kulturbrille:amanuensis

For a moment there, it seemed almost perfect that every metaphor to do with spatial, humanly-possible location was resonant with how I feel today. I leapt from cosmic, inter-galactic comparisons, to stage directions, traffic signals, running lingo, the entire corpus of how we locate ourselves. Distance, remoteness, isolation, was what I wanted to convey. Together with the faintly ascendant feeling of euphoria and anticipation of novelty comes the fear of oblivion (what other fear is there?).

5 months in a new job, and a year into a new life, and still unable to pin down the flailing, thrashing ideas that still come for me, every night. During each fleeting encounter with meaning and purpose, I find myself weakly faltering. Starkly brutal, keenly raw, these long and bittersweet days. If I had been 6, 7, 8 years younger, fearless and unfettered, how I would have destructively smashed everything in sight. Now I cherish and treasure each pithy moment, clutching at sand and shivering in the torrent of otherworldly, Singaporean, correctness. There is only one way to conduct one’s life, with eyes open and holding one’s breath, lest.

There are players on the stage, entities and amorphous ideas and constructs that stubbornly, wonderfully linger and dance, dance, dance. I have no doubt that the penny will drop, soon. Somewhere at the back of my mind - the thought coalesces, the knowledge settles into place - that a life of metaphors is no life at all.

There has to be a way out of completely giving my life over to a singular cause that will consume the rest of my third decade.

• 2902 GALLERY
  (tags: singapore photography art)
• Singapore Sports Council introduces first-ever National Cheer Challenge
  Sigh.
  (tags: education singapore)

For the first time this year, ill, a shredded throat and a febrile haze filling up most of today. But there was redemption, despite all the unfulfilled moments and disillusionment; there was Annie Leibovitz. If you were there, among all of us voyeurs, yes, it was me, it was me hacking and tearing through the documentary, as through the tears, defying a deflated, fibrillating heart to savour each moment of photographic apotheosis. At one moment I blinked, lost, unsure of who I was, and where I was, mimicking the act of photographing, being there in the moment.

I outdo myself. There are decades to come, years to come, a day when I will have family, shoeboxes full of photographs, not just juvenile snapshots, each of them a story that isn’t just a one-liner. Armed with a dogged determination to make something out of so little at all, I should take on a little ambition, if only to warm the chilly inside of my still faintly incandescent vessel. There was once a time when I went forth - to New York, through alleyways, into paroxysms - where everywhere I looked, I was framing, when I filed envelopes of negatives and learnt how to be non-existent behind the camera. There was once, if I might clumsily explain, when I found that space between a macro and a full-length portrait on a 50mm lens, a space available only to those who knew how to press a shutter and not run away.

But you had to have been there to understand why it was the best cathartic experience I’ve had all year. It was searingly authentic, masterfully brief, full of reminders of what it takes to make meaning out of the pernicious present. There is no counting of the hours, but only a measuring of the years, as perspective is brought to bear on the most salient moments of a life. And, as silent testimony, there are photographs, ineluctable, each a sudden, piercing, intrusive reality that one had to force back to stay in one’s seat. It became a universe within a single narrative, all those lives, all those things, ideas, emotions, fate, all splashed across a screen and pointing to the one central theme.

Perhaps now, even as the I contemplate a half-successful but increasingly bland life, even as I scale back the dreams and fears that hold me down each day, I remember what it felt like to become one with the lens; one with the world that I so longingly gazed at and poorly captured, in my own way. But there are no regrets; for even though every hope and every desire was impossibly far-fetched, silly, far too elaborate and outlandish for its own good, when it was made real, it was…good. Sometimes it takes longer than we think, that’s all. I see, you.

We are one. And finally, a full spread.

• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Radio 4 news hit by giggling fit
  (tags: uk wot)

• Polly Toynbee: Religion doesn’t rule in this clash of moral universes | Comment is free | The Guardian
  (tags: religion philosophy politics policy)
• The Obama Doctrine | The American Prospect
  (tags: america politics)
• Defending Dictatorship: Another View on Pakistan | n+1
  (tags: asia politics)

• academicsecret: Argh! (A Play in Infinite Acts)
  (tags: science)
• Maverick Philosopher Is Religion the Problem? Why Isn’t Belief As Such the Problem? The Special Pleading of Some Atheists
  (tags: religion god)
• Is Intelligent Design Required by Biological Life? | Uncommon Descent
  (tags: science god)
• Physics and Physicists: Considering Science Education
  (tags: education science)
• denialism blog : Were the ancients fools?
  (tags: ideas)
• Carl Zimmer’s Dissection: Distinguishing the Artificial From the Natural Is Possible, for Now
  (tags: science)
• SIFF letter
  (tags: singapore film)
• A Guide to the French. Handle With Care. - New York Times
  (tags: culture paris)
• Iain Banks » Matter
  (tags: book literature)
• Serero’s Eiffel Tower Observation Deck (NOTCOT)
  (tags: paris design)

• For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test - New York Times
  Denial. All of us, in denial.
  (tags: drink science)

In between one moment and the next, having run out of time to do work, or prepare the ground, or make a difference, this evening shall be spent in deep, indulgent, excessive contemplation. The long weekend was pleasant - Bones, Monocle, relishing the feeling of letting oneself go, mornings and afternoons spent in the pleasant pursuit of a languor that somehow eluded us both. There be dreams in the making.