one note

Can i also say, i have just discovered Microsoft One Note and it is a revelation. The perfect programme for keeping track of a big project. Thank you Bill Gates!!!
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new life

Can i announce that i've started getting organised on The Book Project, and that this feels like the most exciting life-affirming thing i've done in years. Ok ok, so i'm sure it's all going to become difficult and tedious at some point in the next year or so, and i'll be looking back on this moment and laughing at my over-optimism. But for the moment, this just feels like the best thing i've done in ages.
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No regrets, leaving the useful and socially-lauded teaching job to do this selfish, utterly self-indulgent literary project. Ok ok, maybe not selfish and utterly self-indulgent. i actually think that Singapore needs this book. Heck, why not claim that the world needs this book. Some delusions of grandeur could not hurt right now, if they give the added impetus to keep going on something that, for the moment, remains just the germ of an idea in a curious and impassioned mind.
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PS:
Can i also say, God i haven't felt so happy in ages. Working on writing that i believe in has to be one of the greatest joys ever for me.
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ethics and aesthetics

"What triggered this?" a friend asked, when i sent her the previous blog-post via email.
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i'm so glad i have good friends who ask me good questions. What triggered it, indeed. Well, partly an encounter with someone whose view of art and faith i do not share; partly self-examination of my own attitudes towards literature and writing that endorses values i disagree with. But i've been thinking about these issues for a long time: art, freedom, responsibility, ethics, faith, and the relationship between all of these disparate elements. Heck, i even wrote a paper once on "The Ethics of J.M. Coetzee’s Meta-fictions of the Self", which i thought was awful when i'd first submitted it, but which, if i may say so myself, doesn't look quite so bad when i read it now, 7 years later ...
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Anyway, so yes. i've always been concerned about art, responsibility, freedom, ethics, faith. It's just that these questions are becoming more real now that i'm more involved in the literary community.
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For what it's worth, i hate -- i mean, really hate -- the idea that freedom can be had without taking responsibility for the consequences of that freedom. Wanting to have your cake and eat it too. i believe that may just possibly be one of my pet peeves -- situations where people want to have their cakes and eat them, too. Wanting to have a good thing without being willing to pay the cost. What freeloaders.
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flying by the nets

"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
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(from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce)
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Yes, 'young' is about right. Only a young person could believe that it's possible to totally evade the nets of nationality, language, religion, family, culture, ethnicity. Even the act of trying to fly by them, recognises and confirms their power.
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Yet there is something about this vision that arrests me. A friend once asked me why i don't write for the Church / church, since i feel that God has called me to write. My answer: that it would be a cage for me. i was reminded again today of the censorious tendency that so easily accompanies any turning to religious faith. So difficult -- to tread that very fine line between faith, loyalty, love and obedience to God, and a dogmatic shutting down of everything that one sees as being not-of-God.
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It's not the fault of religion or faith. It's human nature. We just want to be right all the time. The thing about religion is that it can be used / abused to claim divine warrant for our natural desire to be right, and to see others as wrong. It's really as simple as that, i think. And i think that my own desire not to be caught by the nets of nationality, language, and yes, religion -- probably comes from that same twisted desire to always be right, to not have to answer to anything other than my own ideas of what's right or wrong. Not to have my art be tied down or obliged in any way to any rules or systems outside of myself. In other words, the artist's desire for freedom. i think that, taken too far, this can be a bad thing. There has to be a line somewhere, between when this impulse can be harnessed for the good, and when it becomes a thing hurtful and out of control.
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Life is so bloody complicated. People are so bloody complicated. Not for the first time i find myself yearning for simplicity.
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note to self

Being a good literary citizen, a good citizen of Literature Land -- usually involves doing public service stuff such as writing reviews, chairing discussions, editing other people's work, putting together anthologies. i've done all this. Not intensively, but enough to have made my contributions. At some point you just want to hunker down and write your own book dammit.
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i'm saying this, not because i'm tired of serving. But because i know that my own desire to be useful to other people -- not a bad desire, mind you, but one that like all desires needs to be managed properly -- can get in the way of me giving myself permission to do what i feel i want / need to do. So this is here as a reminder. From now on -- or at least, after i'm done with all the things i've said Yes to in the last year or so -- i'm going to turn down all requests to do that sort of thing, and just focus on getting that book written. Once that's done, i'll go back to being of service.
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this is just to say

i have finished

the marking

that was in

the in-box

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and which

i'll be damned

ever

to see again

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Forgive me

this is freedom

so sweet

and so bold

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(With a thousand apologies to William Carlos Williams)

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be

All this endless making. Making new things, new ideas, new this and that. Sometimes i just want something very very simple, something plain and white and pure. To live a simple, simple life. No complications. None of this need to be clever and interesting, to make something of oneself and the world around. Just to be.

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transitions

Two. Days. More.
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Like most other endings (and hence beginnings) of the last several years, this one feels like something that has reached its time. Or, as Edgar put it in King Lear (under much less propitious circumstances), 'ripeness is all'. i do honestly think that this particular period in my life -- trying to be noble by teaching in the state school system and trying to write on the side -- is over for the moment, and it's time to give the writing a proper chance again. 'Again', because i've (ostensibly) tried before. i think the failure from the last time was because i'd set aside the time for a big extended project without having any inkling of what i really wanted to say. Or rather, i had lots of ideas, in my head. But i've only ever been able to write from my heart. Those head-ideas -- they never work out. Which is a good thing to have learnt.
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This time, it seems i do have something to say. Something urgent, from the heart, something that comes from love. i guess the challenge is to maintain the discipline that will enable me to make good art. i still remember what OH said once: something about how being a writer -- trying to be a writer -- (but then Yoda says that there is no 'try': "DO. Or do not. There is no try.") -- will test you to your limit, take all the strength you can muster. i'm not sure what i thought of that at the time: if i remember correctly, i kinda understood where he was coming from, but i'd never experienced it for myself, so it all felt very abstract and theoretical. i think i have a better idea now what he was talking about.
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Funny, this need to memorialise this moment. Perhaps it's the writer's need for closure, for knowing where one thing ends and another begins. For making order out of the mess that is real life. Perhaps.
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All i know for sure is that i need to write a book, i finally have an idea that i think will work, and it's now or never, all or nothing.
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choices

i like to think that as we get older, we get better at making good decisions. We learn to choose well. Looking back, it seems clear to me that the earliest life-direction-changing "choices" in my life were not real choices at all -- they were roads that i was more-or-less forced onto by sheer strength of circumstance.  The choices i've been making recently, though, feel more like real choices: between options that both (or all) have their good points, even if one particular one is what my heart seems to be leaning towards.
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It's about self-knowledge and self-awareness, i guess. "Know thyself". i guess one of the good things about this learning process is that learning to make good decisions for yourself also means learning to trust others, to trust that other people know what they are doing when they make decisions. And thus to be able to let go of things that are neither within my power nor right to control.
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more answers

i've been thinking. And i think that my ranting is not, in fact has never been, directed at good art and good artists. (i'm talking about ethical goodness as well as excellent craftsmanship.) i guess things only start getting problematic when you immerse yourself in bad art by bad artists. So part of the answer is to start being more selective about what i allow into my life.
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The other part of the answer, as the Universe reminded me today (i seem to be getting a lot of answers from the Universe lately. i guess that means i need them...), is that we are all sinners in need of God's grace. And being careful about what influences i allow in my life, is an entirely different matter from taking a sanctimonious attitude towards those things that, for my safety, i choose to keep my distance from. The challenge is to know where and when to draw the line.
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how silly

It's interesting when life gives answers fast. i'm so used to waiting for long, long sweeps of time. But today i got an answer to yesterday's question. Said the Universe today, because you're looking in the wrong places. These people do exist, and you already know them. They're just quieter than the rest. How silly of you not to realise this.
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servants of the secret fire

And this year's Nobel goes to a nonfictionist!
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i think at some point, i'm going to have to resolve my quarrel with Art and Literature. i can't be a writer and be permanently at odds with the very thing i work with. i need to find more writers, good writers, who write for the light. The Servants of the Secret Fire, in Tolkien's words. Why are there so few?
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calvino

Ok. Here is one light-giving place. Hello old friend.
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"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
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(from Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino)
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the dyer's hand

"And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand ... "

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(from 'Sonnet 111', by Bill S)

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wisdom

"One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as a result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess -- the ultimate in giving too little!"
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(from Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer)
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dreams and schemes

Two more weeks. Can't wait. There are so many things i want / need to do. But in the meantime, two more weeks. i guess this is a good time to dust off JL's word-gift from ... gosh, eight years ago: Let this be a joyous summation rather than a drag to the finish.
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Because, oh gosh. That feeling like i'm swimming through starch ......
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