city of rain

It rained today. Not just rained. Poured, stormed, gusted. The air is cool now -- such a welcome change from the humid heat of the last few weeks. Now i'm wishing it'd rain all through the night, too.
.
.

waiting for godot

Well, perhaps not Godot. But this has been a month of waiting. Waiting for news about a job. Waiting for that essay to finally be published. Waiting for responses to queries about more jobs, courses, writing submissions. i've realised that i never had to do very much waiting before. At least, i don't remember ever waiting with such a strong sense of anticipation, even worry -- perhaps because most things in my life have, so far, more or less followed the usual Singaporean order of things, and even when i had to wait, it was a waiting that was altogether in line with what everyone else was doing, and therefore, not so much of a real waiting at all.
.
Does that make any sense?
.
And all around me, my country going mad, the world burning burning burning. Three plane crashes in the last week alone, and of course there was MH370 from just four months ago -- good God, surely some moderation would be in order here?? Israel and Palestine up in flames. i can't believe it's just been about 6 weeks since the end of the residency. Already everyone feels so far away, even the people who seemed so vital, so close, when we were together in Vermont.
.
i'm starting to think that, in order to write, i really have to find some way to build a little bubble around me -- a bubble of excellence, of faith; a bubble that will help me to keep believing in literature, in its value, in the necessity of making work that is not only good enough, but excellent, the importance of taking time, of waiting (there's that word again) rather than trying to rush something into being before its time. i need to shut out all the noise that threatens to divert me from the work i want to do, or that seeks to make me do that work in a way that feels alien to me. i need to learn to keep my independence even when i get involved. i need to learn to recognise that pressure of feeling that signals the arrival of something i want to write, and i need to learn how to make time for it, even if other things are getting in the way.
.
And, both in and apart from my writing, i need to learn to listen to intuition, learn to recognise it and distinguish it from fear and anxiety and mere wishful thinking.
.
This country is really not an easy place to write in. Everytime i have a conversation with a normal person here (i.e., someone who does not write), i feel this overwhelming sense that my choices do not make sense here, that perhaps it's time to get with the programme and buckle down to Real Life. i really wish i could talk to the residency people again. Their faith rekindled my faith when i was there; and now that i'm back, i find my faith dying out again. This will not do.
.
So much that i want to do. And yet.
.
.

withersome

What is it about this country that has such a unique ability to make me feel trapped, to make me feel like if i don't get out of this place my soul will just wither up and DIE. It's a withersome country that undervalues the imagination, eats away at it so that you start doubting it matters. Good for you if you're into finance, food and shopping. Good luck if you're an artist of any sort, a scientist, anyone whose work depends on the mind, on creativity, on difference and invention.
.
Also, people here don't read.
.
i miss Germany, and Europe. People read there.

In other news : it's actually oddly reassuring (while at the same time also somewhat depressing) to know that i'm (still) feeling this way about this place now, when things in my life are more on an even keel than they were last year. So it IS this place, after all, and not just my subjective state of mind.
.
.

on excellence

Somewhere during the Vermont residency, i was having a conversation with an artist friend, who was going on about the importance of excellence.
.
It occurred to me, after coming back to Singapore, that i rarely hear people talk about excellence in the arts here. In literature, in writing. People talk about how much (or how little) of it there is; about whether it finds an audience; about how much (or how little) it is valued by society. About what themes and issues the writing explores, about how it contributes or not to national identity. i don't remember ever hearing anyone ranting about excellence.
.
Why is that? And could this, perhaps, be the reason why people don't take our writing seriously? Because there isn't enough attention paid to excellence?
.
.

no country for writers

Seen on an online forum on NLB Penguingate:
.
"Don't worry, people here don't read anyway."
.
And you ask why i find it so hard to keep faith in literature here, and need to get away to get it back?
.
.

the untenability of neutrality

aka, Why not taking sides means you kenah hantam by everybody.
.
"Though he first made his name as a critic of clerical worldliness, Desiderius Erasmus found it hard to commit himself to the side of the Lutheran radicals in their conflict with the Papacy. Sympathetic to many of the ideals of reform, he was nevertheless disturbed by the intolerance and inflexibility of the actual reform movement; generally he tried to maintain a distance between his critique of the Church and Luther's. To the extent that he became involved in the rivalry between the Pope and Luther, his involvement was unwilling. At a personal level he found conflict uncongenial (which is not to say that his reluctance to take sides was merely a matter of temperament: in a deep sense it was political too). Urged by the Pope to denounce Luther's heresies, he replied, "I would rather die than join a faction." Privately he deemed the reform controversy insane in its fanaticism. In his view, the escalating violence of their rivalry made the two sides more and more alike, even as they more and more loudly asserted their difference. "Strange to see how the two factions goad each other on, as if they were in collusion," he writes. But by refusing to choose sides (one should bear in mind here that to choose sides is not always to choose an ally: it is sometimes to choose a foe), by claiming a position from which to judge (or, as he saw it, mediate) the conflict, he only succeeded in drawing the hostility of both factions upon himself. He ended his life isolated and embattled. "King of the Amphibians," Luther called him; "The king of but," says Georges Duhamel.
.
(from JM Coetzee, 'Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry', Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship)
.
.

claustrophobia

This place is too small.
.
Need. To. Get. Out.
.
.

the difficulty of nuance

Nuance is difficult. It takes time, and it takes many words. It's unTwitterable. Doesn't quite fit on Facebook either. And so many people these days have no time. No wonder our thoughts so often feel shallow, like shadows that shift all too quickly with the passing of the sun.
.
.

dream dream dream

A mind-mate. That's what i wish for in all of this insanity. i want a mind-mate. Someone with whom i can have a meeting of minds.

.

.

tunnelling to alaska

Gosh. The way things are going in this country. Not for the first time, i wish i could just dig a long deep tunnel that goes all the way to Alaska, or maybe Antarctica, and disassociate disassociate disassociate.
.
Le sigh.
.
.

three things

So this is the first time i'm trying out a writing project that has its roots in a more ... shall i say, intellectual interest, rather than something that comes right from that place where the thorn in the flesh is needling and/or hurting. It's a terribly interesting topic -- but without that thorn in the flesh driving everything, i find it hard to envision what this project is really going to be about. What's at the heart of it.
.
It's not that i have nothing to say. It's that it feels less urgent, less intimately tied up with who i am and/or the choices i've made or am thinking of making.
.
They say that most writers / artists etc really only have about 3 things to say over the course of their lifetimes. And they just keep thinking of new ways to say those 3 things.
.
These things can only be seen in retrospect. i wonder what my 3 things will be.
.
.

life lesson #25021

Listen to your intuition.
Listen to your intuition.
Listen to your intuition.
.
Rinse and repeat x infinity.
.
It has almost never been wrong.
.
.