Author: perkaraperkara

wastefulness

He asked me yesterday if ever read the Shahadatul Haq.

Truth be told, I don’t even remember the gist of the book, except that it expounds on the meaning of the Shahadah, and how it is required, how it is our duty to expound this meaning to others, to spread this Haq (truth), that is by pledging to it, we must exemplify it, act upon it, to see that Islam is before our eyes.  To re-enact, re-instate. To place it as the centre of our lives (and others). I remember A, and several others telling me how this ‘revelation’ and this sense of duty affect them so deeply. A asked if what I felt. What did I thought? Probably not the in the same degree as they did.

We talked about the country and how to mend society and its people, and the process of education. All too broadly applied a word. “It all sounds good in theory, but what about the practicality?”, he responds. Aaah, in the specifics he tries to draw me in. I said I do not know. You need people. In the end he comments on my ‘floating around doing nothing’ when I could’ve done more. Not playing the part, as it were. What was I waiting for?

Here I am, having just watched a six hour film about Freud the other day,  with Andre Gide’s The Immoralist book having just arrived for next semester’s subject,  Modernism,  having trite concerns about the indefinite future, pondering whether I should study the Enneagram theory or not after seeing the book this evening. I am wondering what to cook tomorrow.

Indeed I am hovering around aimlessly. I am without a cause.

So I told him that I am not ready.

Of course he and I share more similarities than we care to admit, except that we come from different schools of thought; where he would shudder at  the words ‘a more moderate Islam’.  After all, while he  was reading books from the likes of Hassan Al-Banna or the sirah and the tafsir,  I was dabbling with whatever seems to fancy me at the moment. It would take a lot of effort to be good, do good, but I shall, I shall, I shall. One has to first purify the heart after all, or at least have some initiative towards it, before one tries to do anything outside the scope the individual.

Otherwise one would be a hypocrite.

(dis)engagement

Tomorrow, my brother is getting engaged. It hadn’t really dawned on me if it was not for my cousin video-calling me on facebook (after so many months of ignoring her) this evening, telling that her mother has just flown from Kota Bharu to KL just to attend the ceremony. Maybe I am just too caught up in my own little world that I seem to not peg these little family events in my head. His birthday I noticed only after seeing the little pink birthday cake on facebook next to his name, and I sent a sort of a wish to him. F does a better job than me, at this. I seem to lack the propensity for birthdays, and instead of thinking of gifts for them, I think of Fernando Pessoa’s (or Alvaro de Campos’s, really) poems on the (in)significance of them.

I read that there are currently five hundred thousands of Japanese over a hundred years old, and the thought of it shudders me. If the age of retirement is sixty five, then what is one to do for the rest of the remaining years? Taking trains and reading at bookshops with their little bookcovers or visit the hundreds of temples and shrines in Kyoto, I suppose. Most of the local tourists there are very old.

Yesterday I had my English exam, and I think I did not do a good job at it. Instead of representing masculinity, I am representing the feminine. I should have practiced, knowing I have not answered any time-constrained 3-page-length essay for almost five years already. But things events disappointments happiness quickly fade as if they never happen, and we shall always feel the need to continually seek moments of happiness wherever it may be.

Of course, of course, I try to fill this void by not doing things I am supposed to do but to stall, to forego, and then forget them. I seek in the negative, and view the opposite as something unattainable, that I admire from a distance but can only do so much as to not approach them.

Do I dare disturb the universe, then?

in transit

She would scream at the slightest excitement. It is perhaps in her nature, to do something like this, that one had to, immediately divert their attention to her high pitched voice, only to find out that she is merely raving about videos of a baby holding a baby cat being meowed by the mother cat. She’s watched this probably the twentieth time in succession. Is there revulsion in my tone? None, perhaps, but only annoyance.

I am waiting for his call, but it never came. I was woken up by my father instead. Here he tells me that my cousin shall be staying in my room for three months while she is interning, that my brother is getting engaged next week, that my sister went to camp and had to wade through mud as high as her chest, and that my mother is tired. I am removed from all this. My world is cocooned, confined only to the university and the house and the roads between them. Occasionally I run away to the big city, to watch Glen Hansard or Bloc Party perform, or to see my friends. I went away to Japan all on my own. But all these moments are rare, and the space between these acts evaporate. What significance do I look forward to but the calls from home, that shall tell me things that I am missing out of?

It is morning, and still I await his call. To be separated by distance and time is difficult. This is difficult.

I open my tub of yogurt and fill my bowl to half. Always go for vanilla. My friends have departed to the university to study. It is exam week anyway, and I have one tomorrow as well. I should, I should, I should move.

the yew

as i sat reminiscing days gone by, viewed with both a sense of delight and remorse, there she came and reminded me of my own inner turmoil which i have disclosed to her not more than a year ago. strange how things pass by so quickly and our own attitude and views have changed drastically. yes, i realize that i have fallen. like Plath, i have fallen a long way. and to get back on track is difficult without severing yourself from its source. i am attached to this, and have given my word and devotion. there is no running away but to keep out sieving out the poison slowly.

like chocolate for cake

I bake myself chocolate cake and feel happy. As I cleaned the kitchen, clearing the counter top, washing all the dishes in the sink, putting back the utensils back to their places, a surge of happiness rose within me. Earlier this morning I have felt the same too, while listening to Pheonix’s new album, Entertainment, cleaning my room, donning my prescription sunglasses. I feel empowered with these chores, and is never the happier with a lifetime of cleaning and cooking. After all, I am a woman. 

Around ten i rode my bicycle to A’s house, and opened her tub full of Malteasers, and we both walked to the university to play badminton. I did not want to take the bus, because I hated waiting and loved walking. A paid for me because I was nearly broke. Over here, I slammed the shuttlecock as much as I could before I was tired and tried talking to the woman I played with. She was from Sri Lanka, and she has a PhD. She must be exceptionally smart, and so I become a little disheartened by all the high achievers around me. I remind myself that everyone is good and everyone has their own provisions in the world, and so do I. I become happy again after walking and riding in the sun. I am listening to the Velvet Underground.

At home I try to sleep a little and read De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. Man feels powerful with all his achievements, the rational man, far above all living things, capable of all things – yet at the same time feel powerless in his insignificance in the universe, in the collective whole. This, she says, is ambiguity, and proceeds to Hegel, Sartre, Kierkegaard. I just nod my head a little and play Candy Crush.

 

impersonal

I have this thing where whenever I am pissed, I shall protest my hatred in silence. I shall not talk, but allow myself moments of coldness that can prolong to days or weeks. I shall walk with a blank expression to my face and hover to each corner of the house. I shall look at my face in the mirror and be surprised by how in a space of twenty minutes, or two kilometers,  distance between my house and the train station, I am transformed. I am left here to die, and here my room is the only sanctuary where i shall not speak to anyone. I feel neglected, having passed through days of constant walking at nights and laughing madly with the people I am comfortable with, talking of whatever obscure topics and analysis I have made. Here I retreat to my solitude, and lament to my father that no longer do I feel close to God. I lament to my boyfriend that I am bored. Maybe it is the shift in the environment, where one feels suspended from one state of cheerfulness and another of total solitude. Maybe I am transitioning.

scrambled

DSC_2002

There is a certain comfort in cleaning up your own room. To begin with, I have removed most of the things from the corked board, leaving nothing but the exam schedule, and photos, photos of my child, the siblings as children, of  friends you no longer see actively in your life. A pen drive, marking your position as a student, a toothbrush to signify that occasionally you shall sleep from one house to another, a lens cloth to say that you wear classes. Then there are those books. What do they mean, if Al-Attas was lined with Kafka, , Said,  Beauvoir,  Barthes and Rilke? It means you are in a state of confusion. A crisis of identity.

I try to remain sane despite having to nothing to look forward to but a steps of stones in a  pond that I must jump from one to another. It is June.  I try to list  things that I must cross out evenly, with some sort of false affirmation that everything is going to be alright. But I remain, crumpling myself at my bed after a shower, staring wide eyed to the reflection of the sky at my mirror, denying myself the pleasure of the going outside. My bicycle is left in the rain, battered and ignored. Soon it shall squeak  and squeal pathetically at each cycle to the beach.

denial of the elevated

Perhaps the key is to remove yourself completely from being to attentive to the other until one day, one finally loses hope and scuffle somewhere else. She tells you she is “bored by those cult” writers, those being Palahniuk, Plath, Salinger. You are disgusted by her lumping together Palahniuk with any of your favourite writers, but you remain calm to her. You were introducing Barthes to begin with. He is of a different kind.

Enlightenment – the virtue of having being elevated to a certain position, feels herself better, where one begins to see clearly of a situation and begin to reproach it. It is all good, as one always pass from one stage to another, or in this case, one level to another, for it is an ascent, a vertical one, not where one moves but still lie on the same plane circling around, doomed for repetition.

But to annihilate the past, to the point of denial of one’s own self (or what once was), is to me foolish. One has to embrace all aspects of growth of one’s own self, and not to abandon things but to view things them in a different light. It is not removed from one’s sight, for one is elevated but not displaced, hence it is merely a difference in a point of view, in interpretations relative to one’s own position. 

But she only wants to look upward, to look into the heavens oblivious to everything else. I am suspicious, but I embrace this nevertheless with a certain annoyance. Have I myself become another aspect of your denial, and is thus tossed into alongside amongst your definition of your cult writers, irrelevant and rejected?