many shades of perfect

A perfect day starts when Max and Sara are let off leash in the nearby park and they sprint for a couple of rounds under the tabebuia trees. The retriever's ears flop wildly as she runs. I love seeing their bright faces as they bound over the grass.

Happiness also comes in the shape of a perfect ban cheng kueh cooked and presented in the customary old fashion, now gone out of fashion: a circle folded into half, the centre is soft and the sides are crispy; the peanut filling is dry and crunchy.

Gladness comes from a teochew porridge lunch with family in the childhood neighbourhood. There should be chai bei (chopped up slow-cooked salted vegetables) and home-made fish cake. There wasn't but it was still perfect because there was cold crab.

Blessing: lunch is rounded off with a not-too-sweet, not-too-oily, delicately fragrant or nee, traditional yam and pumpkin dessert.

In a perfect day, there are unexpected finds at the art museum, paintings that make me say "thank you Lord".

In the late afternoon there is an unexpected hour and a half of writing. The story is not leaden-footed today, it bobs like a balloon! But no more, lest this breaks the spell. . .

What can be more perfect after toil and trance than a drive into town to meet an old friend L for dinner? After swimming, driving is the next best thing for clearing the head and especially driving when the sun has finished her glaring for the day. And the music in the car is karaoke-worthy.

Anna Akhmatova's "poor words"

When a poem cuts just so, hairs stand on end, and hands balancing the book and neck balancing head forget about fatigue from mindless meetings, and ears bar the sounds of bus and TVmobile.

I had no idea that I would take to Anna Akhmatova, although her eyes did remind me of Christina Rossetti. Reading her sequence "Requiem" reminds me, how history bears out that poetry at its most powerful comes from persons most powerless. It was during his arduous years in exile that Dante wrote the "Commedia". The "dead poetry" that he begins with in the dark, harrowing journey through the "Inferno", culminates in "sacro poema", "sacred song". More on the "Purgatorio" (my favourite canticle) and the "Paradiso" in a future post (I am not wise enough to love the "Paradiso").

Anna Akhmatova wrote "Requiem" for herself and the other mothers and widows who queued outside prison walls, waiting to see their sons and husbands who were incarcerated by the Stalinist regime. She sings:

I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

"Requiem" is a poem about national suffering in the voice of a suffering woman. Akhmatova said that the poem haunted her for fifteen years, "like bouts of an incurable illness".

I cannot begin to say how her lines move me, nor how it is that I who know nothing of regimes and bone-crushing brutality can feel the dead weight of the voice that says flatly, scornfully, in the opening lines of section 8, "To Death":

You will come in any case, so why not now?
Life is very hard: I'm waiting for you.
I have turned off the lights and thrown the door wide open
For you, so simple and so marvellous.

And I unashamedly marvel at the way a simple rhyme and a simple repetition evoke an unanswerable anguish in these closing lines of the untitled section 2:

Son in irons and husband clay.
Pray. Pray.

timely encounter

Last night the school held the first of three evenings of meet-the-parents sessions. After the presentations, we had to stand in the corners assigned to our disciplines and field questions from parents and students.

A parent came up to me and asked about the teaching of the English language. He was a little concerned that language and literature will not be taught separately. His wife shared that their other daughter had had to study literature at school and she found it very dry.

As I explained to them the rationale behind the curriculum design of English, using the word pleasure more than once, I looked from time to time at their daughter, a slip of a girl in plastic frame glasses. She was constantly fidgeting, darting glances at the handphone in one hand, or turning away to glance at the other people in the room. Her parents listened patiently, their eyes not once moving away. The girl did not look at me until I asked her for her name and shook her hand.

I picture twenty-five other teenagers like this girl, all of them in a room with a poem, or a short story, or a novel on a desk before them. And the teacher in me, asleep since my last class on campus in April, springs to life.

I guess this is what they mean when they say it's a calling.

by an image charmed

"Visiting at 280 Main Street, Amherst"
by Yeo Wei Wei

The leaves on these trees are shields from light
that spear our trespass upon her dress
As white as snow to veil a heart
blood-rich with tricks and cares too dark.
The single square pocket is smug and silent,
once where words wait their turn for tuning.
Emptied sweet wrappers nestle in the pocket
hugging their new company, short lyrics
hiding tall demands.
On these stairs she would have stood,
wrapping her fingers around a pencil
to secure a place like a dash,
palms astride a strange new song
as old as time, unpicked fruit from Eden.
This is the home of Miss Emily
famous in her day for the gingerbread she baked -
in rolled-up sleeves and floury face she had
a homely guise for sherry eyes, sharp ears, and steadfast knowing,
a soul like a bird, like the saint from Assisi -
she hid her savvy as she sipped her sherry
New England's self-sure solitary.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


The poem was written after a visit to Emily Dickinson's homestead in November or December 2004. The photo was taken on that day itself. Dickinson wore only white after turning thirty, and there was a replica of one of her white dresses on display on a mannequin at the top of one of the stairways. It was also during the tour of the house that I learnt that Dickinson loved to bake. After she became a recluse, confining herself mainly to her bedroom (and this is, not coincidentally I think, the room with the best view of the road from town centre to the house), she continued to bake for the children in the vicinity. It was her custom to ring a bell to alert the children and when they were gathered under her window, she would lower a basket of baked goodies down to them. There's an excellent chapter about Emily Dickinson and the house in Diana Fuss's book The Sense of An Interior.

under covers

Today I thought of a poem by Christina Rossetti, "Winter: My Secret". As the title suggests, the poem is about the speaker's secret. Throughout the poem, the speaker taunts the reader: What is her secret? Is there even a secret?

I have read this poem many times but it was only today that I wondered about the colon in the title. It seems to suggest that the speaker's secret is simply the season of winter. Winter appears in the poem as conditions that are anathema to disclosure, making "today" too cold for the speaker to tell her secret:

"Today's a nipping day, a biting day;/ In which one wants a shawl,/ A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:/ I cannot ope to very one who taps"

I like to think Christina Rossetti was having a prescient moment when she wrote this poem, foreseeing that some day in the future critics and scholars and students would pore tirelessly, tiresomely, over her poems, looking for traces of the life she lived. The poem rebuts such efforts, it refutes the transparency of writing - the way a text can bare all, can show the writer in all the nakedness of her emotion, her beliefs, everything that makes her a person. The poem seems to say: the writer can create, alongside the surfaces that reveal depths, other surfaces to conceal other depths. There can be space for secrecy, all need not be uncovered.

"Winter: My Secret" was published in a volume that came out in 1862. That year over in America Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that was kept hidden away together with a thousand and more and it has a similar thread. The poem is short enough to quote in full:

A Charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld -
The Lady dare not lift her Veil
For fear it be dispelled -

But peers beyond her mesh -
And wishes - and denies -
Lest Interview - annul a want
That Image - satisfies -

This poem also makes me think of writing fiction, that there is a delicate balance that needs to be struck otherwise too much or too little is said. The face loses points of charm when it is entirely uncovered.

Is there something being said too about attention and interest that can be captured and sustained through appropriate veiling? The world of fiction is made up of made-up persons, things, situations, and all of it can be dissolved into nothing if there isn't any desire on the reader's part to behold and be engaged by the writer's imagination.

For the writer, there is the reminder of the care that needs to be taken in the work of veiling and unveiling.

归于陌生

Chinese has finally re-surfaced as a language in my social life. It is the language that is used when I start and end each day in the workplace - something that was impossible in the previous work environment. Chinese is also the language we joke and banter in.

I can say truthfully that this return of my parents' first tongue, in a manner that is unassuming, glorious, and mischievious, has been one of the big surprises of my job change.

Will I go back to sounding as if I am in a no-man's land, writing in an English that is shadowed by Chinese? And the shadow is itself made up of broken music.