kulturbrille:amanuensis

Last December, somewhere north:

Departure, No signboard, packing was excruciating. Xtorrent surfaced, time went by, the Budget Terminal. Lovely plain flight, extra long trip to Kamon, sleepy, miniminally commercialised town. Jazz festival.

Pleasantly simple. Westerners and straight perfect beaches. Buzzed at noon and Inside Enderby. Retirement for outcasts. Leaving it all behind and being intellectual.

Afternoons in languor; a life of purpose and activities that count in the long run. Running, swimming, eating, writing. Functional, pragmatic objects. A certain perfection, a defiant drive.

Days of gentle nothing.

In Phuket, it drizzled every afternoon, a sprinkling of holy water. Unfit, pudgy, pasty, swimming with Enderby, grimacing  at a rows of fuschia beach umbrellas, I stumble.

One understands more, now. Fixated on a certain consumption, unable to act and, with each committment, unable to go any further, this is me. In a week, Christmas, and I will be in an even more decrepit cafe, somewhere northeast, somewhere else. There will be pen, and paper, sore legs, and not much else.  I can’t read for the mosquitoes, can’t think for the chaos, so there is nothing to do but drink, mumble, and deny.

You see, there is no Muse, only a Void. By luck, or by chance, one generates meaning from fragments. A year’s worth of resolutions will always include losing weight, reading, writing, remembering every moment, line and face. Without fail, it falls away, limp and watery, though one is never sure if it is tears or rain, or a holy shower of purgatory.

The hours of each day should be apportioned and ideas ruthlessly torn apart. Just like that, just like that. No one will ever be sufficient, no year will ever be complete. But there are years to fill and lives to save.

I remember when I was in Iran, living and looking down at a soccer field, and typed madly on a stowaway. All lost, but in any case never to be read again. Cast, away. Perhaps one must sweep clean to make anew.

One last morning in Phuket, in a gleaming cafe with Bose speakers and hip-hop, and adjacent to a garish tour operator where a young thai woman endlessly powders her face. 50 metres away, happy brown people frolick in the surf. What more could I want? Worn down by the year, sedentary, inert. A holiday to forget, but every moment a reminder of the year past, mad and full of regret.

Perhaps I am too old for regret,  but I am still not conditioned sufficiently to wash it down in beer or hedonism; I am still very much a creature of this world, but not for long, I think, if the narratives of the Woo Yen Yens and Enderbys of this world are any measure. I am to become nothing.

The purpose of my holidays, then, are for me to surface for air, immerse myself in the wide, impossible expanse of this universe, remind myself of my mortality, and then return, rejuvenated and refreshed.

Alone, then, unworthy and incapable of any reasonable amount of human interaction, lost. Was it ever so hard to understand?

Bustling, the cafe prepares for Christmas. Tinsel (onomatopoeic word that it is), a stunted tree, and before long good Christmas cheer and sultry recorded singing. I hesitate, I am visiting a possible future. I will stay a little longer.

What self-respecting person would fly across half the world and sit at a cafe and stare at the beach. Ideas, narratives, existence, the broken shards of time past, all sitting comfortably amongst plastic tables and glistening rattan chairs. Is this what they dream of, in winter, in their grey offices and ghost-filled streets?

Farewells, goodbyes, slipping away into the night, fading, moving on, quietly, leaving behind no trace except disheveled seats, lingering scent, imaginary babble.

I can’t wait to fasten my seat belt, wreck my fingers, open every first page.

This entire year, I have not watched a single F1 race, the last of which is about to finish in a moment; this is in many ways quite remarkable. I have tumbled, caught myself, found love, been caught, and more. But mostly, I have been carting books and papers around all year, in boxes, files, piles, stacks, and this week will be just the same. But it is the last week. For every morning that began at 4am, every afternoon that slipped by in a blur of files and papers, for every frustrating evening spent flying to and fro and fighting the darkness, I sound the Last Post. There is no going back. It is done.

Hundreds of photographs this week, and a 10-22 or 60 macro before London. Rrrrrr.

There are several ways to start writing. A liberal dose of caffeine, emotional turmoil, a gun pointed to one’s head, mon amour, IPPT in the morning, NaNoWriMo, and so on. There has been no time, this year, to write, to myself, to others, to feel the keyboard and to know that this is me. Writing, among all the recent forms of expression that I am involved in – photography, dabbling in music, engineering the possibility of art – is equally exacting and forgiving. I write here, but also in many other places, for many different reasons. The flow of text across the screen has become a guilty, secret pleasure, because there are priorities and complications, and it is time for me to stand and be counted, to not let the complexities of this human, social, limited life constrain me.

Freedom, liberation, my first time.

It is hard to write literally – one remembers faster than one can type, or scribble in a stilted, unfamiliar script – because memories that are recent and fresh are multi-faceted, rich in sensory information, input, context, meaning, ideas. Our best memories are reinforced by our recounting them; writing is one way. 2, 3 years, spent letting memories pass me by, living dual lives in so many ways, speaking and thinking obliquely and never quite saying what I mean, or meaning what I say.

So, for the first time, I write literally, here, for such a long time. Blogging itself has very little intrinsic value, ever since I started in 2002, it has never been more than a tool for me to write, present, parse and reexamine ideas, memories, thoughts. At times it became the only way I could express myself, but even then, behind several layers of obfuscation. But writing, I think, transcends meaning and location, context. It first presents itself as the conduit, but ultimately it becomes the very essence of who we are; words on a page or screen melding with our transient experiences to become a foundation and bedrock of our identity

Yesterday, at Kinokuniya, I bought Renaissance Singapore, or rather, R did. Partially because there is a part of me that must at time wallow in a universe of ideas chased all the way to their denouement, partly because I am going to the National Education Branch next year (I am already listed on the directory), and partly because second to writing, or its equal, is reading – seeing the world through the eyes of another, watching as my mind shifts and change with every line, experience, thought.

Somewhere at the back of my mind as I browsed I saw the other books sitting on every desk I use, bedside tables, the backseat of my car, all in various states of decay. There is now time for this, of course; I am leaving, in a couple of weeks, and traveling back to London, to read, walk, dream and sit with. And today, the IPPT settled for the year, last night, an opening of the vocal cords, and my head reels, now, as the associations bubble up. The Raoul sale, my favourite sweater lost, death and destruction in Pakistan, 377A, duties, obligations, fears and ideas, photography, transitions, various snippets and pages and the feeling of having lectured 5 times this week, and how I am so much in love and starting to emerge into the light.

Yes, my first time.

NaNoWriMo; it is November, after all, a time to move on, produce, generate. In one month I will make the journey home, expunge, cleanse, purge, and fly across half the world to a familiar place. Words slip across the screen in Helvetica, the pristine pixel-perfect pitching of an aging Tiger beckoning once more, now almost free of bullet points and slide and tables and all manners of nefarious formatting that every uses but knows nothing about. Photographs abound, the promise of a new perspective, words pouring out of my ears, my mouth, in the torrent a new beginning, a welcome conclusion, with nothing in my way, not orphaned LibraryThings, not bursting Amazon wishlists, not mountains of books waiting and fleeing from my grasp. In my mind – lives, of the English, repressed love, circles of believers sitting in a room, the sanctity of a blank page, the dull clink of machine spun wine glasses, the clouds of dust from a million things hurled into boxes, luggage, objects of transportation, the thrum of engines moving the world in unison, hearts beating in fearsome synchrony, in the dead of the night, students relishing their freedom, unaware of its transience, lives about to be smashed, ephermally fulfilled and punctuated with the tangy chill of an emptying spoon, faraway, contemptuous looks and careless shrugs of shoulders, words bitten back but cascading down in the darkness, all this coming and going and thick black lines found only in illustrations and superhero comics; the Watchmen, the surge of emotions, an upwelling of fear, sweet sickly, and love, blindingly perfect and all-consuming. So cheers; NaNoWriMo, an excuse, November, a month of liberation, words, my lifeblood, lives, canvas, stuff, ether, silly putty, for the taking and the giving.

Words, words, words. Three, four films, and half a dozen other narrative events in the last week; moleskines, coffeeshopping, bookshopping with a vengeance, and 2 weeks to a final flourish. There is one black notebook for catharsis, one for revelation and faith, and a couple for tracing out the lines of our lives as we wander off into the sunset, and an expectant red one to fill with the ink of the new year.

2, 3 years at my current school and quite worn out; I have tried my hand at every opportunity presented, challenged myself to teach, mentor, learn, embrace, and I have emerged somewhat wiser, if almost in pieces. Friends and family I have neglected; and I was blind to the one soulmate I have now found. So it is with a great relief that I am able to write, now. For none of this is easy; it is hubris and confidence that allows me to plunge right in and tackle, organize, sort, engineer outcomes and seek closure. I leap, and am caught.

Through all my years, which I have oft recounted in lectures, class, in rooms too warm and in places too open, I have by choice and through circumstances found myself traipsing through places unfamiliar and foreign; I have found in my lonely sojourns with a few wonderful friends, now lost to time and fate, a part of myself that has shaped me. I have no confession to make, not in the manner of Rousseau, only thanks to give, for those that came into my life and stayed far longer than they dared, for those that came knocking and quietly left, and for those who I passed in the street and only knew fleetingly. To them all I owe my faith, my loves, my self.

I have only this much to offer, to the few that I now quietly sit beside. My mind, gently throbbing, aching, gathering itself for its new journey, my one and only heart, now revealed, pure, singular, vulnerable, true, and my steady hand, strengthened and weathered, bringing us to a place where we are no longer strangers but at rest in a place both familiar and new, far and near.

For there has been no greater day than this, that I might face the future sight unseen.

As I pack up to move home after being away again for almost 2 years; I have picked through the detritus of almost 8 years of a nomadic, itinerant life. London, where I lived and died, in the army, where I wandered as lonely as a cloud, and in school, where I gave everything up for the life I have today. It is time to organize the Library, time to burn letters, postcards, photographs, time to sort through years of narratives – camera equipment, pens, papers of all textures, sizes, scribblings and notes, drawings and ideas, stubs, crumpled programmes, receipts for sandwiches and coffee, stacks of used tickets, boarding passes, rail cards, library cards, hard drives from treacherous computers, empty Bombay Sapphire bottles, half-filled, stained, flaky notebooks, an ebony guitar persistently out of tune, mysteriously worn-out rollerblades, a doubly etched sword, ziplocs filled with crumbling passports and army notebooks, useless souvenirs, each with a story waiting to be told, and finally, finally, someone to tell them to, beginning with the incredible adventure of how I found you.

Hello, you.

Having finished with Open House (almost, not quite, but close enough) and now tidying up and struggling to break free of all else that is due, obligatory, mandatory, all it took was for R to flop towards to make a difference. There is no retelling of the last 2 years that will do justice to the magnitude of what the person that I am becoming; with each literal word that rings true I am finally emancipated. I feel a little of that doom that Mr. Yee in Lust, Caution carried in his bones. This is my fate, and there is only this.

Come December, London, and finally, free to post pictures, tell stories, and to stand up and be counted among the faithful and the true.