Power

Living     in the earth-deposits     of our history

Today a backhoe divulged     out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle     amber     perfect     a hundred-year-old
cure for fever     or melancholy     a tonic
for living on this earth     in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered     from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years     by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin     of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold     a test-tube or a pencil

She died     a famous woman     denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds     came     from the same source as her power

— Adrienne Rich

Isometry

Revisiting this blog feels like returning to a room you once grew up in, and finding a layer of dust coating your bedspread.

It is very sunny today, and I am remembering the people I've lost over the months. My grandfather, who has no more friends alive, had satay and gado-gado for lunch. I had ayam sambal hijau—fried chicken dressed in a fiery green sauce (for sometimes the most intense sources of heat disguise themselves in the coolest colours: consider, for example, the blue flame of the bunsen burner)—and we walked around NEX with Phoebe, our helper. Though I hate this shopping complex, will I love it once it's gone? Every surface in this dreadful place inscribes questions into my head, none of which hold the promise of a satisfactory answer.

Nothing expresses itself in poetry anymore... I find that if anything, language obfuscates more than it provides expression (whatever that means), and in the microeconomy of meaning, there's no room for a generosity of thought, unless one allows one's writing to admit looseness and half-baked ideas.

I think I could live in Hondarribia, and pop into France for groceries should the need arise. I will own a dog named George, and we will grow old in a tiny house perched on a green hill.

Aubade

There was one summer
that returned many times over
there was one flower unfurling
taking many forms

Crimson of the monarda, pale gold of the late roses

There was one love
There was one love, there were many nights

Smell of the mock orange tree
Corridors of jasmine and lilies
Still the wind blew

There were many winters but I closed my eyes
The cold air white with dissolved wings

There was one garden when the snow melted
Azure and white; I couldn't tell
my solitude from love—

There was one love; he had many voices
There was one dawn; sometimes
we watched it together

I was here
I was here

There was one summer returning over and over
there was one dawn
I grew old watching

— Louise Glück

6 ideas for cafés

1. A café that only sells decaf, yerba mate and a salad of bean sprouts laced with iodised salt. Why do I eat here, you cry all the time. The café owner wears only slate-coloured robes and has an MA in Political Philosophy.

2. A café, buried under a mound of blue mountain coffee beans, forces the visitor to dive into an ocean—tactile and olfactive—representing the consumption and excess of the global capitalist economy. The visitor will find a small trapdoor at the bottom of the mound for him to enter. What are the intersections between food and finance? Café-hoppers are invited to reflect on the possibilities of their late-capitalist struggle while blind-testing a variety of Sumatran coffees, all more vegetal than floral.  

3. A café that tries to commemorate the year 1997. A mixtape, primarily constituted by the exhaustive discography of the Hanson brothers, is played on loop to the dismay of café patrons.

4. A café in a garden, under a stone. It is the world's first microcafé in a fungal colony.

5. A café with one chair and 24 tables, arranged in a line. It is open throughout the week, serving only one customer at a time, who must stay for the entire duration of the day, moving along the tables. The customer first moves together with the shadows cast by daylight; after sunset he will find that internal biological rhythms will lead him to order espresso-based beverages once every 30 minutes. He will call upon these rhythms to choreograph his glacial movements.

6. A café that expresses itself as an equation. When solved, the fabric of space and time will open up to produce the Platonic form of a French press. It has a rather DIY aesthetic, which some might not always appreciate.

"made with wholegrains"

Life update:

Phone screen is glitchy, which is cool and all if only I had the option make everything normal again, just like life, etc. I have accidentally sent multiple friend requests via this glitchy touch screen. Does this represent a broadening of my social circle? 

Monday night and I find myself refusing to do anything academic, watching Girls and eating granola and seaweed and drinking "grapefruit rice beer"— slowly, to avoid ulcer-pain. I have hit new lows this semester. 

In my sadness I have purchased the following items: 4 pairs of socks, 2 types of tea, 1 table mat, and drip coffee. 

frame me

…soon ‘being the bigger person’ will become ‘not giving a shit’.

Thank you Thought Catalog for giving this to the world. Indeed, an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters for the rest of eternity will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. This is a little more plausible.

In recent news I have been feeling Pretty Fucking Miserable: classes this semester have been a step backward in terms of my Excitement at the Prospect of Higher Education and I am still in the process of deciding if this is the consequence of making particular decisions about undergraduate life (and living on campus, and enrolling in a programme I feel very lukewarm about, and feeling increasingly out of touch with my sources of vicarious living overseas), or a natural and organic regression into jadedness (how I loathe that word) and boredom. 

I want to paint my face white.

And contort wildly on a stage and then die and then be cremated and let my ashes be consumed by a thousand autistic ravens. Because this is probably the only sensible way to call attention to the complete and utter lack it in the world and its madness, and I am pained by the realisation that I can come to this understanding with the limitations that accompany my own narrow and suspect subjectivity — what of the nett (as it were) madness that sheathes the entire world of sorrow in every moment and memory? 

I'm not brave enough to weigh the world. 

And I'm not competent enough to derive an understanding of the matrix of events that situates me in my feeble constructs of space and time. I synthesise these two points of insecurity and perhaps wrap my textbooks in them like the cheap plastic wrap my mother used to buy from Popular. I don't know what protects me; I only care that it does, and that it remains easily disposable.

Anyway, the main agents of my extreme annoyance may or may not bother reading this, but here's some universal advice: if you keep using your insecurity as an excuse to get what you think you want, you're only going to be left vaguely unsettled with what you think you have. 

found text ii

through beds of violets and tender parsley

fruits and nuts,
with simple sweeteners
and a bit of spice

no contour is blurred

hermeneutic spiral of interpretations

the richest journey in black, green

the wandering
and the homecoming
of Odysseus

letter

You do not possess the capacity to mourn: absence is not a lack but a quality. In the darkroom, your head-spaces, images appear as quickly as they blanch into colour with neither motive nor morphology.

I am struck by your waxwork skin, and might be less surprised to uncover your rusted frame, skeletal and tidy. These shelves store enough heartbreak to gather a field of dust in the still air.

Sincerely.

found text

image as surrogate/placeholder/conduit for emotion

seven haikus that will make u cry

generation to generation 

all of these tourists covered with oil

create anyone

let's talk

better         over

business 

You are a truth-telling people.

Hail

Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep
among fruits, spilled

in ash, in dust, I did not

leave you. Even now I can't keep from
composing you, limbs & blue cloak

& soft hands. I sleep to the sound

of your name, I say there is no Mary
except the word Mary, no trace

on the dust of my pillowslip. I only

dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets,
of honeybees above you

murmuring into a crown. Antique queen,

the night dreams on: here are the pears
I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves,

asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am,

having bathed carefully in the syllables
of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent

of their sea foam. What is the matter with me?

Mary, what word, what dust
can I look behind? I carried you a long way

into my mirror, believing you would carry me

back out. Mary, I am still
for you, I am still a numbness for you.

— Mary Szybist

The hill paddock

Searching for the missing calf
in the brittle light of winter afternoon

we found instead
a tuft of bloodied feathers
fluttering in the ryegrass

as though they could remember flight,
and longed for it.

—Joanna Preston

vergangenheitsbewältigung (III)

I begin the new year with a sort of existential gagging — the gag representing all at once the act and apparatus of a violent silencing, the medical device used to pry the mouth open, the physical sensation of retching and its inherent fruitlessness, and finally a comedic genre characterised by its physical, visual humour and radical subversion of expectations and normative language. Shorn of all other accretions this is the essence of experience thus far: the effect of silence on real human relationships, the subversion of it through gestures expressing resistance, the double-readings that take place at sites of malcontent and malice. I am trying to save these gestures (the silence that can be read, interpreted and re-interpreted) for a more worthwhile cause but the gag that forces open the avenues of utterance is nothing more than a dismantled, reassembled and reconstituted version of the gag that silences. 

vergangenheitsbewältigung (II)

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.

vergangenheitsbewältigung

vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung vergangenheitsbewältigung an incantatory prayer & it ends here.

degree zero

This year, I have learnt:

1) Flossing is so important. 

2) Everything tastes better with chipotle sauce, unless you're talking about whipped peanut butter and cream.

3) Google Maps will save your vacation.

4) I don't really need an analog camera.

5) If happiness and heartbreak are two different sides of the same coin, I wouldn't want to place any of my bets on a coin toss. 

6) I watch films completely uncritically in my dreams and wake up moved to tears.

7) Dread is only real if it's completely unnamable.

8) I appreciate people who are deeply flawed and who recognise this without resorting to constructing elaborate lies.

9) You are the ultimate construct.

10) My dad makes an amazing boeuf bourguignon.

A Bitchy Theory of the Grotesque

OK, so, Grotesque = grotto-esque, ok? And a grotto is, like, a cave, right? So this theory of the Grotesque, is, like, rooted deeply in all that is cavernous. Get it? So when I'm like, Ur totally Grotesque, I'm really saying that you totally crawled out from a cave, like totally primordially, ok? Like, I don't mean this as an insult or anything, I mean, there's something very endearing about simple life forms, but I'm also, like, Hello?? Like, excuseme, regression isn't something we intersubjectively constructed!! It's totally forrealz For Realz. I mean you need to just take a look in the mirror to see the deep regression into the Grotesque, like, my definition of the Grotesque not urs. Whatever. The word "gross" has, like, etymological roots in the Grotesque? So maybe take a hint? 

Our Whole Life

Our whole life a translation
the permissible fibs

and now a knot of lies
eating at itself to get undone

Words bitten thru words

meanings burnt-off like paint
under the blowtorch

All those dead letters
rendered into the oppressor's language

Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts

like the Algerian
who has walked from his village, burning

his whole body a cloud of pain
and there are no words for this

except himself

— Adrienne Rich

otherly

From At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English (2007) ed. J. Neil C. Garcia: 

Let us pursue the domiciliary analogy in its conventional form: postcolonial poets writing in the language of colonization may be seen as guests residing in the house of English, which obviously isn't their original home. Their situation is therefore—as we have already noted—one of unhomeliness. And yet, it's clear that, by the tragic irony of colonial history, they now have to live in this new house, which admittedly exercises its own powerful claims on their imaginations, on their affections, even as it continues to remind them of their loss of original innocence, their "existential" displacement. They write in English, and yet do so not as residents but as "guests," behaving as Others in the house of the English Self. They deform, fragment or sabotage the traditions of English poetry, infuse it with alien rhythms, twist its structures, disrupt its sense and sensibility, adulterate its music, refract its optics, register, in each and every utterance, the fact of their double alienation from both their old and new identities. In other words, by writing in English, they may be said to insist on the fact that they exist pendulously in the chasm between the antipodes of the "purity" of a precolonial past and the "contaminations" of a colonial present. Readers of this kind of poetry will most likely never mistake it for anything other than creolized, mestizo, ethnic, minority, and yes—in the conventionally political sense that many Western or Western-trained critics understand it—most unmistakably "postcolonial."

wisdom is overrated

There is so much on my mind that I can only reach for rings of donuts and load Buzzfeed, that bane of at-home productivity.

The thing with working from home is that I am within walking distance to actual food that I can prepare myself for free, but would rather open a pack of keropok and eat mango-and-cream sorbet (fantastic dessert, by the way) directly from a tub. Why.

Am reading Northanger Abbey and can identify with the ironist Henry, but I also feel that I am projecting too much of prior social experience onto Catherine — her use of The Mysteries of Udolpho as an interpretive tool to understand the events taking place in Northanger Abbey, for example. I can relate to her tendency to mediate real life with textual life, and this takes place on two frontiers: in books and in film/TV. (Unfortunately Catherine's refictionalisation of her world, after defictionalising gothic tropes from reality, only reaffirms the uncomfortable truths derived from textual life. That sucks.)

I felt like the Barefoot Contessa because I tiptoed to my potted rosemary plant without footwear, intending to snip off some stalks for a gin and tonic with meyer lemons, please forgive my pretensions. Also, this is probably where the similarities between Ina Garten and me end. She does not have to return to public housing.

I need to ease myself back into writing full sentences, because no one speaks with punctuation in daily conversations anymore. It is unfortunate that whenever I hear someone below 25 speak with semicolons in their sentences, the only thing on my mind is how class-conscious they sound. My own self-aggrandising follow-up to this is that we are all at a certain age where our minds are structured by a sublimated form of class anxiety, so it doesn't matter: we are all proletarian whenever it's convenient.

Recently I have been thinking about how complex amorous relations are, and how they occasionally manifest the appearance of being complete and utter bullshit. Of course I stand corrected. This is not a popular worldview because it's obviously detrimental to the human race, assuming there is anything worth perpetuating. Also if relations take the shape of something trite (and consequently, vulgar and repulsive) there surely has to be some minutest grain of reason that might justify its existence? What validates a relationship anyway? Zizek's all like, "if you have reasons to love someone, you don't love them" which is true. It's a supra-rational activity. Let's all have fun with that.

loading screen v