to continue

An sms exchange with my friend F a few evenings ago after I received news of my promotion -

Me: I've been promoted and my unit made autonomous.

F: Congrats! Now you will never finish your book.

Me: I don't think I can do anything but to continue.

F: Then better sleep early and wake up early to write!

[It was 11.05 at night.]

Me: Continue living I mean.

*

                                                

F has said before that he has low expectations of people. It would seem, though, that he has rather high expectations of me as a writer.

In an interview the pianist Mitsuko Uchida said: "There is no perfection. One works and if one is lucky, one discovers something every day. At a certain time one must have the courage to stop, and that's that."

Her statement is what I would say too, about how one might continue being a writer without renouncing all the other aspects that constitute one's sense of a full encompassing life.

Mitsuko Uchida also said: "If there is a heaven - I'm not a Christian - and if I arrive at the gate and they ask me what I am, all I will say is, 'Musician.'"

This immediately brought to mind something similar that J, a dear friend and former comrade-in-arms, used to pronounce firmly, her voice strong and steady, her beautiful big eyes serious, bright, wide: "I was born a composer. I live as a composer. When I am dead, I want to be remembered as a composer."

We were a jovial coterie, all of us practitioners and teachers in the arts - visual arts, music, theatre, literature - and J's earnest declaration (which she reiterated a number of times over three years) was something we admired but also poked fun at mercilessly to her face.

Yet today, when I ask myself what my profession at the gate of heaven is going to be, two words come to mind: "Reader. Writer."

And what I have come to understand is that for the second to emerge and to continue, to be buoyant, the first must always be like a furiously flowing river.

  

two cakes meet

Dear Black Forest Cake,

Thank you for treating me to lunch and telling me about your new pet fish.

I love hearing about pets. This year I have been the happy interlocutor of several tales about pets - a colleague's pet parrot (a sad story that deserves to be made into a short film); my brother YPL's friend's pet snake; a friend's ancient pet rabbits.

You say you spend a lot of time looking at the fish. You make sure they eat properly, you clean their tank, you buy new plants for them. Don't forget you promised me that you will let me watch you clean the tank one of these days.

"Do you scoop the fish out with a net and put them in a pail of fresh water?" I asked. You had done your research, you said. The tank is cleaned without the fish having to be moved. And you describe every stage of the process as if you were telling me the different philosophies of directing that exist.

We were meeting to celebrate the smooth delivery of our project, a children's picture book. It is the very first one you have authored, the second book in a series that still feels unreal to me even though the first one in the series celebrates its first birthday today.

I was also feeling grateful and celebratory because the two-week freeze of my fiction writing had finally begun to thaw two nights ago and yesterday morning the flow was back. So when you asked me how many projects I have going on, I could speak about all 3 of them without feeling the clutch of cold gnarled fingers around my heart.

I like what you said about the source of art. If the self is seen as the source, how small all art would be! I don't know about you, but it gives me great relief, to know that I am merely a transmitter, not the Generator.

Speaking of which, you might like "Generator 1st Floor" by Freelance Whales. It could be a good song to have on the next time you clean the tank.

Yours,
Orange Chiffon Cake

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.

easy living

It's been over 3 months since I wrote anything here. It was getting addictive, there seemed to be so many things to say, vignettes and ideas that seemed perfect for this kind of space. And it was gratifying to see them "out there". Perhaps it would be good to stop for a while, I thought in the middle of an unquiet October, just to see if I would worry about it, to see if the blog would be naggy and tiresome like the other unfinished pieces.

Yes, naggy and tiresome like the summer flies in Victoria, Australia, - you can't get rid of them no matter how indifferent you pretend to be as one of them aims for the cool crevice of a nostril, another passionate one has left its mark on your lips, you are haplessly flapping your hands at them, but they persist, they push themselves into your face.

The blog is much better company than pesky flies of course. That's another reason for this reunion.

academia amnesia

When poetry and poets were deemed dangerous by the Greeks, famously Plato declaimed, "We can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men." Around the work of art there was awe, or to use Plato's term, "divine terror". (Ahh, how delicious, such ambivalence.)

In The Man Without Content , Giorgio Agamben explores the transformation of art from the ancients' sense of its overwhelming power to the contemporary experience of aesthetic taste and enjoyment. Art was once firmly in the sphere of interest; now it has become "merely interesting". From its deep and ineluctable oneness with the godly, the spiritual, and the immanent, the work of art has become a thing of subjectivity in its creation and a product for disinterested consumption in its reception. Agamben is not a high priest lamenting the destruction of art's place in the temple or its schism from deities. But he does provide a thought-provoking account of the artist's and the spectator's evolving relationships to each other and to the artwork across the ages in the Western cultures.

For instance: the question of aesthetic taste. The experience of art became a matter of demonstrating one's good taste as recent as the middle of the seventeenth century. Building on Agamben's analysis, it strikes me that the analogy of eating can be useful in illustrating the change in art from soul food ("food" that "feeds" the soul's beliefs and values even as it draws on these to sustain itself in the artist and the spectator) to the selectivity (and almost unavoidably, the elitism and egotism) of what is tasty and what is not.

From the man of taste, one could trace the birth of criticism. There is today many forms of criticism but I cannot think of any that does not begin with the assumption of a good faculty of judgment, that is to say, good taste. Movie reviews, restaurant reviews, book reviews, yes, even this one that I am not-so-covertly writing here. I have found so many good things in this book, but I shall single out one that is particularly resonant. In a quiet corner I found a protest that chimes with my personal disillusionment with contemporary practices of literary criticism and appreciation in academia. He writes:

"Whatever criterion the critical judgment employs to measure the reality of the work - its linguistic structure, its historical dimension, the authenticity of the Erlebnis [historical context] from which it has sprung, and so on - it will only have laid out, in place of a living body, an interminable skeleton of dead elements, and the work of art will have actually become for us, as Hegel says, the beautiful fruit picked from the tree that a friendly Fate has placed before us, without, however, giving back to us, together with it, either the branch that has borne it or the soil that has nourished it or the changing seasons that have helped it ripen. What has been negated is reassumed into the judgment as its only real content, and what has been affirmed is covered by this shadow. Our appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art."

When critics forget their place in front of a work of art, when critics forget the role of criticism beside the role of art, when critics dissect the work of art as if it were as still and finite as a cadaver, then the critics turn the academy into a world of amnesia - hollow, shallow, and terrifying. But this is no divine terror. (Ahh, how despairing, such emptiness!)

water craft

Over brunch last Saturday a friend said, "There's something relaxing about watering plants." He and his wife planned to go to a nursery later that day. In our garden there are trees and plants that came with the house when we moved in two years ago. Some of them we bought, the others came from the mother-in-law who is an enthusiast for blooms. I am not an ardent gardener, I water as part of a daily routine of caring for the dependents in the household. It goes like this: walk dogs, feed dogs, water plants, make coffee. I am usually too hungry or sleepy to be relaxed when watering the plants. But I do feel mildly excited when I spot new developments. Such as the time when a plant with purple flowers that had not flowered since the first two weeks of its arrival in our home as a birthday gift from the brother-in-law conceded a bud and proceeded to show off this singular violet mistress for two weeks. When it wilted, there was another, equally coy, but it begged off in a sudden spell of heat. There have been no flowers since. I look hopefully but the plant is decidedly playing hard-to-get. I have asked politely. Presently I suspect that it may be demanding to be called by name. A daunting task. I went back to watering with nonchalence.

There have been other petally surprises before this, some of them fit to be the subject of operas. There is a pot of white orchids bought from a charity bazaar during Chinese New Year three years ago. It is the same story as the plant with the purple flowers. Blooming gaily in the beginning, stoically barren afterwards. There was one time when it seemed to be making a comeback, thanks to the chemical seduction of the mother-in-law's Miracle Flower Food. There was a stalk of buds and they were in the early tentative stages of opening when a thunderstorm in the mid-afternoon threw forceful blows against the blinds behind the orchid rack, swinging them against the rack with such force that the pots went crashing on to the floor of the front porch. The stalk of white buds was bent, one of the buds had half-bloomed and it looked sorry and pitiful, lying by the side of charcoal that had until a few hours earlier been fit only to admire the pretty buds from underneath. There is a lesson here about the levelling effect of natural disaster, I thought, as I swept up the broken shards of pot and the dishevelled orchids. But that is not what struck me when I remembered today what my friend said about watering.

The tenants before us had four bougainvillea shrubs planted as a border between the porch and the front lawn. They were the most sad-looking bougainvillea plants ever spied this side of the island. I dug them out and planted Muriana shrubs in their place. The bougainvillea were transferred into pots and moved to a sunnier side of the garden. They did better than survive. They are easily the most thriving occupants in the garden. All I did was to water them every morning and in the evening pour the grounds from the morning's coffee into the soil. There was no art in their cultivation, only the consistency of a basic routine. There was a friend who came over for dinner once and remarked, "Ah, but they are easy plants to please!" And I would not be surprised if other green fingers agreed with him. But for the gardener inside, the serious anxious furtive hopeful gardener of images and ideas, tending to poem-saplings and story-seeds, watering words and pruning phrases, there can be nothing more comforting than the proof that going at something doggedly with the simplest of intentions and means can sometimes yield an unexpected bounty.