Wednesday, January 31, 2007

having a break


The island has been cool and without rain in the past three days. The air is light and agile, drier and thinner. The sunlight also seems less harsh. Can it be that spring has come, at last?

I was at Japanese class on Monday night and the sensei (teacher) taught us the words for summer holiday, winter holiday, spring holiday. When she asked the student on her left, what did you do in the summer holiday, everyone in the class laughed. We don't have summer holiday, someone said. It's always summer here, said another student. What about spring holiday? Nope, we don't have that either. What about winter holiday? We wish. More laughter.

It happens very often in the Japanese class, this communal owning-up to the island's have-not's. And it's done with a good measure of embarrassment, mirth, and contempt. In a much earlier class, with a different group of students, another sensei had said that she was new to the island and would like to know which places she ought to visit. The students looked around at each other and exchanged knowing smiles. This is the camaraderie of the island's people. Looking at the island and seeing it always in terms of the not-enough and the not-here.

When I sit, like the boy in the picture, in front of my book shelves, I am reminded of what a friend once said about not having to travel physically because by sitting in an armchair with a book his mind can go to all kinds of places. I think the island needs to sit in front of its bookshelves and find some way to travel. It has looked far too long at itself and found itself unlovely far too many times.

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Saturday, January 27, 2007

everness

If you want to read about immortalism (an aspect of everness among others behind the last post), there is a book just out on the subject. You can read the review in The Financial Times Weekend supplement, though I think the title itself already sufficiently sells the book: How To Live Forever Or Die Trying: On The New Immortality.

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Monday, January 22, 2007

neverness

Neverness. The tongue pulls back into the pit before it rushes out twice, and twice it is tamed, stroked by the limit of teeth. This is how the word feels in my mouth - true to its meaning. A beautiful word, Borges said in an interview, "a word that's a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair".

There doesn't seem to be room for neverness in this world, so bent on believing, doing, exceeding, saving and delivering, healing, detoxing, bettering, having it all. It is rubbed in our faces every day, can-do, can-have everness.

If everness has a home on earth, it's on this island. The controllers are for ever-changing it in their quest for the ever-lasting day in the sun. We are destined for everness, it seems, when the seasons that mark the passing of time never mark it here.

Suffer neverness instead? "There will never be . . . I shall never see . . . We will never do . . . She shall never learn . . . He will never make . . . It can never be . . ." It is a pall too heavy to wish on anything, anyone.

Writing, and finishing especially, are susceptible to the spirit of neverness. If you have ever set hope by words and yet never heard the whine, I envy you.

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Thursday, January 18, 2007

moss




In a class a few days ago I read Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica". Here's the first section:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
as old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.


I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse that day. I propped my elbows on the panel and I rubbed them against the wood. That is how the stone becomes sleeve-worn, I said, from the people who sat by the windows, resting their arms along the ledges, looking out, looking down.

The smooth stone takes on a mossy facade. This suggests the time that has passed since the ledges were last warmed. I was suddenly reminded of the moss on the ground by the drains and the moss on the sides of the pond in my primary school. I liked to pat the moss, drawn by the dark green hue and the nappy feel of it, like the beginnings of hair on a baby's head.

Is it possible to find moss on this campus? I asked the students.

In November last year I visited a campus in Taipei and was elated by the sight of bicycles. Maybe it's to do with the universities I attended, both of them cycling towns. But to see bicycles parked everywhere, outside the main gate, the side gate, in the parking space in front of buildings, - it seemed proper. The unkempt look of bicycles with missing tyres, the forlorn expression of the ones that had been abandoned - these too were reassuring.

It wasn't just the bicycles, there were also parts of the campus that looked vintage and sleepy. I think if I was a student I would always remember these parts. I saw walls overgrown with climbers. If I had looked closer, I would have found some moss, of this I am quite sure.

If there was time enough for moss to grow, the story of the moss and the story of the stone of old buildings left to grow old

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