Play it as it lays

Not just because I like Joan Didion's writing voice, but because this is something in the neighbourhood of what what I imagined it would be like. And because I've read The Year of Magical Thinking.

Right after I meant not to write

but something reminded me of Frank O'Hara:

...I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart --
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

And then a line from Audre Lourde, which I think I first saw in something of Yisheng's:

love is a word, another kind of open.

And Larkin:

On me your love falls like an enormous yes

And some times, other times, I am afraid. For what that might mean, for both and either of us.

Another kind of explanation

From Joan Didion's collected essays, I find this:

I remember one trip home, when I sat alone on a night jet from New York and read over and over some lines from a W. S. Merwin poem I had come across in a magazine, a poem about a man who had been a long time in another country and knew that he must go home:

...But it should be
Soon. Already I defend hotly
Certain of our indefensible faults,
Resent being reminded; already in my mind
Our language becomes freighted with a richness
No common tongue could offer, while the mountains
Are like nowhere on earth, and the wide rivers.

- From "Notes from a Native Daughter", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

If anyone can find the Merwin poem, I would be grateful.

One kind of explanation

I meant not to write publicly, not until I felt that I had made enough of a start at writing again, so I didn't sound like a parody of myself - doesn't it feel like one is always starting again? without having gone anywhere, and yet starting again - but an essay by Susan Sontag reminded me of this passage from Iris Murdoch.

The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair.

What I hadn't remembered was how the passage continued:

The refusal to attend may even induce a fictitious sense of freedom: I may as well toss a coin. Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful action. But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is. A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality. We act rightly ‘when the time comes’ not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments and with the kind of energy and discernment which we have available.

It's not even a question of fear, or of desire, or at least not foremost a question of fear or desire. But - which way does courage lie? An exercise of justice and realism and really looking.

Gone fishing

to Shanghai. Back in a week.

A live viper, or a fistful of dust

D sends a book by Jack Hitt on walking the road to Santiago, which is part history and part journal and makes the Spanish pilgrimage sound like nothing so much as a very long and very grubby college holiday. Hitt intersperses his travelogue with bits of historical commentary, including this lovely snippet:

Jean Bonnecaze, a pilgrim in 1748, wrote in his journal the recipe for a remedy said to cure a host of pilgrim ailments:

"Take a cleaned chicken, some pimpernel, chicory, chervil, and lettuce - a fistful of each. Clean it well, wash it, and dice into some pieces. Add a viper flayed alive which you will cut into little pieces after removing the head, the tail, and the entrails, keeping only the body, the heart, and the liver. Boil it all in three quarts of water, until it is reduced to three half-quarts. Remove it from the fire, strain it through a colander, and ladle it out into two soups to take one on the morning of a fast. Continue its use for fifteen days, purging before and after the fortnight....If you cannot find a live viper, substitute for it a fistful of dust."

this weekend

1. Julian is back!

2. Great bbq at XW's place on Saturnight. I think the surroundings - the cool stone patio, the long narrow pool reflecting the streetlight, the quality of the food and drink - brought out the civilised part in us - no-one did anything that would necessitate some karmic payback down the road (with the possible exception of Wii boxing).

3. Yoga, as I know it, from my grand total of three classes, runs up against all my instincts - the hippy-dippy part of me is attracted to the eastern mysticism that informs the practice, the yuppie bit tempted by the studios in orchard road, and what I think of as the sane part cynical of the enterprise of yoga - the pretty studios, the motivation for physical exercise*, the gym wear sold out in the reception area, the modern interpretations (where are the ashrams and the Hindu gods?).

* to be fair to this particular studio, there's breathing too.

FYIP

1. I've read Harry Potter 7.

2. It must be awfully difficult to pull Lear off - to have enough of a remnant of greatness in him to sustain the tragedy. I rather enjoyed the RSC Lear, despite Cordelia, who I guess was trying to be feisty and spirited but unfortunately came across as shrill and shrewish, and Edmund, who was a little too much the storybook villain.

3. I did think it was a triumph - that the energy level stayed high, the actors looked like they were really into the play, and pulled off the difficult bits with some success, and that the spear-carriers were aesthetically pleasing.

4. Somehow we seem have produced - neither the richness that a freer society might produce, where artists may have licence to experiment with thought and range and form, and political concerns do not deafen artistic concerns, nor the depth that a more oppressive society might produce, where artists may be able to bring the political cliches and distortions of the day into more human relief, and forge gold from suffering.

5. I've just finished re-reading, and marvelling at, the Northern Lights series, which is rich and complex and inventive.

"Why -" Lyra began, and found her voice weak and trembling - "Why can't I read the alethiometer anymore? Why can't I even do that? That was the one thing I could do really well, and it's just not there anymore - it just vanished as if it had never come..."

"You read it by grace," said Xaphania, looking at her, "and you can regain it by work."

"How long will that take?"

"A lifetime."

"That long..."

"But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you've gained it, it will never leave you."

Normal service will be resumed

when I've finished Harry Potter.

Talk to you then.

Counting

My brother came into my room as I was reading xkcd and said, have you seen the latest one? I showed that to my girlfriend today. (How sweet, I said.) She got upset with me.

He said

he went down to the beach, and let the shallow waves roll over him, and there was gold all over the place, and he missed me.

[Because I often forget.]

Chacun à son goût

From the BBC:

Now, though, after years of applying myself to the Chinese arts of eating, I understand the pleasure of having something slithery and bouncy in my mouth.

Bells, belated

Best wishes to Syn and Bear! And all the happiness that their (new!) house can hold.

4

you're soaking in it.

3

For Sidney Bechet
by Philip Larkin

That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes
Like New Orleans reflected on the water,
And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes,

Building for some a legendary Quarter
Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles,
Everyone making love and going shares --

Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles
Others may license, grouping around their chairs
Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced

Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,
While scholars manques nod around unnoticed
Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids.

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City
Is where your speech alone is understood,

And greeted as the natural noise of good,
Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.

2

Language
by W. S. Merwin

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.

1

What would you say the pertinent facts were, after so long an absence?

Archie

If you too read the Archie comics as a kid:

The Vanity Fair article
The slide show of Archie art through the years
The intro to the show
And Sugar, Sugar!

Dang1 ping1

My brother just called home. From the army. At the pay phone (they give army boys free phone cards; they should really just give them spare handphone batteries). Last Thursday my whole family went with him to Tekong (where all the other boys were accompanied by hordes of family too). At Tekong, after the ferry ride, the parents and assorted relatives have to go one way, to tour the premises, and the boys another, to get their kits and a pep talk. The tour of the bunks and recreation room is conducted by a rather cute army boy, very much like the smiling Sarayon. There is an air-conditioned recreation room decorated with army propaganda and equipped with a TV, some chairs, a fooze-ball table. The guide explains that it's for rest, but since there's one room for each company, 200 boys, the boys will have to ask their commanding officers for permission to use the room. The commanding officers (the guide hastens to say) will generally agree, but sometimes they won't, for example if there's some tough training the next day, and the boys should sleep instead. Not that the training's tough; ok it is tough (tough is good, says a parent), but these boys have all passed their IPPT, so they will be ok, and if they do very well they can win the company awards. (Our guide was the best recruit, or best something, of his platoon.) Then there is a guide to army gear, with a different and less smiling host. He (the different host) has dissected a pack or whatever it's called and pinned its entrails to some billboards. He has also dug up a demonstrator dressed in full battle order (I presume; war paint on his face and unconvincing rag leaves on his helment and the new load-something-something vest on this, though not hung with grenades). Someone asks about the weight of all that gear, and is told that that varies with weapons and the amount of food the boy chooses to bring along (which seems odd). We troop into the canteen to wait (there are many groups of eager relatives shuttling into Tekong). We are called to the auditorium. The commanding officer is a middle-aged man running to fat who takes some pains to explain the training architecture of the army to the parents. An army, he says, marches on its stomach, and so we have improved the army food. The boys sit together in the middle of the auditorium; they all look small and skinny and slight. Too small to wear the army pack and carry 20kg of weapons and ammunition (my father says), to small to be away from home. The commanding officer calls the boys to take the oath, which is flashed on powerpoint (of course). He starts the oath, I, Name, NRIC number, and there is a moment of confusion as every boy speaks his own name and NRIC number, loudly of course, because they've all been told to talk the army way now. I suppose the scene is meant to be touching, and it is a little, because they're so painfully young, but mostly it brings to mind the City Watch taking their oath (I comma square bracket insert name here square bracket comma do swear by square bracket insert deity's name here square bracket...). Then he says to the boys, I want you to promise to call your parents tonight, after 9.30 pm, can you do that? YES SIR! (Their training must have already started.) Now you've promised, you must call your parents first, not your girlfriends, ok? YES SIR! The girlfriends in the audience (not that many of them) shift in their seats. The boys leave first, line up in the corridor. The parents troop out row by row and claim their son. We all go to the dining hall to taste the SAF food. The boys are restless; perhaps a little eager; perhaps a little apprehensive, but not really by much; it's probably all a little unreal at this point, like a massive school camp; there isn't much to do after we've eaten lunch (which was edible); this is just waiting time, like the time in an airport before boarding the plane. We look for the bus back to the ferry. My brother walks us there, and there are hugs all around - my father shakes his hand instead, because he is all grown up now - and last minute instructions on washing clothes, sleeping early, not exhausting the handphone battery the first day. Other boys are hugging their assorted relatives, all a little sheepishly. Call us! we say. And then we board the ferry back.

A Map of Disappointments

There's a Zadie Smith article on why writers often betray themselves in aldaily.com.

The few things I've written have felt like betrayals when I was writing them - felt like I let truth slide away in favour of more familiar phrase or thought, some word or thought that came (too) readily to hand. And after writing whatever it was I was just glad to have written something, and ready to believe that it said whatever I meant to say.

I used to think that what one really required for a great novel, or poem, or any piece of writing, was courage. Throw away the lights and the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

This follows a dinner conversation with xz when he said, I don't think you're happy at your job. What I said then, what I say to these things - I'm not unhappy. It's still interesting. There are good points. If I were better at it I would like it more; it's just a question of working harder. I have to do this, and being unhappy would just make it harder. (The last one on grimmer days.) And I thought this was a sign of growing up, of some kind of maturity; after all, being an adult is all about being sensible and letting go (even of things that used to define you) and doing things you don't want to do, isn't it? But I generally write even less when I'm fooling myself, and I haven't been able to write anything for a while now.

Which disappointments would you put into your map?