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Coffee, again. I am being treated by marvelous friends. So it was, Ashaari telling us about his brother joined the firefighters after his exams. Snakes, factories, cats. A life of two third leisure, a third danger. At least one knows what is one up against with. But the pleasure of doing meaningful work! The immediate fruits of work, no matter that you had to spend three hours standing holding the water hose, putting out the fire.

Back here, she is contemplating life after studies. What shall I do? , she throws the question into air. What are your options? I asked. So with the count of her fingers, she lists out her life plans. To stay. To go back. To study. To work. It always oscillate between those four, no matter who you talk with. What after this? everyone seems to ask, whenever you meet. Je ne sais pas. I am already accustomed with blocks of years laid out for me, that at the end of the day, I am apparently as clueless as I began.

Can one opt to travel instead ?

to be more cognizant of time, and what passes in between. to find not escape in the endearment and adulation of of the self (and others), but to face fully the torrents of the moment. to not ignore anybody, but at the same time, to be ignorant of the little things. to say little and be little as possible. one is to tread lightly on earth.

25th August 2013

It’s my birthday tomorrow. I look back upon the calender with two things on my mind, what has changed since last year’s, and what have I become. Last week I wrote on essay on Joyce and wrote that it is not the series of happenings that makes us into what we are, but  it is  the culmination of events, the accumulation of experiences, that has shaped me into what I am. How old was Daedalus when he decided to flee from his surroundings? Moreover, is flight the only necessary solution? And for myself, whose wings are clipped at the moment (only by my own admission), what shall I do once I have freed myself from everything? Shall I take flight and risk drowning or stand along the edges while my body weakens?

Am reading Beauvoir, where she tries to find what freedom means to the existentialist, who has no value but that of his own. In the end he still has to measure himself in terms of others. It is difficult to assume the position God, tiresome to keep moving for the sake of moving, defying for the sake of defying, and latch yourself to other people’s values – be it Marxism or Socialism. The debate is endless. In the end, only god persists. Freedom, she then says, can never be absolute, as one is never free to choose whether to be or not to be. We are thrown into existence, into childhood, in an environment we never consented to. Yet it is precisely childhood that shapes our core values, it is the past that one always compares to. Thus one is never completely free.

But nevertheless, the question of our own mortality. And the question of usefulness. What then, have I to say for myself? Yes, of course, I shall be graduating, I have read more books, I have probably written more, I have  traveled more, but I fear that all these are what happens externally. Inside, I am all the same. I haven’t grown. Older, but none the wiser.

Perhaps I should finally start writing my own novel.

Just finished with Joyce, now I have to read up and make points for the essay test next Tuesday. Reading Joyce becomes rewarding as one reaches the end. As if there is the maturity in thought, personality, the soul, and then into the unknown, the flight of Icarus, the ‘Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead’. I remember, scribbling on the first page of my copy of The Portrait when I was seventeen, waiting for my turn inside the hospital in the remote, perhaps anxious – I was either about to declare to the doctors there that I could not stand being depressed, or probably just taking the usual escape from classes I have no whatsoever passion about – life assailed me, suffocated with trivialities left and right.  The Portrait, or at least a part of it, that I managed to understand and read, left some sort of impact that is to not be afraid of going against things that are against your being.

Bildungsroman. It was T that first mentioned the term to you. He was talking of The Catcher in the Rye. You haven’t read it yet, so on the weekend of your fifteenth birthday, you went to Kinokuniya with your father and you picked four books; Salinger’s, The Dictionary of Philosophy, Mensa’s IQ Test Book, and Mein Kampf. The last one your father didn’t agree on. How very telling. Here was M, just turned fifteen, about to launch into the real world, believing herself to be super intelligent and enthusiastic about the many disciplines of the liberal arts. The second trip with your father, he bought you Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, after fiddling around it for ten minutes or so. It was beyond him.

It was also beyond you that you would end up, now, about to turn twenty two, in your final year of engineering. What happened, as you ponder, after being talking to your English tutor, her saying ‘how brave’ you are, and strange that you would take this. Out of pure interest, I said. And I like Woolf. The motivation behind every single action cannot be told simply in short sentences. It is an accumulation of sentiments, memories, experience, knowledge, and blind hope that brings us to that single momentous decision, “I shall now…“.

***

Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Also, do not simply put words into people’s mouth. Above all, be silent and severe your tongue.

***

Spoke to F again. Always a delight. He now uses the words, ‘weather through’. He probably doesn’t remember that I took it from Rilke’s letter to Lou-Salome.

“It is not enough for two people to find each other, it is also very important that they find each other at the right moment and hold deep, quiet festivals in which their desires merge so that they can fight as one against storms. How many people have parted ways because they did not find the time slowly to grow close to each other? Before two people can experience unhappiness together, they have to have been blissful together and possess a sacred memory of that time, which evokes a kindred smile on their lips and a kindred longing in their souls. They become like children who have lived through the festivities of a Christmas night together; when they find a few minutes to catch their breath during the pale, drawn-out days, they will sit down together and tell each other with glowing cheeks about that pin-tree-scented nighttime full of sparkling lights . . .
Such people will weather all storms together.”

***

Tonight; Birthday cake, cupcakes, thesis progress report, Annemarie Schimmel, essay points.

***

Just started reading Rumi’s Mathnawi. Will try to make it a point to read it every two days or so. Annotations.

The week passes by so quickly. A feast, the lighthouse, a movie, Pride and Prejudice, Iman, cakes, car boot sales, coffee, lectures, Joyce, meteor shower, the sea, ice cream, the airport, late night conversations, the scene, crying, convergence, thesis, dinners, invitations, more coffee and teh tarik.

The Mrs Dalloway tutorial seemed, trite. The tutor is perhaps absent in her teaching. S sat beside me and she too, seemed bored, and did her Kanji instead. I mentioned The Hours. The guy in front of me seemed to want to bring something, saying that Richard and Septimus was the embodiment of pre-modernists, unable to convey their emotions, repress their thoughts, masculinity, that do not burst in every direction. (That is why he can only internalize, handing her a bunch of flowers, holding Clarissa’s hands, “This is happiness.” He cannot say ‘I love you’). But of course, any single serious attempt for a serious discussion was discarded by a remark or two about Aspie’s or reading off the traits of what makes a Modernist text Modernist – anxiety, chaos, thoughts, disarray. Such a text book, superficial, approach rather than to shoot off in different directions to form the whole to me is a waste of time. One must be given time to fool around with ideas and possibilities and express it. But we brave through.

The lecturer was fun. She mentioned a lot from A Room of One’s Own, perhaps Woolf’s most famous essay. I read it about a year ago, liked it immensely. For there she was, Woolf, explaining how women in the old days did not even have access to the library, or that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre isn’t really womanly in her “rage”, or how even if the women of her day wrote more and had access to more thing, how poorly do they write (“!”).  A woman must have, to write creatively – she lists this out – economic independence, a room of one’s own (mental and physical), education, a press, freedom of mind, experience of the world, a support group (resource), and finally she musn’t be conscious of being a woman. That is, to me, one musn’t cry out that one is a woman, and her condition unjust, but one must simply be (think Pride and Prejudice‘s versus  Jane Eyre). 

You see, perhaps I have nothing better to do than to read novels and poetry concerning the loss of innocence or inexplicable sadness or the anxiety of love. I feel as I am, unfeeling. Perhaps the way that I maintain my sanity is to read and permeate into the insanity and absurdity of others. Perhaps in reading do I draw my enjoyment in understanding of people, ideas, and the world. Of life itself.

Last night I watched Despicable Me 2, courtesy  of Kak Z.. It is one of those movies that one doesn’t have to think too much (or at all). One wonders at the function of this particular scene (and soon, countless others), except to induce laughter. A formulaic plot; Save the world.  One wonder at the particulars the adults are concerned about; dating someone, finding love, becoming a good father. Children; fairies, mother, headbands, ‘boyfriends’, dancing. All trivial. It is interesting to note, at her birthday, although Agnes realized Grew (Groo?) was pretending to be a fairy, she lets him be.  The maintenance of fantasy – we let ourselves be lulled by unrealistic scenes and monsters for we take comfort in the little moments of fleeting happiness it gives us.

Perhaps I am just more amused by words and sentences.

The day ceases, the people disappear, and memories diminish. So we try to capture, encapsulate moments in photographs, in our desperate attempt to preserve a moment in at point in time. Recorders we all are; either in words, images or numbers. A personal historian, that each of us has a lifetime to record, to accumulate the wealth that is their own lives. For only in these moments can we tell ourselves, that we indeed exist, and have existed before. To have a page torn out, or to have not a page written at all – we cease to prolong our own story, a story that continues long after our own death. Because we cannot be seen, felt, observed, or spoken to, we seek to immortalize ourselves in these little vignettes; an impression, a painting, a letter, a novel, an exercise book.

But all this is futile; one can only mean something for so many people. In the end, all this records, memorabilia found their way in dusty bookshelves, in opened boxes, between pages of a book, in car boot sales – only to be marveled at for a while, then the wonderment ceases. One cannot know further than what is presented. For after all, how can one build a whole’s person life, out of a single object?

More importantly, how can one sum up another’s character, in a single meeting?

Raya consisted of food, friends, coffee, phone calls, and the beach.

There’s not much to do in this city; you either go to the university, or take a bus ride to the beach, then walk to the city and board the next train to Sydney. Pleasant is the word to describe this place. One can ride bicycles smack in middle of the road at night, walk their dogs around the neighborhood and say hi to every stranger, surf at any beach they like along the stretch, take walks at the forest and hills and coasts and cliffs, read books at the park while the ducks scurry alongside you, watch blots of people skydiving every sunny day on the way to the university. For strange encounters with high, wasted people who will ask you, ‘Are you nuns?’, and speak of graffiti and acacias, one can go to Melbourne.

K and her sister has been everywhere around the world, from spending a whole day in the cemetery in America, to attending lavish weddings in Burma, to finding bacon in a strictly labeled chicken burger in Seoul. It is nice, to trot all over the world. Here, in my head, lies names of places I must visit some time or another; Jogjakarta, Konya, Damascus, Fes, Copenhagen, Andalusia, Cape Town, Paris. To work, to live, to learn.

Here is a bottle of perfume and a three page letter from F. “This has traveled thousands of miles to get to you”, says K. It’s always nice, to receive these writings; either on tissue papers, or your little Moleskin notebook (I’m afraid I have accidentally spilled chocolate milk on it while I was in Japan, dear), or your three am emails, or in autographed books from all those quirky authors.  You write, as always, with large spaces between the lines and words, airy and romantic. It’s impossible not to love him. He is the ideal. The one possible person.

The housemate says you can buy better perfume here, and even she could get me one. I say, no one (not even myself) has ever gotten me any. A scent is a way of saying; now, this scent shall be you,embody you, and therefore you shall forever be associated, symbolized, reminded, by it. In other terms – I mark you.

Surely she knows nothing much going on over in Egypt or Turkey or Syria, not that it doesn’t bother her so, but news of rife and affliction from faraway lands soon blends into background noise it become ordinary after a while, and what affects the world, does it affect you? Shall one be ignorant and remain like a stout observer from afar or, join in the moment, flare a point or two, and see how everything unravels? Or shall one, believing himself capable, join in the frontiers, take up the weapon (metaphorical, literal, a pen, a gun, a mouth, your pick), and stand against all?

Oh, but things are so complicated, so I shall read my books, and still, observe things from afar. It is imperative to understand what one is saying, to muster up belief in your own words, and channel all that into something edible and beautiful, or at least, truthful.  For what value are words if they do not come from the heart?

Articulation. She has been said to be articulate. first, by Miss N, who somehow takes interest in golden little people and what they can do. I cannot do anything, except express myself in any manner that is comfortable to myself. And even that occurs in little moments of clarity that when I try to preserve them, they are gone. So, no, I say. That is untrue, she says, you seem to have a more critical mind than the others. You understand nuances. But, I say, to translate mere words and understanding, and translate that into a comprehensible form to others, that requires eloquence. Eloquence.

If there’s something she admires in a person, it is eloquence. Let us forget for a while, all the orators and debaters on stages and platforms with flags beckoning on them. It is, the ability to speak seamlessly on any subject that does not emanate out of raw emotions (for that is passion), but rather of a deep contemplation on the subject, something that has been mauled, turned and churned over, that one speaks what one understands and thinks about it, not a mere immediate reaction towards something.

But first, one must sit and read.

P/S; Seeing that I have acquired, as it seems, some readers, I am deeply sorry for my ‘vertical elevation’ remark, dear L.