kulturbrille:amanuensis

Yesterday, at dinner with a rabbi from Chicago who was injured in recent Israel-Lebanon conflict, I found that I no longer desired to flee this country. To desire flight implies dissatisfaction, discontent, possibly with one’s circumstances, or in most cases, one’s lot in life. I am discontent, I thought, but only with myself and my choices, which have often turned against me. One finds meaning either in a multiplicity of experiences, or in denying them. I can only live with the former; wherever I find them, I will go.

Yes, I have roused myself, but only barely, in denial and still saddled with a laundry list of obligations and duties, trying desperately to pull away from more than just tedium and boredom. I carefully array my defences, organise the troops, and retreat to a safe distance. A metre-high pile of books to devour, each night, punctuated with guilty sessions of trembling, then with weak fingers, I flip through what comes tomorrow. Every little bit of isolation counts; from my grim Westone UM1s, blue nano, to my stumbling gait that brings me away from you even as I half-turn to toss a hurried goodbye. Today there was more Coetzee, Marivaux, Mamet, echoing the past, and even it is too late for me to pull out lines, already half-forgotten, leaving behind the warm afterglow, all I need, I still must, must recall lines:

I was there, 5 years ago, lost in Leicester Square, frantically running up and down streets clutching the hand of a stranger, crying out for the Donmar Warehouse, falling through the door and shedding tickets, scarves, coats to land heavily in a chair and behold, almost late, the curtains opening, and I can still see (not hear), in my mind, one of the opening lines, hurled from actresses most amazingly garbed, of a necklace and other violent observations: I wear it, should I be summoned on the instant, to choke a horse.

Oh.

Halfway through obligations and the remains of a curriculum shredded and scattered across the swirling concrete floor, I sigh and escape briefly into Coetzee’s Slow Man. How delightful! Lugubrious, dark, gloomy, scarred, misanthropic, full of regret and denial, exactly how we will all turn out. A man, powerless to act, ignorant, unwittingly pulling his life apart one thread a time. Paul, on the wrong side of sixty, loses a leg in an accident and declares his love for his day nurse, exalted and delectably imperfect, and in the aftermath emerges Elizabeth Costello: ‘As you said, you want merely to pour out your love upon her. You want to give. But being loved comes at a price, unless we are utterly without conscience. Marijana will not pay that price.’

Paul Rayment lingers not because of his acerbic, offensively melancholic life, but because he suffers for it, while we refuse to.

All in all, not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on. Dogs in the grip of passion coupling, hapless grins on their faces, their tongues hanging out.

- Coetzee, Slow Man

Over the last week, I’ve travelled; ostensibly, for work, to a place not too far away, but in truth, I was hardly there. Instead, I read: Chicken with Plums, a lovely, lovely gift from a friend, far away, Seth, Haddon, Pessoa, Bloom, and yesterday, seized with a frantic desire, I sifted through the books at Kinokuniya. This morning, in between blank sheets of paper and the hieroglyphics of my profession, I slip, slide, into Marquez:

I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love. When my tastes in music reached a crisis, I discovered that I was backward and old, and I opened my heart to the delights of chance.

I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love.

- Marquez, Memories of my Melancholy Whores

I have, in a decade, sampled and sacrificed for the red herrings that many claim as truth. Even now, as I guide and educate youth, I am still exploring frantically, as I suppose I will be, when I am ninety-one. I am unsure; in my days of dilettantism and dabbling, has anything left behind more than scars and regret? Has there existed, in any form, the immortality found in each and every narrative, in Nasser Ali’s embracing of death, when love departs, the staunch idealism of Aunty Henny, and unknowable perfection of a life lived blindly, the atomised moments of languorous afternoons, in the only secular transcendance we’ll ever know, etc.? This immortality exists, but only in the books I hoard, in my room, and one day I shall sell everything else, as well, leaving only my books and notebooks, and just the photos that I can squeeze onto the wall.

I read, not as Bloom suggests, as solitary praxis, but rather, as denial. To feel greater the depth of my loneliness, the void between my experience and those of others, to aid the construction of unspeakable meaning as I babble to others, and so on. Slipping away from conformity to days of industrious labour, calculated to erase the tedium of a real life, and earn myself hours of solitude, on mornings like this.

Marquez writes: In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are. In all the books that remain, lingering and musty, in my mind, I find the beginnings of an end, where, weary and shrunken, I finally make the choices that youth cannot, and retire gladly to an inner sanctum, where I will measure out my days in pages and monologues. Did I ever really believe otherwise? Have I not read the signs?

One week has barely passed, and I have finished essays and assignments I cannot quote (context! context!) and written another ten thousand words. I have plunged into the deepest abyss of boredom and fought my way through legions after legions of obligations, duties and responsibilities, all for the right to spend a hour or two a day reading and reflecting. And I will have my cake and eat it! In the last week, there have been rumblings; I am confirmed in my place for the coming year, the New Atheists emerge into the spotlight, tragedy has struck great people and tremendous things are happening in the places that matter, and I slowly, slowly, put names to faces and set the stage for the coming year. As the year fades, I will have time to correspond, piece together fragments of ideas, and finally lie down, and rest. I should very much like to be able to do so. And for the next few days, I will pretend.

10, 000 words in 24 hours, and counting, and no end in sight; it is exhilarating to be able to roam freely across time and space again, and all there is left to do is to find time to read the thousands of pages I must before the new year begins. A plethora of intellectual (and lesser) obligations in addition to personal ambition demands a lifestyle that revolves around the construction of knowledge and its application. How would one go about pretending to live such a life? By being ruthless, selfish, misanthropic, absolutely insufferable, or by being completely invisible, living in the shadows and always just out of sight.

Over the weekend; Tiger and the Snow. Benigni is an unlikely combination of absent-mindedness and worldliness. His naïveté is quickly tiring, and it is his personification of human, pure, love that endears, and sustains. His is impossibly efficient and resourceful where love is concerned, but cannot remember where he parked his car, ever. Delicious! There is the light, frivolous intertextuality, Fuad, our conscience, the fatalistic, pragmatic poet, a man of this world, with whom we can empathise, but cannot identify with. In Baghdad, in war, with the realities of the world pressing in, Vittoria is similarly oblivious to our useless and misguided machinations; she loves him but musn’t know; he, she, we are all not allowed that knowledge, lest love become rational, logical, put together, common-sensical. But without knowledge there can only be chance and fate; action is galvanised by knowledge, and therein lies the paradox and the natural death of any narrative of love, amour, and this climaxes at the joining of hands in the midst of overpowering, uplifting, smothering forces. Just as Benigni is removed from reality, we are told that the easiest way to love and to live is to dream, to live in utter ignorance, brash impertinence, or to be invisible. Vittoria! Vittoria!

My battered moleskine, still unnamed, dark and brooding, is fixed, and lives on. Pages of semi-narrative and drowning thoughts, a heathen pragmatism applied to our secret lives, and one day to remember and forget. I look forward to a bit of cinematic heaven; but am not sure. Trusty Benigni, Aardman, or Nolan, all delicious and delectable? Cohen, who is not here yet, or Gore? Then, a blistering essay to craft, a show-and-tell, and a flourish to savour. Daydreams to point the way to tomorrow. Days and days like this, living on borrowed time, only moments before descending back into the maelstrom (and perhaps one day to never return). Almost more than I can bear, this mind of mine, waking up, finally, finally. Public discourse is almost tragic as it literally falls apart, and to roam daily across the disciplines, to be able to live among those whose lives might be made or unmade through such unseen, unknowable machinations as these, to have each moment bursting with sweetness, an incomplete beauty, to look forward to possible tomorrows instead of fading yesterdays, to perhaps one day find a tongue to use, as all those who have come and gone had, or could have had, and one day to remember them all.

The Drunkard’s Song
Rilke

It wasn’t in me. It went out and in.
I wanted to hold it. It held, with Wine.
(I no longer know what it was.)
Then Wine held this and held that for me
till I came to depend on him totally.
Like an ass.

Now I’m playing his game and he deals me out
with a sneer on his lips, and maybe tonight
he will lose me to Death, that boor.
When he wins me, filthiest card in the deck,
he’ll take me and scratch the scabs on his neck,
then toss me into the mire.

Thank you, and I am glad.

There is no better gift than to learn that I am to be saved in the new year, when I will teach students more than facts and knowledge. Now, I am finally beginning to feel like a teacher, even if I will be struggling and floundering. An excellent choice, so many years ago. And, even though there are still regrets and fears, and hurt, for once, the days stretching ahead of me are full of hope, excitement, possibility, etc. I am doubly glad.

At a recent gathering of fellow educators, we gazed into crystal balls and saw more of the same. There was thickly brewed coffee, lush carpeting, and glacial sweets between sumptuous meals, which have convinced me that enough, is as it should be, enough, and there will be no more stimulants and intoxicating substances, for a while. It reminds me of what I read, after sunrise, days ago.

‘Ah, you sensible people!’ I cried, with a smile. ‘Passions! Intoxification! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt, passing by like the priest and thanking God like the Pharisee that you are not as other men. I have been intoxicated more than once, my passions have never been far off insanity, and I have no regrets…

- The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe

Young Werther is wrong, of course, naive, to say the least, and doomed to die for his hubris and transgressions. Respect and worthiness in a person is largely important only to oneself, a measure of one’s state of dunkedness (pardon my impunity, and no, not drunkedness), i.e. how caught up one is in acceptance, social status, etc. And in a recent survey, I saw that there are men these days that have no one to speak to, which is no surprise, considering the many alternatives we have today for real conversation (or real men, and people). There are few today who will take the time to seriously consider another; impressions and hearsay form the basis of the decision to stay and talk, or move on and condemn another to the eternal abyss of strangerhood. True friendship, it might be said, is in danger of becoming extinct; even those we meet regularly or speak with are themselves inconstant and transient. It is telling that we look to silence and eye contact as measures of a friend’s enduring committment. We are never sure, not anymore. A friend today, a stranger tomorrow, torn apart by circumstance, misunderstanding, apathy, and ignorance.

Perhaps we forget too easily that we comprehend time poorly. I have lived a quarter of a century, at the least, and I am frequently alarmed at how little I have accomplished. I am uncouth, uneducated, desirous, hungry and selfish, and will remain in this state of discontent until I die. What mitigates long days and longer nights is the idea that nothing is cast in stone. We are constrained by our lot in life; there are obligations and rules, of all sorts, at all levels, and it is just as important to honour them as it is to turn one’s face to the sun and remind oneself that life is infinitely variable. It is only in Singapore that we are seized with fear that we will, for instance, fail our examinations and thereafter lose all hope of finding reasonable employment, or that if we choose the wrong spouse, we will live a life of miserable single parent-hood and devastating social condemnation. If we do not get into the right schools, the right jobs, the right places, all is lost, and we will then live out our lives as listless automatons, working to feed ourselves, and not much else.

It is not true, of course. Success and moral imperatives have been elevated and mythologised, and it is criminal not to fail but to think of failure as acceptable. And I am guilty as charged; in as much as I make many decisions to follow, crudely, my heart, I am still alarmingly conservative. I still, in my weaker moments, think in terms of predictable endgames and saccharine futures, like any human would. At times I am rash and push such visions away, as I have done recently, and always hope that they will never return, that I might ignite and be burnt away in a flash, but then that is foolishness and another story altogether.

Next year I will take the plunge and live at least one dream.