dry grass singing

On being a Christian in multi-religious Singapore

2010-02-20T23:42:00.009+08:00

This post has been a long time coming. I've kept my silence so far on the Pastor Rony Tan issue, mostly because it seems to me to be a fairly straightfoward, obvious case of a zealous fellow Christian crossing the line between zeal and civility in his comments on other religions. Pastor Tan has apologised publicly for his comments, and his apologies have been accepted by Taoist and Buddhist leaders in Singapore. Can we leave Pastor Tan alone to sort out his thoughts on the matter, and move on to the larger issues that the whole debacle has unearthed?

But this note is not about these larger issues at all. It's about me. Necessarily so, because, as it has been said, all writing is autobiography. And this is the part of my autobiography that has to do with my spiritual journey as a minority Christian in a multi-religious, secular society like Singapore.

I came to the Christian faith through a long, slow process that took at least 11 years, if not more, and so I can honestly say that I've looked at life from both sides now - through the eyes of a skeptic, as well as those of a believer. I can equally honestly say that I have not forgotten what the world looked like through the skeptic's eyes, and I pray that I never will. It was with a mixture of horror and grudging fascination that I looked at my Christian friends back in my non-Christian days. How could they allow a religion, a system of beliefs, to pre-determine and dictate their behaviour in every possible life situation they found themselves in, regardless of the specific circumstances governing the matter? How frightening, and how wonderful, to be so certain of everything, to have the answers to all of life's questions down pat to just those few simple formulaic responses!

In the close to three years that I've been a professing, baptised Christian, I've come to know the certainty that I used so much to fear, and I've also come to know the limits of that certainty, the way there is room for mystery even within the fortress of faith. But (and perhaps I flatter myself here - only my friends can tell) I also like to think that the arrogance that so often comes with certainty is kept in check by memories of those years spent questioning everything there was to question. So when I listen to discussions about issues like last year's AWARE episode, and the latest Rony Tan controversy, my instinctive response is to look at them from the perspective of the non-Christian, to look at myself, and my fellow Christians, from the point of view of the outsider. And I readily admit that to the outsider, some of the things that we Christians do, do not look very Christian at all.

So what I'd like to do here, is to set down, as fairly and objectively as I can, the way things stand as I see it, and to talk about how I've been trying to negotiate the complexities of life in multi-religious, secular Singapore while maintaining my sense of religious integrity.

Firstly, let me just state for the record what I do believe, because nothing else will make sense otherwise. I believe that there is one God, and that He has made Himself known to humanity, first in His interactions with the Jewish people and through the revelations of the Jewish scriptures, and finally in the historical person of Jesus Christ. I believe that humanity is hopelessly flawed, and that all the problems we face on the individual and communal levels are the result of a fundamental selfishness and corruption in our nature. And that this personal corruption is the result of our turning away and estrangement, on an individual, personal level, from the only source of good - the God who created us. I believe that this good God is also a just God, and that left on our own, we would all have to be punished by this just God for the wrong we have done. I also believe that left on our own, our failure to meet this God's standards of goodness keeps us from communion with Him. This has consequences both eternal and temporal. Eternal separation from God is, literally, what we call hell. And in the here and now, this separation mires us in a hopeless cycle of attempts to save ourselves from ourselves - through self-discipline, through good works, through religious rites. But anyone who has tried all these things knows that they never work for very long. The malicious thought, the selfish, grasping impulse, the impurity of even our best intentions - these never go away for long. It is impossible for a drowning man to save himself.

And finally, I believe in the preposterous proposition that is the Gospel: that out of love for us, God Himself, in the person of His son, Jesus Christ, has already atoned for the wrong we have done by living the perfect life and taking the punishment that is ours upon Himself, in the historical event of the crucifixion. And that He proved His power over the death and corruption that is our human heritage by rising from the dead on the first Easter. And, most preposterous of all, I believe that the same victory over death and corruption can be ours too by association, if we ally ourselves with Christ by admitting that on our own, we are hopelessly corrupt, placing our trust in Him and submitting to His authority over our lives. I believe that this alliance with Christ has the effect of changing us for the better from the inside out - and that this is the only way that we, as individuals and as a society, can find salvation.

Now that's a whole lot of pretty unbelievable stuff to believe. But it's crucial to get it all down, as accurately and fully as possible, because it goes some way towards explaining, though not necessarily exonerating, the way Christians sometimes behave.

As Christians, we share our faith because we believe it actually makes a positive difference, and that in fact it is the only difference that lasts, the only difference that counts. In his letter to Christians living as minority members of non-Christian societies in the 1st century A.D, the apostle Peter tells believers to 'always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have'. That, we do most readily - perhaps sometimes too readily, or without sufficient consideration. But we are also told to 'do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience' (1 Peter 3:15-16). I think that categorically excludes all forms of disrespect (mockery, name-calling, unfair discrimination) and aggression (anything along the spectrum from verbal insults to war). It also excludes all behaviour that goes against God's express commandments - because any such behaviour should of course weigh heavily on our consciences as violations of God's will. So, laughing at other religions is out; as is being economical with the truth in the attempt to do what we think is God's will; as is singling out a particular group of people for special condemnation as if we were not all equally guilty of failing to meet God's standards and equally in need of mercy. All of which Singaporean Christians have been guilty of in the last few years since I became a Christian.

But I think it's fair enough to say that the proselytisation that can be so annoying, pushy, insensitive or downright nasty in its expression is often the result of a (sometimes misapplied) concern for the non-believer's well-being, both now and in eternity. I think the problem is that Christians often fail to consider one of the most fundamental elements of good communication: connecting with the other person. In focussing on the relatively abstract truths of eternal salvation or damnation, Christians forget the living, breathing truth of the person standing before us - with all of his life history, his hopes and fears, his doubts, and his faith. (Yes, faith: because we all have faith in something - God, or gods, science, economics, politics, art, love, other people, ourselves.) What results, then, is a failure to speak to that person as an individual. Instead, he becomes an archetype, a stereotype, a straw man at which we hurl our pre-packaged expositions of the Gospel, leaving him at best bemused and bewildered, or at worst, permanently hostile to the very faith we are trying to share.

I remember one especially bizarre incident from my pre-Christian days, when I found myself on a bus next to a colleague I hardly knew, on our way to another colleague's wedding. I can't remember what small talk we were exchanging at the start of the conversation, but I do remember her very suddenly launching into a 5-minute speech on sin, damnation and salvation - a speech that left no room for me to say even a single word. It came out of nowhere, and ended just as abruptly - and I was left literally speechless, utterly flabbergasted, and thinking that if I hadn't already been relatively receptive to Christianity, what she did could very possibly have turned me off the faith forever.

Conversely, I remember equally clearly yet another incident on a busride with a Christian classmate who remains one of my closest friends to this day. A street evangelist approached us, and started on her spiel without so much as a few polite preliminaries. My friend, a devout Christian then and now, saw the look of discomfort on my face, and stopped the street evangelist, saying "She's from a mission school - she already knows the Gospel. Thanks very much but we can't listen to this right now." I was so grateful to my friend for her sensitivity, and for what I now recognise to be her wisdom. Now, lest anyone should misunderstand, she is no lukewarm Christian. In fact, she is the same friend who first tried to explain the Gospel to me two years after that incident - but only because I asked. She is also the person who, at various points in my life, invited me to Bible study discussions and other suchlike Christian activities when she sensed that I was ready to attend them. And she knew when to stop asking.

These incidents, together with other encounters with Christians and non-Christians over the years, have shaped my atttitudes towards evangelisation, especially in the context of a multi-faith society like ours. Yes, of course I believe that the God I worship is the only true God. I wouldn't worship Him otherwise. And of course I believe that Christ is the answer to all of humanity's fundamental problems. I've given up so much for the faith - all that giving up had better be for something really good. And of course I would love for my friends and loved ones to share the hope that this faith has given me. They are my friends and loved ones, after all, and I care about them.

But I also know that I live in a society where freedom of worship is guaranteed and safeguarded (within certain limits - more on those some other time). That is the basis for the sense of security I feel as a member of a minority religion in a dominantly Taoist/Buddhist society. And just as I want others to respect my freedom to worship the God I choose to worship, I also extend the same courtesy to them - they are free to worship whatever or whoever they choose to worship. I may be concerned about them, but that concern will express itself outwardly in dialogue that first seeks to know them as people before talking about God, that seeks to understand their concerns and share their lives regardless of whether they share my faith; and inwardly - in prayer, which is purely a matter between my God and me, and none of anybody else's business.

I understand very clearly that I cannot impose my faith-based ethics and practices on people who don't share my faith - if, for some reason, I feel that those ethics would be useful ones for society to adopt, I'll have to persuade others of this via the use of reason and logic, rather than by appealing to faith-based values. And I know that the Gospel is as much about living as it is about proclamation, and that the ability to live it is not my own. Very often, I fall short of even the standards I set for myself, let alone the standards that God sets for us. So I try to remind myself as often as I can of the words attributed to St Francis of Assisi because, hopefully, they'll help to keep me humble: "Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words."

window-shopping

2009-10-13T23:00:00.003+08:00

I've started a new blog.

Here. Take a look at the windows. :)
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back in business

2009-01-28T23:03:00.001+08:00

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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a man for our time

2007-08-28T16:18:00.000+08:00

‘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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the heart has its reasons

2007-08-17T00:47:00.001+08:00

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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the music of chance

2007-03-11T13:01:00.000+08:00

[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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anniversary

2006-10-28T10:16:00.000+08:00

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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on the essay

2006-03-02T22:31:00.000+08:00

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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the calling

2005-12-17T22:54:00.000+08:00

[Comments, critique and brutal honesty will be much appreciated, esp. if you could say something about the diction and overall structure and direction. The seesawingbetween casual and not-so-casual is not working very well here, but i'm kinda at a loss about how to fix it. Suggestions welcome.]

There are people who expend vast reservoirs of energy searching for their dream vocation, the One Calling that will help them fulfil their purpose in life. Some find that purpose in helping others, while others revel in the cut and thrust of intellectual challenge, and yet others find fulfilment in the creation of beautiful things.

i think i've found my calling. i could spend my lifetime doing the dishes.

This has nothing to do with a love of domesticity, a penchant for orderliness, or even a cleanliness fetish. It's about instant gratification, pure and simple. You start with a teetering tower of greasy, gunky dishes, perhaps with mashed-up pasta and fish-skin and gooey melted ice-cream clinging to the off-white porcelain, and proceed, plate by plate, spoon by spoon, to soap and rinse and dry, or, if you're too lazy for that, to soap, rinse, and tuck each plate snugly into its appointed slot in the plastic drip-dryer, before finally rinsing out all the forks, spoons and chopsticks in a clattering crescendo that climaxes in a foaming whirlpool gurgling down the vortex of the kitchen sink.

Then you scoop clear the sink of the remaining debris, scrub it vigorously with clean-scented, lemon-fresh Jif, and take a step back and contemplate the newly-washed dishes, each one glistening still and silent like an ancient Greek shrine, each one a testimony to our eternal struggle against the forces of entropy and our quest for beauty and grace. And best of all, this process takes little more than a few minutes, or over an hour at most, if you are washing up after a fairly elaborate dinner party.

Doing the dishes is a good way to make yourself useful at a party, especially when you haven't contributed much in terms of food-provision or entertainment. It is also a good excuse for zoning out after the exertions of an extended period of social interaction, when you feel that your stock of jokes and small talk has run dry and when your facial muscles start to ache from all that smiling. Even regular, everyday dishwashing has its rewards: it allows you time to collect your thoughts and sieve through the events of the day, sorting them out and finding the links between seemingly disparate ideas and occurences - all while doing something useful and essential. Best of all, you get the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of your labour almost immediately, and oh! what a contrast between what comes before and after - making this the most immediately gratifying of household chores, and probably even more immediately satisfying than most of the work we do in our professional lives.

When i set up my own home, one of the things that is definitely not going to be on the list of kitchen-appliances-to-be-bought is a dishwasher. Never mind the potential savings in terms of time and energy - i cannot do without my daily dishwashing spa-treatment. The convenience may just kill me.
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haunted by history

2005-11-28T11:03:00.000+08:00

In the German town of _________, just ___km _____ of Hamburg, there is an old cathedral that was hit by Allied aerial bombardment during World War II. It is a cavernous, echoing place -

utopian dreams

2005-11-22T21:47:00.000+08:00

[Draft. Outline of structure only. To be built on after i do some research. Pls feel free to comment and suggest stuff.]

1551, from Mod.L. Utopia, lit. "nowhere," coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying perfect legal, social, and political systems), from Gk. ou "not" + topos "place." Extended to "any perfect place," 1613. Utopian, as a noun meaning "visionary idealist," is first recorded c.1873.

Anecdote.

History is littered with the scattered remnants of our yearnings for _____________ (a better where to find???)............
To reclaim our dream of Eden.

Utopias gone wrong:
the Communist experiment
Hitler's Third Reich
America?? land of the free
Singapore????

It's a simple human truth. People screw things up. All the time.

Yet hope springs infernal in the human breast. (apologies to alexander pope)

Conclusion? No matter the failure - we must keep trying (or we might as well just roll over and play dead....)

time's winged chariot

2005-11-05T23:35:00.000+08:00

It's been more than a year since i started this blog. i didn't even notice till i looked at the archives on the sidebar.

*Insert random cliche about time flying*

Time to take stock, to start counting up gains and losses, to think about where things have been and where they will be headed.

*Takes stock, counts gains and losses, thinks about where things have been and where they will be headed*

Ok. The yearly quota of navel-gazing - sorted! On with the rest of my life!

Thanks for reading and commenting, guys! :)

to take a life

2005-11-05T22:32:00.000+08:00

Another storm in the media - this time about a 25 year old Vietnamese-Australian man who's been sentenced to death for attempting to smuggle 396 grams of heroin into Singapore.

Here are the facts pertinent to the case:

Van was caught in transit at Singapore's Changi Airport in December 2002 on a flight from Cambodia to Australia. He was in possession of the drugs because he was trying to raise money to clear drug-related debts incurred by his twin brother in Melbourne, Australia.

Van was convicted on 20 Mar 2004 of trafficking 396 grams of heroin and sentenced to death by hanging. On Friday Fri 21 Oct 2005, Singapore's President SR Nathan rejected Van’s appeal for clemency. He will be executed within a fortnight.

Ever since I've started thinking about these things, i've been troubled about Singapore's laws on the death penalty for drug-traffickers. From what i understand, the rationale is that drug trafficking can have multiple negative, or even fatal, effects on a disproportionately large number of people. If you think about it even further, it can even be argued that a disproportionately large number of drug addicts belong to the lower classes, and that the last thing the poor need is a drug addiction to further lock them in the vicious circle of poverty. Furthermore, addiction affects not only addicts, but their families as well (think dependent spouses, children, even unborn babies). It is indisputable - drug trafficking has ugly, ugly, potentially life-destroying consequences.

But a drug trafficker does not deserve to die for his crime.

Many arguments have been put forth against the death penalty being used on drug-traffickers. It has been rightly pointed out that most traffickers are no more than lackey-middlemen, and that it is the drug-lords in Colombia, Cuba, Thailand, and other far-flung locations who should bear the blame for the existence of the drug trade. It has also been pointed out that, in some cases such as the one currently in the news, the extenuating circumstances make it necessary to temper justice with mercy, and to give the criminal a second chance.

These, and other arguments, are certainly valid and compelling. But as far as i'm concerned, the real crux of the issue lies elsewhere. With or without easy access to drugs, the choice of whether or not to take drugs still lies, ultimately, with the individual. The drug-trafficker cannot be blamed if someone makes that choice, just as a gun-manufacturer cannot be blamed if someone decides to use a gun to kill another person, or even to kill himself. The drug trafficker does not do what he does with the specific intent of killing another human being. Drug trafficking is not murder, and does not warrant the same degree of punishment that is meted out for murder.

For this reason, i have always been opposed to the death penalty as a punishment for drug trafficking. And if you, Gentle Reader, feel the same way, i urge you to sign the petition at the following website to register your views.

http://stophanging.com

Frankly, my dears, whether or not we give a damn will make no damn difference in the final outcome of this case. The guy is going to die, and there is nothing any ordinary citizen is going to do that will change that. But sometimes the mere act of standing up for what you believe in is a necessary step in itself, regardless of the outcome.

Stand up and be counted.
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visceral

2005-10-30T21:19:00.000+08:00

What an odd word. V-i-s-c-e-r-a-l. From viscera, meaning the internal organs in the main cavities of the body, especially those in the abdomen, such as the intestines. From the Latin, viscus. How odd that deep inward feelings should somehow be related to our abdomen, rather than to the heart. Why not, for example, cardiac? "At some cardiac level, i know that this is what i really want." What do intestines have to do with our deepest instincts and emotions?

Then there are gut feelings, gut reactions and gut instincts. Butterflies in our stomachs. What is it with this stomach business?

A quick Google search led me, surprisingly, to a profusion of websites on Biblical studies. Apparently, the ancient Hebrews regarded the bowels (somehow that word seems so much more... visceral... than 'intestines' or 'guts') as the seat of emotion. So every reference in modern English translations of the Song of Solomon to the 'heart' was originally a reference to the bowels. "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him." Oh dear. i can't think of anything less romantic than the thought of a lovelorn bout of stomach-wrenching diarrhoea.

A somewhat more palatable, and more medical, cache of gut-related information was yielded after another Google search was done with a change of search terms. This time, i found out about the existence of what scientists call the 'second brain' in the intestines. The man responsible for bringing this to the attention of the public is Michael D. Gershon, researcher at Columbia University and author of The Second Brain (1999). According to Gershon, the enteric nervous system, or, in layman's terms, our intestine, functions as a complex, integrative brain in its own right. Apparently, our intestine is the only organ that can function independently of the central nervous system, meaning that it is capable of propelling food through all its yards of tubing even when the nerves that link it to the brain are severed. Not only that, the chemicals that are produced in the intestine have also been found to have an effect on our emotions.

i suppose this validates, somewhat, the ancient Jewish understanding of the role of the bowels in regulating our emotions, and i'd be interested in knowing what the scientific community has made of Gershon's initial findings.

More tangentially, all this goes to show how a morning of random etymological musing can sometimes take you down fascinating byways of probably totally useless thought.

[Those of you who are interested may wish to read this article by Michael Gershon, from the medical magazine Hospital Practice. It's very technical, and for the life of me i could not muster the patience to read more than the first few paragraphs, but if any of you do, drop me a note to let me know how you found it!]
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but the greatest of these is love

2005-09-11T19:25:00.000+08:00

Be With Me (2005)
Director: Eric Khoo
Rated: M18

[The film was selected as the opening film for the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival 2005. It premiered to a full house and a standing ovation.]

Hype. The four-letter word that ought to strike fear into every film-maker's heart. The high expectations that accompany a critically-acclaimed film can sabotage an otherwise perfectly satisfactory viewing experience, and it is the rare film that survives unscathed. Be With Me, Eric Khoo's first film in eight years since 1997's 12 Storeys, escapes with just a few minor scratches and bruises, and manages to finish on a poignant yet understated note that all but makes up for any minor flaws in the film's narrative structure. This quietly classy effort by one of our two internationally acclaimed directors (the other is Royston Tan, of 15 fame) successfully weaves together three separate narratives, each exploring the universal experiences of love and loss, and the tapestry that emerges is one that celebrates, no matter how mutedly, the strength of the human spirit even in the face of the deepest sufferings.

The central narrative thread, ‘Meant To Be’, is based on the real-life story of Theresa Chan, SIngapore’s Helen Keller. Onto this story of a woman who has triumphed over her blindness and deafness to live a fulfilling life, Khoo superimposes a subtly-conceptualised subplot of an old shopkeeper, his debilitated wife, and their social worker son who is the lynchpin that holds all three narratives together. ‘Finding Love’ traces the life of an obese security guard who is obsessed with a glamorous, high-flying executive, while ‘So In Love’ is a tender paean to the young love between two schoolgirls who meet in an internet chatroom.

The structure of the film helps to sustain the viewer’s interest all the way to the final shot. Khoo has set himself the difficult task of bringing all three narrative threads together, and the strain of the endeavour shows in places, particularly in one unforgivable aesthetic faux pas towards the end of the film. The three narratives could also have been more evenly-spaced. By and large, however, the links between the characters in the three narratives are convincingly drawn – in an island the size of Singapore with a population of 4.5 million, it is entirely possible that the lives of a shopkeeper ‘Uncle’, a down-and-out security guard, a high-powered corporate chick, and two middle-class schoolgirls should overlap, and Khoo makes full use of this to make an implicit comment on the simultaneous strength and fragility of the bonds that hold our society together.

Let me just start by deflating a few expectations for you with a jab of my metaphorical reviewer's pen. Those of you who are expecting to see lots of hot sexy bedroom scenes should know from the start that, despite the M18 rating slapped on the film by the Media Development Authority, there really is nothing particularly controversial nor provocative about the film. The notorious depiction of 'lesbian intimacy' that forced Khoo to replace the film's original promotional poster with something depicting a more acceptable heterosexuality was really nothing more than a shot showing two teenage schoolgirls embracing each other on the steps leading to the entrance of Borders. Nothing that any real-life thirteen-year-old schoolgirl studying in a real-life girls' school would not have at least heard whispered about on her school's grapevine. Definitely nothing worth an M18 rating. It really is time the film censors woke up to the truth of what is going on among youths in Singapore today (or, indeed, what was going on among youths in Singapore as early as fifteen years ago).

Viewers who are unacquainted with Khoo's work and who are expecting either the larger-than-life histrionics of Singapore's other veteran film-maker Jack Neo, or the absolute blank minimalism of European arthouse films, will also be disappointed. In this film, Khoo finds the happy middle ground between loud populism and isolated elitism, and the result is an readily-accessible film that still demands intelligent engagement on the part of the audience. Even more than in 12 Storeys, Khoo's directorial vision presents an unsentimental yet lovingly-shot survey of the Singaporean cityscape – the Shenton Way office tower, the old provision shop, the wet market, the Orchard Road alfresco café, the disco, the charity hospital, the 2-room HDB flat, the district 10 semi-detached house, the posh condominium.

Set against this geographical social critique, the lives of the characters are played out in near-silence as communication is carried out in the form of SMS messages, IRC chats, emails, letters, and almost-wordless dialogues. Indeed, the sparse dialogue in the film is mostly given to peripheral characters like the security guard’s contemptuous family and the abusive parents of the family next-door. In fact, the only major character with a significant speaking part is, ironically, the deaf and blind Theresa, who speaks in the awkwardly dignified manner of a woman who has lost her hearing at the age of 14. The silence, as they say, is deafening, and works as a stark reminder of our human need for connection and intimacy, especially amidst the potential isolation of urban life.

In true Singaporean fashion, the main coping mechanism employed by the characters to keep their loneliness at bay is the preparation and consumption of food. The hawker fare that the security guard gorges on alone is his only consolation in an otherwise drab existence. In contrast, the provision shop Uncle’s sumptuous cooking is a symbol of his love for his wife, and, later in the film, signifies for him the continued will to live. Similarly, the fact that Theresa prepares her own meals underlines her independence and her determination not to let her handicaps control her life.

And it is her strength, together with the love that enables its existence, that saves this film from being yet another well-shot, glamorously nihilistic Eric-Khoo social commentary. As in 12 Storeys, the potential for nihilism is always there, shadowing the lives of the characters, and to deny its existence would be to impose on the movie an interpretation that it simply does not support. Yet, for all the stylistic similarities between Be With Me and 12 Storeys, this film differs from the previous one in its assertion of the enduring power of love. Cheesy as it sounds, the strength of the film lies in its honest, unsentimental portrayal of the continued persistence of human compassion even in the most brutal of environments. Call it by any other name, but there is no denying what lies at the heart of the acts of kindness that relieve and illuminate the bleakness of urban life as seen in the film. And it is this ultimate rejection of cynicism and darkness that makes this such a gem of a movie in a world where critically-acclaimed art so often denies more than it affirms, tears down without building up.
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the heart of the matter

2005-09-04T17:27:00.000+08:00

[Yet another draft. Though it may take some time before this expands into a full-length essay. There's also the possibility that i will just leave it as a vignette. What say you?]

It's a bit of a cliche, but then that's what cliches are: ideas that are often perceived as universal truths. Or, at the very least, universal half-truths. And the half-truth is that people who traffic in the world of ideas - and that includes many of my friends - are very often guilty of relegating the physical world to second place. So once in a while it is good to remember that even the words we use to communicate our thoughts are embodied things. Voices are formed from muscles and air, printed materials from woodpulp and ink, and e-text from millions of electrons whizzing about on giant cables both underground and undersea.

All this is a reminder that we are far more vulnerable than we think we are. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak - and by extension, so is the entire physical world that the flesh is ineluctably yoked to. The undersea cables that make the internet possible are susceptible to failure due to, among other things, ships' anchors and fishing nets. Equally vulnerable are the houses we live in, the roads we travel on, the bodies that we are in. Recent events like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have made it impossible to forget the primacy of the physical world, and the ease with which this world can be destroyed.

Sobering thoughts - but necessary, once in a while. Because, as a friend put it, this matter matter matters.

trajectory

2005-09-03T01:09:00.000+08:00

[Another experiment - still in its 1st draft. i need to make the diction consistent. This also needs a proper last line. Comments and critique, as usual, are more than welcome.]

Describe the arc of your life thus far.

The fear of blood that made you reject the offer of a place in the Biology class, against the advice of your teachers and the expectations of your peers.

The momentary vacillation that landed you in a class where everyone else spoke, thought and dreamt in a different language from you.

The flatline monotone of the goldfish-eyed Physics teacher that dulled the last vestiges of your interest in science.

The strain of pretending to be interested in music and TV shows that you weren't interested in.

The need to get away.

The ugly industrial pipes that sent you running (in a cab) from one end of the island to the other, in search of a college that had not been abandoned by beauty.

And on the same day, the dark evergreens and brilliant white walls of the front porch you fell in love with, and that made the choice of any other college virtually unthinkable.

The weight you lost during the half-year spent at home which made you realise that your body couldn't afford to stay.

The need to get away.

The bad writing that made you brave enough to try.

The slamming of a door, and your impotent anger at your completely inadequate, stammering reply to a child when asked why she was not allowed to do what she loved and was good at.

The need to get away.

The inability to get away.

The utterly unasked-for benison of hope-blue sky, and the gift of song on your friend's wedding day.

Very often, the events and decisions that shape our lives are miniscule, barely-discernible, inexpressibly banal - the things that will escape the biographer's pen, the ones that we often do not even acknowledge ourselves because to do so would be to admit the smallness of our ambitions, the narrowness of our concerns. But perhaps there is a time for lingering, just for awhile, over these trivialities. It's humbling. It puts us in our place. And it reminds us that we are, thankfully, only human.

the end of innocence

2005-07-24T10:53:00.000+08:00

"[Radical Muslims are] determined to destroy our way of life and substitute for it a fanatical vision of dictatorial and theocratic rule... At its root, the struggle is an ideological contest, a war of ideas that engages all of us..."

by Stephen Hadley, Frances Fragos Townsend
writing for The New York Times

The recent terrorist bombings in London affected me in a fundamental, visceral way. Firstly, of course, there was the grand cosmic irony that the first wave of attacks took place just a day after London's jubilant victory in the bid to host the 2012 Olympics. But more than that, the list of bomb-targets were to me a litany of places which had made up the urban Arcadia of my university days. Tavistock Square, Russell Square, King's Cross, Warren Street: all these were places where, in a very real sense, i grew up. Watching the news footage of the aftermath of the attacks, i could not help but feel a surreal sense of familiarity: there on the TV screen were the same plane trees, cracked pavements, walls of concrete, granite and sandstone that i had lived with, walked amidst, for three happy years. Yet there was an air of unnatural stillness about the scenes featured onscreen – even the frenzied activity of the emergency workers seemed at odds with the lucidity of the still summer air. The whole incident, like so many other terrorist incidents, felt unreal, a nightmare from which all feelings of fear and horror had drained away, like blood from a pale thin face.

As terrorist incidents go, though, the London attacks were nowhere as unexpected or as devastating as the others that the world has had to grapple with in recent years. That London was a prime target was as good as fact after Tony Blair's decision to lead the UK into a preemptive strike on Iraq based on highly dubious claims about weapons of mass destruction that have now been all-but-proven to be non-existent. The swift, concerted response to the July 7th bombings shows that the British government has long been steeling itself for precisely such an eventuality. Far be it from me to trivialise the pain and suffering caused by any kind of violence, no matter what the scale. But, to be absolutely objective, the London attacks seemed designed to warn and intimidate rather than to cause any harm on the same scale as the September 11 attacks, or even the Bali bombing.

The response of ordinary Londoners to the attempt to intimidate has been nothing short of stunning. I'm not sure if I could muster the same mixture of resilience and wry humour if I were ever to face a similar situation. The British government's response, though, has not been as easily laudable. What, for example, can we possibly make of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes? Innocent posterboy for the London Met's deadly incompetence, Menezes has unfortunately become a symbol of all that's wrong with the world's current approach to the terrorist threat: shoot first, ask later, and never mind if you kill a few innocent bystanders along the way. But no matter what the response, one thing has remained constant ever since the first plane crashed into the World Trade Centre on that autumn morning in September 2001: the world has chosen to cast the story in epic terms, as a clash of civilisations between the rational West and the fanatical Middle East. This has resulted in a stark dialectic that has divided the world along the lines of reason and madness, moderation and fanaticism, good and evil. And in this battle of mighty opposites, every salvo fired serves only to further entrench the conflict and deny any possibility of resolution.

There can be no doubt that terrorists are mad, fanatical people doing mad, fanatical things. Yet, to attribute that madness to a simple desire to propagate "a fanatical vision of dictatorial and theocratic rule' is at best reductionist, at worst hypocritical, and above all, counter-productive. Firstly, it would take a grand leap of the imagination, as well as a good dose of condescension, to believe that these terrorist organisations really wish to take over the world and impose some warped vision of religious purity on the whole of civilisation. Such a claim fails to take into account the fact that most of the masterminds behind these terrorist organisations are highly-educated, intelligent and worldly-wise individuals who know enough about the systems they are fighting against to be aware that these systems are not going to collapse as a result of a whole series of well-timed terrorist attacks at a whole series of well-chosen, symbolic venues. These terrorist masterminds may be mad, but they are not stupid. Let us not lower ourselves to the level of lackey suicide-bombers who allow themselves to be tricked into thinking that leaders of organisations like Al-Qaeda actually believe their own rhetoric. And rhetoric it is, as anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with human nature will be able to discern.

Attributing the problem of terrorism to an ideological clash of civilisations is not only misguided, it is fundamentally dishonest. An interesting counterpoint can be seen in the way the IRA's terror campaign against England was never really attributed to the religious differences between Protestants and Catholics. Instead, it was widely acknowledged that these religious differences were simply used by the IRA to promote its political agenda, which had far more to do with a history of perceived dispossession and injustice than with any real quarrels over the nature of the Eucharist or the conditions for salvation. Of course, the religious differences could be conveniently exploited to fan the conflict, but by and large the world seemed extraordinarily clear-eyed about the true nature of the Troubles in Northen Ireland.

It is therefore puzzling that this same world appears intent on couching what is essentially a political and economic issue in cultural and religious terms. Or is it? The answer lies in the expected response to both types of problems. Telling ourselves that the issue is cultural or religious absolves us of all responsibility for the problem. After all, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. It's not our fault that we just happen to have different value systems. We can't help it if we believe in freedom and democracy, while you believe in goodness-knows-what because your system of societal organisation is backward and unenlightened. We can't help it if our skin colours are different. We call our Gods by different names - and because only our God is the one true God, we will fight to the death in defence of the only Truth we know, never mind if that same Truth also commands us to love our fellow man.

Political problems and economic issues, on the other hand, are man-made, and thus demand human responsibility. Did our forefathers forcibly take away your forefathers' land, leaving you aliens in your own country? Do the economic policies pursued by our country cause you to be unfairly disadvantaged, and do they widen and perpetuate the existing gulfs between the haves in our homeland, and the have-nots in yours? And if some of this is our doing, are we then accountable for providing solutions? What if the kinds of solutions you seek are not in our interest?

It is far easier to get on the moral high horse by attributing what we don't want to deal with to fanaticism and irrationality, even evil, in other people. However, honesty requires us to admit that this is no ideological battle, no cosmic struggle between the Forces of Good and Evil, no matter how much American spindoctors may wish us to think so. Undeniably, the average suicide bomber may see his mission in such terms. Any other motivation would render his actions purely irrational. Policy-makers and decision-makers who drive world affairs, however, must not mistake political rhetoric for reality. And the truth is that terrorism is a problem rooted in the absence of global political, economic and social justice, and in the subsequent resentment created by this lack. Any viable solution must therefore entail a full look at the worst of the glaring inequalities and injustices perpetuated by our complacent assumptions about the globalised world that we make our home.

on the fringe

2005-07-15T23:14:00.000+08:00

"Did you like art lessons when you were in secondary school?"
"We drew lots of chillies..."
"You mean you didn't do O Level Art?"
"No. But i've always had friends who were artists."
"Maybe that's because you find you can relate to them."

(a snatch of a conversation with an artist colleague)

This is partly an elegy to the art education i never had.

At the age of 10, i bought myself a sketchbook. Its pages danced in bright pastels - cool turquoise, sunshine yellow, tropical-palm-green - and i used it to draw pencil sketches, painstakingly copied from beginners' How-To books. i can still remember the woody scent of the blue 2B pencils and the textured feel of drawing quick short pencil-lines against the barely-there grain of the sketchbook paper. With a child's earnestness i taught myself to vary the depth of the shadows cast by the mugs, pots, vases and bowls that marked my first tentative efforts. i learnt how to create (what i thought were) subtle gradations of light and shade with the flat of my thumb, developed a connoisseur's taste for the different brands of pencils and erasers, found a real (though undoubtedly childish) pleasure in reproducing the shapes of the objects i chose to portray.

This brief childhood affair with Serious Art ended when i tried, in a bout of artistic hubris, to draw a sketch of Denmark's famous 'Little Mermaid'. It was done on paper the colour of an impossibly aquamarine sea. After carefully detailing each ebony curve, each strand of jet-black hair, i showed the drawing proudly to my mother, expecting nothing less than fulsome praise for my most ambitious piece of work thus far. She took one look at it, and laughed. "The breasts are wrong." i was so humiliated i immediately tore out the drawing and balled it into the wastepaper basket, together with whatever artistic aspirations i'd harboured up till then.

But childhood dreams never die - they just metamorphose into private enthusiasms whose roots may or may not be remembered as time does its daily work of erasing the incidents that don't matter and colouring over those we'd rather forget or want to preserve. So it was with a start that i realised, almost two decades later, how art, and the people who make it, have sounded an ever-present groundbass in my life, one no less significant, though less conspicuously audible, than that formed by music. Unbelievable that i'd never noticed this before. After all, the evidence was there for all to see: my early acquaintance with the Renaissance Greats (at the age of 10, i was one of the few among my classmates who knew that Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michaelangelo were more than just heroes in a half-shell wielding weapons with vaguely sinister Japanese names); the string of artist-type close friends who've walked in and out of my life; the happy afternoons spent wandering alone through art galleries in London; even (and this really blew my mind away, because i'd never seen the resemblance) my art-collector father with his cabinets full of paintings by various Old School Singaporean and Chinese artists.

Since September last year i've once again been skirting the fringes of the floating world. This time, though, in the company of a bona fide Artist who knows the ins and outs, whos and wheres, of the art circle in Singapore. It's a fascinating, fantastic, frightening place where people never seem to grow old and where, it seems, anything really goes. Electronic noise, performance art with imaginary toilet bowls and white cotton knickers, crystalline landscapes drilled in perspex... Sometimes i wonder, To what end? What does all of this have to do with anything that really matters? i think of the art world as analogous to the Land of Faerie so beloved of writers like Keats and Neil Gaiman (both Romantics with a Dark Side). Both are worlds where beauty matters deeply, but where that beauty can be, as Yeats put it in another context, a terrible beauty - one that exacts a terrible cost. And like the Land of Faerie, the art world can be dangerously beguiling, drawing our attention away from the real world of real problems that require real solutions.

So i stay on the edge, taking tentative little forays into this strange place where i feel strangely at home, yet never staying for long. And i look at the people who inhabit this world, and admire their courage. Zai, his wiry boyish frame belying the dark origins of his art; Dawn, bubbly leaper-over-of-auditorium-seats; Victor, his eyes blind behind his RayBan shades; Charmaine, who was late for school because she was picking mushrooms; Donna, braving red-tape and bureaucratic bullshit for the sake of what she believes in. All these people have shown me different ways to be, hitherto unimagined in workaday Singapore. And though i know i'll probably never have the guts to choose as they've chosen, do what they're doing, it is good to know that they are there, carving out spaces for themselves and for all those who need them.

random extravagant beauty

2005-05-13T20:59:00.000+08:00

Walking out of the workplace i am always struck by nature's extravagant beauty. The sky - bright youthful blue in the afternoons, dark dusk in the evenings. Outside at the bus-stop, i see the delicate beauty of rain tree leaves silhouetted against the night sky, like a fine lattice of intricate black lace set against rich grey velvet. After rain, the fallen leaves are a glossy black against the concrete pavement.

In the mornings there is a coolness in the air from the dew on the leaves. It is a crisp kind of coolness, not at all like the thick slow coolness that falls during afternoon rain and lulls you to sleep, but something that invigorates, makes your eyes shine even amid a sea of grey. The birds must love this because their morning song rings out without fail at the start of each new day, as they wing their way across the rooftops and over the treetops. There's a pair of them, one red and the other green, that have frequented the area ever since i started noticing these things. They soar and dip through the foliage in an exuberantly celebratory dance, the unlikeliest pair - i think they're of different species, though they move so fast i've never been able to get a good look.

There has to be something to all this, other than to make random people feel happy about their ordinary day-to-day lives, or even to make other random people happy about their ability to see and appreciate totally random beauty.

a very unfortunate event

2005-05-07T22:08:00.000+08:00

SSC 25th Anniversary:
Beethoven's Choral Symphony

Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by: Lim Yau
Soprano: Tamara Matthews
Mezzo-soprano: Graciela Araya
Tenor: Paul Austin Kelly
Bass: Johannes Mannov
Singapore Symphony Chorus, Singapore Bible College Chorale, Hallelujah Chorus, & The Philharmonic Chamber Choir

Claude Debussy said once that 'music is the space between the notes'. By that definition, then, what happened at the Esplanade Concert Hall on Friday 6 May was anything but music. Under the baton of conductor Lim Yau, the SSO forced the audience to witness the frenzied massacre of Beethoven's sublime 9th Symphony in which there was no space, between the notes or anywhere else, for the music to even take just one tiny life-saving breath. It was an experience that i honestly could have done without.

As a die-hard Beethoven fan, i'd been looking forward to this concert ever since i bought the tickets in February. Beethoven's 9th is one of those masterpieces of the classical repertoire that i cannot imagine the world being without. It is a work of great generosity, an extraordinary experiment in musical form and technique that somehow came out, not just right, but just right - despite its composer having been almost totally deaf at the time when he wrote it. i love the way the first movement emerges out of mist and fog, in an other-worldly half-light unlike any dawn that has ever greeted human eyes; the jocular energy of the second movement, with its musical 'Gotcha!' right at the end (i imagine Herr Ludwig, guffawing out loud, slapping his thigh in amusement at his own little joke); the absolute hymn-like calm of the slow movement; and of course, the pure joy of the last movement - it boggles the mind that a near-deaf musician could have written something called 'Ode to Joy' as convincingly as Beethoven did.

It's hard to imagine how any experienced conductor could possibly have messed up the 9th. Not because it's an easy work to perform - it's too massive, too complex, to be easy. But i had thought before this that its very fame would protect it from bumbling conductors or other performers who didn't know better. After all, anyone with access to the many recordings of the 9th could not possibly get it wrong, could he? And anyone who was less competent would surely steer clear of this old classical workhorse in favour of other, lighter pieces.

So what went wrong with this concert?

Lest i give in to the temptation to say, 'Everything', let me state for the record that i think the orchestra and soloists did a wonderful job, given the circumstances. It was not their fault that the conductor was pushing the music far beyond its limits. In fact, the soloists were brilliant, and one can only imagine the possibilities that went to waste as a result of Lim Yau's haphazard conducting. The orchestra, too, did the best it could with the conducting it got. The blame, as far as this listener is concerned, lies squarely on the shoulders of the conductor.

The performance was the most insensitive handling of a piece of music that i've ever heard in a public concert (barring that awful version of the Rach 2 i heard a couple of years back, played by the NUS Symphony Orchestra). All semblance of musicality was lost in the breakneck pace at which Lim Yau drove the orchestra in his apparent eagerness to get to the end of the piece in time to rush home for the Friday evening episode of his favourite primetime TV show. Or, as a friend put it, 'One would think that LY was paid according to how many notes he could squeeze out of the orchestra in a set time.' He rushed through all 4 movements at virtually the same headlong speed, ignoring totally what any good musician should know: that music needs space to breathe, that time has to be given to allow musical meanings to gather and grow. Not only did the pace result in the total absence of feeling in the playing, it also led to very messy ensemble work, sometimes in simple passages that really should have been a breeze to play. It's been a long time since i've heard the SSO play so badly - in fact, in recent years i've grown to expect high standards from our national orchestra - but i cannot see how they could have done otherwise with such poor direction from the conductor.

At its best, the 9th is a complete musical universe that encompasses in its 4 movements a whole history of creation, from its embryonic beginnings to the exultant triumph of its finale - a hymn to the joy that pervades all of creation. And within this musical universe are passages that, well-executed, could make a grown man weep. Yet, what happened during the concert was more like the aural equivalent of a soggy pudding splatted across a greasy linoleum floor. Passages that ought to have shimmered with light (the mysterious opening, for example, or the transcendant soprano chorus lines towards the end of the 4th movement) sank darkly into oblivion, while more complex contrapuntal passages sputtered hopelessly into unintelligible gibberish as the players tried desperately to keep pace with the conductor, and with each other. The whole of the slow movement was hacked through mercilessly, and the resulting lack of soul (especially obvious in slow movements in general) was, depressingly, representative of the whole rendition of the work in general.

Halfway into the 1st movement i realised that if i was to get anything more than utter frustration from the whole concert experience, i was going to have to look elsewhere than in the music. i started, firstly, with the performers. It seemed to me a wonderful opportunity to see for myself how artists behave when they feel that their art does not meet the standards of excellence they set for themselves. So i couldn't help but notice that the soloists (all highly-acclaimed international singers) were looking bored throughout the performance, and that the boredom morphed during the curtain calls into sheer disgruntledness. You could actually see it, quite clearly, from their body language. The orchestra members, too, looked none too pleased – instead of the usual foot-stomping and bow-tapping that breaks out at the end of a good performance, the orchestra simply sat rather stiffly in their places during the curtain call, with only the principal violinist diplomatically tapping his bow on his music-stand while the rest of the musicians looked on with plastic smiles on their faces.

One truly positive thing that did come out of the whole sordid affair was that i got the chance to check out the interior of the Esplanade concert hall. It is truly a work of art - the most beautiful concert hall i have ever come across. With its pinewood finishing, olive green wall coverings, and the black microphone cables hanging down from the acoustic canopy like the aerial roots of a banyan tree, the concert hall encloses the audience in a warm orange glow that effectively shuts out the distracting noises of the outside world – even mobile phone signals are cut off when one is in the hall.

It is in every way a state-of-the-art concert venue, and the majority of the performances that it has hosted since its opening have surely proved its detractors wrong – quality hardware does help facilitate quality performances, no matter what sceptics may say. More than that, though, the venue justifies, endorses and vindicates the art, if the art is good. Much as it appears politically-incorrect or even anti-artistic to say so, it does seem that an expensive, world-class performance venue somehow endows the performances that take place under its auspices with a certain aura of class and social acceptability. Would the Vienna Philharmonic perform in a school hall? i rest my case.

But i digress. In this particular case, the art was manifestly not good, and no amount of architectural or technological wizardry could conceal the fact. Even if the rest of the audience seemed fairly satisfied with the performance, there was at least one member of the audience on Friday who did not applaud at the end of the concert. And that, coming from someone who’s always felt that good artists deserve all the support they can get, is saying a lot.

the inevitable post on the Casino Issue

2005-05-02T20:40:00.000+08:00

Once in a while, something happens on this small island to galvanise the normally passive islanders into passionate action – or at least voluble speech. Several years ago, this took the form of the Hello Kitty Issue – concerned Singaporeans all over the world joining in the chorus to lament the poor state of manners and civility shown by the barbaric behaviour of certain native islanders as they fought, literally, over the Hello Kitty soft toys distributed as free gifts by a certain fast food chain as part of a promotional campaign. This time round, the hot-potato is the far less frivolous issue of the proposed opening of not just one, but two, casinos in our hitherto cloistered city-state. After almost half a year of vigorous public debate that saw Singaporeans sharply divided along the lines of liberal and conservative, pro and anti-casino, the decision was finally announced in favour of the 35 000 new jobs the euphemistically-named ‘integrated resorts’ would generate for the economy. All this, amidst much public weeping and gnashing of teeth as ministers (both political and religious), gamblers and ex-gamblers, aunties and uncles, Singaporeans here and away – in short, the whole spectrum of Singaporean society – pitched in with their two cents’ worth of heartfelt discourse. It was, in short, nothing short of truly amazing.

It was also a revealing, and frightening, example of the way Singaporeans have made a habit of expecting to have their cake and eat it, too. Frightening, because this surely is a case of hubris on a grand, nation-wide scale. Yes, we are the little red dot that could. We are the economic miracle that took place while the rest of the world was looking elsewhere, not even thinking about us enough to expect that we would do anything less than screw it all up and whimper, tail between legs, off the world-stage. We have, to date, managed to balance the difficult demands of being a cosmopolitan city-state while maintaining a (some say excessively) strict hold on public morality. We have done all this, and more – perhaps too much more. Yet to think that we can, once again, pull off the knives-through-the-box-with-the-bimbo-inside trick, is perhaps to take our belief in the miracle of self-determination just a wee bit too far.

I might as well declare my allegiance now for the blur of mind who have not already guessed my stand on the issue. I was, and still am, firmly against the setting up of a casino (or two, or three…) in Singapore. Unusual, I know, for me to take such a strong position on an issue that impinges on the right of the individual to make his own decisions and to take personal responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. I suppose this is an example of how, in the battle between abstract theory and personal experience, the latter has always carried far more weight for me than the former ever could. And my (vicarious) personal experience has shown me how gambling addiction can tear lives asunder and leave them broken and almost beyond repair. I have seen entire extended families divided by conflicts over how to deal with a family member who is a gambling addict. I have seen people suffering – financially, emotionally – because a loved one who is a gambler insists on sponging off their goodwill and charity by borrowing money and chalking up huge debts that he cannot possibly hope to repay. And to top it all off, these people almost invariable come from the lower strata of society. The ones who suffer most are the ones without the financial and social resources needed to extricate themselves from the mess that they land in as a result of their failure to control their gambling habit.

Of course, not everyone who gambles becomes an addict. That would be a gross over-generalisation of the sort that upsets me so much when I hear it coming from other people. In fact, I am open to the possibility that most people who gamble do not become addicts. (I have a friend, for example, who sets aside a fixed budget for jackpot-gaming every month. As far as I know, he has kept to this budget, which he sees as the price he pays for the entertainment derived from his regular encounters with the one-armed bandit.) What I am concerned about, though, is that the people who do become addicted to gambling are the ones who are likely to have the least ability to seek and effect a cure. They are likely to be the people on the lower end of the economic scale. They are the ah peks and ah mahs, ah cheks and ah sohs who people our heartlands, the ones for whom the boom of the new economy spells not excitement and new hope, but possible unemployment and despair. The ones who need excitement and hope, however meager or fleeting – and who seek it in pastimes like buying 4D and Toto, or horseracing. Yes, I know I am generalizing, but these stereotypes exist for a reason. And I have seen them, spoken to them, lived through family quarrels over what to do with them, so that for me, they are real people, not mere cardboard bogeymen set up by moralists with nothing better to do with their time.

As one of the people who objected to the setting up of a casino here, I find particularly objectionable the idea that it is now my responsibility (together with religious organizations, social service organizations, and other groups who were opposed to the casino) to help protect Singaporeans from the pernicious effects of something that we did not want to take place in the first instance. So this is now my problem? How’s that for passing the buck?

The government has assured us, time after time, that measures will be put in place to protect Singaporeans from the pernicious effects of our own greed and lack of self-control. All thanks for this thoughtfulness, I say – but why should we protect just Singaporeans? Do the tourists whom we expect to form the bulk of the visitors to the casinos deserve any less protection? Is it right for us to think only of our own in this matter? What kind of nation are we becoming, to work into policy laws and regulations that will benefit our own citizens at the expense of others?

But my objection is not just based on moral grounds. I find the manner in which the debate has been couched in terms of economics versus ethics highly dubious. Even if we accept the argument that in this case, our economic survival has to take precedence over the maintenance of our (admittedly rather clinical) ethical environment, it remains to be seen if the integrated resorts will indeed become the cash cows that we so fervently believe they will become. With such a small local population, the IRs (as they are now called) will have to depend on a steady influx of tourists who will find, once they come here, much of the same sorts of amenities that can be found in any other first world city. That should take care of the visitors from first world countries – why come here when they have the whole of Europe and America at their doorsteps? What can we offer that will distinguish ourselves from our older, more established first-world cousins? As for our neighbours from the region – what can we offer that cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai cannot? Why would, for example, our neighbours from up north want to visit our IRs when they have their own well-established casinos in their own country?

It just seems to me that the decision on the integrated resorts was made in the absence of any more creative or interesting ideas on how we can maintain our global competitiveness in the years ahead. It bespeaks a serious lack of imagination on the part of the decision-makers, and sends a rather desperate smoke-signal to our competitors that says, “Hey, we’re really at our wits’ end here and we cannot see any other way out of our present situation. So we’re going to follow the business model that other countries have used successfully in the past, even if it isn’t particularly exciting or novel, and in the meantime let us pray and hope that this all works out.” Not a particularly inspiring solution to the problem, I must say.

Finally, I find the argument that opening two casinos in Singapore will help build our reputation as a ‘funky’, ‘happening’ and attractive place to live particularly fatuous. Funkiness is not predicated on the presence, or absence, of roulette tables and jackpot machines – nor is it necessarily dependant on whether or not people are allowed to choose to get their kicks from the thrill of gambling. Funkiness is an attitude – a state of mind and a way of life that means, among other things, people having the freedom to pursue the things they feel passionate about, and having the imagination to dream big dreams and the daring to make those dreams come true. There are many ways we can help make Singapore a funky place to live, and while the setting up of two casinos may signal a relaxation of the rigid moral codes that characterized the Singapore of the past, it does not in any way show that Singaporeans have become more passionate, imaginative, or daring. In fact, if anything, it shows that we are a country that has run out of fresh ideas, and that has to resort (pun not intentional) to building the kind of glitzy, high-cost international resorts that virtually every other developed country already has in order to stay abreast of the competition.

Nor is the casino decision likely to make the idea of living in Singapore any more attractive for the ‘foreign talent’ we are trying to woo. In what way will the integrated resorts contribute to making Singapore a creative, intelligent, compassionate and humane society that creative and intelligent people will want to call home? To what extent will the integrated resorts provide these people with the intellectual stimulation and the variety of lifestyle, entertainment and leisure options that they value?

All these questions remain to be answered. For the moment, it seems only wise that we work our damnedest at making sure the integrated resorts succeed in the economic sense, and that we continue our efforts to ‘remake’ Singapore into a society that truly values people as people, not as mere units of production. And in the meantime, let us pray very very hard that we will not live to regret our decision on the Casino Issue, and that the integrated resorts will not be the harbingers of destruction that so many people fear they will be, either to our society as a whole, or to the individuals who make up that society.

the light in the east

2005-04-24T18:31:00.000+08:00

[To my gentle readers:
i find my writing getting more and more stilted, more and more cliche-ridden. It seems now that i have nothing important to say. This is the worst yet that i am allowing myself to 'publish' on this blog. So why publish, you ask? Because the alternatives - to not write at all, or to write and keep it all to myself, would both lead to stagnation. Because writing needs an audience. So bear with me till the time when this gets better.]

The island i live on measures 42 by 23 km. For the geographically challenged, that means that it would take you all of half an hour to drive non-stop from east to west at the speed of 80 km/h, or 20 minutes to drive from north to south at the same speed. Singaporeans are denied the privilege that people in other countries have of saying (with no hint of self-mocking irony), I live in north / south / east / west Singapore, because Anywhere segues almost seamlessly into Everywhere Else, largely undistinguished by climatic zones, local culture or political affiliation. Even our government has tacitly acknowledged this fact – our ever-expanding electoral zones seeming to point towards an Utopian future when Singapore will simply be governed as a huge conglomerate constituency, removing the need for all artificially-imposed boundaries, and allowing us to truly be one people, one nation, one Singapore.

In the meantime, however, certain renegade Singaporeans continue to cling to outdated ideas of our island’s physical and cultural geography. A friend of mine once claimed that the light in the east is different from the light on the rest of the island. Something about the air there, she mumbled. Which is just the sort of thing to send the skeptic in me on a crusade in search of the One Truth. So on my occasional forays into the east (another curious feature of life in Singapore: despite our size, we rarely venture beyond our own kampungs, except for work-related purposes), i’m always on the lookout for evidence that would prove or disprove her claim. And so far, i must concede that the evidence seems tipped in her favour.

* * *

At one point in time I half-seriously thought the light in the east looks different because there are fewer high-rise buildings there. (It’s dangerous to build high-rise buildings near airports – a fact that has taken on a certain dark resonance after September 11). Fewer tall buildings allows more light to filter through. I love being able to see the sky, and in the east, the patches of sky you get to see are that much bigger than elsewhere in Singapore. Take a walk in the east on a Saturday morning, and you will find a crisp clarity in the air that in a less busy country might pass for quietness and stillness; in Singapore, though, this is obscured by the growl of traffic and the miscellaneous noise of people going about their weekend lives – an intriguing example of how the aural and the visual are so closely intertwined that one can affect our perception of the other.

* * *

Perhaps the light in the east looks different because the air in the east allows it to. I know for a fact that the air in the west is more polluted because of the heavy industries located in Jurong and Tuas, and someone once told me about how the air there smells like a chocolate factory because of the presence of some deadly chemical or other. How exquisite. Delirious chocolate poison – the sweet sweet smell of death. I can think of worse ways to die.

* * *

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to capture the light in the east on camera. Does there exist a camera sensitive enough to record each nuance and shade of dust-refracted solar energy that comes our way? I remember my own attempts to photograph the blue of the London evening sky – that deep rich blue, hued with infinite possibility. The photos turned out grey-blue, purple-black, grey-black-blue – an object lesson in unrealized hopes and disappointed ideals.

And what if it were possible, anyway? What difference would it make to anyone – the exact luminosity of something as intangible as the light in the sky?

* * *

If I were an Easterner living overseas, one of the things I’d definitely feel homesick about would be the light in the east. Funny how it’s never the big things that grip your heart and leave you feeling strangely hollowed-out and emptied – sometimes it’s not even the important things that do that. In this way our memories become a motley montage of cracked pavements, greasy sandwich-bar windows, linoleum floors (with air-pockets where the lino was not properly glued down), clean white walls lined with rusty green rails, small green mosaic tiles on concrete floors, fine stubby grass on cow-eaten meadows, the tangy sunburst of fresh orange exploding in your mouth. The weight of it all. Yet skimming, light as light, across a rain-washed sky.

not-so-pithy aphorisms, #243 - 249

2005-04-10T20:08:00.000+08:00

People with hell in their hearts should make it a point to keep it there.

It's unfair to make other people suffer for your personal unhappiness. Of course, the fact that it's unfair and irrational doesn't make it any less rare. I dare wager that more than half of all the suffering in this world is caused by walking Infernos who allow their bitterness and hatred to spill-over onto the people around them. And who often make their poor unwitting victims feel as if they are somehow to blame for something that is entirely not their fault.

That is why i am fully in favour of people wimping out of difficult situations if they do not have the strength to stick it out without using other people as emotional punching bags, or if they do not have what it takes to turn a bad situation to good. Because we have enough of hell in this world without people spreading more of it around. Perseverence is only as good as one's ability to find light in the darkness, or to be a light in the darkness. Anything else is tragic self-deception - a deluded attempt to convince oneself that what one is doing is admirably, or even heroically, stoic. Wisdom is knowing when to call it quits.

This applies to all aspects of life - in school, at work, in a marriage. In my not-so-humble opinion, the mindless assumption that perseverence and stoicism are universal virtues is in urgent need of revision. Perhaps these qualities wear well on saints and martyrs, but saints and martyrs fight on the side of heaven, not hell. The rest of us mere mortals should be given, and should take, the licence to be merely mortal, and to take the only-too-human option of removing ourselves from those things that cause us pain and suffering. Anything else is nothing but foolish vanity.

[Request to readers: Could someone do a logic check on this? i've this sneaking feeling that this post is fundamentally illogical, but can't quite put my finger on the reason.]

out of the mouths of babes

2005-03-25T21:26:00.000+08:00

Gems of wisdom from student essays:

"When people marry, they expect care, tension, and unconditioned love."

An odd mixture of cynicism and idealism, this. Too many cares will result in tension, certainly - but to also expect, in the face of this rather grim certainty, love that emanates, pure and unconditioned by social mores or gender expectations... Well, all i can say to the writer of the essay from which this was taken is, "Good luck."

"Men are women."

Clearly a comment on the gender-role confusion that plagues postmodern post-feminist society. It must be tough being a man these days - we women send a dozen (and then some!) conflicting signals about what it means to be a man, and somehow they have to keep it all together, without going postal.

Perhaps Chaucer and his fellow medievalists were right after all - the answer to the question "What do women want?" must be: "Power". Power to mould men to our every whim and fancy, power to make them who and what we want them to be - men when we want to take a backseat and be pampered and taken care of, and women when we want to feel in charge.

i'm glad i'm not a man.

"Is it ethical to keep a dead person alive?"

A profound question that has many resonances on this Good Friday, and in the light of the ongoing furor over Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

At what point does life end? And at what point should life end? And what does it mean to be alive, or dead, anyway?

Is it ethical that our economic system should be geared towards keeping alive the many people who are dead in spirit - all those who have been, in the words of TS Eliot, undone by death?

in good hands

2005-02-09T23:49:00.000+08:00

[for Ben and Mels, with apologies for the very purple prose]

Watching a spate of close friends' weddings take place, one after another, and anticipating The Next Big One (a beach party, complete with SPG outfits - the horror! - and seaside salsa), it's almost inevitable that my thoughts should turn to luurrve sweet luurrve, and marriage, and other generally soppy yet life-changingly momentous things that are not really soppy at all once you really start thinking about them.

(How i love the way talking about the things that matter is always so difficult, and sometimes just so darned... embarrassing. i love the way we hem and haw, stumble over our words, gird our feelings in layers of see-through irony, politely avert our eyes and collectively pretend that the irony is doing its job of concealing how much we really care.)

When Ben and Mels got married, something changed for me, quietly, almost imperceptibly. Even now, i still don't know exactly how it happened, and can only guess at why it happened, but the world suddenly took on a different tone. A warmer, brighter, happier tone. If life could be seen in colours, i would call it a bright, creamy, sunshiny yellow, shot through with shades of terracotta and burnt sienna.

Part of this, no doubt, was simply because it was the most enjoyable wedding i've ever attended. A peacefully busy morning spent with old friends at the bride's place, a beautifully simple church ceremony in the afternoon, and a smashingly fun dinner to top it all off. Great food, great company, great music (the food arriving accompanied by the strains of the 'Star Wars' theme, the couple walking into the ballroom, first to Bach's 'Air On A G-String', then to 'Yellow' by Brit band Coldplay; the friends-of-the-bride with our almost-too-sweet choral rendition of 'We've Only Just Begun'; MW hamming it up onstage with his deep-sexy-baritoned version of 'I've Got A Crush On You' accompanied by Dom-the-Human-Trumpet). And the after-dinner round-the-piano vocal-jamming session: Grace improvising, Brando doing his trademark Kermit, John showing off, the rest of us laughing and singing and fooling around and acting like we didn't have the sense we were born with. For just that one evening, we were high on life, drunk on youth, absolutely, utterly in the moment - happy, like a profusion of fresh spring flowers suddenly bursting brilliantly, unashamedly into bloom.

But that's not even half the story. After all, a wedding is just that - a wedding. White lace and promises, and a lifetime ahead in which to keep them. The first in a whole series of projects both big and small that the couple will have to undertake together, till death do them part. A fait accompli that marks the official institution of the world that the couple will have to build together, minute by minute, word by word, deed by deed. The burden of hope can seem almost too heavy to bear.

Yet, watching the newly-weds go about their tasks as host and hostess of the biggest party of their lives, i could not help but feel that this burden was something they would not only be able to shoulder, but that in their hands it would no longer be a burden, that it would become something strong, lasting, and beautiful. Ultimately inexplicable, this quiet confidence - in our fallen world, can adherence to any kind of hope be anything but inexplicable, be called anything but faith? So i will call it faith - this belief that they will succeed where the alchemists of old failed, that they will take the dross of everyday life, with all its litany of joys and frustrations, laughter and tears, and turn it into the gold of a lifetime lived together in a deep and growing love.

i am not one who is given to easy optimism. Over the years i have become perhaps a little too conscious of humankind's prodigious creativity when it comes to making a mess of things. Consider the amount of damage just one person can inflict on the world around him. Then take that and multiply it by two, and what you have is just a fraction of the total damage two people can do collectively, to each other and to the world at large. You can prove this mathematically. It's exponential. So it was with a sense of glad surprise that i found myself believing, wholeheartedly, uncynically, that this was one thing that would not become The Next Big Screw-Up. Nay, i don't just believe it, i know it. i know it in the same way that i knew Ben and Mels were going to get married, even when they first started dating, all those years ago. And this knowledge is all the more precious because it's given me the faith that with God's help, there are things that transcend even our human propensity towards error and entropy.

It is a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to know that the people you most care about are happy and well. i'd like to say for the record, with total, unironic sincerity, that i am thankful that one of my closest friends is in the good hands of a good man, and that he in turn is in the good hands of a good woman. And that the years they have together ahead of them are safely in good hands too.

in praise of men

2005-02-05T23:46:00.000+08:00

This is an experiment. Comments and brutal honesty welcome.

i like men. Let me say that a little louder. I LIKE MEN. In fact, truth is, i usually like them better than women. There. Now send in the Feminazis. Assemble the firing squad. But before i take my last breath, at least hear me out. i have my reasons. And though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

Men are fun to be with. They laugh out loud (sans shrill screeching), act silly, joke about being fat. Celebrate their beer bellies. Make crude jokes. They know the fine art of Letting Things Slide, of not taking life too seriously, and of not allowing life to take them too seriously. The best men carry with them an air of confident good humour that can see them through almost any situation. And that confidence makes the people around them feel good as well. It's a mojo kinda thing.

Men don't talk about spa treatments. As far as i'm concerned, spa treatments are the single most deadly conversation killers ever dreamt up by the human race, followed by manicures and diets. "You know i tried out the seaweed with milk honey and yoghurt package yesterday... it was so good, you must try it too. Only $135 after discount! And the best thing is that it comes with a manicure voucher - 20% off your next manicure with them. i felt so good after that i treated myself to an ice-cream... i was like, that's 200 calories that i'll have to work off at the gym..." You get the idea.

Men know better than to take things too personally. They take criticism cheerfully and will still be your friend even if you tell them that their singing really, really sucks. i like working with men because they are task-oriented and direct. If they want you to get something done by 5am tomorrow dammit, they will tell you so, in no uncertain terms. None of that circuitous emotional kid-gloving for them. You always know exactly what's what when you're working with men, and there is little need to second-guess them because, hey, they're simple, uncomplicated people.

Having good male friends is one of the greatest blessings a woman can have. It helps balance out the baleful effects of estrogen overload, and contributes a healthy sense of perspective and objectivity to her life. And that, when seen in contrast to the emotionally-charged, purple-hazy, narrow-horizoned perspective so typical of the fairer sex, can be as refreshing as an ice-cold beer on a hot windless afternoon.

Alright. You can bring on the firing squad now. The first female anti-feminist, dying for her cause. Roll over, Joan of Arc. The gender war is where it's all at now.

counting the cost

2005-02-05T21:11:00.000+08:00

Economics, a colleague told me once, is the science of life. It is the study of how people make their decisions, of why they choose one road over another. This was a radically different take on the subject from the one i'd been accustomed to at school - a veritable paradigm shift, in fact, and one that changed, in however small a way, the manner in which i think about life. What used to be a rather impersonal, if vaguely fascinating, academic discipline suddenly became an all-encompassing theoretical framework for understanding human motivations and actions. The idea that everything carries an opportunity cost, and that all our choices are the result of the weighing and balancing of costs and benefits, was something that i had never quite appreciated before. Now, though, it appealed to me at a deeply personal level, made possible no doubt by my new-found awareness that everything we do in life, we do as a result of a choice, whether conscious or not.

Contrary to popular belief, the best things in life are not free. Even our most cherished values and beliefs come with price-tags attached. And if deciding in favour of some of these 'best things' seems, at first, not to make 'economic' sense, it is only because we are so accustomed to equating economics with money and finance, when in fact that isn't what economics is about at all.

Imagine, for instance, that you are an amateur artist who has given up a stable career as an architect in order to devote your time and energy to art. The cost of your decision? Partly monetary, of course - an artist-friend once confessed that Singaporean artists are constantly bitching about money (or the lack thereof), and the sacrifice seems all the greater in the light of the relatively attractive income guaranteed by a career in architecture. But there are other costs as well - the loss of prestige and social standing, the giving up of a high-flying yuppie lifestyle, and most frightening of all, the very real possibility of failure and subsequent disillusionment. Set against all this, the benefits may seem relatively meagre to some: the chance to do something you are passionate about, the possibility (as yet unfulfilled) of success and personal fulfilment. But there is also the cost of not pursuing a dream: frustration, boredom, wasted talent, the nagging 'what-ifs' that assail you as you lie awake in bed at night. The thought of which may, or may not, be enough to tip the balance in favour of the road less travelled.

At some point last year, i started making conscious, metacognitive choices for the first time in my life. i chose, for example, to buy peace-of-mind and clarity-of-conscience at the price of exclusion-from-the-in-crowd at work, because i realised that all the in-crowd seemed interested in doing was bitching viciously about people they felt did not match up to their high standards of competence and excellence. i realised, too, the price of that particular decision may actually have been higher than i could positively ascertain, for the simple reason that exclusion-from-the-in-crowd also rendered me vulnerable to being a victim of their gossip-mongering. More recently, i have purchased the-right-to-pursue-what-really-matters-to-me, at the cost of possible-deadlock-on-the-career-ladder, failure-to-fulfil-society's-expectations-of-me-as-an-ex-scholar, and probable-future-inability-to-match-my-friends'-lifestyles-and-income-levels. And at this very moment, i'm buying the-sense-of-achievement-that-comes-with-writing-something-vaguely-decent, with a-few-hours-of-lost-sleep.

Perhaps one day some motivational self-help guru (from America, of course) will write an allegorical fable featuring a Great Supermarket of Life where all the possible choices in a given individual's lifetime are lined up on rows upon rows of shelves, grouped according to some strange yet ultimately rational system (Career, Country-of-Residence, Life-Partner, Colour-of-Underwear...), all with price tags and electronic barcodes neatly attached.

So, how much is that doggy in the window?

dinky poetry

2005-01-21T13:37:00.000+08:00

Fear of Flying

It's the thought that does it,
Cruising near the height
Of cloud-nine heaven – how our faith hangs
By the slimmest of silver linings,
Gossamer light skimming light as fireflies
Across an air-thin sky.
No Icarus, we know that to soar
Too near the sun
Spells certain disaster.
It’s never the flying that causes fear –
Only the thought
Of white feathers floating
Upon a grey sea.

private universe

2005-01-21T09:43:00.000+08:00

"I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelike sprite..."

(from 'Holy Sonnets', by John Donne)

"It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working - bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming - all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned - reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less."

(from 'A Hanging', by George Orwell)

There are times when the most dazzling of epiphanies dawn on you with all the everyday banality of a peanut-butter sandwich, and you know that any attempt to communicate these insights would come across as being equally trite. So the epigraphs attached to this piece serve the twofold purpose of demonstrating that my latest banal deep thought is not too commonplace to escape the notice of people far more talented than myself, and of showing the manifold possibilities of language in the hands of the masters.

i've only just begun to realise the enormity of the fact that each of us not only sees the world in a way that is uniquely, unequivocally individual, but that we actually carry within ourselves entire worlds that differ completely from those of the people around us. Consider the implications. A desultory group of strangers waiting for the bus at a bus-stop - multiple worlds spinning in their own orbits of loves and hates and indifferences; two people engaged in a conversation - two worlds colliding and meeting in an extraordinary warping of space and time never to be repeated again till time should turn in upon itself and all the stars burn out.

Add to that the possibility that all matter is derived from the remnants of a Big Bang that took place tens of billions of years ago - and the idea that everyone is a world in miniature suddenly takes on an even more startling meaning. Because what this potentially means is that all of us are made of what used to be bits of random stellar matter - stardust, as the Romantics would have it - and that we are thus literally 'worlds' in the physical as well as in the metaphysical sense.

The road to this particular epiphany started with my fascination with the problem of perception, which in turn was first manifested in an essay on madness in the work of Browning and Tennyson that i wrote in third-year university. At that time, i was particularly struck by the possibility that a simple blue square might look different to different people, and went about rather obsessively asking various people (whom i conveniently categorised as scientists and artists for ease of reference) what they thought of that proposition. Interestingly enough, most of the scientists thought that the same blue square would look the same to everybody, whereas the artists tended to think the opposite. Which confirmed, much too neatly i felt, the objective-sciences and subjective-arts dichotomy that so many thinkers nowadays are trying to move away from.

It's been years since the blue-square experiment. i have spent most of that time in the penumbra of a dull sadness that shaded everything i did or saw or thought about, so much so that it eventually became my reality. Years of living in shadow ain't nice at all, let me tell you - but it does enable you to appreciate the light all the more deeply when the light finally does break through. And that, really, is what triggered this latest revelation: i realised that the world looked different, and thus was different; and that if my simply perceiving the world differently could actually result in the creation of a world that was qualitatively different in so many ways, how much more would each individual person, at each moment of his life, also be perceiving and creating and being an individual world that is uniquely, ineluctably his own.

This goes beyond the recognition that everyone has a different worldview and perspective on reality. The truth is that each of us is a different reality - and when our own individual reality interacts with everyone else's reality, new composite realities are created that we all instinctively recognise as separate and distinct. That is why we have different social worlds, and that is why moving from one social world to the next can have the effect of travelling to a different, suddenly alien planet.

The concept is not new - the Metaphysical poets held it as a truth upon which they built their work. Still, it's a dizzying, dazzling idea, both in its depth and in its simplicity - as the best ideas often are. i love the sense of possibility it affords - the notion that there is an infinity of worlds to discover and explore, and some of them living, breathing, walking, talking, right next to us, every day, everyday. It's exhilarating, and frightening, all at once. And one of the main reasons why there will always be more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in anyone's philosophy.

a minute's silence

2005-01-02T20:00:00.000+08:00

In the face of such tragedy, there really is nothing very much to say. Because nothing we can say will be of much help to anyone, except perhaps as a form of catharsis for those of us who can do nothing but watch, donate money and pray. Perhaps at some later date, when all the relief efforts have abated and the focus turns from saving lives to rebuilding what has been broken, perhaps then would be the time for words, for speech.

this used to be my playground

2004-12-23T13:43:00.000+08:00

Outrage. There is no other word for it. The Powers That Be have dug up the basketball court behind my house and in its place are planting a Landscaped Garden, that in my humble opinion will serve no greater purpose than to become a breeding ground for mosquitoes and other creepy-crawlies.

This angers me for several reasons. Firstly, it seems to me to be a summary action of the sort that The Powers That Be claim they are trying to move away from in their attempt to create a society built more on consultation and consensus. Yet, here there was no consultation, nay, not even an attempt to notify the residents in the area who would be affected by the decision. And now that it's been done, there's been not so much as a squeak of an explanation from the authorities as to why such drastic action had to be taken. All we have are rumours. As for me, all i know is that when i walked out of the house a few mornings ago, the basketball court was right where it had always been for the last 25 years (or longer, for all i know), and when i came home in the evening, it had been replaced by an angry heap of rubble spread across the entire area - jagged slabs of concrete lying haphazardly like so many beached whales gasping for breath under the evening stars. It was an act of destruction, cold, cruel, and callous, and all the more unforgiveable because the manner in which it was done just smacked of pompous 'i-know-better-than-thou' officialdom.

But it was not just a physical space that was destroyed. That would have been tolerable, if only barely. What makes this almost a desecration is the fact that the basketball court was the focal point of the neighbourhood's social life, the place, in fact, that made the neighbourhood a neighbourhood, rather than just a random collection of terrace houses scattered in a tree-lined valley. It was the place where New Year's Eve countdowns were held, where children learned to skate and rollerblade and cycle, and most importantly, where the young people of the neighbourhood would gather each evening for a game of basketball or football. This was a daily ritual that had remained unchanged ever since my family moved into the estate a quarter of a century ago, and those of us who have been around for some time still cherish the idea that hanging out at the bastketball court was a rite of passage for generations of children growing up in the neighbourhood. And now this communal space has been taken away, and in its place is an ugly rectangle of lumpy orange-red soil and balding tufts of cow grass.

i grew up hearing the sounds of shouted laughter and balls ricocheting off the wooden backboard. i even learnt to distinguish between the sounds made by basketballs and footballs - basketballs have a mellower, more echoey timbre, while footballs tend to sound sharper, harder. i remember the little green and red mosaic tiles that were used to mark out the lines on the court, before the tiles were removed and the lines were painted in instead. The basketball court was where i first learnt to ride a bicycle - i remember first wobbling around its perimeter, supported by my father, then careening round and round in the belief that the faster i went, the easier it would be to keep my balance. All these things are woven into the fabric of my memories and it seems almost disorienting now that the place that these memories are inextricably tied to is suddenly gone.

Some people, i know, would object to this apparent excess of sentimentality and nostalgia - life goes on, they would say, we need to move forward, not live in the past. Still, in this case i do not see how the new Landscaped Garden is going to be an improvement on the past, and the losses (of a sense of community, of a sense of rootedness) seem to be infinitely greater than the potential benefits (no more footballs crashing into people's backyards, pretty flowers and trees to look at). In almost every way, this is a step backwards - an erosion of civic space at a time when the national agenda purports to be the strengthening of communal ties, a diminishing of the store of emotional capital that gives people their sense of identity and self. Perhaps the Landscaped Garden will, with time, begin to accumulate a history of its own and become as much a part of people's lives as the basketball court was - but this is one occasion when i feel that too much optimism would be misplaced. Cynical? Perhaps. But there are times when cynicism seems a well-justified and perhaps even natural response, and this is one of them.

two vignettes

2004-12-12T10:30:00.000+08:00

(I)

It was done so casually, as the best magic tricks often are, tucked in the most offhand manner between a sip of Coke and a word to a friend. The smoke rings floated slowly above the stone table, while all around the boy in the pink polo T, the crowds went about their lives, oblivious, unseeing.

(II)

Almost unbearably cute. Disney would have had a field day. It is not often that you see a pet eating off the same plate as its owner. Even rarer, to see a parakeet sharing a roti prata with a balding, middle-aged man in an aquamarine singlet that matches its brilliant green-blue plumage. And when that parakeet is completely unchained, totally, utterly free to fly, if it chooses - why, then you have a miracle.

the making of "the adventures of a horny widow"

2004-11-29T01:53:00.000+08:00

Torremolinos 73
Director: Pablo Berger

Following my grand karmic tradition of watching films about porn films with guy friends (two movies do not a karmic tradition make, i hear some wetblanket intone, and in the name of Hyperbolic-Writing promptly silence the voice with a disapproving glare), i approached Spanish film Torremolinos 73 with some trepidation. The last time i'd seen one of these self-reflexive films-about-porn-films, the movie (Boogie Nights - more on that one some other time) left such a bad taste in my mouth that i swore never to inflict such an experience on myself again. And now, here i was, not only doing exactly what i'd determined never to do again, but imposing a possibly painful two hours on some poor bloke who probably had even less of an idea of what he was getting into than i did.

Fortunately, what we were both getting into was a gem of a film that is as sweet as it is hilarious, and that is even more about love and family than it is about sex and the porn industry. But above all it is a loving tribute to the art of cinema - with a tongue-in-cheek sideswipe at the cheesy Seventies, complete with campy disco lights and even campier music.

Plotwise, the movie is so zany it borders on farce. The basic premise: Alfredo, an encyclopaedia salesman and his wife Carmen find themselves in an ethical quandary when Alfredo is given an ultimatum by his boss - make documentary films for the World Audiovisual Encyclopaedia of Human Reproduction, or get fired. Faced with impending pauperdom, the couple finally give in to the fact that 'integrity buay sai jia eh' (literally, 'integrity cannot eat one', as some of my guy friends put it), and agree to take on the job of making soft-porn films for the Scandinavian market. This bold enterprise takes the decidedly ordinary couple where they have never gone before, with Alfredo developing a passion for film-making and finding a new hero in legendary director Ingmar Bergman, and Carmen becoming a soft-porn movie star in Scandinavia. Alfredo's obsessive ambitions soon reach epic proportions when he decides to direct his own feature-length tribute to Bergman called 'Torremolinos 73', with Carmen in the starring role. Real life, however, fails to live up to his dreams. Caught between the realities of commercial interests and Carmen's longing to have children, Alfredo finds himself making the most difficult decision of his life - and it is here that the film reaches its poignant and comically bizarre climax.

Filmed entirely in the grainy, slightly ill-defined cinematic style of the Seventies, the film has a quirky charm deriving from the distinct sense we get that the story is being told by a camera with a personality. In most films, we are aware, if at all, of the camera as simply a narrative device. Seldom does this awareness develop into the feeling that there is an active, intelligent, wryly humorous consciousness directing our attention and response to everything onscreen - everything from the opening shots of Alfredo labouring up the stairs (the lift under maintenance, as luck would have it) only to have doors slammed repeatedly in his face by his potential clients, to the hilariously solemn footage of Carmen fastidiously folding her clothes and placing them neatly on a chair even as she is being taught the art of strip-tease by a Scandinavian porn-star.

All art speaks to us as individuals at specific points in our lives. Perhaps if i were to watch this again, say, in ten years' time, i would see it as a study of a loving marriage troubled by circumstances beyond the couple's control. At this moment, however, what strikes a chord is the film's exploration of the cost of passionately and single-mindedly pursuing a dream. Something has to give, somewhere. In the movie, what gives when Alfredo becomes increasingly obsessed with film-making is his relationship with his wife, and that it all works out in the end is probably due more to the rules of the comic genre rather than to a truly satisfactory resolution of the tensions and dilemmas faced by Alfredo and Carmen.

Food for thought, perhaps, for those of us chasing after our private rainbows.

champagne supernova

2004-11-27T23:55:00.000+08:00

One of the most energetic explosive events known is a supernova. These occur at the end of a star's lifetime, when its nuclear fuel is exhausted and it is no longer supported by the release of nuclear energy. If the star is particularly massive, then its core will collapse and in so doing will release a huge amount of energy. This will cause a blast wave that ejects the star's envelope into interstellar space. The result of the collapse may be, in some cases, a rapidly rotating neutron star that can be observed many years later as a radio pulsar.

I never thought I'd say this. But the truth must be spoken, even if it hurts (cue melodramatic background music). And the truth is, U2 is now a has-been. Actually, it’s been a has-been-in-the-making ever since the curiously-labelled 'comeback album' “All That You Can't Leave Behind” that the critics went radio-gaga about when it was released four years ago. But the latest album “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” is the final nail in the coffin of what used to be the best band in the world. And if the members of the former best band in the world had any sense at all, they'd quit now while they're still ahead, while the music critics are kind (or deluded) enough to continue writing good reviews of their work, while listeners around the world still have enough goodwill to give them, despite the evidence, the benefit of the doubt.

The new album is not bad. In fact, as most albums go, it's pretty good, and is definitely a worthwhile addition to my ever-expanding CD collection. U2 is still more than capable of writing a decent melody. Bono's voice still has that faintly Messianic edge that all the postmodern sunglass-wearing irony in the world has never been able to erase, and there are tracks like ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’ and 'Yahweh' in which The Edge's guitar riffs soar in good ole Joshua Tree fashion over the solid bass lines provided by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen. Some things you just can’t leave behind. This album sounds polished, well-thought-through. Tracks like 'Vertigo' might even fool the casual listener into thinking that the band has managed to translate the spontaneity and sense of mischief it's always shown in performance into a studio effort. The songs are all based on suitably important themes. To all intents and purposes, it looks like U2 is back for good. Yet, despite all the apparent likenesses, the group's old spirit has gone. U2 has produced, for once, a thoroughly listenable and decent album.

Decent. Competent. And boring.

There’s nothing really wrong with the new album. Upon repeated hearing, it even takes on its own comfortable charm, like a favourite t-shirt well-worn with age. It’s something that grows on you. But U2 never used to be just a band that just grew on you. They were a band that grabbed you by the scruff of your neck so that you simply had to pay attention, whether you liked it or not. They didn’t do ‘floataround stuff’ like the blatantly radio-friendly music that has characterised their recent efforts. And even when they courted their fans in the most outrageous of ways, they never looked as abject in their courtship as they’re starting to look now.

I used to be a loyal U2 fan. And because I'm the sort of person who doesn't love in half-measures, my fandom used to border on worship. For someone who doesn't like collecting things (I don't like the way they clutter up my life and eventually take on a life of their own), I own an uncharacteristically impressive collection of U2 paraphenalia: eight CDs, an oversized t-shirt, a book entitled 'Until the End of the World', the credit card receipt for the tickets to their 1997 'Pop' gig that I had to sell because I couldn't make it back to London in time to catch the show. But the band meant more to me than just the sum of the shelf space it took up in my room. For years, U2 was to me an emblem of a life lived in perpetual quest of that something more, proof that passionate engagement in the world around us is more than just a hypothetical possibility, a beacon of purposeful and meaningful audacity in a world that so often seesaws between pointless rebellion and mindless conformity. Of course, I was aware that all of this was probably just a clever marketing gimmick designed to sell an image to gullible consumers like me, but at least it was an image that I could buy into, one that I wanted to believe in, in contrast to so much of the other trash that Hollywood and MTV try to hawk to us nowadays.

What I used to admire most about U2 was that they were always so eager to try out new things - new genres, new philosophies, even new identities. I've watched them evolve from the earnest born-again Irish Christians who rocked entire stadiums with anthems like 'I Will Follow' and 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', to the postmodern self-reflexively ironic (and, may I say, patently ludicrous) rock stars who strutted on stage in gigantic plastic lemons, wailing the lyrics to songs with titles like 'Mofo' and 'Lemon'. Their music ranged across an entire spectrum of different genres - stadium rock, intimate ballads, electronic dance grooves, and their own unique brand of rock-pop-jazz that simply defied categorisation.

They sang about love, of course - but not just romantic love, though as far as that went they did it in a way that most other bands have never even come close to emulating. Crowd-pleasers like 'One', 'With Or Without You', and 'All I Want Is You' contained edgily bittersweet lyrics that explored the complexities of loving another person with needs and desires equal to but different from one's own. Then there were songs like 'Love Is Blindness' and 'So Cruel' that, with their lacerating self-awareness, slowly and methodically peeled the layers off dysfunctional romantic relationships to reveal the obvious but rarely realised truth that most unhappy relationships exist because, basically, people choose to be in them. Then there were other kinds of love - love of country, love of humanity, love of God. All of which were expressed in songs that had nothing much in common other than intelligent lyrics, truly original music, and a certain passionate urgency in the delivery that shone through even the most polished of studio-editting – ‘MLK’, 'Bullet the Blue Sky', 'Pride (In the Name of Love)', 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For', 'Until the End of the World'.

They sang about our times - war ('Miss Sarajevo'), the media (‘Babyface’), alienation ('Numb', 'Zooropa'), consumerism and excess ('The Playboy Mansion'), urban angst ('Stay - Faraway So Close'). They sang about things that mattered, yet somehow managed not to come across as preachy and heavy-handed. And damn, they were good.

No matter that their excesses sometimes made them look a little ridiculous (in the case of the lemons, for example, or the ridiculously over-the-top make-a-statement supermarket launch of 'Pop' in 1997). Never mind the grand posturing, the cross-dressing, the silly sunglasses (said The Edge: "In the beginning the idea of wearing sunglasses for an interview seemed kinda stupid. Now we realize that in fact it’s not whether you wear sunglasses that’s important, it’s what kind of sunglasses you’re wearing."). U2 dared to do things that no one else had the balls to do. And their sheer audacity somehow made it all okay.

And how could you not forgive them their occasional trespasses, when they used the publicity generated from such rock star wankiness to further various good causes such as raising AIDs awareness and relieving third-world debt? Of course, one can be cynical and accuse them of milking the public's sympathy in order to boost their own profile, but whatever their motives, the fact remains that they've done more to engage in and contribute to the world around them than any other pop or rock group I know of, and that in itself deserves to be acknowledged and lauded.

So this is my tribute to the old U2, the band that were once the unacknowledged legislators of my emotional world. It feels strange to write about them in the past tense. And, even after their latest disappointing offering, there is still hope that the unforgettable fire which used to inspire their music has not yet been wholly extinguished. And that someday, they will find it in themselves to once again write, and perform, music that truly matters.

retrospective

2004-11-21T01:40:00.001+08:00

This was written.... gasp! FOUR years ago, and i'm only putting it up here because i think it offers an interesting counterpoint to the previous entry. i must confess that i haven't been able to look at this with a straight face ever since a friend spotted the (unintentional) Obi Wan Kenobi echo in 'You have taught me well...' Still, i shall spare everyone the usual self-flagellating criticism - not because i think particularly well of this poem, but because i'm starting to find the (possibly very Asian) tradition of pseudo-modest fishing-for-compliments-disguised-as-self-deprecation ('Sorry, but the cookies are really not crispy enough...') and the consequent assurances from politely-appreciative friends ('No, that's not true.... yum yum, they're very crispy...') slightly annoying. Honest critique from all of you is, however, more than welcome.

Prayer

Humankind’s instinct is to search for patterns,
Impose them, if need be, on the random
Splash of extravagant starlight
Spilling across the night.
We seek to order chaos, and if
That is not quite possible, ma’am,
We do apologise for this unfortunate
Turn of events – may we suggest, ma’am,
That you try again some other…..
But we have no patience for the long haul,
In the long run we’re all dead, and
What good is knowledge if you’re not
Alive to taste its fruit?

I want to believe.
Help thou my unbelief.

The Pilgrim Fathers read the earth,
Scanned the mottled blue of hope-new skies
For signs of Your divine solicitude.
They found it in the simplest
Fall of autumn leaves
Russet on the forest floor.
Please, Sir, I want some more.
But when that ‘more’ comes,
Bang in the middle of my placid life,
I, petulant child,
Question its provenance,
Will not accept Your gift,
If gift it is at all.

What then is belief?
Help thou my unbelief.

For faith means hope,
And hope is the serpent
I have learnt to distrust.
You have taught me well,
Master of my life.
So I see, in this sudden
Conflagration of patterned unlikelihoods,
Nothing but the purely coincidental.
Your burning-bush party tricks
No longer leave me in wide-eyed wonder.
So I tell myself.
Yet You, knowing conjuror,
Stand, smirking, in the darkness of the wind.

Why then this belief?
Give me my unbelief.

signs and wonders

2004-11-20T16:42:00.000+08:00

"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe."
- John 4:48

We all love the spectacular, the extraordinary. As children, which of us did not gape in wonder at the sight of fabulous fireworks exploding in the night, the heady mix of colour and sound fading slowly into wispy tendrils of light? And later in life, how many of us have not been fascinated by tales of the supernatural – the virgin birth, the miraculous healing of fifty-two cripples at a famous pilgrimage site, the overnight conversion of the wife-and-alcohol abuser into a saintly father-figure and motivational speaker?

All the things that i used to call, at a time of general bitterness and cynicism, God's burning-bush party-tricks.

For the past few weeks, though, i've been thinking about the miracle of the ordinary. It seems to me now that even our waking up each morning is a miracle in itself, a miracle that too many of us take entirely for granted. And the only reason we don't see it as such is because our minds have been dulled by custom, lulled into complacency by habit, such that we no longer see the poetry in the everyday.

But that begs the larger question of what exactly constitutes the miraculous. According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

miracle · n. 1. an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws, attributed to a divine agency -> a remarkable and very welcome occurrence. 2. an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something: a miracle of design.
- origin ME: via OFr. from L. miraculum ‘object of wonder’, from mirari ‘to wonder’, from mirus ‘wonderful’.

The first definition is of particular interest, because it seems to assume firstly that natural or scientific laws are somehow independent of any sort of divine agency. This is a rather strange assumption, given that most major theistic world religions do attribute the natural world (and therefore the laws that govern it) to the work of a divine agency. It also suggests that anything that is explicable by natural or scientific laws (which, by the way, seems to me to be another illogical dichotomy) is neither extraordinary nor particularly welcome.

Yet, if we only stop to think about it, we'd realise that everything which we are to perceive in this world is, in its own way, ‘an amazing product or achievement’, ‘a miracle of design’. The earth that nourishes the olive tree. The sunlight reflected in the diaphanous wings of a common dragonfly. The dirty roadside puddle that harbours a million living organisms. The fossilised remains of long-dead plants and animals that fuel our vehicles and industries. The tired commuter slumped in his seat on the rush-hour bus who sees the world, responds to that world, and thus creates a world, in a way that is uniquely, unequivocally his own.

With such an abundance of daily miracles happening and existing around us at every moment, perhaps it is for the best that we don’t usually see them as such. Perhaps there is only so much wonder the human mind can take, and our habitual dullness of perception is a coping mechanism, designed to help us get on with the necessary work of daily life, uninterrupted by the over-stimulation of the senses that would result from being in a state of constant rapture. And perhaps that is, in itself, a miracle worth celebrating.

to my gentle readers

2004-11-10T15:37:00.000+08:00

Just a little authorial intrusion here:

Thanks for reading, and i hope it's been at least mildly entertaining.
A request: if you're leaving a comment (and i hope you do), pls do sign off in some way that makes it possible for me to identify you. i do want to put a face to the comment. :)

thankee. :)

bimbonic bitching

2004-11-07T21:46:00.000+08:00

The world is made up of two types of people - those who give way when swimming towards you in the same lane in the swimming pool, and those who don't.

There is nothing more annoying than having to give way, time after time, to some hirsute hulk of a man with his beer-belly spilling out of his swim trunks who refuses to even acknowledge that fellow pool-users may just possibly have the same right to the unobstructed use of the lane as he does. i have yet to decide whether similar situations involving the cute yuppie-types with the well-toned muscles and chiselled cheekbones are any less irksome. My gut feeling is that if anything, they are more galling, not less, because one expects that all that culture and refinement ought to have made some kind of difference - and i am not talking about skincare and manicures.

i hate to generalise, but the truth is that nine times out of ten, these inconsiderate people are men. Now my friends will attest that usually, i like men: i find them easier to relate to than women, more open-hearted and less petty, more willing to just let things slide when you want to let them slide. At work, the people i most enjoy hanging out with are all men. Yet for some mysterious reason, swimming pools seem to bring out the worst in the male species. My current theory is that the watery environs of the swimming pool evoke memories of that epic first battle that every human male has to go through to even get a shot at life: put a man in a swimming pool and everyone else morphs magically into a rival sperm competing in The Great Darwinian Race for survival. He cannot help but be a boor.

Assuming that there is a biological basis for such boorish behaviour, the natural question is: can it be corrected by education, or is it just one of those things that we pray to have the serenity to accept? Can nature be improved by nurture?

Well, there is only one way to find out. i propose that all schools should mount a comprehensive educational programme to teach swimming-pool etiquette to all students, girls as well as boys. This should of course include a full-scale longitudinal study that tracks these students well into their adult years, preferably to the point at which they would have developed the said beer-bellies (or in the case of the women, thunder thighs). Such research would be, i believe, a first for our local schools, and would doubtless earn us glowing accolades from educational psychologists the world over.

In the meantime, though, i'd better find me a sugar-daddy to fund a private lap-pool for my exclusive personal use.

deopan shitan

2004-11-07T20:40:00.000+08:00

In my first year of university, i was forced to study Anglo-Saxon poetry - 'The Wanderer', 'The Seafarer', 'The Dream of the Rood'. Of all this, i remember nothing except the Anglo-Saxon word for 'deep': deopan. And the only reason i remember this is because of the panic i felt in the week prior to my first-year exams, when i realised that the combination of too-much-partying and too-much-mooning-around had left me sinking in the academic equivalent of a stinking cesspit. That was when i coined the phrase, 'deopan shitan' - dog-Anglo-Saxon for 'deep shit'.

Talking to a friend yesterday, i suddenly recalled this phrase, together with another scatalogical term i use to describe my theory on why unhappiness cannot be measured, and why all unhappy people feel they must be the unhappiest people on earth, regardless of the nature or scale of their problems. The theory is based on the metaphor of being stuck in a 'piece'a shit' (for maximum effect, this phrase should be muttered, slowly and with feeling emphasis, in a deep bass voice): When you're in a piece'a shit, all you can see is shit, and you cannot tell how big the piece of shit really is. Only outsiders are able to compare the relative sizes of different pieces of shit and give you the necessary sense of perspective to deal with your problems.

To quantitatively assess the size of a piece of shit, to tell the sufferer exactly how big (or small) it is so that he will have a better idea of what needs to be done to extricate himself from it, and then to assist in the extrication process: that's what friends are for.

tunnel vision

2004-11-04T18:29:00.000+08:00

There is something about being on MRT trains that changes Singaporeans from the busy, go-getting rat-racers they usually are, into passive, apathetic passengers who seem content to just settle in the first tiny spot they find in the first carriage they step into, staring glassily into the mid-distance. There probably isn't much else to do on a train, and given that most train journeys are relatively short, there isn't very much impetus for people to move to find a more comfortable spot, even if they are standing uncomfortably in a crowded carriage next to a relatively emptier one.

Only sheer fatigue can propel a person out of this unthinking stasis, forcing her to weave her way down through the carriages in seach of a seat on which to rest her tired body. Exhausted, she finds herself pushing past groups of people who stand rooted in their individual little untidy spots, faces set blankly against the curious gaze of strangers. They make no attempt to give way to this strange anomaly of movement, too tired be polite, walking grimly down the corridor towards the front of the train.

Upon reaching the front carriage, she sees to her disappointment that the empty seats she had glimpsed from the previous carriage have been cordoned off for the train operator. Slumped against a corner, she looks up at the dark panel of glass at the end of the carriage, and is suddenly aware of an other, different world outside the plastic orange airconditioned one in which she and the other passengers are ensconced. This other world is dark, grey, all hard lines and precisely-engineered curves - a self-contained world that admits no light except the pale yellow of the train's headlights and the ghostly blue of the subway lamps. Yet it is almost impossible to imagine ghosts in this subterranean place - ghosts need history, need a storied past, live on the murmured echoes of human voices; and this place has no past, no stories, only concrete walls and the rush of cold wind as the train hurtles past.

In his radioplay-turned-novel "Neverwhere", Neil Gaiman creates an entire parallel city called 'London Below', located in the bowels of the London Underground, peopled by earls who hold court at Earl's Court Station, and medieval monks in black hooded robes at Blackfriar's Station. And travelling on the noisy, clanking London Tube, with its stations strewn with torn magazines and discarded drink cans and inhabited by families of furry grey mice, it is easy to picture such a quirkily alternative world. The Tube is large - it contains multitudes. Not so with the MRT in Singapore. Perhaps Romance and Efficiency simply don't make good bedfellows. Perhaps people simply do not feel enough about the MRT for it to accumulate a real history of its own - history being an amorphous concept that incorporates the subjective as well as the objective, feelings and reactions as well as people, places and events. In London, the Tube is responsible for raising the blood pressures of countless commuters who have to put up with broken promises in the form of delays, breakdowns, and strikes almost as a matter of course. In Singapore, by contrast, the MRT delivers exactly what it promises, and thus most people never even give it a second thought.

It is probably too easy to draw a parallel between the onward rush of an MRT train and our nation's relentless push towards progress. MRT trains are designed to move in both directions, and depending on the direction in which you are facing, the train can be said to be moving either forward or backward. To the foolishly sentimental who think that a sense of history is integral to a nation's identity, who are always looking backwards to a past of crumbling shophouses, leaking zinc roofs in shabby kampongs, and squat red-brick libraries, our progress may seem like regress. Yet, all one really has to do is to stand at the right end of the train, and to look through that narrow pane of darkened glass into the tunnelled world outside, to know that there is only one way to go. And there is no looking back.

on happiness

2004-10-27T20:57:00.000+08:00

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

2004-10-24T22:37:00.000+08:00

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

2004-10-23T17:22:00.000+08:00

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

2004-10-23T10:38:00.000+08:00

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

2004-10-23T09:48:00.000+08:00

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.