Writing is a muscle, and mine has atrophied into a quivering, amorphous mass of industrial petroleum jelly, freshly spilled on hot tarmac from a rusty northbound truck to Selangor. Currently, I self-identify with deep-sea blobfish.
Recently Ace of Base's "The Sign" appeared on my Spotify playlist like an answered prayer: it describes, accurately, an epistemic journey from ignorance to experience and knowledge. "Under the pale moon/ where I see lots of stars." Images depicting the cosmos—by law of antinomy—prefigure terrestrial, banal, human concerns. We return to the past, re-interpreting events with a profoundly impoverished sense of their complexities, assigning them a semiology in fruitless attempts to match memory with meaning. What is The Sign but a fractured and unstable semiotic object in an interpretative paradigm that enslaves us? We are alone in our thoughts.
