juggling

This. Says everything.
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The Juggler
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A ball will bounce; but less and less. It's not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
So in our hearts from brilliance,
Settles and is forgot.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls
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To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air
The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands,
Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres
Grazing his finger ends,
Cling to their courses there,
Swinging a small heaven about his ears.
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But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all
Than the earth regained, and still and sole within
The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble
He reels that heaven in,
Landing it ball by ball,
And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.
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Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's
Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls
On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:
The boys stamp, and the girls
Shriek, and the drum booms
And all come down, and he bows and says good-bye.
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If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands
In the dust again, if the table starts to drop
Through the daily dark again, and though the plate
Lies flat on the table top,
For him we batter our hands
Who has won for once over the world's weight.
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(Richard Wilbur)
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sleep. simplicity.

i so need to be in a place -- physically, emotionally, spiritually -- that is this music right now. Those images in the video of urban life -- they make me feel so drained and dried-out and thirsty, they make my eyes and face feel tired. i need to be somewhere green and cool, somewhere with minimal concrete, somewhere with wide horizons and lots of trees. With a river. Or lake.
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Need. To. Get. Out. Of. Singapore.

Also. Quote of the day from the video:
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"Things that are seemingly simple are often very difficult to execute ... "
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the art of seeing

Years ago, i wrote a poem called 'Misreadings', based on a rather funny episode when i'd misread (in a cookbook, or maybe some advertisement for kitchen equipment) 'frying spatula' as 'flying spatula'. Quite a funny image, if you think about it, and something i turned into a piece about perception and interpretation.
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It's something i still think about quite a lot. Not flying spatulas, obviously. But about perception. What is it that makes us see what we see? How is it that 2 people can look at the exact same situation, and see such completely different things? And this doesn't even have to be confined to questions of meaning. i mean, that internet uproar about The Dress earlier this year was precisely about the issue of visual colour perception. (It's white and gold!)
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Right now i'm praying that what i see will be the 'right' thing for me to see, whatever 'right' is. It's so important, to see things right.
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打乒乓 !

One of the better things that happened to me at the VSC residency last year, was re-discovering table-tennis. Or "ping pong", as the Americans call it. (Why is it that 乒乓 sounds so nice in Chinese, while "ping pong" sounds so terribly amateur-ish in English? It's only a difference of one vowel, and yet, what a difference!) My only regret is that the re-discovery only happened in my last week there -- but better late than never. i can't quite decide which was more fun: actually playing (in my totally clumsy and amateur-ish way), or watching R, T, C, and the rest of the guys playing -- their games fast and furious and so. Completely. Stylish.
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Table-tennis really is a pretty cool sport. Not just 'cool', in fact. i'd use the word 'exhilarating'. Someday, when my writing is up to it, i'll write a poem about a table-tennis match. i want to be able to capture the sheer speed of it, the force of that moment of contact when your bat smashes the ball against the table. i love the way you have to be so controlled -- measuring just the right amount of force to put into each move, thinking about things like spin and angles. i just love watching the pros play -- the way they dance so far away from the table-edge and yet manage to place the ball just so on the other side of the net.
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i've got so many bad habits to un-learn. Apparently i don't even know how to move my arms or position my body the right way. But practice makes permanent, and now that i'm taking proper lessons with a proper coach, i hope to be able to play properly for the first time soon enough. Then i'll have a fun friendly safe competitive sport that i can continue playing for the rest of my life, hopefully all the way till i'm a doddery old person with a headful of silver hair and lots of smile wrinkles around my eyes.
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Life can be good.
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bridge

Being a bridge is an interesting business. You meet all sorts of people, get to see how diverse and plural the world really is. Incorrigibly plural, in the memorable words of Louis MacNeice. But you also get trampled on. And squashed in between. And frequently, not quite fully understood by any of the sides you're trying to bridge (and there may be more than one).

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i remember talking with a friend about the trampling just last year, during one of the outbreaks of inter-ideological squabbling that have been increasing in frequency here in the last few years. And her response (bless her!) was to tell me that i could choose to be a strong steel bridge anchored in an unshakeable faith in God. Such is the power of metaphor. i'd been thinking of a rickety little wooden bridge, or perhaps one of those ugly concrete structures you see almost anywhere that just don't add very much to the landscape and are generally utilitarian without looking too good. Instead, what she had in mind was this...

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And that's a truly beautiful thought.

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cold green places

i'm starting to realise that holidays in cities don't really feel too much like holidays to me. Too much of the same thing, i guess: Singapore's so hyper-urban that what i want from a break is to go somewhere green. With water. That's the other thing i've realised i love. Lakes and rivers and seas. The next holiday will have to be somewhere green, with water. i'd like it to be cold-ish, too. Not too cold. Between 10 to 20 deg celcius would be just right.

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There's definitely something about being too long in a completely built-up urban environment that slowly but surely withers the soul. You can almost feel your spirit drying up from all the hard dry surfaces -- the concrete, metal, glass, and plastic. 

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i guess i've just never adjusted as well as most Singaporeans to the completely-urban life. So many of my friends like taking 'city breaks' -- they'll head off for a few days to places like Bangkok, Taipei, KL, Shanghai, Hong Kong, to shop and eat. Not my idea of a holiday. Which is rather inconvenient, i guess, given that most of the cold green places with bodies of water in them, are rather far away.

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proportionality

People seem so easily offended these days. Or rather, in so many cases where 'offence' has been taken (and given), the response seems to be so out-of-proportion to the offence itself. Charlie Hebdo, for example. Sure, be offended when somebody insults your religion. No need to kill for it. The current Tim Hunt debacle. Sure, start a Twitter-storm. (The guy had it coming, really. It was such a dumb thing to say at an international conference for crying out loud ... Even if, as i very much suspect, what he said has more than a little truth to it ... ). But it was wrong for UCL to demand his resignation over a silly little un-PC remark like that.
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On the contrary, i think the Malaysian justice system has been quite measured in its sentencing of those tourists who stripped on Kinabalu. A 3-day jail sentence is really nothing very much -- a token sentence, really, just to make the point that such behaviour is illegal and won't be tolerated. In effect, it'll be kinda like roughing it out on a mountain for 3 days. Sure, it will be a blot on their records, but really, they shouldn't have, and if they had done the same, say, on the Buckingham Palace grounds, i don't think the Queen would have been very amused either ... The fine -- S$1800 -- does seem a bit steep to me, but it's just money, and i'm assuming these students, or their parents, can afford it.
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In Singapore, too, there seems to be this pattern recently of over-reacting to the most trivial things. Sigh. Small country, petty minds? Or maybe this is what happens when people just have it too good -- small trivial things start assuming a totally disproportionate significance in the mind ...
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brilliant new theory

Ok, so i have this brilliant new theory. Hear me out for a bit.
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So artists need suffering in order to create good art. The means of attaining that suffering, though, differs from artist to artist.
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Macro-level circumstantial hardship. Eg. living in a war-torn country, or under an oppressive government, etc.
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Dysfunctional family.
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Genetic health problems that are totally Not Your Fault. (A close substitute would be having a very close family member with a long-term debilitating health problem that impinges on the writer's personal life.)
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4.
Multiple unexpected-deaths of very close loved ones.
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A screwed-up love life / sexual-identity-related problems.
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Doing stupid self-destructive things.
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Or some combination of the above.
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i think that about covers it. i daresay 99% of the truly great artists -- writers, musicians, visual artists, etc -- all had one or more of the above.
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thoughts

Ok. Now that it's over, i feel i can finally speak. The Kinabalu tragedy hit many Singaporeans hard. For so many reasons. Of course, there's the fact that most of the Singaporean victims were schoolchildren -- barely 12 years old. They should have had so much life ahead of them. i guess the fact that it happened on a school trip left me quite shaken. i've taken students on overseas trips before; i understand the kind of responsibility that teachers bear on these trips. i can't imagine what the surviving teachers must be feeling right now. It must be unspeakably terrible. And then there was the unexpectedness of the whole thing -- climbing Kinabalu is a common-enough outdoor activity here, and lots of Singaporeans do it. It's known to be safe and do-able. Who would have thought ...
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This year has been one reminder after another that life is so unpredictable -- and often enough, not in a nice way. At times like this, it's almost inevitable that we try to seek some sort of meaning in what is really just meaningless. So we tell stories of heroism and bravery, of sacrifice; we make private resolutions to cherish our loved ones, to make the most of life. i don't know. i guess all these are necessary and legitimate ways of dealing with what would otherwise be overwhelming and debilitating. Life goes on. Is what i've learnt. Until it doesn't. And then it goes on for others.
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Reading The Snow Geese by William Fiennes has really been quite an experience for me. It's been quite some time since i've read a book that is not only an amazing work of art, but that also speaks to where i am in life at the moment of reading. And, whether for the better or the worse, it's reinforcing a prejudice i'm developing about writing and life -- the idea that it's the writers who go through the most whose writing has the most depth. Reading about William Fiennes's life is hard. He really hasn't had it easy at all. And yet you would not guess, from reading The Snow Geese, just how much he had gone through before the epic trip the book documents. i guess i do admire his spirit. And i think i might just be falling in love a little bit with his view of the world. Which he would never have developed to the full if not for the illness, if not for all his family has gone through. But i wouldn't ever want to be tested in the same way.
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i dunno. i think, at the end of the day, i just want to live a quietly meaningful life. i want the small joys -- love and friendship, being useful in ways that matter. Things like the Kinabalu disaster -- you can't help but feel that life really is so tenuous. That's what i'm feeling more and more the older i get. How tenuous everything is. i wish i could be a bit more celebratory in my outlook. But i don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
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respect

So some of the tourists who stripped on Mt Kinabalu have been arrested by the Malaysian police. The locals believe that the act was disrespectful to the mountain, which they consider sacred, and many of them think that the earthquake happened as a consequence of that sacrilege.
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Of course, educated people everywhere are laughing at the Sabahans, mocking their beliefs as out-of-date. i wish they would stop.
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i mean, look, i believe in plate tectonics as much as the average educated person does. For crying out loud i was a geography geek back in school. But that doesn't mean i think that it's OK to make fun of other people's cultural and religious beliefs and customs. Whatever happened to good ol' old-fashioned respect and good manners? Etiquette? Civilised behaviour?
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i think there's a certain arrogance -- ok, let me be frank, not just a certain arrogance, but a great deal of arrogance, behind what these tourists did. A great deal of extremely ugly arrogance. It's the same arrogance that led those cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, in the name of 'free speech', knowing as they did that this is considered taboo in Islam. It's an arrogance that the world can very very very well do without.
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To be honest, i think those tourists deserve to be arrested.
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i find it quite amazingly hypocritical that the same people who cry foul over things like Nobel-prizewinning-scientist Tim Hunt's allegedly misogynistic comments at a conference in South Korea, can fail to see that essentially, what those tourists did is really not that very different. Which is, to trample on the dearly-held beliefs of a particular group of people -- in the case of Tim Hunt, feminists in general and female scientists in particular; and in the case of those tourists, native Sabahans. If they can feel offended at Tim Hunt being politically incorrect about something that they (essentially) hold sacred (i.e., gender equality), they should be able to understand the offence felt by the Sahahans when something similar is done to them.
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BAH HUMBUG.
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too many earthquakes

There have been too many earthquakes recently. The latest, in Sabah near Mount Kinabalu -- a magnitude 6.0 quake that was completely unexpected because such quakes are rare in the area. (One in a hundred years, according to scientists here.)
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My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the children and teachers from Tanjong Katong Primary School who died on the mountain.
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mission: impossible

Gotta love that zany energy!
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restoration

Ok, i think all the crap from the last few weeks has made me lose perspective a bit. So now for some Perspective Restoring Stuff.
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First, this. Gorgeous. Book.
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The Snow Geese, by William Fiennes.

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In THIS particular edition, with the gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous introduction by Robert Macfarlane. O.M.G. Such an indescribably beautiful introduction for such an unbelievably beautiful book. 

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God i love Brit writing.

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Reading this is reminding me of why i got into all this in the first place -- just the sheer love of the written word, of the way it can, when done well with integrity of craft and intent, touch the mind and move the soul, change the way we see. It's making me remember why i wanted to do all this in the first place, before people and politics and all the rest of it got in the way. 

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Back to first principles. 

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i guess we all have to do that once in a while. That movement away from where we started, so that we can learn and grow; and then the movement back, to know the place with new eyes.

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And, the other clarifying (and exuberantly happy) thing: this video by The Piano Guys.

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God i so needed to see that. 

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different worlds

i live in too many different worlds. All of which have different, nay, opposing, values and ideals. i used to think that i like it that way, because it means i don't become one of those one-dimensional, one-track-mind people who can never see perspectives different from their own, who can't understand that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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But right now it's all becoming a bit too much. When push comes to shove, and decisions need to be made, you can't be a member of all camps. You have to choose. And that then means that relationships are affected.
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So one either chooses a camp, or decides to stay outside it all, away from all camps, in no camp -- and alone.
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i think most people choose to belong. We all need to belong. It's a far greater and more fundamental human need than the wish to be interesting.
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PS: (Edit, 5 June)
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Actually, i think it's more than the wish to be interesting. It's really about the desire to not be stupid. Now, that's difficult to navigate -- between wanting to not be stupid, and wanting to belong.
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doctors

i need to make friends with some older people. Like, between 5 to 10 years older. I'm surrounded by gin-nahs in so much of my life -- either literal gin-nahs, or people who act like them. Where are the stable, steady, sensible people who've seen a bit of life and have their feet firmly planted on the ground; the ones who don't get carried away with bright shiny ideals that cannot stand the test of Real Life; the people who just get on with it, doing what needs to be done with no fuss, no fanfare, no grand-standing.
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Like the doctors i know. One surgeon, and two emergency department doctors. Also another surgeon who is not my friend, but whom i just got to know recently. i like their steadiness, the fact that they look disease and sometimes death in the eye and still just keep on keeping on. The fact that they've mastered all that knowledge and handle all that responsibility -- and still manage to be kind. That they work so darned bloody hard -- no other career demands more of a person than a medical career, i swear.
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People who deal with the Real Stuff -- flesh and blood and bone.
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Yep, looks like i totally need to hang out with my doctor friends more. Pity they're always so busy ......
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the voice

 

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