perkaraperkara

i brood, a lot.

since the present doesn’t interest me, i would go ponder into the far reaching (indefinite) future planning of things things i wish to happen. of course, this imagining doesn’t come in a methodical manner; that is after A then B, and subsequently C, but rather the ‘future’ that i envision always come in  moments or situations that would be able to encapsulate everything that matters, a sort of mis-en-scene, if you wish to use the french term. of course, all i imagine are scenes, but never concrete happenings. so conversations, gestures, facial expressions, movement, that would give away five ten years in a matter of minutes – that’s the sort  pondering that i do, and i revise these scenes over and over again until it is, not perfected, but.. appropriate.

sometimes you have friends in which you seem to disapprove some parts of their behaviour, but to dismiss people entirely based on those behaviours alone seemed a bit ridiculous. tolerance, i tell myself, everything i seem to find myself in situations where i have to clean up people’s shit, which is the case for every morning inside the kitchen. yes, the george samsa situation seems to have gone out of hand, and as i type this there came out from under the television another roach. buggery. but winter is coming, and with this comes a little death, although not a definite, permanent death, but i still i hope the day will come when i will not see a single cockroach in the house again. sometimes you need a little optimism to get by.

as week thirteen seems to close i think i have learnt a lot in the lit class. perhaps not to the point of perfectly analysing a text, but rather probably a higher appreciation of any text or film, however boring they are. and the word intertextuality, perhaps the most important terms discovered, meaning the reinforcing of a text by another text, but by no means influenced by it. macam name-dropping tapi subtle. think The Marriage Plot versus our local Amerika. other than that perhaps a coming home into  literature which i have abandoned for a good four years.

i am thinking of course to continue taking this subject, going into Modernism, ignoring altogether the opportunity to learn a new language, but french or german can be learn anytime. why so eurocentric, in the first place? i wish to return to bahasa melayu, to read more malay books, to become more eloquent in their words. for now i know nothing. translation comes to mind, but so far i have nothing worthwhile to work on. letters from rilke seems always a delight to read, but do they contain any coherency from one to another?

plans remain abundant. but this must be taken note of; each time you are about to go out to a large gathering, always remember to drink coffee or else suffer from irritability.

now i am in dire need to read something good, something that i would immediately fall in love with, but so far, nothing, nothing, seems to be as intriguing or as profound. perhaps all that remains is to now, write, but as i am in this state of having someone to talk to all the time (or most), makes me lazy. hence the lack of writing. tee hee.

and now i invite you to listen to Walter Kaufmann’s lectures on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre. because as far as i know and led to believe, this dude knows Western thought more than anyone else.

goodnight. i have a test tomorrow.

i am not fond of naming people, and to assign each their initials would be a clear giveaway, but nevertheless, tanpa memberikan nama kepada seseorang, begitu susahnya kita untuk mengembangkan aspeknya (if any) yang lain.

if the word aspect can be confused with expect, than what is one to expect, affronted by this curious defect? is it to deflect, or merely a confusion of the tongue, as one is bound to write cease as seize, morn, with mourn? either way i cannot inquire, for my place is a peculiar one.

it is one thing to be gazed by others, but another thing altogether to think that one is being gazed at when one is not. the former brings affirmation in one’s actions, while in the latter one has to tiptoe in paranoia and confusion.

in my head is a story, but an incomplete one. this is an imagining of a situation that nonetheless bound to happen, but since i have not written any lengthy words worth reading by anyone, it might all just be buried to the back of my mind, like all seeds of ideas that are never given any chance to grow on their own.

i think i am necessitating the steps towards liberating myself. the road is a hard, but communication, if kept scarce, yet towards the point bears more meaning than ones that invades (albeit welcomed) every other moment or so. first one reacts with a loss of direction, then one copes with that loss by slipping in comfortably into one’s old habits. by then an ease of mind has been achieved, and you finally feel free (sort of). 

attachment can be a dangerous thing. 

(no one missed you).

apabila ada percanggahan dalam diri sendiri dalam pememilihan suatu perkara, kita (aku) lebih suka berdiam diri dan cuba untuk memproses segalanya dalam perkara. dalam menyuarakan sesuatu pendapat, misalnya, kita lebih suka untuk melihat, terlebih dahulu, pendapat orang lain sebelumnya, sebelum kita boleh memilih sesuatu/sesebuah pihak. ada sesebuah proses yang akan berlaku di sini, di mana anda akan cuba untuk “weigh in”, atau cuba untuk memformulasikan sesebuah argumen yang akan mengambil/mengetepikan one point over another, sambil cuba untuk mengkonstruk sesebuah pemikiran yang koheren (?), sekurang-kurangnya untuk diri sendiri.

sejujurnya, suatu perkara yang aku sedar apabila kurang menulis (not that i have never attempted), ialah suatu keadaan di mana aku tidak lagi mampu untuk berkata apa apa tentang apa apa. of course, one is /never forced to have an opinion (or a stance) in the first place – other than ‘i hate cakes’ or ‘i love to cycle’ – and living amongst women who rarely think of larger situations at whole, there is even less a requirement to do so. engineering is a very formulaic process, where everything, at least in this point of studying, is straightforward. so one does not have to think (at least creatively), and ready to drift off into a neatly cut out path that is sure to guarantee you a High Distinction.

so writing is, at least to me, is a process i need to undertake in order to coherently form an framework of an idea, and from that, to draw a singular opinion (ambivalent or not) over something. it is not merely enough say something, or to word out the words of another; i need to properly lay out one’s claim and that which supports that claim. surely one is able to draw up something sketchily in one’s head in critical moments, and but to properly speak, not only only to spew sporadic sentences that point to nowhere but immense confusion, one must have at least thought of the subject beforehand.

so back to our drawing board.

hello.

booked a ticket to Glen Hansard and the Flames at the end of March, and thinking of going to Bloc Party’s next week. planted chives, coriander, and parsley in pots and hope they will soon germinate. need to pump my bike tires. to jog with new Nike app instead in the mean time. new phone. new mug. bought a secondhead leather saddle bag for eight dollars which looks good as new. reading salman rushdie for tutorial next week. doing a thesis on renewable energy and how to inject it to the system. volunteering for some high school kids cultural visit of some sort just because i can. house cleaning. run to the beach kut tomorrow morning. so things are looking good, it seems.

sebab tak mengikuti sangat perkembangan semasa; a few notes.

indie(ke?) pulp or whatever, really. the things maisarah notices in books she does not really enjoy reading.

– that is written merely for the momentary enjoyment of the reader (if any), where things and objects and subjects move in a dramatic fashion as to shock the reader. or to intrigue by grabbing the attention of the reader by magnanimity. one twist after another. one big movement after another. sensational.
– thus the thing that moves a story relies not primarily the narrative, but the plot. or explosive dialogues. like watching an indonesian drama or a simple thirty minute tv series. too much noise. in this case the question that is asked is what happens next? who will speak next? what must happen?
– nuances discarded. curiosity only extends to cause and effect that which can immediately be seen, but not what lies underneath.
-lack of depth. no scene or plot where the character can be seen staring deeply at
the window thinking of something, no long paragraphs of Raskolnikov comparing himself to Napoleon.
– mistaking bad formatting of sentencing/paragraphing and grammar mistakes as conveying reality as it is. that people speak this way. “Everything gonna be alright” is not alright. Unless you are specifically intending to convey how broken English can be spoken in Malaysia. depends, really.
– namedropping awkwardly, as if the voice comes not from the characters, but from the author/narrator itself. unless you make your presence known (macam Kundera, atau Danarto).
– the character never learns anything.
– matter>form

but sometimes, sensational is good. macam Nabokov (kut).

but in the end it’s all a matter of preference.

schopenhauer cakap;

“Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for
nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse — honora y provecho no caben en un saco . The reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language”

The Art of Literature. 

like Roland Barthes (whose biography you bought for three dollars remain tucked underneath your closet) or Goenawan Muhammad (whose Catatan Pinggiran remain inaccessible to you because you haven’t been to Indonesia – somewhere you’ve been wanting to go to for the past three years). Sterne. Cervantes. Dante. Thackaray. You ask yourself the intention behind reading these things, as you pile up more books at your bookshelf, trying to stow them away buried, or try to give them away never to see them again. it is not as if you can even explain to anyone any of the books, because you’ve never been asked to, or you’ve never been around a social circle that reads the same things that you do, or because you simply see no point in talking about it, except when you tug home a few books home or the occasional classic movies from the alumni bookshop or the library, only to be commented by your housemate

‘beli lagi?’
‘pinjam lagi?’
‘yang dulu tu dah habis baca ke?’
‘murakami lagi?’

that gives you a sort of reminder how much you have borrowed/bought and how little is read.

but why the need to read exactly?

the question remains unsolved.

Sometimes I think of all the people I have come across with, the numbers exchanged with them, the conversations we have, the places we went to, the things done, only to realize that I am not a good friend (or person) to begin with.

I get out of people’s hair the soon as the circumstances allow me to. I realize this isn’t the most rightful course of action to do, but sustaining conversations, or friendship for that matter is never one of my strongest points. If people call each other in the evening after school, to catch up with things, I’d never be able to do that. I hate talking on the phone. I don’t have any girl’s day out, or catch a movie with them, take pictures with idiotic gestures within the space of one minute.

The friends I have from primary school, secondary school, boarding school, or those random people I used to be I don’t know, chummy with, have deep conversations with, I rarely go over my way to call them up. Not because I wouldn’t love to hear about them again, or that I am trying to move away from them, but I think there’s a time for everything, and it’s best to preserve it that way rather than to muddle things and people up. If we are bound to bump at some point, say in three, four years, ten years I’ll be glad to talk.

There’s Facebook anyway, but I don’t bother myself to scroll down on (anyone’s) everyone’s profile for their updates. I’d rather leave it to chance encounters, momentary news, for the wind to carry it to us (Has anyone seen the movie The Wind Will Carry Us? Brilliant).

People sometimes label me as an extrovert whenever I talk to them, for the amount of questions I have for them, strange, direct, or annoying as they are, but as soon as all of that dry up, as soon as the interest dies, I’ll never bother them again. I’d rather be on my own, left to my own devices. In that way I cannot imagine myself to be likable – I know myself to be a bad friend, yet, one of these days, a person is bound to call me up, to send private messages, or to scrawl on the public wall to see how I’m holding up. Naturally I’ll avoid these small confrontations like the plague, but in the long run I realize this will inevitably make me lose friends, even those who I once held very dear.

But I realize my tendency to do this all stems back from the inability to find any commonality between myself and people, causing me to go from one person to another, to peer into them, and leave them intermittently after I’ve discovered that nothing, nothing, will ever bind us together. The interests simply do not converge. This is an inefficient way to go about life, really, but slowly we maneuver through and try enter and leave as lightly and quietly as possible.

Of course, having a significant other does change all this. So begins the constant intrusion into the privacy you have built for yourself. I am still trying to make sense of this, to reconcile over the fact that no longer do I need to write down my thoughts, or to keep them solely to myself; the time for self-concealment is over and so begins this process of merging into one another, of trying to understand, tolerate and accept these differences between one another. I don’t know what the future holds (for me, for us, for whomever really), so we’ll just have to see how things progress. Maybe someday I’ll extend my tolerance and discard my aversions towards others.

In the meantime, I remain your favourite friend.

(or how to burn else be burnt)

Lately I’ve been in the company (or supervision, really) of an engineer at this department who’s been constantly bombarding me with questions and ideas regarding this field. Unlike all the other engineers, who really do nothing but to manage and direct people, or choose to ignore me entirely, he actually has to carefully weigh each decision, and do all that analysis and calculations and stuff. Which usually involves millions of ringgit and a bunch of shady old contractors with their safety helmets and mobile pouches. So off we go and watch the array of people you need to go through in order to power a building. A tedious affair, really.

So questions, ranging from the harmless Ohmic equations, to what it really means. It apparently isn’t enough to just say V=IR and assign what they represent, but you must go into the heart of things, of why they even exist in the first place. I, who have apparently decided to go on automatic mode and breeze through electrical engineering by carefully memorizing and understanding only the key things at only most important times (like all of us, no?), try to scramble through the vague memories of my first years and found out I understood nothing. (or maybe we can just say we forget). Naturally this annoys him. Says if you can’t really explain something, a concept, a theory, to an engineer, let alone an outsider, to the point of understanding, to the point where they go ‘Aaah’ which is of relief and not more puzzlement, then I have failed.

He then reminds me to the Sejarah textbook, of what drove the Europeans to Enlightenment and propel them into the Renaissance era?

It is the spirit of inquiry. The quest for truth.

Ach, I say to myself.

Suddenly, I could see a fifteen year old version of Maisarah loathing me entirely, indulging in such trivialities, pursuing cheap attractions that do nothing but distract and waste your time from the more important things.

I always view myself in such terms, because if we could compare myself then and now, (back then) I would find myself more angry, boorish, critical, but yet more passionate than any other period in my life. there i was, trying to study Latin, German, and attempting to understand Nietzsche and his will to power, learning new vocabulary, and whatever Greek gods and goddesses in every sort of myth, poring over suicide notes and journals of school shooters, occupying myself with encyclopedias and dictionaries of world history and philosophy in trying to make sense of the world. i would read Crime and Punishment in two days while stuck in a hotel, and ponder whether murder is justifiable, whether god existed, whether life is necessary.

Yes, I was pretentious as hell (I still am), and very depressed. Now that I think of it, it’s like Dwayne out of Little Miss Sunshine (minus the silence, though I did have my share of muteness). But to cling/marvel/reminisce on past experiences shall get you nowhere. The thing to do is to look forward and forge/discover new things. I realize I am getting older, thus more

But now i can see myself receding slowly into passivity, where I am no longer interested in new things, except the occassional dip into Persian Poetry, or Rilke’s quest for truth, Ghazali’s sciences, Kierkegaard’s despair, Jung’s psychology, Thoreau’s wilderness, James’ psychology of education, the feminine mystique (as always), french-arabic lessons.  The large corpus of literature and philosophy i think i shall never have time to read all of them. All this without ever having any concrete understanding on them. I amass ideas and understand none. The most I can do is to blurb a sentence or two that is incoherent and insufficient. Thus, I lay claim to nothing and declare myself a hypocrite.

Of course, in this situation, what is to be done?

Perhaps things have taken a very different direction, or that slowly I am crawling towards things without much enthusiasm or guidance. All this done amidst all these engineering studies, which I doubt myself having as much passion as I have in… everything else. Apparently I can’t even answer why does Reactive Power exist.

Rilke once wrote to Lou that although he thinks himself sufficient (superfically, with a home, a wife, a daughter) he stills wants “to be real among real things”. Now I am sitting in the office where in front of me, a large header for a board is titled X-tream (how extreme), with a table with ten different manuals for the operations of transformers, switchgears, circuit breakers so that you, the reader, may have lights in your homes, a laptop to type all this and to refer to the different textbooks of electrical theories, and finally a cup of coffee which shall no doubt make me lose sleep once again tonight. I must work, and finish my report soon. At home, the numerous books that I plan to read at the beginning of summer still remain unread, as the case with most of things Maisarah plans to do during the break. With three more weeks left in this country, so we strive to accomplish everything.

At the moment, such is our pursuit for realness.