kulturbrille:amanuensis

Fishbowl is back, of course; it took 3 weeks and many lurching, roaring experiences in a forgotten replacement to drive home the point.

10 minutes, a moment to catch one’s breath, somewhere out there, by the river, looking back on a blog-void (collect them!) of 2 months, thinking if there really is anything to be said here and now that I haven’t already quietly mouthed in the last few weeks. There will be respite soon, from the trundling momentum of event after event, but then I will literally be washed up on the beach, dripping, blinking, noting very carefully the sand between my toes and the sun on my face.

And now, they would say, it is the time for action. No longer can we stand balefully outside the window, no longer can we stamp our feet on the cracked pavement. No longer can we allow our brethren and assorted associated lumps of flesh and blood to breathe this putrid air, no longer can we tolerate ignorance, prejudice, and a litany of other half-misunderstood intolerances. We must stand up and be counted, there will be change, whether we want it or not. You are the key, the wretched instrument of my salvation. Your time is past, do something useful with what little you have left. Take this change, seize it with both your hands, if you are able, and hop around in a dance of euphoria, at least until the joint ends. Thank you! Thank you!

I give thanks, and am put in my place. God, family, Rachel, friends, life. Amen.

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.

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.

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.

Every day, even with Newsfire, I end up with a thousand or so posts that I can never read in full. Lethargy, apathy, circumstance, the litany of excuses for not being alive - not that reading every post in a devilishly simple newsreader is life - somehow gives me that feeling, that peculiar disconnectedness, isolation, that I’ve savoured in so many train stations around the world.  Tanjong Pagar, the old King’s Cross, Baltimore, Grand Central, York, Tampere (in Finland), Syracuse, dozens of open-air, identified-only-by-cyrillic-script platforms where trains could stop. At everyone, at some ungodly hour, laden with packs and books, a mind quelled and bursting, but knowing that for that short eternity between now and that time on the board, there is nothing. Nothing.

That’s for another time, though. I explain briefly the revival of del.icio.us, Pukka, Newsfire, the habit of marshalling links and devouring, consuming, waiting for the day when, like a balanced meal, there will be a cloud of tags bursting with colour, my inner leanings, and every spark that I ever knew somehow here again. Photos like only a mechanical, unseeing camera could capture, lines from scraps of plays, film, secret books and passing souls, and a symphony of knowledge, information, ideas that I have come to believe is possible with.

Be not afraid.

Sorting through books, happily shelving, already reliving memories of adolescence and childhood, hungrier than ever before and coasting to a standstill, waiting for a time. In a way, capable of ingesting more information, more efficiently, but disconnected from drive or impetus. Names, faces, memories, a past that is textured, multi-dimensional, tangible, not the peculiarly simplistic version that we all thought we had and paraded with wild abandon. I did not know there was only one chance.

Solitude is in short supply; it is not a desirable commodity, of course, but everyone needs a little of it, fallible, weak, sinful beasts that we are, like alcohol or a fag, or a guilty pleasure only you can know, etc. There is no solitude left in this country, feebly, we are made to feel that all manner of extensible social contact, from fellow miserable lift-users to distant disenfranchised Chinese in Penang, everyone’s existence is brought to bear on the small window of our existence, with us peeking out at everything and our faces fixed in an expression of eagerness, interest and intelligence rapidly fading into perplexity. Wait, wait, what was that again?

A year ago, in school, I often bemoaned the lack of time to read – to process information, to take it in – I fingered fiction and magazines, opened my RSS reader (I must say, Newsfire is making me very happy, in a Tuftesque kind of way) every morning, guilty at the thousand or so preening and strutting unread articles, read 10 before my morning coffee, and consoled myself. But in reality, I read a great deal more each morning than I do today – Kant, Locke, Chomsky, Russell, each day, I ripped through pages and pages, speed reading both out of necessity and desperation, paraphrasing and engineering lessons, before trooping out to construct a reality I had always wanted to inhabit.

This year, I am reduced to being an engineer; wandering around an empty NIE campus on a Sunday afternoon, churning out correspondence and juggling plans and ideas as best as I can. I am fortunate; just last week I have been able to slip into the mix 2 dozen research papers and books by Freire and Marsh, plus the entire library of resources that my department has accumulated as part of its work – I am to write a dissertation for my MEd, which will inform and guide my work. But this great fortune is in the midst of chaos and madness, of a certain kind.

I return frequently to the notion of information, knowledge in its crudest form. I need to read, be it the Bible, dozens of newspaper articles, commentary on all manner of things from the railroad sleepers to moebius strips to hairy crabs and the mechanics of jet propulsion. Each serves a purpose; each fills a part of me that heaves into life each time. But that is what my education and upbringing gave me, an insatiable thirst for knowing that has taken over all else, that I have stumbled and fallen, and searched, and questioned, until, exhausted, I was unsure of what I was.

So, here and now, I am just merely thankful for quiet afternoons and books and papers to read, and a chance to construct meaning at work, to immerse myself, and on the horizon, other pieces of a jigsaw that I cannot, dare not mention just yet. Spilling over myself, remembering every jarring moment as I regard photographs, memories, thoughts, listing, desperately, every shred of information as if I could transform them into a discernable element of this…

Already I am buried in something else. Wait a moment.

At this point in time last year, I was juggling a dozen different responsibilities, and dark, dark nights. Fear drove me through books and material; I was endlessly moving from book to book, from book to class, from class to meeting, meeting to meeting, food, madness, and love. I had taken on too much, and I didn’t need hindsight to tell me that. At the end of the year, I collapsed, nearly insensate, weakly counting my blessings.

It is starting to feel almost the same, now. Hour after hour, grappling with abstract plans, blatantly leering glances at rows of books nearby, cabinet after cabinet of files, careful manoevering amongst responsibilities, obligations, new ways of doing things, everything a whirl of newness and unfamiliarity, every moment spent in momentary reflection a respite from the torrent.

This year, I am standing still, while all around me everyone stumbles along. Plans, dreams, hopes, fears, somehow or the other we are all swept along. I feel, guiltily, envy, at the plans of others laid out by chance or by design; I count my blessings and I cling all the tighter to all that makes me whole. Perhaps I have spent too long living through symbols, motifs. Doors, books, hearts that will forever remain unseen, substitutes and replacements for the act of living. Out there, there are 3 boxes of books, still on their way back from Hay-on-Wye, in the picture above, a place of escapism and alternatives, the aesthetic of which is not made any less by a repudiation of their permanence.

My dream of opening a bookshop has remained, however, from its distant beginnings when I had the freedom to roam and imagine myself in the shoes of others. Today it stands, a monument and blueprint, beckoning with its imperative stare that I find my way to its doorstep. Each day, every page I spend in a half-wakeful stupor, drinking, imbibing, in denial and mesmerised, a broken record and turntable, woefully clinging to the sensation of flight and ascension, I remember the dream.

The fine line between this unwholesome fear and the miniscule beyond; dare I hope to be able to pull us through? Dare I speak once more of thoughts and ideas, knowledge and information, meanings and consequences, instead of spinning, spinning, in a void made by my own hand? How shall I reassure, how shall I choose?

(I feel the quickening of a litany.)

Having been parachuted into my new workplace - having been in the army for 2 weeks, driven by a desire to do things well and properly, not just by the book but for my men - I am now half a mess. The last 2 days at work have been clearer and more focussed than any other day this year; I find myself switching between work and reading, information, ideas quickly, the calm and peace of 2 weeks of sun and sleeplessness masquerading as wakefulness, interspersed with hours of being with R and shards of books and articles, have been more restful that I dared hope for. But there is still hunger; a desire to walk down the road talking to myself, standing still, waiting for a moment, touching every life that slips by, a hunger to spend every waking moment immersed in doing and thinking and being, a foolish hunger, no doubt, but an increasingly sharp, present and gnawing hunger. 12 hours of work a day, less sleep than I really need, and struggling to find the space to balance out my hopes and dreams with my fears and doubts, but, hey. It’s working. Cartier-Bresson never had it so easy; I am now a kaleidoscope of untold dreams, slowly awakening. Sigh.