perkaraperkara

her gesture(s) of love

it is either these between two;
i am getting exceedingly desperate
or,
no longer having any qualms,
i am rightfully too cheerful
too playful too loud
for my own good.

shall we scream for sheer attention
or shall we slink back quietly into despair?
shall i allow my words be cringe-able
or groom them with curious parables?

***

i burst into laughter when the father said, “we all came from gogol’s overcoat”. de heckkkkkk.

while he might have read the overcoat on the train to calcutta, i first read it (or tried to, because they turned the lights off) on the freaking bus on the way to kelantan, printed out in draft, all twenty or so pages, my first time boarding a night bus alone dammit. then the girl next to me, hei baca apa tu. i said hm, gogol. gogol? de hek is det. ape tu dik. oh tak de pe penulis rusia je. suka baca buku ek. aah. dah malam kuuut. yeh. rajin print. heheh takde duit beli buku. dik belajar ke. yeh sekolah menengah. oh tingkatan berapa. empat. baru start eh. yeh baru dua minggu. rajin balik. heheh.

after that, afro girl appears, sees me dragging a full plastic bag full of books down at jalan hamzah(?) in the wee hours of the morning, going into seven eleven buying a tin of nescafe, and then the wait for the first bus to pengkalan chepa and then, empty, empty.

***

you who never arrived

Mesti kadang kamu semua tertanya tanya tentang maisarah dalam kehidupan orang lain.

No, I don’t in the most accurate sense of the word, participate.

Petang semalam mereka mereka selepas kelas terus pergi photo shoot untuk salam perantuan. Di sebuah lapangan di taman, terletakknya sebuah kerusi, dan kamu para perempuan, patiently menunggu orang orang yang muncul secara gradual dari pelbagai, memakai baju raya yang indah indah, memecah harmoni hijau-biru kawasan itu. Bukan sebagai satu invasion, tetapi mungkin sebagai satu interruption.

These people, all of them blend into the background, one with high arched heels, painted face, strutting their curves here and there, laughing insensibly , and the boys ,- boys- how boring have they become in your eyes – all in their fleeting laughter – that seem to hold ni weight in any respect – you look upon them in the same way you used to look at the world six years ago,- apathetically.

Of course, there is only one exception to this but he is not there. A good question! Where is he? Not one knows, he is far removed from the group, ostracized as it were by his own will, a will , a purpose that is different from all the undifferentiated masses of masculinity around him. Soon he shall be unreachable, cut off, completely. But that is our destiny, we can only carry on without any bitterness in our hearts.

But his is more noble than yours.

Let’s talk about the one. For the whole day yesterday, all I could think about was the first lines of Rilke’s poem which, ah, I shall copy shortly.
*
You who never arrived
In my arms, Beloved, who were lost
From the start
I don’t even know what songs
Would please you. I have given up trying
To recognize you un the surging wave of the next
Moment. All the immense
Images in me – far off, deeply felt landscape,
Cities, towers, bridges and un-
Suspected turns in the path,
And those powerful lands that were once
Pulsing with the life of the gods –
All rise within me to mean
You, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
The gardens I have ever gazed at,
Longing. An open window
in a country house – , and you almost
Stepped our, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, –
You had just walked down a then and vanished.
And sometimes in a shop, the mirrors
Were sill dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
My too sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
Bird echoed through both of us
Yesterday, separate, in the evening …
*
Love, is a fickle thing (but he could be talking about muse, or God), and even more so marriage. And I in my inadequacy should never dream (yet) of such a divine institution. *sigh*.

(We could talk of evolution or Rilke or work or books but I remain, in my longing, foreign, forever separate from you.)

surge

so for the first time you are excited that finally you are hearing the very words you used to only read in books and strange blogs and uttered by mad lonely men on the edges of the night, all being churned out by some professor in front of you, locke hume hobbes descartes wordsworth thoreau marx augustine capitalism socialism evolution naturalism transcendentalism romanticism the concept of the sublime the awe in horror and wilderness and nature, all over the course of two hours.

and then you stop short to wonder whether other people inside the class are actually interested.

and so the week begins

“From here to happiness is a road, flat, upright, distances in between blotted out by vision, yet realized by intelligence. From here to there is a road leading down blue pajamas to feet, to bed post, to screen door, to gray slatted porch roof, rain-puddled and drenched, to decorative white railing to a road, to a line of sand, to a gray, rain beaten sea. Not yet to leave, not yet. For this road is a way to savor, a way back to living again as living is full. Not of bridge-playing, not of eating a frappe with two other girls, not even talking with one another. Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.”

l’opposition

the archaeologist, the philosopher | immature, impossible | outspoken, pensive | churns out the most typical critical thoughts, speaks of themes and symbols and irony | sees out to oust others and to define otherness and holier than thou attitude, laughs in one-liners of simple universal truths | tangled, unfazed | passionate, blithe |

and yet you feel nerved by every great soul. the admission of one is crucial to the acknowledgment of weakness on your part because you, are lacking in every single aspect, unable to write to read to speak anything, unable to love or to declare love, incapable to lead to recite, to speak before others and to crack a joke or two to be merry to to live like all those dead people you admire and aspire to.

and our will must be greater than others.
not our ego to speak out, to astound people with our knowledge and uniqueness in search for self validation.
but our passion and eagerness in truthfulness to speak honestly in order to seek truth, to solve all our speculations and problems that we turn over and over in our minds for days and night.
but first, give avenue for other people to speak
one must listen in order to learn,
do not be in love with your own voice,
to cackle ardently while the dead set of eyes
angelically patient stare squarely at your face
you can have reign in your own space
but in the meeting of another soul
one communes and thoughts are exchanged
and remember that even if they do not read as much as you do (you false fool),
their passions are truer than yours.
their purpose are clearer than yours.
their manners are better than yours.

ensemble

a weekend trip to newcastle. as it is customary of me, being so un-narcissistic, or an too overbearing on memories to keep on repeating the same things for weeks without end, one must begin as swiftly as one terminates, becomes sentiments do die.

reading Rilke’s diary as a young poet on the train, in which he recounts his days as a young artist/student/poet/sojourner/wanderer/whatever written specifically to Lou Andreas Salome. my impression of rilke does not lie exclusively dia di dalam dakapan ibunya (why rest things on solely the past anyway), atau mungkin saya tidak mampu lagi menghabiskan Malte Laude Briggs-nya.

anyway, saya tak rasa saya berminat lagi terhadap Rilke as a person, or specifically his visions towards nature. i find his imagery too strong. maybe i am no artist and i mingle not around blond painters or spend nights walking barefoot through meadows…. mungkin sebab saya tak ambil art history and have never been artistically inclined to paint/draw anything except strange bearded old men with grave eyes.

(requiem for a friend was written FOR Paula Becker)

anyway, bagi saya, sesebuah puisi itu mungkin harus dibaca secara perlahan lahan. engkau tak boleh nak fathom one book of poetry in one go to see the effect. macam Bert yang cakap pada aku minggu lalu yang it took him years (decades?) to understand Blake, and that it is sufficient that i just look at one thing at a time. if one opens ones eyes immediately to everything, mungkin kau akan lemas in confusion. (dan aku tak pandai menulis dalam Bahasa Melayu, i shall admit to this). the laboring over one single line of poetry. (how does one write a haiku anyway)

Tapi, “I thought you hated poetry.”

there is that. mungkin kejap lagi lepas buat tutorial saya nak sambung terjemahkan (baca:belajar maksud) this little play oleh Sartre, sebab saya poyo. slowly saya sedang cuba untuk belajar untuk mencintai semula perkataan perkataan. (sebab vocabulary saya tak berkembang sejak tiga empat tahun yang lalu, nampaknya). been working extra hard on translating stuff, anyway. both arabic and french. german malas sebab well, egh, i have no german kamus at my disposal.

Matters of the heart

It is indeed a blessing to be sponsored to learn overseas, to be given allowance for board, food, and transport and silly expenses, to have your tuition fully paid by some organisation, to be told to learn about one’s ways in the world, but all of this turns against you when you simply do not have enough passion for the subject, enough enthusiasm to break through the normal boundaries, enough will to study outside the given classes, enough maturity to maintain responsibility, let alone receive one, enough piety to soldier on, enough discipline to follow through the end for each and every single thing assigned to you, enough courage to be able to communicate to convey what exactly that it is that you want to do, and to ultimately realize for what purpose are you exactly put into this situation, with the fear of debt and failure surrounding you.

Of course, I am not to (and should not rightly) complain, while all the other people are beating about trying to earn their bread while having to pay through whatever loans they bargained themselves into. It is simply because I haven’t known enough hardship, never having to ever, support myself, so to speak, that I have simply fallen flat and unable to proceed without first having to prep myself that I need I need I need I must I must I must execute this.

Nor do I think I have enough pure a heart to be saying anything. Anything than runs from my mouth is bound to false, and I cannot understand why is it that I am still standing perfectly still while everyone else is becoming good, better, resolved, finding their way towards life. To have finally found peace, guided by the rope of god. While I am here, having found truth, continually slip and fall and tumble, forever perturbed by something I am not yet quite sure myself.

They say it concerns the heart. That it is never important to know everything, that the aim of usrah (or tarbiyyah) is not to gain knowledge, because learning can be somewhere else, sometime else, but the aim is to wet, to render the heart sad and aware of its inadequacy, to remind, to purify, to rejuvenate, to set our bearings.

Of course, I am continually trying trying trying to be good to stay true (of what, exactly?), to bow my head low, to be in a constant state of reminder to be aware of his continuing presence, to not betray time, to be khusyuk and direct everything to him, to ask forgiveness everyday, and to finally be sincere and submit my will whenever I face Him.

I shall try try try until time denies me…

huis clos

***
[unfinished]

god leapt out of his seat
and made him paralyzingly stiff
down the hill of dampness
they scoot him off in an ambulance
into the hospital where there are
doctors who knowingly declare
‘dear sir, my diagnosis is that this
is a case of the slip of the disc’
‘come nurses, to the scanners!
let us now study his structures’

***

tiger tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night

now it is something to be sharing the same passion in reading books, but it is something else altogether when he starts to suddenly pick up The Bell Jar and hands it to you, the morning after you just happen to read the first fifty pages of Plath’s diary, and then start to recite Blake’s poem from memory, going tiger tiger burning bright in the forest of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry, and then starts to explain the poem to you, and then goes on and on about Shakespeare and English and then Australian ballads of poetry and work and writing and the theatrical broad daylight.

of course, he just happens to be an 82 year old man who also happens to read Sylvia Plath.

of course i returned home today bringing yet five, FIVE, books, for free. score of the day would be Pessoa’s Selected Poems, but i haven’t even vaguely started his book of disquiet…. so bringing home more books brings more guilt than pleasure.

also, i think i am beginning to love, cycling at night. it’s so calm. and i can see the moon directly infront of me. now, i need to oil the chains, because it squeaks horribly, more audibly in solitary roads….

Ginberg’s “happy” rendition.

let the moon be my sole witness

i, in my sheer brilliance, decided to donate blood in the evening, in this month of ramadan, and decided to cycle home after only having milkshake, and lo and behold, barely maintaining my speed, i stopped halfway, and walked, carrying the weight of the world that is my bicycle, palpably light, for i was atlas himself, sat on the bench twenty meters from the house, gazed at the grinning moon trying not to faint, ears buzzing with steel-like sounds, and aaaah, puked in front of the beer, wine, spirit and store.
they shan’t suspect a thing.