joyas volardores

i've read this essay before, and loved it, too; but today, we heard it read out loud in class, and it was... a revelation.

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Joyas Volardores

by Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas volardores, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

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Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

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Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

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The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

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Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

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So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

if the soul

It was years ago, back in the first workplace, when i first encountered this poem. A friend showed it to me during a conversation that must have been about music and literature -- but i can't remember exactly. i wasn't too impressed at the time, but somehow, the images of limpets and rock pools have stayed with me all these years. Was reminded of it yesterday, and have read it several times since. i'd never really noticed its fierce, elegiac beauty before. The more i read it, the more i like it.
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And i don't even know the title...
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If the soul of my dead father remembers anything
he will remember the rake of these rock pools, the lean
of their stacked lines, he will note limpets and shrimps
and know this umbrella mist as it falls lightly as drizzle.
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If he remembers anything he will hear the clipped whisper
of the waves on the turn, here where he used to swim
far out as if -- I wonder now -- it was his only solitude.
I suppose a soul from this place will hear the gulls squeaking
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and have no argument with high-sighted oblique storms.
'High tides are expected,' a woman said to me today,
my father's soul will want to be here, in the spray
and in the gale, in the storm's uncompromising rage.
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i.m. Albert Hart
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(David Hart)
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from the heart

So here's a radical idea: schools should just measure academic achievement. i get alarmed whenever (well-meaning) civil servants and educationists talk about factoring things like lifeskills and ethics into our school assessment systems. i mean, sure, i know where they're coming from. They're frustrated with the over-emphasis on academic results as a way of 'measuring' our students; they're concerned about 'holistic education'. They want our education system to produce more 'well-rounded' students. All good and noble intentions, it must be said.
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Here's the thing, though. Some things in life are simply unquantifiable. Try to put a number to them, and the whole thing just degenerates into a farcical and meaningless, not to mention time-wasting, exercise in futility. (i remember the time when we had to test our students on 'teamwork' and cooperativeness in Project Work. At its worst, we were instructed to note whether or not students smiled and nodded at each other during group meetings to acknowledge their team-members' contributions. No kidding. It was ridiculous.) Assessing our students on Lifeskills? Like, grading them on whether they can cook a decent meal without using Maggi Mee? Giving them a Resilience Score based on how well they bounce back from a poor test result? The mind boggles.
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The problem with this is that it treats only the symptoms of a deeper problem -- which is the belief that everything in life can be and ought to be quantified. It is essentially a materialist worldview -- one which has no place for the intangible things of the spirit. The solution to stressed-out students who feel that there is an over-emphasis on academic results in our education system is not to factor a wider range of skills and aptitudes etc into the assessment process. The solution is to show people that school results -- of whatever kind -- are not the be-all and end-all of life. It is to persuade them that some things, some of the most important things, simply cannot and should not be quantified. It is to protect as many things as possible from the encroachment of The System, rather than to try to Systemetise as many things as possible -- which is what we seem to be doing now.
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Of course, such a solution would never work here in Singapore. i'm not sure if there's any place where it would work, but definitely not here. C'est la vie.
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tak boleh

Ok. So there was no miracle. But still. There is change. However gradual, it is still change. And that, at least, is something.
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malaysia boleh?

Malaysia went to the polls today (ok, well, technically, it was yesterday...) and for some strange reason i'm getting swept along in the excitement. Haven't felt so alive in months.
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imagine

"... The ambition of advanced capitalism is not simply to combat radical ideas, or even to discredit them. It is to abolish the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present. Its task, in brief, is to annihilate that perilous power known as the imagination."
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(Terry Eagleton)
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Something for us to think about here in Singapore. So often, i hear people lamenting The System, and yet the very things they do are feeding into The System and making things worse. We simply don't see that there can be an alternative, and if we do see it, we often don't have the courage to pursue it. i think, what this island needs more than anything else is, first, imagination, and then, courage.
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The Serenity Prayer comes to mind. That, and also John Lennon's 'Imagine'.
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farewell, and farewell, and farewell

That by-now-familiar feeling -- bracing the heart for yet another round of farewells.
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It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,
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It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.
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Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting,
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Are sages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being
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Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans' wings,
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The density of the palms' shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
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Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon's ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.
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(XVI, from Dark Harbour, by Mark Strand)
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looking for silence

"The greatness of (Joyce's) Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamour universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom's mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savours is a storm we all know. And that is the book's horror, too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet. How much cruelty is occasioned simply because of the noise that is within us: the din is too great to realise exactly what we are doing to others, or what is being done to others in our name. Thus an offhand remark, which leaves us as easily as a breath and which we think no more of than a breath, cuts a friend to the quick. And thus a whole country can be organised toward some collective insanity because there is no space for individuals to think."
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(from 'Hive of Nerves' by Christian Wiman)
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cheesy new age harp music

Never thought i'd find myself saying this, but yeah -- suddenly craving cheesy new age harp music. The sort that comes with photos of spring flowers, summer lakes, autumn trees and winter fields etc etc on Youtube.

Some ice cream would be nice, too. Better still, sorbet. Lemon sorbet. With lychee, or longan. Mmmmm....
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