CCXLV - Take heart

You will someday be able to say what's in your heart. That is your gift to yourself.

Do not be afraid of losing, or of failure, or of having hesitated and not daring. Only be afraid that you were not good enough. Knowing that, take heart.

CCXLIV - Dreams

I have long ago graduated, whether through will or through desire, I do not know, from viewing my dreams as symbols, or as prophecy, or as self-consolations, idealised simulacrum of future intimacies, a nether recreation of what is no longer possible. In short I do not think of them as being much more than patchwork arrangements, regurgitations, however dynamic, of thoughts which accompany subconscious flows of chaotic memory, and visual frames drawn carelessly, like birds in a trawler's net, in the periphery of one's mind.

But the strange thing is that dreams have a certain power, an insidious draw, over the consciousness. The old things have this power, commonly called nostalgia, which the tides of memory, from deep, unremembered waters, cast upon one's shores. Dreams of a colour and timbre recognised by the soul of one's consciousness, through which a strange, ectoplasmic attachment forms, pensive wisps of spider-web streaked with morning dew.

I feel that unsettled gravity, after I dream, clouds of something not-quite-anxiety mark my horizon, as a furtive animal senses a thunderstorm. I search my thoughts and do not know. Suspicion, some inner decision, not quite resolved conflict, I do not want to revisit. Fight, I fight it, by the cold light of day, blinding will.

water returned to the sea, cold, purposeful water,
water of crystal poplar and unnamed desire,
undercurrent winding in repressed agony, vengeful dance.

CCXLIII - Jardin Botanique

 An afternoon at the Botanics, when perfect, is unlike an afternoon anywhere else. It's hot, and also dry. The wind picks up, soft, and not for long. So it's going to be a stifling kind of walk, but the sooner you make peace with it, the better. Nothing better than a paced sweat. Light fabrics, pockets for music players and keys, soft shoes, a cap, sunglasses. Now it's perfect. The light streams down in lazy sprinkles through golden foliage, oscillating, whispering and innumerable. There are many places to start walking, and there are as many paths to take, so no walk feels quite the same as the others, no instance of music meets with vision at the same point. I choose Bill Evans, or perhaps he chooses me, and you can't really tell with music, can you. There's something dreamy, no, mystical about what he evokes when he plays. Pair that with a little green world, going it alone, nothing else on your mind. It works a charm. The piano, the path, it melds together, the adventure takes. 

Now, look at the trees. Trees everywhere. The thing about trees is that they're always there, always a part of the background, a grove here, a cluster there, giants on both sides. And yet a moment happens, a closer inspection, a long glance, and a tree presents itself to you, as if for the first time. Take one, now. It's thick, scaly, perhaps a grey type of brown. Wide, slightly protruding cylinder, slanted for light, wind or weight, and sprouting upwards and manifold. But down below, where roots touch the grass, run haphazard ridges, it's such a creature of essence, of reality. Reach out a foot and touch it, step in the sand that spreads between its toes, balance on the uneven veins running underfoot. It's so rooted, so actual, so existent. So much a creature of itself, of growing, of moments strung together in being. Up above, fresh, tender saplings eke out tiny stalks, branches long and spindly, arms strain at distended angles, odd shapes. Everywhere leaves, then ferns, then palms, then tendrils, then flowers, then fruits, then moss, then bark, then at the same time, everything else that makes up a tree. Green, brown, and gold dominate. 

Consider next how much air a tree covers over with its hands, how the quality of light it lets in is just the kind to sustain the kind of grubby, insistent life that takes shelter under these boughs. Know also that there are all kinds of trees, and one is not alike to another. Know them through their fruit? No, they hardly fruit. I know them through their figure, and colour, and the types of leaves that they have, and the type of stripes that run down their bark. I hear a kind of music that runs as well through this race, a meandering sort of sweep to their bodies, sighing as they bend, gurgling as they rustle, now laughing, now weeping, as they caress the wind. Trees, peaceable and calm. 

But take a jungle path, and now, silence. Quiet, dark, and hidden, at every side is a ready ambush. What is there in such closeness that presses in so heavily? What manner of tree now sits, stern and unrelenting, its heart a closed book. Same tree, only different scene. More trees, in numbers unnerving, impassable, thicketed. Quickly striding now, time to get out of here, into the air. Only the end of the path, into strong light and renewed wind, brings uncommon relief. 

The Botanical Gardens is nothing if not relief, strong sunshine and the promise of eternal forest. Nothing on my mind, just walking, breathing, and free, calm space in the sun.

CCXLII - UNESCO, ¿Por qué? For what?

The words UNESCO heritage site and intangible cultural heritage mean nothing to me, and perhaps that's my fault. Ignorance, admitted. (I've been to three UNESCO heritage sites, I think, outside of Singapore, and it's not as if I wanted to visit them on that basis.) 

"... the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity."

"... ensuring visibility and awareness of the significance of the intangible cultural heritage and to encouraging dialogue, thus reflecting cultural diversity worldwide and testifying to human creativity."

UNESCO. It's a chop of approval, which frankly, these things never did much for me. No, I think Makan Sutra is something of an authority on food in Singapore, I'll accept that. But things like ISO, Michelin, Man Booker, Wine of the Year, you know, I take that stuff with a pinch of snuff. If the thing has inherent value, if it means something, which I've appreciated for my own reasons, then I figure that's better than borrowing from someone else's judgment. And they morph into popularity contests anyway, the judging is arbitrary, opaque, gossip-fodder. 

And these are all just labels, in competition, which to me is counter-intuitive because no one place should be compared to another, and judged adequate or wanting. In whose eyes more culturally significant, by whose toil more worthy of admiration? By whose humanity? I don't get it, and I hope I don't get it either. Why should we court the attentions of those who can be drawn by a label? By what merit do we feel ennobled to be treated as having attained iconic status? What does the child of this country think of being compatriot to a land with two UNESCO labels? But I'll speak for myself and say I think it's all very silly. 

Take the Botanical Gardens. It's not a place, I don't think, which Singaporeans would recommend as uniquely us, something that had to be walked to understand this country, what it's about. And it's a legacy in a way of our colonial past, when Great Britain had the whole natural history craze going (Darwin sailed on the Beagle eight years after Raffles started the Gardens, and he published On the Origin of Species thirty years after. I'd be remiss for not mentioning his younger colleague Alfred Russell Wallace, who, you say?). Would an Asiatic, a Straits Chinese get all huffy about plants the same way? Don't get me wrong, I love it. I'll talk about it sometime else. I just don't think it's an icon we cherish in quite that national way, not like the old Kallang Stadium with the fireworks and winning the Tiger Cup, or City Hall overlooking the Padang, or Changi Airport when it had two terminals. I mean, am I wrong?

And it's worse, I think, for two reasons, when it comes to hawker centres, hawker culture. The first is that our hawkers are our own, and what I mean by that is that the UN and whomever they have in the culture department have nothing to do with our hawkers. I say "our own", of course, without in any way appropriating the lives that hawkers live. No, on the contrary, hawkers are the salt of Singaporean earth, and I am not. I simply can't be, me a child of the sanguine eighties. They're individuals, families, old and small, little else besides handed down recipes, ancient words passed down besides stoves and stone pestles, and toughness, always toughness. The war and old families meant no school for most. Waking up at four am, noses to the grind, peeling prawns, cutting chili, boiling broth, god, they live by the sweat of their brows. Us, when we get a three dollar bowl of noodles, take a one dollar bowl of soy beancurd, how much do we think of the labour that goes into making all that? And yes, we talk of profit, of five hundred bowls a day, but do we talk of rent, do we talk of toil, do we talk of the heat of the wok and the heft of the garbage pail? No, we're next-generation. Someone else does it. Someone else slaps the iron spatula and tends the roaring flame. They're a dying breed, and we all know that. When I was a child and someone told me that hawkers would die out, I knew I'd never do what my grandma did, and so it was inevitable. Not at that price, nor at that sacrifice. My grandma, my uncle, they have hands, you know what I mean?

I mean, it's ridiculous, what does the UN have to do with that? 

Which is related to my second point, which is that the [rude-word] Singaporean government has little to do with that either! I mean, I'll say it like it is, right here. Yes, they've built the centres, they've sort of managed the rents (don't quote me on that, you'll get an earful for sure), they've kept the grounds tidy, they've put in part work part welfare and things like that. But what on earth is the Singaporean government being all proud of the individual hawkers for when the hawkers have stood up for themselves from day one to present-day-eighty-thousand and going on? I mean, stuff that, you overstuffed shirts, take a hike. Put up your banners and your congratulations from the MPs somewhere else. This publicity, this flirting with UNESCO, it's a joke. 

Think about it this other way. Every bit of heritage, every rough word, subtle cooking savvy, keen skill and artful acumen handed down, is so unique, so precious and fiercely protected. These are trade secrets in the purest sense. How's it make any sense to aggregate all that, build a "brand", for crying out loud, and pop a shiny ribbon on it? I mean sure, you can defend the idea of "hawker culture" as the heritage, and you can pretend that the idea that each hawker is unique is still protected, somehow. But you take a visitor to Singapore and ask them, well what do you think of this bit of heritage which has now taken home the UNESCO thing, and they eye the bak chor mee stall next to the mee rebus stall and that's kind of it? 

UNESCO? Why? ¿Por qué? For what?

CCXLI - regrets

A regretful pathos snuck up on me this morning, as I lay in bed half awake. I suppose I allowed it to lie with me.  It happens, but perhaps it hasn't happened for such a long time that I never thought of it happening.  I think it's the reflective, self-inflected deliberation of the past few days, some part of the conversations at night I've had with Adeline.  Things talked about which I don't have an answer for.  Well, no, the answer lies with me. 

Cher's song came on the radio once. It's such a classic, it goes, if I could turn back time! That's all it needs to say. Boom, you're sucked in. And her grand old hurting voice, so proud.Singers always have these tragi-comedic Greek theater lives, I almost assume she's got one too. The truth is I think listening to her song made me pensive, and thus off like Dante, irresistibly, to the pits. That's the difference between radio and everything else. Radio has true magic. When it comes alive, the moment is yours, and you take it. I don't even think it's magical, it's actually religious.

And here's the torch you have to carry in the descent, telling left from right. Do you think that life would be better if your choices at the time were more carefully taken? Or do you flee from such moral cowardice?Because the things you chose to do were those you wanted to do, given the circumstances, given the person you were, your perception of those persons you had in front of you. Being now your own Virgil, do you wish your younger Dante had acted with more wisdom? But let's not pretend; it's such a tempting pit to plunge into. Irresistible. Never-mind something so pedestrian as buying the lottery a day earlier; think about all the people you love who you could have loved more, all the girls you've left behind. Words, names, places, and faces; sunbeams, scenery and songs evoking passions left behind.

Maybe you could have fixed some things, but think about the enormity of life as it goes on around us.The daunting immutability of our own relationships in the present. And meaning wafts, does it not, it takes shape in the moment at which it was conceived. What was meaningful to you then, what you wanted to do for pure, if not good, reasons, would you change those things, just so that things turn out a different way? Would you then betray yourself tomorrow? The truth is, maybe you weren't the person for it at the time. Well, no, you weren't. Not a man good enough. That's the thing that haunts me, finally, but also the dregs that spare me agony. The tide rises and turns,  smoothing over sand-prints underfoot, and you leave the water a different person, that's all.

Some days it might seem other choices were better. But you, as you are, weren't there.

CCXL - No Longer Rule

A rolling gray palls over the mid-day afternoon,
Near land covered in forbidding cloud, yet as not threatening to burst.
The air thick, and treacly. Damp arms, moist necks, circled breaths,
Like so many pulls of wool to conceal the maw; heavy, rank and stifling. A cocooned jaw.
A muffled inhale, weak to sate weary nostrils, slow to flood a slow-pulsed heart.

The air is still. Not so the land.
It hums again with loud insistence. Now softly purring, now richly whirring,
A land returned once again to its own dominion, mastered by great and small.
And if all are masters could yet any be masters? Or none, it matters not,
The old lords long departed, they who thought themselves kings.
Ages did they roam, unseeing, unconcerned, even unhappily. What men are happy kings?
Now they are fled, withdrawn to their castles, no portals, no gates, no footmen on the bridges.
Desolate, isolate, incommunicate. Hungry, pacing, unkempt. Nowhere to go; too bad.

The world to its former glory; see now, gold adorns the tops of trees.
Coloured wings glimmer, festive, grasping now a stalk of ripened grass-seed, worrying now an upturned flower.
A thick buzz emanates, fitting and stopping, then plying unchallenged. For how else shall the Master Grasshopper win his spurs.
Old giants, the trees decline to sway, ancient songs written in thick lines on their bark will not be sung today.
No conductor leads them, no reed ticks off little tremors of rhyme and tenor.
For the air is still, pristine, insistent in its steady majesty;
Time paused but always alive in mysterious animus.

A living carpet verdant sprawls far afield, it needs no spinning.
Underfoot lies its web of trailing tendril, above the surface, a tickling, fuzzy rug of live strands.
Pervasive yet not proud, though it conceals a true kingdom;
Regal are the insectalia, noble though crawling on their bellies, rightful though they nose closely the ground.
Varied are its populaces, shy now under raised green blades, curious now though the stone settles on their backs,
Each to their task, thus forming a polis of unimaginable strength and depth.

Subterranean, a murky underworld of suspicion, subterfuge, and predation.
Yet all in survival, the golden rule, better yet than any other invented. Needs be.
So all is fair, in death all are equal;
If one feeds on another his kin need not visit vengeance on the other. Only needs be.
No office polices misdemeanours here, no agency surveils miscreants.
All beasts being angels, each according to their own kind, trusting the better angels of their nature.

Alive, all are alive, and who is left to say how well it is.
The world deprived of Man, then abandoned to his devices. To spiral into an empty house, only his soul.
Who has fed poorly in the summer of his strength, thieving on needs more desperate than his own.
Now emptied, his cupboard lies bereft, all things left apart, the centre does not hold.
Needs he sup on the abuses of old age, poorly he tends over his decline.

Anger, raking over the last ashes of bygone glory.
Slow the fire that smoulders to its destruction,
Furious the embers that feed their blind hunger, dance their final kalinka, swarm to the inevitable, their oblivion.
See enraged creation squirm, desperate, life slipping from its grasp.
And yet, to what end? No fist in anger ever saved a life worth changing,
No history worth recall rescued in a pique of maddened impulse,
No chorus penned by latin hands echoed in the sighs of travelled wind.

Let slip, let fall, let disappear, let return, let end.
And return again to eternal nature, its voices to reign for time, times and half a time.
Till all is renewed, and forever be, man no longer.

CCXXXIX - the power of intuition

I have a private, perhaps subconscious way, with which I learn things quickly - I use my intuition to map out a tree. Take a word or a phrase, assign it to a discipline, and assume it has the trunk and branches arising from classical understanding of that discipline. If I can't, if my knowledge of that discipline is lacking, then I take the next most analogous discipline I have knowledge of, and I assume the unknown discipline has the trunk and branches of that analogous discipline. Then I test out the tree (whether from my actual knowledge and applied to that word or phrase, or from an analogous tree) by asking questions. I ask questions which I expect, based on the tree, to have predictable answers. The more that the true answers match my predictions, the more safely I can assume to know that thing; the less, the more that I have to throw away the assumed analogy, or to learn a new tree entirely.

As Brian Skinner, associate professor of physics and blog author of Gravity and Levity, writes, it is "one of the most important strategies in physics: solving by analogy." (see link). Thus, "[t]his is the best form of cheating that I know: you show that the hard problem someone is asking you is identical to a hard problem that someone else has already solved, and you look up the answer. You come away looking clever without having to do much difficult work at all." For the great Feynman once wrote, "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."

The great thing about this method, this intuition-rubric, is that if it works, it works really effing well.

The problem with this approach is at least threefold:

1. Conceit - I stop listening to an explanation faster than I should - partly because I am thinking of the tree (this takes time), and partly because I am relying on the borrowed tree to plug in the meat of the explanations. It is also perhaps because the explanation is delivered by a non-expert, or in an uninteresting manner. This is remedied by making sure to learn from credible, clear sources.

2. Mistake - I pick the wrong analogy, or worse, I pick the wrong questions to ask. Or perhaps I misinterpret the answers, and draw incorrect conclusions from those premises. All this is very difficult to remedy, and takes time to learn from. Also, carried away with my own genius, I tend to assume the gaps between the actual tree of knowledge and the presumed tree are smaller than they are, and paper over cracks. But analogies must fail sometimes, and the more tenuous the analogy, the less useful the tree (and I may not realise the error until too late).

3. Ignorance - It takes time and learning to develop intuition - to amass knowledge of disciplines, to build trees of knowledge, and to learn how analogies should work.

The interesting thing out of all this, is that errors and mistakes can be wonderful, wonderful things. Novelty comes from having a solid core of knowledge, but with imagination in application, derivation and expansion. So often we have this beaten out of us! And the most important things in all of learning are curiosity and creativity. Even if a guess is wrong, it is interesting to consider the conceptual steps that led to that guess; even if intuition is wrong, it can reveal that the world is stranger than we think it is. Not being afraid to be guided by one's own intuition, and being proven right or wrong, is surely the most intellectually satisfying thing.