I found my heart coming back to me these few days, making its trembling presence known first through my mind -- "do you like knowing about people more, or knowing people themselves?"-- then through my skin, my stilted speech.

I tremble; they're gonna eat me alive, alive

A Saturday night, after the play. We entered the cafe somewhat awkwardly, uncertain about these new settings. Ordered a tea and a flat white before heading to the biggest seating space we could see: a cream couch, well broken-in. It was easy to see the charm of the place as we sunk in: the spacious interior, moderately lit; magazines, draped here and there; a couple of people unabashedly immersed in the constructed universe of their books; the low hum of chatter, occasionally spiking with laughter. The mint inside my tea started making its magic, a light radiance seeping outwards.

A Saturday night, and no performances? In the haze of our conversation I thought that.

Someone soon went up, testing the chords of his guitar. "The next song's going to be funny; it was when I first liked a girl, at the age of fifteen." His words mashed over each other, but it wasn't important what he was singing, but that a human voice filled the room, and all these people intently listening as he offered to us-- mostly anonymous-- moments from his life. The lights were by then mostly off, and a few milky light bulbs strung their glow across the place. People strolled in from time to time, some leaning against the wall, some scanning the room until they spotted a wooden chair, or someone they knew; went up to them and kissed their cheeks before walking over to empty seats. A trend of outfits: boys in huge black-framed glasses, slim shorts that ended above their knees, and loafers which showed off bare ankles, built calves. The routine was familiar: a prelude, the song, the appreciative applause.

When we emerged from the cafe a light rain was falling; the wall took its chance to don on a diffused orange dress.

That we can be more than ourselves: that is worth living for.

My heart sleeps without waking in the arms of sadness.
--from La Vie En Rose

Life goes on. May is the month of heat and thunderstorms.
I bring Edith to the zoo but all the animals were hiding in the shade.
Half an hour in we sat dumbly in front of the penguins,
envying their wallpaper Arctic.
Edith understands, makes few demands. When we get home I prepare dinner,
she washes up. As usual I cook too much, or eat too little.
The gods have left too much hair in their bathroom drain; no air
comes through to us. Back in my room my fingers fidget
across the keyboard, as if I could propel a breeze with that.
I talk to old friends, make new ones. My words sink down like dregs.
At night I loosen the curtains, crank the fan to a higher speed.
As I drift off the sky crunches into rain.
Dimly I feel the wind beating against the windows, curtains
flung across rattling grills. My heart
sleeps without waking.
I have dreams of you. In the morning
I rise for work, leave quietly my sleeping heart.

-takes a deep breath-

I have decided! To! Take on yet another project, as if I'm not already feeling guilty enough of neglecting five hundred other projects that I somehow have taken on due to some masochistic desire.



{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

In keeping with the general spirit I use this blog in, I'm going to do 100 creations inspired by some work or other. Okay who's kidding who, those creations are going to be mostly writing. And "some work or other" can come from anywhere-- a line from a song, poem or movie, Wikipedia entry, comic, whatever. Point is it must be inspired by something that can be reproduced.

Let's hope this gives my dying writing spirit some boost. (I'm kidding about dying, don't cry)

Finally I feel calmer, restored to the night which has snatched back its coolness from the oppressive summer heat. Just a couple of hours ago a girl was shouting in the neighbouring void deck, line after line stacking upon the last all collapsing into a muddle of anguish and accusation. Shut up, I say, although at this distance nobody is going to hear it, which is why I get to say it out loud. Or if I am hidden behind my room wall, directing an irritated voice down: "Stop smoking!" The real-life equivalent of anonymity.

Hello. What if I am Olivia, surname undecided, preparing for a date two hours later. He's a mechanic, has a tendency to get caught up describing his pliers, wrench and the sixteen different types of screws he carries around with him in his toolbox. "This one, " he takes one out, "see, has two ends, like it doesn't know where to start and stop; you screw an end in here," he takes a knob, grooves already made, "the other side, in the anchor; you never see it again. Its entire body, snug between two objects. Not like this," he takes out a drywall screw, "insists on being the third party in a threesome, wall, object, and then its head, but it's good for separating."

Today he will not bring his toolbox along, because he will have time to go home from work, shower off the grease, perhaps spray some cologne. He will feel a little exposed, no tools to bring out, put in my hand, trace their angular bones while lightly touching my skin. He will wonder what to discuss if not structure, joints and swiveling pivots. What can penetrate to the heart if not the material that makes things tick? Certainly not what I do, me with my advice on insurance, my light-footed dance of to-and-fro as I decide how much to push according to income and risk, balancing compliments with a sprinkling of what-ifs, the more they can be praised the more they stand to lose. My job counts on probabilities and our unique ability to project onto the future; his job, on touch and sight, and the ability to project beyond the outer covering into the dark space of gear and pendulum.

I guess I will offer him the medium-risk policy; the chances of him being swallowed up by a machine he just gave life to are, after all, not that low.

I dreamt of you last night, or what housed you,
a lilac grey coffin a beach away from the sea.
"It's fine there," my father hollered, as I looked,
saw an end of it emerging from the sand like a head
bursting from the waves, or the blunt end of a pole
punctuating skin from within. "It isn't!" I screamed,
for how can this be fine, why the sand was breaking across its insistent hull,
anyone could see its naked head. Why were you not buried deep enough?
Why are you even buried in the sand? We each
stood at a corner, bent, brushed the sand away, on the count of three
heaved, and I was right under, its weight
beating up and down with every step, my head
stretched under its macabre pulse. While we walked inland
I tried to recall who it was, inside, I tried hard
not to breathe, even though it had been months, remembering what my mother said
about the stench in graveyards, wafting across pews
as Christians prayed and prayed. As we arrived
at a ready-made hole I saw my mother, my sister
walking beside, not under, I looked &
only my father and I were lifting, but when we drove it down
I saw that I was wrong, my father was only ahead, directing—
I emerged from under, I sobbed great breaths:
"Why did you let go? Why did you let me carry it alone?"

After I woke I realised it was my other grandfather
who had died, and he was cremated, and I never saw
his coffin, or his body.

Literary analysis is at its most breathtaking in moments such as Shoshana Felman's Turning the Screw of Interpretation-- I must admit that I am entirely bowled over, and I bow down to the goddess that is Felman. Many times I look up from the text just to exclaim in a certain sort of rapture, this is it, a finger on the point, the complete intersection of understanding and truth, that little clink, yes I sound quite insane here (MADNESS), taken over by the text but it is just so good. You know how in J2 we saw this essay by a certain Jensen, and at the end of it, the marker writes "THANK YOU for the essay"? It's that sort of feeling.

It's easily available online, but I think to get that feeling you need to have read 1. Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (duh), 2. Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter, 3. Jacques Lacan's Seminar on the Purloined Letter and 4. some of Freud's theories on transference, repetition, the uncanny and the unconscious, although this isn't as important. Primarily 3, because it is quite a frustratingly dense text, so Felman's analysis provides that oh gosh this is what is glorious about living feeling by illustrating what she gets out of Lacan.

[I have down just three out of the many parts that have me enraptured, but because they are built up by the whole essay, this is really a spoiler that might reduce the gorgeous effect of this essay.]

Written not only for the very personified image of power, but also for their own censorship and their own prohibition, the letters addressed to the Master are in fact, at the same time, requests for love and demands for attention. ...The letters to the Master can convey, indeed, nothing but silence. Their message is not only erased; it consists of its own erasure... the fire inside the story turns out to be, precisely, what annihilates the inside of the letter; what materially destroys the very "nothing" which constitutes its content. ...the fire is the story's center only insofar as it eliminates the center.

To see... is therefore paradoxically not only to perceive, but also not to perceive: to actively determine an area as invisible, as excluded from perception, as external by definition to visibility. To see is to draw a limit beyond which vision becomes barred. The rigid closure of the violent embrace implied by the act (by the "grasp") of understanding is linked, indeed, to the violence required to impose a limit, beyond which one's eyes must close. For it is not the closing of one's eyes which determines the invisible as its empirical result; it is rather the invisible (the repressed) which predetermines the closing of one's eyes... it is precisely the imposition of a limit... which hence makes possible the illusion of total mastery over meaning as a whole. ...her grasp of the ship's helm is in reality the grasp but of a fetish... The screw, however, by the very gesture of its tightening, while seemingly filling the hole, in reality only makes it deeper.

But in contrast to the classical mystery novel plot, this crime is also not committed until the end: paradoxically enough, the process of detection here precedes the committing of the crime. As a reader, the governess plays the role of the detective: from the outset she tries to detect, by means of logical inferences and decisive "proofs," both the nature of the crime and the identity of the criminal... Ironically enough, however, not knowing what the crime really consists of, the governess-detective finally ends up committing it herself. ...Incarnated in the governess, the detective and the criminal both are but dramatizations of the condition of the reader. ...For if it is by the very act of forcing her suspect to confess that the governess ends up committing the crime she is investigating, it is nothing other than the very process of detection which constitutes the crime.

There is so much recursion, so much turning into oneself here, the Scheme part (strengthened by the very little I have read of Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid) of my soul is utterly bewitched. SO IN LOVE. (The blindness of love-- it is because you are so certain, so clear, of your feelings, simply by the intensity of them, that you shut possibilities out, and that is what constitutes the blindness inherent in love.)

Some things I am conscious of, in my poetry, like my liking of metaphors of water, liquid, or celestial objects like the moon; some things I find out along the way, with the help of other people.

Today/yesterday it is this: the motif of time. It's quite funny because it's so true, I am obsessed about the passage of time, neurotic, even. It's not something unique to me, but I find it quite exciting to see something I don't consciously put in pop out as a recurring theme? And that's one of the cool things about creating, these moments when you realise that something about yourself has been revealed without your design.

Glancing at my collection; look what I've found.

Mellor's letter:

That's why I don't like to start thinking of you actually. It only tortures me, and does you no good. I don't want you to be away from me. But if I start fretting, it wastes something. Patience, always patience. This is my fortieth winter. And I can't help all winters that have been. But this winter I'll stick to my pentecost flame, and have some peace. And I won't let the breath of people blow it out. I believe in a higher mystery, that doesn't even let the crocus be blown out. And if you're in a Scotland and I'm in the Midlands, and I can't put my arms round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I've got something of you. My soul softly flaps in the pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being, between sun and earth. But it's a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.

So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause and peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chase, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that flows between us. It is like fresh water nad rain. How can men want wearisomely to philander. What a misery to be like Don Juan, and impotent ever to fuck oneself into peace, and the little flame alight, impotent and unable to be chaste in the cool between-whiles, as by a river.

Well, so many words, because I can't touch you. If I could sleep with my arm round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure.

Never mind, never mind we won't get worked up. We'll really trust in the little flame, and in the unnamed god that shields it from being blow out. There's so much of you here with me, really -- that it's a pity you aren't all here.

Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence? We want to root up gigantic trees in a primeval forest, and to tear their huge branches asunder in our convulsive grasp; and the utmost that we can do for the relief of our passion is to knock over an easy chair, or smash a few shillings'-worth of Mr. Copeland's manufacture.

--Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon

---

Scheherazade; Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forgot they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we would dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
We’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

Once you kept flowers, gave vases to them, forgot
vases stayed long after flowers died. When the house was new
you were happy to be guided by lamps, feigning forgetfulness

around the furniture you arranged. You forgot
me. Thought that once given, I
would never return.

But I did, drop by torrent. At first
in minutes: the peak hour traffic, the extended
appointments. I hid in your dinners, slowed,

had to be heated. You tended to your flowers,
gave them sun. Hours: the calls
at the restaurants, apologetic, you telling the waiter

you would have the set meal for one.
The candles burned. I came back,
put them out, kissed your eyelids; you rose from sleep,

eyes stinging, listening to the darkness
of the house. I pooled in your pots,
drowned your flowers. You threw them away.

I made my home in your ransacked laundry. You tried
to dry me bare, but the creases
would not allow. I surged, took over

your house. At first
you struggled, made phone calls: The number you just dialled
is currently unavailable. I rained my hands over your body,

tried to soothe. Ran your watercolour dress. Why resist,
sweetheart? Take me back, what he doesn't want. You sobbed,
felt me clogging your lungs. You stopped lighting

the candles. Of course. Saw me in every pocket,
thought me a fly when you poured yourself a drink.
I am the drink. Now it is night.

Give yourself to me. Now your body
a meandering shadow, earrings
glinting the moon's light.

If the Earth was a disc spinning so furiously
                                                  it appears a sphere
If all of us live in the same space, just nanoseconds
                                                  from each other
If three thousand miles from Europe to America is actually
                                                  the exchange of space for time
And earthquakes came
                             because the disc lost momentum
If long distance lovers occupied the same place, bodies overlapping
                                                            in different time universes
If the Internet was messages staying at a spot
             so every country, a second behind or in front, could see them
If the dead was so far ahead
                               we couldn't afford the exchange rate
If we knew how to plot this disc, so we can say
walk to the edge, where I am, and maybe
your scent will linger long enough for me to sense.

you ask, coin poised
between finger and thumb.
I imagine its ridges making railroad tracks
on your finger pads, a train chugging along,
destination unplanned. If suns are coins
set into motion, sweeping life into being as they decide—
then we are birthed by this process
of indecision, showing all possible
forked paths, alternate universes;
that when the sun finally quavers
to a stop—
whatever choice it makes
ceases our suspended existence.

Rewatching Lust Caution, because I felt like it. Maybe I'll go into a review some time (probably never) but I just wanted to pick up on one thing-- the role of reflections. Mr Yee looks at himself in the mirror in his house at least twice, once to arrange his hair, the other time gazing hard into his own eyes, as if judging himself. The first time Wong Chia Chi goes to Mr Yee with an understanding that they would have sex, she spots him first by his reflection in the window, and turns on her heel shocked. Wong Chia Chi looks at herself in Mr Yee's house mirror when the servant greets her and tells her that he is away in Nanjing. After Wong Chia Chi alerts Mr Yee to run, and is looking for a trishaw to bring her away, she only managed to flag one down after spotting one in the reflection of a shop window.

Reflection-- the only way to see your own appearance, perhaps try to see what others can derive from it. It is interesting that the first time they had sex, she sees him first by his reflection, calmly sitting on a chair behind her with a cigarette in his mouth.Yet if we are to argue that they see each other only by their projected image, we won't be satisfied because in the entirety of the movie these are two characters who arguably reach a deeper (lol) understanding of each other than any other two characters. Seeing what each other wishes to project is precisely what allows them this understanding?

The trishaw's reflection-- we're looking at what's inside the shop, the kind of life that Wong Chia Chi has been living with all its pretense, normalcy, luxury, but she is looking at the surface of the window pane-- the window pane separating her from who is inside. At the same time the appearance of a trishaw, the means of which to possibly escape, is as fragile as a reflection, a mirage, an illusion.

If we are to connect these two instances of a reflection-- the completion of the mission of killing Mr Yee would allow Wong Chia Chi to escape the country to England, but this notion of escaping is as much of an illusion as the trishaw. From the way their relationship developed, from how even as Mr Yee is the "enemy", he remains the only person who talks to her, the only 'real' person in her life, from how they are trapped in their respective positions as traitor and spy-- perhaps she understood as well that this means of an escape was never an actual possibility.

If you're one of those tl;dr (look! I used a semicolon!) people who prefer to jump straight in before reading the rest of the post, AND, you use Internet Explorer, I will kindly give you a word of advice, in blockquote because I can,

In this case, the grass is definitely greener on the other side of the fence.

Once upon a time, there was a semicolon.

This is possibly not a remarkable thing. After all, one hardly pays attention to punctuation when brevity is the soul of wit and a hundred and forty characters do not permit superfluous wastage. What more, a semicolon! People can live their whole lives without using it even once. Same goes to matrices, quantum mechanics, meiosis, the like. In short, a semicolon belonged to the lower caste of a low caste of life. But you are gravely wrong.

This semicolon's name was, you guessed it, semicolon. Actually, it prefers the definite article 'the' in front of it, but it has since learnt that the inconvenience of having to correct people on the usage of its name was much more distasteful than having its first half of its name truncated. A typical conversation from when it was not so worldly wise went like this:

Stranger: "Pleased to meet you! You are?"
The Semicolon: "The Semicolon."
Stranger: "Hi Semicolon, nice night isn't it?"
The Semicolon: "It is The Semicolon."
Stranger: "Yes, that's what I said (:"
The Semicolon: "No, you said Semicolon. My name is The Semicolon."

You can tell it wasn't the most popular guy around, until it grew wiser.

The Semicolon prided itself on being the punctuation to use for forming long, sophisticated sentences. It is hard to go wrong with semicolons; you can add as many as you like; you won't sound like a three-year-old who has just started learning English, as you can with full stops and commas; no, three-year-olds do not use semicolons; what more, you can use it for graphical responses, like this ;D

Anyhow, it dropped inside zhixin's livejournal and made its home there. The end.

You saved my life he says. I owe you, I owe you everything.
You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just
        get gone, but he’s relentless,
keeps saying I owe you, says Your shoes are filling with your own
damn blood, you must want something, just tell me, and it’s yours.
         But I can’t look at him, can hardly speak:
I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I’d just as soon kill you myself,
I say. You keep saying I owe you, I owe… but you say the same thing
         every time. Let’s not talk about it, let’s just not talk.
Not because I don’t believe it, not because I want it any different, but I’m always saving
and you’re always owing and I’m tired of asking to settle
          the debt. Don’t bother. You never mean it
anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed.
There’s only one thing I want, don’t make me say it, just get me bandages,
          I’m bleeding, I’m not just making conversation.
There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western,
Henry. It’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard
          out of the bone white afternoon.
It’s another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it Henry,
keep saying until we get it right… but we always win and we never quit.
          See, we’ve won again,
here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say Please,
for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,
          we can stay all buttoned up…
But we both know how it goes— I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head underwater, I say I want you inside me and you split me open
          with a knife.
I’m battling monsters, I’m pulling you out of the burning buildings
and you say I’ll give you anything but you never come through.
          Even when you’re standing up
you look like you’re lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby?
Do I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your
          mouth like the hand of a thief,
like a burglary, like it’s just another petty theft? It makes me tired,
Henry. Do you see what I mean? Do you see what I’m getting at?
          I swear, I end up
feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search
my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to
         sink his teeth in?
I know you want me to say it, Henry, it’s in the script, you want me to say
Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted and worth dying for, too…
        but I think I’d rather keep the bullet.
It’s mine, see, I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s
as good as anything. You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it
        out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest,
covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because I’m hungry
and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your
        slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue
and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet
was already there, like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time.
       Do you want it? Do you want anything I have?
Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle
it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me
       in a way I understand.
Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home
now? There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a
       dead man at our feet
staring up at us like we’re something interesting. This is where the evening
splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,
       and make a wish.