dispatches from quiet places

Two Departures and an Elegy

Adrienne Rich passed away last Thursday, and my maternal grandmother on Friday. Is the only connection between the two people one of death and mortality? After some thought, I think my emotional relationships with them are rather similar. With Adrienne Rich, I never quite knew how to approach her work. To me, reading Rich felt like an obligation that I had to undertake as a student. Her poetry was interesting insofar as they were rich in details to pad an essay with. In this light, I never experienced her work on an emotional, or even sensual, level. Only in her death did I discover her moving articulations of indignance and sorrow — a discovery that I now regret, having failed to appreciate the work of a living poet.

I felt the same way with my maternal grandmother: I only spoke to her as a matter of obligation, as a grandchild raised with a vastly different language and in a very different domestic environment. I never knew how to interact with her, and any effort to communicate would have led to dead-end conversations like Have you eaten? and — well I can't really recall anything more. So it is with some regret that I view her demise, vis a vis my own relationship with her. I wasn't really emotionally shaken when she passed away; only moved by other people's expression of that loss. But from my uncles' and aunts' (tearful) recollections of her selflessness, her strict pragmatism, and love, I could only imagine what the loss might have felt like from these secondhand encounters of my grandmother. 

Why elegy? After working on a mini essay about Susan Sontag that was also supposed to highlight my personhood (college applications are convinced that this is good for everyone), I decided that everything is an elegy, a kind of memento mori that speaks of an ineluctable transience that casts that shadow of mortality on the physical, and eventually the transcendental (Okay, iff ideas are drawn from the experience of materiality.) Speech about the dead is an elegy, the constraints of form and structure be damned. In fact, all speech is elegiac in some way — the proper nouns that we use now will become obsolete in the future, words will grow archaic, languages have no eternal shelf life, etc. etc. We are all going to die and everything is a testament to this.

Running and Eating, the Alternative Meaning of Life

I did some running recently. Okay, I ran 15 km with A on Sunday. The first 10 km did not hurt. The last five, however, made my thighs burn afterwards. (BTW is lactic acid real? Why have I not seen it before? Can I emulsify it with olive oil for a vinaigrette?) One thing I really appreciated was the organisers' thoughtfulness in preparing cold towels for all the runners at the finish line. It is approximately a zillion times more refreshing that the hot towel that SIA distributes on the plane, a pompous expression of "We're so smug about our awesome service that we still give you cattle-class losers a hot towel for your unspeakably agonising 22 hour flight in front of that teething baby." In conclusion, I am glad to have run 15 km with A because I definitely wouldn't have done it alone, not with that distance and with that reporting time. 

We also had brunch (but after some delay it turned into lunch) with MX and S at PS cafe, that pretentious place for people with deep pockets and zero ability to cook their own brunch, which might have cost at least three times less with 8 times more satisfaction. My statistics are very exact, because, well, science!! Maybe I'm just bitter, as bitter as the old frisée in the salad that sat and cried next to my food, but if you have OK food at prices meant for Above OK food, then at least make up for your weird logic with More Than OK service! Is that so hard? Apparently for the employees at this establishment, occasionally serving diners fancy tap water that have vegetables inside more than makes up for that deficit. (Relatedly, I would not mind being slapped if I was to be served food that's basically an orgasm on a plate at no cost other than the infliction of physical violence, maybe some verbal abuse.) 

Inspired by the first proper meal I had in days, I browsed a copy of The French Laundry cookbook at the library and realised that I haven't cooked in quite a while, and I miss all the magical (ok, I know science can explain it, whatever) and delicious transformations that take place. I really want to host a picnic dinner at the new river at Bishan Park, and there will proper tableware and cutlery! No biodegradable disposable plates made of cornstarch! No plastic forks that break when you try to eat your steak! No supermarket sushi in-lieu-of proper food! We will not sit on plastic bags! Self-actualisation! Yay!