on happiness
There are many differences between Singapore and America. (i am aware, of course, that this is one of those statements that means about as much as "There are many differences between cats and dogs." Still, one has to start somewhere, and why not the obvious and banal?) But i think that one of the most fundamental differences lies in our attitudes towards effort and achievement. And this is where words prove their power, if not in shaping our values, then at least in reflecting and reinforcing existing biases.
Ladies and Gentlemen, put your hands together for.....
Exhibit A: The Declaration of Independence
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness..."
Exhibit B: The National Pledge of the Republic of Singapore
"... so as to achieve happiness, prosperity, and progress for our people."
Americans pursue happiness; Singaporeans achieve it. Game, set and match to my beloved high-achieving country.
* * * * * *
Happiness is one of those things that is notoriously difficult to make good art about. Imagine Heathcliff on Prozac. Unhappiness, on the other hand, is cool: it stalks the night with spray paint and a broken beer bottle, screaming its agony to a raven-black sky. Or something like that, anyway.
The arts are peopled by depressive, angst-ridden figures who seem haunted by their failure to achieve the happiness they so desperately pursue. And the sad thing is, the greater the artist, the greater the unhappiness. The Who's Who of the arts world reads like a roll call of the truly miserable: Beethoven, Van Gogh, TS Eliot - who was a great writer until he found happiness in his second marriage. On the other hand, happy people like Mendelssohn are generally known to be mediocre artists whose work somehow does not have the depth and emotional power of their unhappier counterparts.
That depth and emotional power should have their roots in negative emotions is a cliche that, like any cliche, needs to be questioned and examined even while we acknowledge the store of truth and experience that made it a cliche in the first place. Surely hope and joy need not be shallow or naive.
... work in progress ...
my pet cockroach
That's right. My pet cockroach. Of sorts. For 3 weeks, it lived under a small flower-shaped plastic container placed like a bell-jar in one corner of my desk. Unlike most other pets, however, it was given neither food nor drink, and it was not taken out for daily walks around the estate. It did not welcome me home joyously when i got back from work every evening. It did not have a name.
It was, in truth, a prisoner, a 'lifer' serving time for the heinous crime of having been born a cockroach and for doing the sorts of things that cockroaches normally do. That is, if it was a cockroach in the first place. Its identity was a matter of debate - it was the right size and shape, but instead of being the usual uniform glossy rust-brown, it had dark-chocolate stripes running horizontally across its body. It had no wings.
i had first seen it gorging on a pear that i had set aside on my desk as part of my ongoing weight-gain campaign. After the miserable failure of my usual roach-capture techniques, i finally resorted to trapping it under a plastic container. What i would do with it after that was not really an issue at first - somewhere at the back of my mind was the vague notion that i could easily dispose of it when it eventually starved to death.
What i did not count on was the amazing resilience of the little critter. After 2 weeks, the only change i could see in its behaviour was that it ran around a lot less than before, and spent most of its time resting quietly in a corner of its little cell. Occasionally, it would get up and start clawing at the walls of the container, feelers waving in jerky slow-motion, like a shipwrecked sailor scanning the horizon in hope of some sign of coming deliverance. Wriggling its lithe body this way and that, it would push the bullet-shaped pellets of cockroach-shit across the floor of its abode, arranging them neatly in the centre, rather like the primitive tribes that i used to see on TV documentaries - the ones that use dung as fuel for their homes.
Up close, i could see each detail of its anatomy with startling clarity. The segments, joints and hooks on its legs. The wiry curve of its feelers. The suppleness of its body. The light tan of its underside. Each body part perfectly formed, each fulfilling a function. Each movement perfectly coordinated - deliberate, precise.
i realised with fascinated horror that i would not be able to kill this cockroach in the same way as i have killed other cockroaches before it. At most, i could sweep its dead body into a plastic bag and dispose of it that way. But even then, i would not be able to do so with the same nonchalance i normally have towards small dead insects.
So it was a good thing that one day, exactly 3 weeks into its captivity, i came home to find it gone. The plastic container had also disappeared, and the cockroach-shit was nowhere in sight. i found out later that there had been an epic battle between the cockroach and my mother, who had removed the container in the belief that the critter was dead, and who then had to contend with a frantic escape attempt on the part of the desperate prisoner. The attempt proved futile, however, and it met its ignominious end, mashed to a pulp in a wad of toilet paper and flushed down the toilet into final oblivion. And that was the end of that.
In the course of those 3 weeks, it occurred to me that what i was experiencing was a kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome. Instead of the prisoner coming to feel for the captor, the captor in this case had begun to sympathise, just a little, for the prisoner. i realised also that any kind of genuine knowledge makes genuine hatred almost impossible. i could not remain indifferent towards my prisoner after having observed its behaviour at such close quarters, for so long. It was difficult to hate something that i had begun to perceive as being beautiful, even if that beauty is of the basest, most basic kind - in this case, the symmetry of nature, and the perfect fit between form and function. Of course, this does not discount the fact that the cockroach is a household pest and is capable of spreading harmful diseases. (Thus my relief when i found out that Mum had done the dirty work of killing it for me, because i would not have been able to do it myself.)
In most cases, though, knowledge - genuine knowledge based on a sincere desire to seek and know the truth - is antithetical to hatred and prejudice. Call me naive, but i don't think it would have been possible for the Nazi prison-guards to do what they did with their prisoners if they had actually taken the time to
really see them even for just one day, to know them as human beings. And that only way they could have
not seen that was if they had been taught not to; if they had been taught, and had accepted, the doctrine that their prisoners were not in fact people. The Nazi regime was inhuman - not only because of what they did to others, but because of what they did to themselves: stifled the fundamental human impulse to
know about the world around us. The impulse for which, we are told, we lost Paradise and took on this mortal coil that we have since struggled in vain to master and overcome.
That is why the most inhumane political regimes are also the ones that seek to control and restrict the free flow of knowledge and information, or, in the worst cases, to fabricate information and pass it off as the truth. A kinder, gentler society is one that values truth and the pursuit thereof. Whether it be the truth about our fellow humans beings, or about the other creatures both great and small with whom we share this tiny blue planet, third rock from the sun.
notes from a green island
For quite some time now i've been musing about the civil servants (at least that's what i believe they are) who are responsible for designing our, for want of a better name, horticultural landscape. Who are these men and women, what do they do, and where do they do what they do? What drives them, and is there a point at which they can look on the work of their hands and say, "It is finished"?
i imagine them poring over blueprints that map out the green spaces in our city - each public park, each traffic island and road-divider, each pavement, each parking lot - all of which have to be lovingly tended so that life will flourish and grow. Sometimes these anonymous figures take on a life of their own, chatting over tree catalogues and coffee in the office pantry, "So, brazilian ferns are the latest in-thing huh...."
It must give them quite a kick to see, springing miraculously from purchase orders and tax invoices, conifers and palms standing side by side on the same basketball-court-sized handkerchief of land. Where else but in Singapore would one find such a Frankenstinian combination of trees from completely contrasting climatic zones, looking for all the world as if they had spent the last millennia evolving together in mutual harmony and accord?
Somewhere in the dusty archives of the
National Parks Board there is a hidden parable about our national identity, waiting to be unearthed.
The Reverse Side
The reverse side also has a reverse side. (Japanese proverb)
It's why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is—the opposite
of what we said.
And perhaps why as we fall in love
we're already falling out of it.
It's why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.
Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein things in—
the snapshot, the lie of a frame.
How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.
(Stephen Dunn)
hell freezes over
well. so. i wouldn't call this succumbing, cos i'm under no external pressure to do this. But i need a repository for random useless thoughts and impressions, like the fact that fingernails grow at the rate of about 0.5cm per month, while toenails grow a bit slower, or the fact that cockroaches can survive for at least 3 weeks without any food or water and very little fresh air. Not quite the kind of thing you can talk about to just any random person.
i will even attempt to use capital letters.
