the weekend

 

(continued)

I read a translation of Danarto’s Orang Jawa Naik Haji. They did not have his other copies available (It is in Storage, for all I know), and sat between the musty shelves at the second floor of the Fisher Library, drying my feet and my skirt. Rain suddenly poured, and I was left but no choice but to dash to the Quadrangle. A man came running to me, holding out his umbrella, muttering “You might need this“. I said yeah. I took shelter somewhere beneath the stairs where no one would pass and wait out the rain to calm down, but then an old man saw me and remarked, “You found yourself a nice dry spot there“. I said yeah. Yeah is all I say these days. 

The translation was okay, I found the phrase ‘Danarto has turned into cotton’ quite interesting. Marked here and there, it was either some undergraduate thesis or some other. Out of time, I read it in bits. It is interesting to find Mina in 1983 covered in filth, where people ate, shat, slept, and prayed in the same spot. Is this all part of the trial purposely put to make us reflect, or are we just being neglected by authority? He then tells of the Safa and Marwa, where somewhere along the way, some old person made a mess, and the officers had to make a circle to clean it up, thus even constricting the already congested path. The money-grubbing Arabs. “To give as little as possible, and to take as much as possible“.

Then I leafed through the random books available, from Goenawan to Latiff Mohidin to some of Chairil Anwar’s poems (this is the first time). Poetry baffles me sometimes. Poetry as the art of reduction. Barthes calls classical poetry merely an ornamental variation of prose, the fruit of an art. To be poetic, he says, doesn’t evoke any depth or domain – only the ability of expressing oneself more verbosely, artistically, than that of a conversation. Modern poetry, is however absent of all these aesthetics, ‘a quality sui generis and without antecedents’. If classical poetry is born out of thought, the modern arrives at a thought, to an ’emotional density’.

(That is what he writes in ‘Is There Poetic Writing?’ from the book Writing Degree Zero, anyway.)

A came around four thirty, thirty minutes before the library closes, and we went upstairs to see some rare text exhibitions. She left me before to study physics. We looked through all the brains and muscles brilliantly sketched at the pages and at some 12th century scrolled text. Probably written in Latin. We went to dinner after that, at one of the wives. Her house was twenty minutes away from the university, and so we walked, passing through the already finished street fair this morning (despite the rain), the vendors closing each of their stalls. I heard Quizas Quizas Quizas playing, and a pakcik Melayu (who sold satay) remarked ‘Dah habis baru nak pasang yang ni‘. There in the park, was a monument erected in the name of the Glorious Dead. Is there anything glorious about the dead?

The wife’s house was one of those classic terrace houses in Sydney, built probably in the late 19th century. I always wanted to go inside on of them and sit at the balconies, and sat we did, eating ice cream, while inside the men watched KL Gangster 2 on TV and the women hurdle around a photo album. The wallpapers, windows, furniture, are wonderful to look at. The idea of the porter suddenly made sense, as the owner rented the second and the third floor to other people. Downstairs, I peered into the living room where the walls were lined with shelves full of books. The owner is probably a quiet person, I said to our host. She said yeah, and we said our goodbyes on the landing and went home.