transcendental

Andras Schiff, the Goldberg, followed by Beethoven's Opus 109 for an encore for crying out loud (who plays Beethoven's 109 for an encore piece???!!!???), and a bunch of other stuff just by the way (including a Brahms intermezzo for another encore, one of several encores) and the people who were there with me -- somehow there was something redemptive about this evening that made it feel like things are on the mend. That i've made the right decisions so far. It's an odd, inexplicable feeling. But one that i definitely needed.
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Late Beethoven slow movements are ...
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illogical

i have never understood those among my friends who call themselves 'Christian' and yet seem to think that being Christian entitles one to a life of ease and pleasure -- and by implication, that if anything is difficult and causes pain and suffering in their lives, it must therefore be God's good pleasure that they do whatever it takes to get rid of the cause of their suffering -- even if it goes against what God has commanded.
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As in, i understand the human yearning for that sort of thinking to be true. But how can anyone read the account of the crucifixion and believe at the same time that the goal of the Christian life is maximum pleasure and to have things go our way? What kind of mental gymnastics does one need to do to believe as such?
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the horror, the horror!

i am reminded of this quotation from Simone Weil that i came across several years ago, when i first started suspecting that perhaps writing was my vocation. i found it horrifying back then; i still find it horrifying now. And i cannot wrap my mind around how Weil could have seen 'beauty' in such a life. Like most modern humans (to use the term used by that student i just quoted a few posts ago...), i do not like the idea of not having a choice.
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'The carrying out of a vocation differed from the actions dictated by reason or inclination. ... The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined, either by the pressure of circumstances or by impulses such as I have just mentioned, and where there is never any room for choice.'
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(Simone Weil)
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vocation

Sometimes i think i was made to write, that this is indeed the sole purpose of my life, and this is why so many other things in my life have not gone the way i wanted them to -- because if i'd gotten what i wanted, i would have been distracted from writing, indeed, i would have given up writing altogether, and this is why i "cannot have nice things", as my artist-luthier friend CB once said.
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It's a horrible thought, in some ways. What a terrible price to pay for being who you're made to be. And then again, what would be the cost of not being who you're made to be? i really don't know.
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quotable quotes

Sometimes, you find these gems while marking student work:
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"The modern human is slow and clumsy, with pathetically small teeth and weak nails."
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the king is dead ...

... long live the king?
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Thankfully, that looks like the way it's going. (As opposed to, the king is dead, REVOLUTION!)
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This has been the year of being hyper-aware of the swirling of time and events, waves and waves that no one person can control, and of thinking, I wish i were a fictionist, because it seems to me that it is only in fiction that a writer would be able to convey that sense of time being on the move and people being just caught in the tide. i was just saying to some friends today, what's happening in Thailand now would make a wonderful setting for a novel. A big epic historical novel, spanning decades, following the fortunes of one family as they make their lives in Bangkok, and everything culminating in the week of the king's passing. Or, perhaps the story could start in the week of the king's passing, and then move backwards and forwards the way, say, Rushdie's Midnight's Children does.
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Anyway.
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i'm not a fictionist, so all i can do is write little blog posts about the swirling of time -- time as hurricane, cyclone, typhoon -- and how odd it is, to be living in the midst of it all and, in a sense, at a kind of crossroads myself, and wondering which current i'll be caught up in this time, and where it's all going to go.
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i mean, if Bob Dylan can win the Nobel, anything can happen, right?
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the fourth state of matter (2)

So now i've read the whole thing a second time (and a bit more, if you count all the individual paragraphs i've looked over on top of the full re-read), and this essay is breaking my heart. i take back what i said yesterday about how it's the content, not the way it's written, that makes it devastating. No. It's both -- form and content. Working in tandem. The casual-yet-deliberate blandness of the prose, the way she weaves the four sub-narratives into one, the way she places clues at strategic points in the narrative that you go back to again afterwards, thinking, Ah, so that was what she was doing.
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Those heartbreaking last paragraphs.
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i've also looked at some of the commentaries online, many of them written by teachers of creative writing in the US. My mind clears and comes alive after an entire day clouded in the usual marking-and-teaching-XYZ fog, and i'm thinking, i can SEE myself doing this. Both teaching writing in that way, and also, being taught writing in that way. i can see myself as a grad student, attending classes where such things are taught, and then going away from class with my heart burning and mind on fire, back to my room (or cafe, or library, or wherever it is where i do my best writing) and working these ideas and methods into my own work. i can see myself teaching undergrads how to dissect a piece of writing, how to catch the tricks that writers play on their readers, how to figure out how a writer manages to coax certain responses from his readers -- and then getting them to look at their own writing and see what they can do to make it stronger.
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i can no longer see myself doing what i'm currently doing for the rest of my working life.
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Which is a bit of a bother because, as everyone knows, there are no jobs in the creative writing tertiary education market unless you happen to be, like, Mark Doty or something.
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Damn you, Jo Ann Beard. Now look what you've done.
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the fourth state of matter

i've just read Jo Ann Beard's 'The Fourth State of Matter' for the first time. Or rather, i've just got to the end of it for the first time. i've seen it before, anthologised in creative nonfiction collections, and i've tried reading it, but could never get through the first few pages. The writing seemed so bland, so ordinary. Nothing here to see, folks. i couldn't understand what made it worthy of anthologisation.
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Now that i've finally finished reading it, i can understand the fuss. It's a devastating essay. Not because of the writing. But because of what it's about.
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i never know quite what to make of trauma writing. It seems to me to be a peculiarly American genre -- [warning: anti-American-culture rant coming up] -- not just because of its willingness to bare all to an audience eager to lap up every last detail of the writer's personal pain and suffering, but because it seems to me that it's only in America that such trauma would be so commonly available in the first place, as grist for their writers' mills. Firstly, there's their gun culture, which to this day i find incomprehensible and irrational; then there's the whole attitude towards sex and sexuality which, to me, seems to lead so logically and inevitably to a culture where the miracle would be if you didn't get raped on a date ... But more on that some other time.
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Back to trauma writing being a peculiarly American genre. And my feelings after reading 'The Fourth State of Matter'. See, i don't quite know what to think. On one hand, i'm cut to the heart by the story. A story like that doesn't need verbal pyrotechnics -- in fact, to dress up such a story in anything more than the plainest of words seems almost like sacrilege.
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And yet. And yet.
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i can understand why it's necessary to make art out of stories like that. It's partly much-needed catharsis, the urge to articulate experience and by doing so, to impose some sense of order and meaning on the chaos, the incomprehensibility, of experience. i get that.
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Yet there is a part of me that also feels that there's something vulgar, profane, about that kind of art. Or rather, that there is something almost opportunistic about publishing such art. The making of it, i can understand, might be viscerally necessary. But publication? On one hand, i can see how such work honours the loss; it's a way of giving those who have suffered a place in artistic eternity. Yet. These were real lives that were lost. What can one essay, however well-written, do to compensate for that loss? And if the writer were to profit from such work, either financially or simply in terms of an enhanced writerly reputation .......
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i don't know. Life is complicated. All i know is that after reading the essay, i'm left thinking that the US sounds like a seriously screwed-up place (not that i didn't already know that ... it's just that the essay just brings it home in a very visceral way), and i'm not sure anymore if it's the kind of place i want to go to, even for the sake of my writing.
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23 years

23 years is a long time for water to flow under the bridge. For all these years i've occasionally thought back to what happened in secondary school and all the things that followed as a result. i've come to see it as a blessing in disguise -- albeit one that took years to play out. Still, i never really understood what exactly had happened and why it happened. All i had were hunches, based on bits and pieces that i'd picked out at the time. But i never had any way of ascertaining if my hunches were right.
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So when i finally got the chance to ask my questions yesterday, it was really a bit of an anticlimax. But still, i'm glad for the closure. The why of it seems just as incomprehensible to me now as the entire thing was way back then, but at least now i know that one of my hunches, at least, was spot on. It just doesn't make any sense to me -- and if it makes any difference at all to feel slightly vindicated, i'm glad to say that at least one of the people involved also thinks it doesn't make sense.
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i don't think i've ever been very good with things not making sense. And to think that my entire life direction took such a dramatic turn just because of one thing that didn't make sense and that wasn't even my fault at all -- .......
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Maybe this is why water so fascinates me, and the slow growth of trees. All things that flow or grow and change in response to forces entirely outside of themselves. One day, perhaps, i will be able to weave all this into a story that has some kind of discernible shape. Or maybe the opposite will happen, and i will learn to accept things not having any discernible shape at all.
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not watching TV

Writer (after relating yet another barely-believable story of her writing adventures):  Welcome to the drama that is my writing life.
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Writer's friend: No wonder you don't watch TV.
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what is friendship?

It's odd to finally catch up with old friends -- the kind you used to be really close to -- after not being in touch for a long time, and find how much they've changed. Or rather, to realise that you've both taken different paths in life that are leading in different directions, that your values and priorities have diverged so much. You wonder if things have changed, or if your values and priorities were different all along, but just hidden from each other, only to be revealed by time and circumstance. 

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So you keep silent upon hearing of the choices they've made / are making, despite being very certain that, in the same situation, you'd make very different choices, despite feeling that the choices they're making are actually not the best. And you're left wondering what friendship means: if your values and priorities are no longer the same, can you still really be friends? What does such a friendship entail?

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