged between the spaces of a crowd, the feeling of eyes and the grasp of a gaze through the veil of passers-by, seconds of the past stretched into eternity by memory.

In the proximity of a breath, the eager uncertainty of fingertips, the matching of footsteps between puddles, the unexpected coalescing of a moment in the rain with a single umbrella and a distance to walk, a place to find; all these fall into place as memories uneroded by time, the shared realisation of possibilities and their gentle relegation to the sigh of the drifting rain, as opportunities out of time and place, less suited to reality than to memory, the material of dreams and sudden dazes in the day.

Memories--the footprints you left all over my past, that I find myself continually retracing today, and that stretch out as far as I can see in the direction of the future.

hello

2008-09-21T00:37:00.000-07:00

are you cold?
i can't see you
but do you see what i see
hear what i hear
feel what i feel
in the mirror?

i live in a garden
and i water the vines
that wind around me.
water drips from my
fingertips
and still they twine
and climb and wind
and freeze me
into a strange hedge
a stranger whom
i do not know
but i think i am.

i am an observer
watching the interrogation
from next door
through a one-way mirror.
the prisoner stands by the wall
he does not know he is watched.
yet it is a mirror
he stares into.
and then when he bends
i bend too.

so. in my mirror
feel what i feel
hear what i hear
but do you see what i see
i can't see you
are you cold?

The Selfish Giant

2008-09-19T06:36:00.002-07:00

Everybody knows about Oscar Wilde the aesthete, the dandy, the smirking connoisseur of pleasure and art, the charming literary genius hostile to all social conventions and yet dangerously charismatic. This side of him is on sparkling display in his most famous plays: The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windemere's Fan, An Ideal Husband. It is clearly how Wilde wanted the world to see him, and these plays contain Wildean witticisms at their best.

But his short stories intrigue me; they not only make for fascinating reading, but also seem to illustrate a curious religiousity alien to his plays, almost antithetical to his image. Here's one of his tales that I like in particular:

The Selfish Giant
______________

Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant's garden.

It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. "How happy we are here!" they cried to each other.

One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.

"What are you doing here?" he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away. "My own garden is my own garden," said the Giant; "any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself." So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

He was a very selfish Giant. The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside. "How happy we were there," they said to each other.

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round." The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. "This is a delightful spot," he said, "we must ask the Hail on a visit." So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

"I cannot understand why the Spring is so late in coming," said the Selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden; "I hope there will be a change in the weather." But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the Giant's garden she gave none. "He is too selfish," she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind, and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.

One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King's musicians passing by. It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring, and a delicious perfume came to him through the open casement. "I believe the Spring has come at last," said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing. It was a lovely scene, only in one corner it was still winter. It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy. He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly. The poor tree was still quite covered with frost and snow, and the North Wind was blowing and roaring above it. "Climb up! little boy," said the Tree, and it bent its branches down as low as it could; but the boy was too tiny.

And the Giant's heart melted as he looked out. "How selfish I have been!" he said; "now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever." He was really very sorry for what he had done.

So he crept downstairs and opened the front door quite softly, and went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they were so frightened that they all ran away, and the garden became winter again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears that he did not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole up behind him and took him gently in his hand, and put him up into the tree. And the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them round the Giant's neck, and kissed him. And the other children, when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any longer, came running back, and with them came the Spring. "It is your garden now, little children," said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall. And when the people were going to market at twelve o'clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.

All day long they played, and in the evening they came to the Giant to bid him good-bye. "But where is your little companion?" he said: "the boy I put into the tree." The Giant loved him the best because he had kissed him. "We don't know," answered the children; "he has gone away." "You must tell him to be sure and come here to-morrow," said the Giant. But the children said that they did not know where he lived, and had never seen him before; and the Giant felt very sad.

Every afternoon, when school was over, the children came and played with the Giant. But the little boy whom the Giant loved was never seen again. The Giant was very kind to all the children, yet he longed for his first little friend, and often spoke of him. "How I would like to see him!" he used to say. Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could not play about any more, so he sat in a huge armchair, and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden. "I have many beautiful flowers," he said; "but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all."

One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting. Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder, and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvellous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?" For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."

"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love." "Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."

And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

For whom the Bell Tolls

2008-09-19T06:36:00.001-07:00

"Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member.

And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is.

The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.

Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

_____________________
John Donne

From "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die."

2008-09-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

Haha.

Something I found and dragged out from a folder in my computer, written long ago, the lagginess of its loading time on Microsoft Word analagous to the crust of electronic dust it's been gathering.

Pardon the angst, it was written with the unsubtlety of youth and the influence of too much Byron and John Donne:

A Friend
__________________

when we take photos together
we are never alone
always, you and me
separated by two or three.

when we go on dates and dinners
it is always with the others
with friends and shouts and cheery noises
your laughter amidst many voices.

I worked my way through the sunlit crowd
the implacable distance of people
through photos and functions and countless yearbooks
down queues, in meals, through changing looks.

I have been a patient smiling face,
I have waited madly by the phone
written too many poems, heard too many songs
watched you through the spaces where your library books belong.

I found you finally in the crowd
I reached my hand to turn you round
and you did, but in cheerful agreement
with someone else’s call, and your gaze was distant.

when the albums have ended, and the tapes run out of time
the voices swallowed by distance, and your footsteps too faint
I tread gently through the madding crowd still
looking for your traces, and your footsteps to fill.

I cannot help it, I miss you so much
the delight of your laughter, and the surprise of your touch.

2008-09-13T19:47:00.000-07:00

I struggle sometimes, ineffectually, against myself: a hard-edged, bright-eyed drive toward achievement and intellectualism, that frowns condescendingly upon my dog-eared collections of poetry, sneers at foolish remembrances, and my fondness for certain useless, worthless things...

the way of love

2008-09-13T03:26:00.000-07:00

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love,
I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not love,
I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,
and though I give my body to be burned and have not love,
it profiteth me nothing.
Love suffereth long and is kind.
Love envieth not.
Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doeth not behave itself unseemly.
Seeketh not her own.
Is not easily provoked.
Thinketh no evil.
Rejoiceth not in inequity, but rejoiceth in the truth.
Bareth all things.
Believeth all things.
Hopeth all things.
Endureth all things.
Love never fails.
But where there be prophecies they shall fail,
whether there be tongues, they shall cease,
whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part,
but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I fought as a child,
but when I became a man I put away childish things.
For now we see though a glass dark plain, but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then shall I know even also as I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, love - these three,
but the greatest of these is love."

_______________
1 Corinthians 13
King James Bible

Biblical verses at their finest stand unsurpassed as demonstrations of how the prosody of wisdom runs in perfect natural counterpoint to the rhythms of poetry... It strikes me somehow that words of truth, the lyricism of poetry, and the subject of love are strangely, innately attuned to each other. These verses from Corinthians are a peerless combination of the three.

2008-09-08T03:30:00.000-07:00

Growing up is sometimes an unaccountably stale, rancid activity.

It doesn't always entail self-improvement, enlightenment, sudden wisdom or the insights of maturity. Maybe it doesn't even involve change.

What it does involve, however, is aging. Sitting there, getting older, watching the soporific seconds play themselves out on the clock, ticking themselves to death.

It's time for dinner.