kulturbrille:amanuensis

In 2004, I put my life on hold. Unprepared, fresh out of green, about to plunge into teaching, I had several months to roam and discover. (Every time I think of roaming, I think of the time I was in Mongolia, in 2002, with H., sitting outside a ger, reading Nozick’s Invariances, watching the sun deepen from blue to black, and the 3,000 stars visible to the human eye coming out to play, a horizon that went full circle, for an endless, endless night.) I met S., A. found me, I bought a car, I started lessons at the AF, I watched plays, I went to Iran, I half-read, half-drowned. I can barely remember them all, but I can recognise myself.

Between then and now, so much, so very much has happened. You can read it, partly, in asymmetry, now crippled because I have neither the heart nor patience to reassemble the pictures, photographs, the memories. Now, A. is gone, and it is too soon for me to speak, explain, or to make real, incontrovertible declarations that I can only whisper to myself now.

Terrifyingly, I am almost happy.

I sift through all the books that I put on hold in 2004; I look at the stacks that have accumulated in the time since, all the magic that has passed me by, I look at the busy, empty months between then and now, and I ask myself, how did I survive, how did I fall in love and not know it? In the last month, an empty, hollowed chest, and a spinning, spinning head, and too much, and too little. In the last week, finally.

I have systematically destroyed and quelled every spark, every beginning, but. Wrecked, empty, less than half the man I used to be, my tongue paralyzed, my mind limp and bedraggled.

This very morning, I pick up where I left off; I start my motorcycle lessons again, instead of being at church, where I’ve been for the last 2 years. In the blasphemous, electric lyrics of Zero: “Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness, and cleanliness is godliness and God is empty, just like me.” Forward, I must, and then.

Somewhere in between, I’ll find you.

I am at peace with myself. I have no illusions about what has come to pass, and no qualms with what I am doing. Many would say that I am foolish, but who is to understand the shape of a heart that refuses to be smashed? Paradoxically, unfathomably, it continues to beat, sustained by an unequal mixture of willpower, hope and memories, rising and ebbing with the flow of each day and with each tiny morsel that arrives, unceremoniously and callously delivered to one’s door. Lesser mortals would play a part in such a charade, or if so embattled, would have faded and passed away, proud in defeat but in smithereens.

I perservere. I endure alone, because I will not sucuumb to the same mistake, for love is between two, not more, and most certainly not for the common horde to judge or influence. A pure love sits calmly in a maelstrom of uncertainty and impending doom, but gazes upon its destruction calmly, stoic, and finds its only salvation in its very implacable, indomitable nature. For what was misunderstood was my nature; in my darkest days, bereft of love and affection, I turned inward, and never buckled. I walk the straight path, and will prevail.

This heart is mine to give.

Over the last few days I’ve written about 60,000 words. Wonders never cease. 60,000 words, and if I think about the last two years and in between, you can easily multiply that by 20, 30, and you’d still have a conservative estimate of the number of words I’ve written to a single person. Now, if only these words, these lonely missives of companionship, love and committment, had been used more wisely, where would I be now?

I’d still be here, in my second week of school, but perhaps all this loneliness, this despair, this emptiness inside would not be here. Having lost everything through complacency and hubris, as well as apathy, why, there’s nothing to do but to pick myself up, and carry on. Writing, more and more, and more, to that very same person, a torrent, consuming my life, fixated on that singularity, all my hopes, fears and dreams in that one, the one.

Come back, come back.

Writing is transcendence.

(She writes briefly, and I am filled with blazing hope, and equal dread.)

The question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very angry, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but - as in a dream - can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

- Orhan Pamuk, The Nobel Lecture, 2006

For all those that have helped, in any way, thank you, thank you. I will wait.

[Exposed on the cliffs of the heart]
Rainer Maria Rilke

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-ledge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awarenesss,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered bird flies, slowly
circling, around the peak’s pure denial. - But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart….

There are no fresh roses to be bought at 3am anywhere in Singapore.

At least, not at Holland Village, Mustafa, Tekka Market, KK hospital, Tan Tock Seng, and all the wet markets, 7-11s, Cheers and petrol stations in between.

At the temporary Whampoa market, I run right over a concrete road divider, smashing my right side-skirt.

Shaken, I decided to return, before I killed someone or myself, but not before checking that the florists along Thomson Road did not throw out yesterday’s flowers with the trash. I also discovered that at wet markets, florists leave orchids, carnations and other familar, nameless flowers outside at night. But they are not what I promised.

Chinatown, perhaps. Oh, or Waterloo. Sigh.

I have had the most unbelievable 2007; A. has gone, on New Years’ Day. It is both a measure of my eccentricity and desperation that I have responded with no small measure of determination to set things right. There is no more analysis, or gnashing of teeth, and even though I am reduced to a lurching, pensive mess, there is purpose in what I am doing. I have written reams, roamed far and wide in search of clarity and comprehension, and have only energy and willpower left to expend. In all my years, I have done some impossible, incredible, fantastic things. At 26, am I still capable of more? As it turns out, I am. But what is more surprising is how rational and quiet, how focused I am.

What of December? Shrouded in gloom, even before the New Year, I laboured long and hard at items that took up far too much of my time. I spent it in a half-daze, waiting not only for the year to end but for a spark to set me off. Now, I think back to the days I spent attending class, struggling to get started, and of course, with perfect hindsight, should have seen my desperate bookshopping and yearning for solitude as an instinctive defensive mechanism at what was happening so very subtly to me, and her. Every single response was not, as I thought, a discordant alignment of the planets, but rather an intuitive, visceral response to an unknown threat.

In Siam Reap, as I found myself distracted from reality and basking in the brilliant, golden sunshine, slipping between ruins and bars, cafes, strangers, I found sustenance.

No, I will not yield.