dry grass singing

window-shopping

I've started a new blog.

Here. Take a look at the windows. :)
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posted by eothen @ 11:00 PM 0 comments

back in business

Ok, I'd like to declare this blog open and back for business again. It's been too, too long since I've gotten any real writing practice - and it took a reminder, from a particularly sharp-minded former student of my dad's, that writing loses its edge (in Chinese, 'bu2 li4') once you stop doing it for too long to scare me out of my complacency. Writing is the one thing I know I do well. I cannot, will not, let it go.

The other thing that has hindered me from writing in this blog is that, honestly, after all a while it stopped being a place for me to practise, and started being a place for me to show off instead. I became so conscious of the quality of the writing that I posted here, that it became impossible to really write anything for "practice". So this time I'm gonna try to leave me ego out of this, and really make this a platform for practising my writing, which was the original purpose in the first place.
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posted by eothen @ 11:03 PM 2 comments

a man for our time

‘Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee.’

(St. Augustine)


There is a restlessness that cannot be stilled by any peace the human heart can know on its own, a thirst that cannot be quenched by any water we can drink. More than any other novel I know, Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas tells of that restlessness, that thirst. And it is this novel that prompted me to begin the journey that would bring me, eleven years later and almost to the day, to the altar rails of a small church in an obscure corner of Singapore, against all I had ever known of myself, to be baptised into the life offered by the only Person who has ever been able to satisfy that thirst.

It seemed innocuous enough, the slightly grubby paperback half-hidden beneath other similarly battered books in the ‘For Shelving’ book-bin at the Geylang East Community Library. It was the week before Easter. The stylised picture of a man’s face, his beard a dark angry red set against the dirty-white background of the book cover, caught my eye. As did the fact that its author was a Nobel Prize winner. But most of all, I was intrigued by the title. Barabbas. The acquitted. The one who should have died. I knew enough of the Gospel to know the name and what it stood for.

Of course I had to read it. It was almost inevitable. The novel’s premise is simple. Told from the perspective of Barabbas, the criminal who escapes death when Jesus of Nazareth is crucified in his place, the novel follows the life of the eponymous anti-hero as he struggles to find rest, acceptance and faith in the wake of his unexpected and undeserved release from punishment. But Barabbas never finds rest. Instead, he spends the rest of his life haunted by the memory of the cross, unable to forget, yet unable to believe. In the stark, spare language of the novel, there is a thirst that is never slaked, an intense longing that whispers in the dry spaces and silences between the words. There is also a terrifying emptiness – the emptiness of not belonging to anything larger than one’s self, of being unable to love, of living without God.

So Barabbas wanders from prison to robbers’ den, desert to metropolis, slave-pit to palace, his life seemingly dogged by a sort of blessedness, a kind of grace. Is it grace that orchestrates his meetings with the man who turns out to be the apostle Peter? Is it grace that has him chained next to Sahak, a devout Christian, when they are both working as slaves in the dreaded Cyprian copper-mines? If it is, why then does this same grace not work deep enough? Why is it that, when asked to explain the ‘Christos Iesus’ carved on the slave-disk hanging from his neck, Barabbas can bring himself to say no more than, “I want to believe”?

Lagerkvist was wise enough to leave these questions open. The modern mind resists pat answers, and when the questions touch at the very heart of mystery, it takes a certain wisdom and humility to admit that the answers may simply be beyond the reach of even our human capacity for reason and discovery. This humility is something that many Christians would do well to learn in our ongoing discussions and debates with non-Christians who demand irrefutable evidence for our faith. We may offer historical records, logical proofs, personal testimonies; but ultimately, there is no irrefutable evidence. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. This is at once the easiest and the hardest thing about the Christian faith that non-Christians have to come to terms with.

One need not be a Christian, however, to appreciate the novel’s almost prophetic insight into the human condition. The novel speaks urgently to our world today, as the foundations of even our most basic beliefs about our identity and our place in the universe are shaken with each new scientific discovery, each new philosophical speculation. Those of us who struggle to find meaning and truth will see our own lurching, homesick wanderings mirrored in Barabbas’ geographical wanderings; those of us who have stood, paralysed, on the knife-edge between knowledge and faith, will find ourselves empathising with this all-too-human man who cannot find faith. In fact, I dare say that it would be almost impossible for a Christian to truly understand and empathise with the novel’s troubled core. A faith that has always been secure cannot possibly know what it means to long for faith in vain. Yet this is why Christians need to read this book, if only so that we can better understand what it means to want to believe, and in doing so, to be more sympathetic in our approach when we reach out to our non-Christian friends.

And, beyond all that, we would do well to remember that, in a sense, we are all Barabbas: guilty as hell, deserving death, yet somehow miraculously acquitted and given the gift of life, because Somebody else has already died in our place, on a hill at Golgotha almost two thousand years ago.
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posted by eothen @ 4:18 PM 0 comments

the heart has its reasons

This was written in response to an article in a local newspaper on a Singaporean guy reading English at Oxford. The article made me angry. i rarely get angry, even though i do a fairly good imitation of it when necessary. (And in my previous job, it was often necessary.)

It's quite a purple poem, and a little inconsistent, and not totally polished, but i thought i'd put it up anyway, partly because i've been receiving complaints that i don't update this blog quite enough. i hope this has at least a temporarily mollifying effect.

And, for those of you who want to know, all the images in the poem are indeed taken from real life. These are images i've carried around with me, for years in some cases, awaiting articulation. My hope is that the next time you, Gentle Reader, see the things described here, you will see more than what others do, (and this more need not be the same as the more that i saw), simply because you know there is more to see.

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Given his smarts, I can't help but wonder why this former Gifted Education Programme student from Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) chose English when he could have easily picked from a wide range of more 'marketable subjects' for his higher studies overseas. – Jasmine Yin, 'Today', 11 Aug 2007.


"There is no why," I want to say, but the mind
rebels against wearing the heart on sleeves.
I will not speak of love or truth; decline
the defence of a poet's art. Which leaves,
instead, this song of rain trees laced, wet-black,
on grey velvet skies; cities rising, rose-
blushed, on the wings of dawn; a snail's long trek
across pimpled tiles cracked where moss still grows;
golden french fries jewelled with salt; blood-veined
marble in a silent church; a broken
bell that tolled the hours before the bombs rained
down on the town where once it was spoken:
"The heart has its reasons, of which reason
knows nothing." The last prayer of the season.
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posted by eothen @ 12:47 AM 2 comments

the music of chance

[Good grief. It's been so long since i've written anything here that i think i've lost the ability to write altogether. Ah well. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Let this March holiday be a time for building up what i've allowed to break down over the last year.]


This post has been a long time coming. The patterned unlikelihoods that i've grown accustomed to ever since they first started occurring, just after university, have finally reached epic proportions that demand articulation. i've been wondering for the longest time about what these strange coincidences might mean. Earlier on, it was easy to dismiss them - pure chance, random occurrences that the human mind cannot help but try to interpret in some kind of purposeful way. But when these coincidences start gathering force through sheer frequency and fortuitous timing, one cannot help but wonder.....

Someone asked me, after i'd told her about the more notable incidents that have happened in the past few years, if i saw these incidents as random or purposive. My answer, that they are evidence of God's manifest presence in our world, was something that has taken me a long while to formulate. For me, it's the only satisfactory answer. Being as i am, the notion of a random Darwinian universe that is purely material not only horrifies - it simply does not make sense. It fails to explain too many things. So, the alternative to that, that there is a higher power that guides the affairs of men, is something that i have always held as true. Yet, the idea that everything that happens happens for a reason also seems to fail to make sense. There are things that happen that don't appear to make much difference in the grand scheme of things, incidents like meeting a long-lost acquaintance on the street the very day after you've dreamt about her, that honestly do not seem consequential, no matter how you look at them.

So what do i make of events like the Vienna encounter with TBS, or the serendipitous discovery of Mark Doty's 'Heaven', that really have had very little impact on anything of importance in my life so far? It seems to me that they are visible manifestations of God's guiding hand in human affairs. Our Creator, i am convinced, has a sense of humour, and if all good things come from God, and if fun, properly understood, is a Good Thing, then i am certain that God also has a sense of fun - and all these gratuitous coincidences are His way of reminding me, gently and with a twinkle in His eyes, that He is there, and that there is no need to fear because He isn't planning to go away.

Of course, i may just be superstitious. And that is no doubt what many would like to think. Still, it seems to me that life does fall into patterns, that it does have its own silent music - and music, by its very nature, is never the result of pure chance.
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posted by eothen @ 1:01 PM 0 comments

anniversary

It's been 2 years and a day since i first joined the blogging community.

i just thought that this needed to be recorded.

In addition to all the other things, blogging has rescued me from inarticulacy. It has given me a legitimate space to think, to test my thoughts, tame my feelings, grapple with ideas, put them into an architecture of words - words that will reach a readership, no matter how small or limited, words that, hopefully, will have some effect, that will make something happen.

Happy anniversary.
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posted by eothen @ 10:16 AM 1 comments

on the essay

What literary genre are you? A poem, perhaps: palpable and mute. Or perchance you are a novel, and not just any novel, but a Victorian novel: generous, capacious, ambitious, desiring nothing less than to encompass a whole world in your metaphorical embrace. Or if loose, baggy monsterdom does not quite become you, the taciturn subtleties of Hemingway’s short stories may be more representative of Who You Truly Are. Whichever it is, I will bet you a million to one that your options did not include the essay. I know this from experience, vicarious and otherwise. After a few years of blog-surfing on the internet, during which I have come across all manner of online quizzes (“What Is Your Inner Eye Colour?”, “What Type of Raunchy Underwear Are You?”), I have yet to encounter a quiz that lists the ‘essay’ as one of the possible keys to the heart of one’s mystery.

What this means, besides the fact that my life has been immeasurably impoverished by this omission on the part of online quizmasters, is that very few people actually consider the essay a literary genre at all. And that, if told point-blank that it is, most people would have very little idea of what an essay, in the literary sense of the word, actually looks like.

But the essay has always been notoriously difficult to pin down. Its inventor, Michel de Montaigne, made a name for himself (in more ways than one: his Essays are, in a way, an epic attempt to build a public persona that would be his monument, his one shot at immortality) by writing a series of ‘essais’ or ‘trials’: works meant to put himself and his opinions ‘on trial’; and by doing so inaugurated a tradition that has been built on by people as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Mark Twain, E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, C.S.Lewis, Umberto Eco, J.M. Coetzee, Anne Fadiman, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion. Writing on a bewilderingly varied range of subject matter, from the trivial (Umberto Eco’s essay on how to travel with a salmon comes to mind), to the seriously thought-provoking (E.B White’s much anthologized ‘Once More To The Lake’, George Orwells’ classic ‘A Hanging’, and Joan Didion’s recent writing on her husband’s death), these writers bequeathed on the essay a many-splendoured legacy – but also ensured that their collective brainchild would grow up bearing the burden of never quite having a distinct sense of identity, of never quite knowing just where it stands among its more illustrious literary brothers and sisters.

Indeed, despite its illustrious list of practitioners and the undeniable significance of their contributions to the craft of writing, the essay has yet to find an secure, acknowledged place as a bona-fide literary genre. In part, this may be due to its rather embarrassing family resemblance to the newspaper op-ed column – hard enough for a serious writer to distinguish himself from the great unwashed hordes who think they can write, and the last thing he needs is to be associated, however tenuously, with those hacks who write for (the horror!) those very same masses he is trying to avoid. In recent years, the fear of contamination by association has been augmented by the emergence of the weblog, or blog – now that anyone with access to a computer is free to essay his opinions online, the boundary between what is perceived as serious writing and what is not has become more nebulous than before. With writers like Jeanette Winterson and Neil Gaiman jostling for space in the new online democracy next to people with names like Kampongchicken or Mr Brown, beginning writers may well be leery of staking their reputations on writing essays that look too much like the latest musings of yet another erudite blogger. But what causes the most confusion, I suspect, is the unfortunate co-opting of the term by educational institutions everywhere as a signifier for that bane of student life – the essay question. The memory of all those sleepless nights spent labouring over ‘an essay on the role of economic and social factors in Foucault’s discussion of madness’ is traumatic enough to put anyone off considering essays as anything approaching works of literature.

This, of course, begs the question: What is literature, anyway? Far be it from me to attempt a definitive answer. The last time I tried, against my better judgement, I ended up making a confession that would not bear repetition in polite society. But I digress. (One of the characteristics of Montaigne’s essays, by the way, is their tendency to meander.) It is possible, however, to look at what others who are far better qualified to answer that question have said. One of the more commonplace responses has it that literature involves the aesthetic use of language in a way that sets the work apart from other forms of linguistic communication. The Russian Formalists took this further when they argued that literature defamiliarises – uses language in a way that makes it strange and unfamiliar in a given context. Another definition posits that literature lends itself to interpretation – that one must somehow read between the lines to extract that pearl of great price that is the Meaning of the work. (Literature teachers the world over, despairing after reading the hundredth essay on how Moby Dick is an allegory for apartheid, will no doubt rue the day this belief crystallized into near-dogma.) And let’s not forget the family of definitions that invests literature with quasi-religious qualities, arguing, like George Eliot, that literature is the artform that is nearest to life, amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. Very often this argument morphs into the far-fetched claim that literature has a civilizing or moralizing influence on its practitioners and audience.

Based on these three definitions alone, it is easy to see why the essay has failed to attain a status similar to its more popular cousins like the novel or the short-story. Though well-written essays invariably do use language in a skilful, even innovative way, the reader’s attention is usually drawn to the content of the work, rather than its form. Sometimes, writers deliberately eschew the display of linguistic pyrotechnics, opting instead for a more conversational tone, such as in George Orwell’s ‘Shooting An Elephant’ (starting with the disingenuously casual, “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”). As for providing room for interpretation, the essay fails most miserably because of its disconcerting tendency to say exactly what it means. Which leaves the last definition, the one most likely to fit (essays, especially personal essays, being about as close to life as art is likely to get), and also the one most out of sync with current tastes in fashionable literary circles.

If the essay’s status as literature is disputed, what place does it have in literary journals and magazines? I would venture to say that a lot of writers take to writing, or at least publishing, essays, only after they have tried out, and perhaps cemented their reputations in, other genres. The essay fills in the spaces left by poetry and fictional prose. But to relegate it to a mere space-filler would be, I think, a mistake. These other genres satisfy our need for alternative psychological spaces in which our imaginations may roam free, unfettered by the claims of the real world, important though these may be. But the real world is there nonetheless, insistent and, well, real. And the essay transmutes this real world into something akin to art, providing writers with an avenue through which they can reflect on the world around them without the distorting lens of fiction, and without the obliqueness and formal constraints of poetry. The essay gives us, in other words, a bridge between the everyday and the sublime.

The best essays, the ones that make me want to grab a plane ticket, fly immediately to wherever in the world their writers are currently residing, (or, in the case of writers who are no longer living, hop into a time-machine and travel back in time) and buttonhole them into coffee and a long conversation, are the ones that, like all good art, help me see the world in a new way. There is no subject matter that is inherently more suited to the form – for me, a pet dog is as valid a topic for essayistic exploration as Shakespeare’s tragic vision. What makes a good essay is the ability to find the sublime, the unusual, and the quirky, in the ordinary and mundane. For instance, one of the most engaging essays I have read lately, ‘Bumping Into Mr Ravioli’ by Adam Gopnik, describes in loving detail the writer’s struggles to pin down the elusive Mr Ravioli, his three-year-old daughter’s imaginary friend, and reflects on how Mr Ravioli’s persistent absence is a symptom of the busy-ness of life in New York City. I’ve also enjoyed Auden’s essays on life and literature in The Dyer’s Hand for their depth of perception cast in such easy-reading language, and for all his occasional obtuseness and snobbish elitism, T.S. Eliot is still one of the masters of the literary essay. More recently, I have started to appreciate scientific essays targetted at the layman, and I am grateful to writers like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Oliver Sacks for expanding my mental universe and making the foray beyond my comfort zone just that bit less uncomfortable.

What I have come to realise, however, is that more than any other genre, the essay seems to appeal most to those who are, not to put too fine a point upon it, not quite in their prime. (What that says about me is fodder for another discussion.) As Anne Fadiman writes in her introduction to her edition of The Best American Essays 2003 (a genuinely worthwhile collection, despite its rather unfortunate ‘America’s Top 40’ nomenclature):

“Philip Lopate has called the personal essay the voice of middle age. After compiling this volume, during the course of which I read essays of every conceivable stripe, I’d extend that statement by saying that any essay – personal, critical, expository – is more likely to be written by someone with a few grey hairs than by a twenty-five-year-old. (He’s too busy finishing his first novel.) Activity and reflection tend to be sequential rather than simultaneous.”

The concomitant to this is that the essay is also more likely to be read by someone with a few grey hairs, or at least who is old enough to appreciate its more leisurely pace, its meanderings, its rootedness in the real (all essays, whether they be essays on art and culture, science, history, contemporary life, or even the writer’s personal life, are tied to something real, and do not pretend to be anything else). I myself came to the essay comparatively recently – when I got to the point where the illusions of fiction actually tired me out, and I started to yearn (what a hopelessly Romantic word for an impulse so inherently unromantic) for writing that would ground me to the mundane and the everyday, for writing that tells the truth without telling it slant.

Far be it from me to affect a world-weariness that my age does not warrant. Few things annoy me so much as unearned cynicism. (And nothing stirs my admiration as much as a grounded idealism where the right to cynicism has been earned.) But I do think that the essay is an acquired taste – and it is a taste that I hope will be cultivated and nurtured even here in Singapore, a young society always in a hurry to get somewhere else, to become something else: a society that may seem, at first, antipathetic to everything that the essay represents.

So, what literary genre are you? An essay, perhaps: grounded, thoughtful, truthful (as far as it is possible to be truthful when it is so difficult to even know the truth about ourselves) – someone with the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your contradictions.
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posted by eothen @ 10:31 PM 1 comments