Morning, the usual commute. All the sent emails from the sea from F, opened up, read, and reread. Today is his last day after all, and then chop chop, the helicopter on towards home. I cannot imagine being at the sea, not on your own admission. I wonder if he has read Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea. All I could muster up, was a line from The Waste Land. ‘Consider Phlebeas, who was once as handsome and tall as you’. (I might have gotten this wrong).
In return, what have I considered? Perhaps motioning through life, as I always have, morbidly.
*
“Is this poem romantic?”, the question said. A poem from Zurinah Hassan, made itself into the English literature syllabus. “Yes, because she is in love with the artist”, my sister says. “Yes, because she longs for the past”, I say. The answer at the back says “No, because it’s about the irony wanting to hear a flute played when all is suffering, not love”. I then proceed to give a crash course on romanticism to my sister, the night before her exam.
*
On the drive back and forth to Eksotikata, Loq and I talked, mostly about childhood memories, love and the things we love.
If there’s anything I love doing, it is the downplaying of personal memories. I treat everything insignificantly, I have no appreciation of the moment (and this is the opposite of Rilke’s being), no carpe diems, no nothing.
This, in contrast with all the women at the office, who tell every little detail they remember, down to the singlest remark or gesture, and carry themselves, cubicble from cubicle repeating the same stories, for weeks and weeks, which recedes itself into a dull buzz in my ears.
I wonder how this, Knausgard dude, can bore out details of his grandmother’s death in eighty or so pages. How one can, excavate the mind, concentrate solely on churning out memories into words and words into a book. One must be attentive, to absorb all that is happening surrounding them.
But off now, to work.
perkaraperkara 