return to the womb

i have the most kind, motherly, mother on earth.

there is an idea inside my head, one that speaks to tell of this relationship between the family and the individual, for i am greatly attached to the family.

tapi saya tak balik raya pun tahun ni.

syahdu.

i want to be able to write everyday, with much more comprehensibility on my part, so that when i look back at this, i’d be able to understand what it is that i have wanted to do with my life.

reading Plath’s journals helps. she fleshes out these little funny ideas on life and marriage and self-love and graduation and purpose and the cause and on suicide on writing and the like. on love. on accomplishing life. i suppose it doesn’t hurt to actually read her as i grow up, as i bloom into the age of thirty, to actually be able to bridge and map out experience and see if we ever coincide or not. i need to be in touch with the feminine. not one of the loud feminist types who argue of mundane things such as shaving your armpits in toilets or the ability of express your thoughts squeakily on a little platform for women, but one so personal so anguished so private one whose every thought is pregnant with that want to give everything away to relinquish herself yet remain mute in her nameless suffering.

i take that back because that sounds like something out of Ombak Rindu.

there should be a quality of nobility attached to it. one that immediately demands call forth, respect or awe over her selflessness. can a woman be so selflessly proud?

a nickel in melbourne

her hands, they are rough and have seen life. cancerous mother, dead father, i don’t remember the others…. she is the rope that everyone clings after. look at the way she carries herself, as she struts proud in her gait, composed, prepared to meet life, not undulated, hardened, stiffened. i try to spark some interest in her but to no avail. 
of course she fascinates me when she tells me of writhy alphabets, the three letter bases that give rise to many different layers of meaning and uses. i tell her i am no longer used to learning a language, and that i, have abandoned my french, german (or even latin for that matter) buried beneath the dust, only to be picked up for the scarce visitors that i receive. they ask me, oh mai, are you learning this? i say, i used to, don’t ask me a thing.
Bert shall be disappointed I haven’t picked up and read any Baudelaire. 
but look at her as the many people squirm around her and ask for translations and differences between what . she explains them perfectly and with great ease. now that, maisarah, is, useful knowledge. one that can be extended towards others. on the other hand, no one gives a shit whether or not you have read Goethe’s Faust. you want to translate Rilke? learn German, dear.
just like knowing and understanding English and its nuances can gives us a way to open up to many types of literature and a new understanding, one can begin to acquaint oneself with more meaning and ideas, and so is the case with the Arabic language. it is the stairs towards a new attic with hidden treasures. no i haven’t got the quote with me at the moment. 
and one has to understand every word of the imam when he recites and weep. and i know nothing. nothing but connectors and common verbs and nouns. i weep for myself. when shall i learn? 
i must i must i must.

***

and he says i have to chill out and relax and switch off, so to speak. that he does not know i manage to keep up with all this. honey, i have no time to rest. i shall die if i run dry. it is a curse of the gifted. if i am stagnant, my mind shall run rampantly ill and dark thoughts shall secretly make its way into my head. and i’d rather die of exhaustion than slowly die and be nothing. 

now, if you could jimmy it into your brain

the sheer exaggeration of the other self, and call it your other persona, you are now on your way to become another Pessoa. but i, i, i, there is only one i. and there are no multiplicities of the self, (or perhaps the schizophrenia you claim to be having is a lame excuse for your hollow external), nor is having mpd that interesting, unless you happen to watch paranoia’s agent and the baseball bat sneakily delivering you towards truth (a metaphor my dear). period. stop for a while. and look at yourself. your surroundings.

there are about ten books scattered on this table; one the Quran (you still haven’t fulfilled your quota for today yet, maisarah), one magazine you haven’t the heart to read yet because all of it concerns the word dakwah, Oblomov (which is due tomorrow), Rilke’s new poems that you still are flipping without much enthusiasm, and his Diaries of A Young Poet that he wrote for Salome, Al-Attas’s book – still unfinished, and three other engineering books you care not to name. several notebooks, all scribbled in the first ten or so pages.

i am no narcissist, and the word becomes so awfully tedious these days. first time i heard it i was fourteen – anything greek seemed cool to assume. then slowly we grow up and people mature and vocabularies expand and pretense becomes the very air you breath in and suddenly such a name for a character of a novel becomes altogether a cliched idea. scoff scoff. everything then stales and pales and suddenly Fight Club is overused by men who think they have a taste for cult films. or liking Sigur Ros seems to be the in thing to put as a soundtrack in every single abstract unsteady handheld video you make with your expensive dslrs. or printing compiled half shitty stories or your facebook statuses in double a papers, stapled together, and give it some pretentious melayu-ed english with a seemingly ironic playword, seems to be so wonderful an idea you start to sell them for a dollar or two trying to convince yourself that you, are a writer, dear.

but of course, what are you doing?

-24th July 2012.

our relation to each other

Is one of friendship, for you resemble a fragment of my past, my only confidant of the time, the executioner of all my evil and dejected thoughts, one who would read Dostoevsky with me when all others would rather read biology and visit cancer stricken teachers in deathbeds, you, who chose not to cry in face of death, you, who question existence and authority, you who were rejected by the masses when I chose to eject myself away from it, so this little communion of ours, progressed to one to mean me being your only protector, your only defender, although you have never asked any of this.

Of course I never understood whatever afro girl has ever said to you, nor any of the rumours spreading around you, for I seek the story only from you. Like when you ran away in the middle of the night on your birthday from all maddening crows who swore to beat you, so much their hatred was towards you, and off you ran, jumping off the school gates into the thick darkness that would greet you like a mother. But she smothered you, and so you, came back to me, when we encountered above the canteen, where you slept between desks and made chairs you bed and the curtains your sheets and the stray cats would made love to one another in your presence and you, startled, feeling lost suicidal insignificant, invisible avoidant of the world of all that you have ever known, you returned to me, the only one who could’ve remotely understood it all. You would ask me of advice. You who have lost a father and grew tired of the passive mother, would return to me, always, always, continually.

Of course all of this is fiction.

the colossal wave

Because I have lost all the ability of express myself more clearly, because you, forever elude me, because, after every line is read, every word written, and every syllable carefully constructed in my head, they all just spout into a soup of odd adjectives incomprehensible and self denying. 

And the sister tries to decipher whatever blabber of thoughts jumbled up moans she receives through the telephone trying to make sense of every single amplified elongated dragged out syllable, a work unaccomplished.

What is this, some cry or an outburst, another one of you antiques? Shall you emerge sane, in the end? And the words that keep on turning in your head is one of Plath’s I cannot stand being a passing fancy. How merging, now you open her up like a book of advice, trying to seek ease, when in fact all she manages to do is drag you down with her. of course, you never even had the ability to be verbose, the ability to think for yourself. You have now ceased to function and you keep on clinging to every single person you know to try and replace your soul. You want to cease being.

And then trying to recite poetry in the middle of the night. Preposterous. Blake turns in his grave. Peace visits us peace visits us you convince yourself . At ease soldier heart at ease.

love, death, people, and solitude

of course, i have said all i intended to say, and so now we wait. either way i am in position of not to care of whatever consequences that may happen. and we have experienced many little deaths already, such that there is nothing to lose anyway – i have cut out my heart into pieces and one by one it is trampled upon, sampai lunyai. dan kalau ada orang yang mahu resurrect it all all i can do is smile weakly as i breathe my last. how exaggerating.

and even if i dream of you in the rain bringing out a bouquet of stories to sell, and that we, sat down at the porch speaking to each other in hushed reverential tones, and then she emerges from the door, walking past us in full awe, a goddess scorned, i am not to take meaning in any of this, and discard it all just like everything i have done to all my restless nights, buried and forgotten.

we spoke of death yesterday. you on your mighty chair, and i exhausted from the multitude of people i have to face every other day – and you spoke of your dead friends and lost lovers and airport encounters – and i with my epileptic death and road accidents and the protruding yellow that mysteriously gnaws at you from a distance – death terrifies you, because you have been so much among the living you seem to see death as something distant and foreign.

have you forgotten a time when you used to speak of death as your dear friend, death as the ultimate exit, the cure to every suffering, the ultimatum, the bearer of all definite answers (and it still is, isn’t it?), death as a goal, death as a longing? that the thought of death seems so novel and grand an idea, and each day wouldn’t pass without you speaking of death?

so lost you are in your living. on loving. on becoming. on being. when clearly we all carry a death within us, and like a thread and the spool, time, like a string, is coming shorter and shorter, yet look at all the years accumulate behind us, monstrously, ready to engulf you at any moment.

and people, the only reason you are putting yourself out there is to rid yourself of your self. to be amongst strangers and feel little and insignificant and to gain insight on the world. brazilians speak portugese, for example. not spanish. and you, feel, yourself quit capable of all this. it is time anyway to speak and be merry rather than hole up with your malay-ness and all that. one does not have to fit a particular mould at all. and you yourself, the most individualized among all the individuals, with all your peculiarities and penchants, you know yourself to be better than this.

and bert says, you are the most unique of people.

iran iran iran. so many people from iran.

and then there’s the brother, in all his piety, speaking of marriage and the quran without any difficulty. so dedicated he is in his studies, in god, in relation to people, friends, family. he speaks english to you now, and his attitude, his gait, resembles R too much. and you envy him, as always.

mother. mother. mother. where would i be without mother?

two third

“If you find the right person, why waste your time on others?”

surprisingly i don’t write that much about ramadan itself, kan? ok lah, jom, sebelum saya sambung buat karipap untuk jamuan besok.

what a shame.

  • so now that i am only 1/2 through the quran. that’s a lot to catch up, reading + translation. dhaif betul maisarah ni. sibuk dengan dunia. haih.
  • terawih, probably missed about 4 of them. or five. travelling. sick leaves, so to speak. my body shut down completely last week i can’t even manage myself to get up. 
  • i got hit by a car today… okay that sounds totally blown up. i got softly bumped by a car today on my bike and managed to scratch my hands and knees and the only thing i could hear was a big fuck from the driver. nice eh? 
  • kaki lebam hidup muram.
  • i also haven’t managed to pick up reading, that much. jadi takde maknanya bukak goodreads berkali kali because all my reading material have no plot. who can manage to read a book of poetry in a week? or a twelve years worth of diary in a month? not me. books with narration are much easier to read. and i have deliberately troubled myself reading all this so called stream of consciousness (whatever that is), automatic writing. i have even took the trouble of putting out Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night that i bough last may (2011) on the shelf so i could force (force?) myself to read it. maybe knowing that not many books appeal to you any longer, you start picking only the good ones. tapi you have been a book snob from the beginning, maisarah, bukan?
  • too busy, yet i am getting increasingly happily distracted by all this ‘hai mai’ every other day… which is all fine and dandy but egh egh egh egh egh egh egh gedik la woi. kbye. 
  • marriage is fine an idea but too hard too heavy a burden (or is it a blessing?), to magnanimous a task. too fearsome. 
  • of course, i am not ready, but i am willing to be, ready. 
  • tapi takde calon. kut. ahahahahahahahaha.
  • imam masjid menangis baca page terakhir al-furqan. sila baca nak tengok sendiri kenapa.
  • sometimes that fear of not being true to yourself, or living falsely, is already written in the quran you know? it’s called being a munafiq. a mere pretender.
  • abang saya dah balik dari amerika. 🙂
what a typical entry. 

before you go to sleep

just a list of possible things maisarah can be, given the present condition,

  • slacker
  • electrical engineer
  • power analyst
  • consultant/manager/corporate shit
  • energy enthusiast 
  • nikola tesla
  • developer/planner
  • master environment 
  • researcher…. energy related

in contrast to things you ever wanted to be, dead, buried, forgotten, or have lost passion of, without giving further explanation that would make you sit in the shower for hours…

  • archaeologist
  • astronomer
  • physicist/mathematician
  • geographer
  • historian
  • philosopher, sociologist, or… idea enthusiast
  • town planner
  • scientist
  • shitty writer
  • psychiatrist
  • psychologist
  • education enthusiast
  • nothing
  • bookstore owner
i think i never liked the idea of studying english, or those wordy things. i’ve been, for most of my life, first, an analyst, an observer of life and the systems surrounding it. not particularly objective, but one that is observable and can be linked to society. one that is based on facts, or ideas that can be expanded, expounded and furthered by thought. 
the idea of aesthetics, or what is beautiful-  the arts, have never really appealed to me, for i do not really sea the usefulness of it. of course, that doesn’t mean that i am entirely ignorant of the idea of beauty, i can surely appreciate landscapes, that is described as the awe in horror. also, since i have been reading a lot of literature, and bits of philosophy, the thing that concerns me is not the idea of rapture that is captured by Rumi, but rather one of unity and quite simply, ketenangan, or the ease of the heart that is not throbbed by the quest for meaning. 
and that, i think, is the main difference between the way i function, that is driven by rational truth, one that seeks the absolute in order to be free of any qualms, anxiety. OR one that is driven by the desire to drown, to bask in awe, and all that lofty and beautiful notions of God and heaven and salvation.
I want to seek truth.
Others want to be saved by it.
they say Tolstoy is the only writer that manages to balance this difference between thinking and feeling. 
and i love literature simply because it allows me, to tap into all these mushy things i wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. i love beauty simply because i can appreciate creativity and how people strive to find meaning in every single gesture and words and actions. 
ayat cam keling. kbye nak tido.