Last Chance to Lose Control.

Switchblade
Fight/flight
Say, you might
Find

A sudden evacuation of -
- Air
- Gravity
- Fleeting sense
Of sanity

All overrated phenomena.

Your life in details
A man, a wife
A child, a life
Home - three storeys up
By the folding stair
The wind - her hair
Flayed to the strands
Caught to reveal its deep brown hue in the dusk light.
Though black it feels
In the deep night.

It is not the minute details
The placement of a chair
Or a bed lamp or thrown sheet

No, what you remember -
A silk sense of slippery recollection
Bare skin, a grin, a kiss

A rush of blood
Yes, to the head
A song, you know
That played between you
Cued to candle flicker-light
Of a room service dinner
Those little table trays, with fold out wings - left/right
Blackouts
Emergency lights - then
Finally
Candles

It was 1998. The hottest summer
In KL, the hottest metropole
On this mad planet.

You remember, remember, remember
Even now. 6.16AM
Deep in winter
One spin of the world away

Sydney.
Film-makers shun this city
Its basking sunlight
They claim - "so overexposed"

Like an X-ray
As Sylvia Plath would say
You loved those burning words of hers
What a model for a life.

What a wife
You might have been
What kind of happiness
We might have known.

One spin of the world away, you're -
Locked in a glass case museum
All our memories
Under guard, lock, key
And always out of reach.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

From the city, the sea is seen
As a value
Measurable
Saleable
Waterfront property
To be career-climbed
The rightful prize
Of the inheritors of this material world.

It is not -
A tempest
It does not -
Swallow your lovers
For ten years or so
Odysseus to the nymphs of the sea
So succumbed
If briefly.

From a stranglehold land
We imagine
Ourselves impossibly
Conquering

We tame seas to cross them
To raid, to love, to bleed
To believe and find new believers
In savage lands.

The sea between - submissive.

We imagine our return
An inevitability.

I walk out now
Each step I take will fall first
And end there.
Each step will not be retraced.

Down the dawn street which dips
To the bluff
Beyond, the plunging deep

The Pacific
Which swims and swallows
All kinds of life

Which meets other oceans -
The Indian Ocean

They meet and nod
They wave
They acknowledge similar predilictions
Life - and their tastes
For the giving and taking
Of life.

The sand between my toes
Grows damp the further I go
To the very edge of my world.

To you, you know
To sea.

...

Liberal Education.

I came. You called.
I paced -
In and out of hours
Blind
The kind poets sing of
Blind love
Beautiful, pulled gold
From the cold earth
Torn, tarnished
Polished - alive.

Bleeding, beating hearts
Thudding unsteady,
A metronome tick - click
The pace of ordinary life
Too ordinary for you

You, destined for greatness
Or the grave.

Should I have followed?
Half a decade later
I should know.

Know myself, at least
If not how, or why
For me, the remains of
Our bleeding hearts still smoulder.

I don't know why.
I don't know how.

To truly know, I've been told
Is to know you don't.

To truly be - well, at ease?
Signpost the way, stranger
Please.

10 Virginia Lane.

Urgent

The flit-moth, distracted

A metropolis of lights

Delights

So many to tempt

Too many to taste

Lay waste

Ravished in an hour

Left to wilt

These cities, charred skeletal

A winter, nuclear, for fifty years

Ash rain to fall what followed

Our first chemical burn.

And the others? All those others

Feed and flicker by the lick of light

Of a low wick flame

Kissing the peeling walls

Tentative, exploratory

Tender kisses, each for a streak

Of cracked wall paint and plaster

A wrinkle of character

For these observing walls

Watching all, feeling keenly

Every cry and whisper

Surprises them.

Every flit-moth born - by the day

Winding their way through the windowpane

Attracted by - their delight

The swinging bulb light

Single strung, wire to ceiling

Surprised. Why?

For every temporary resident of this room

Derives their wonder

(That old, familiar feeling)

As if it was theirs alone

To feel for the first time.

New - and never known again.

in just this way.

"'But what are we doing? We're talking.'

'Still,' said Hatsue. 'you're not Japanese. And I'm alone with you.'

'It doesn't matter,' answered Ishmael.

They lay beside each other in the cedar tree talking until half an hour had gone by. Then, once again, they kissed. They felt comfortable kissing inside the tree, and they kissed for another half an hour. With the rain falling outside and the moss softly under him Ishmael shut his eyes and breathed the smell of her fully in through his nostrils. He told himself he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never again happen in just this way no matter how long he lived."

- Snow Falling on Cedars, David Gutterson.

Where does the line lie between telling yourself how you feel, and feeling? I wonder that from time to time, as I think thoughts I never thought I'd allow, say mellow truisms to suit the circumstance and company, let the world flow by, and me in it, a leaf in the stream to the sea. Alike, in almost every way, with the full forest of falling leaves losing themselves to the river tides. Is it humility to feel this way? Or resignation?

Snow Falling on Cedars is a story of so much love, aching love, from a very teenage affair between an American boy and Japanese-American girl. The seductively forbidden kind which flared bright and burned deep. As a man, he returns to his hometown to cover the trial of his lover's Japanese husband, accused of murder. The novel traces, ever so delicately, his regrets and untidy longings. He questions whether his feelings were ever real or true. Certainly, there's nothing left for either of them to pursue in this life. She's loyal to her husband, and more loyal to her sense of being Japanese - a point sharpened by years in an American internment camp during WWII.

I guess in this reading - it's really just a skim-read over a book which I read and left years ago, unimpressed at the time with its plain language style and subdued descriptions - those are themes that stood clear. What is real? What do you do because you feel you need to? And where does right and morality come into all of this?

If anyone was to ever ask me why I work so hard, so relentlessly, in so many directions, I would probably tell them, 'To buy freedom.' It's a capitalist world we live in, cold and contractual. I know the world doesn't have to be this way, but for now, it is, and we have to abide by its framework of laws. You need money to buy comfort - a home, clothes, food, travel, free time. You exchange your time and skills for money. And if you're shrewd, strategic, and very lucky, you might build a business, write a book, make a film, which allow you more choice - freer time, endeavours to enjoy - like work, but better. And at some point, you could choose to exit completely - do your Dharma Bums mountain watch. That's where I sense, under the day-to-day muddle of doing, I'll understand the truths that elude me. Painful, honest, obscure, elegant. And maybe I'll wring art from the experience. Or maybe become something else, someone else I never imagined.

Just as I have today.

You lose, you gain. Nothing stays the same. It is merely energy, transmuted. Still, it aches. 

You Shall Know Our Velocity

"Not the first world," says Annette, "the world we are from, not the second or third world, so many people treading water. This is different. The fourth world is voluntary. It is quick, small steps from the other worlds ... Everyone is sleeping and we are here, in the sea. That is the fourth world. The fourth world is present and available. It's this close."

- You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers.

After watching Where the Wild Things Are and Away We Go, I'm reading the screenwriters' first works - his novel and autobiography. I love it. I haven't been MOVED by writing - the act of or reading - for so long, the air around me felt thin for it. Now I can feel it. That irrational, urgent desire to scribble until you kick up gold from the dust. I'm envious of Dave Eggers (though according to the Salon.com articles I've been reading, this is hardly a unique response) - he's fearless to the point of egoistic. It reminds me of Jack Kerouac's philosophy of writing - don't look back, assume everything you write is inspired.

Though Haruki Murakami sees it differently. As a steady whittling, carving a work of art by your will, your patience, by sheer stubborness alone. Elemental forces as the wind on a cliff face. He compared it to marathon running, quoting a famous Japanese marathon runner who said:

Pain is necessary. Suffering is optional.

Just my thoughts of the day. And that passage from You Shall Know Our Velocity. Is it just a spoilt, second-gen immigrant way of feeling? That you are free - free, that is, in the sense that you reject traditional 'treading water' ways of being so you can be instead a volunteer periphery dweller. At best, the latter day equivalent of a Taoist immortal hermit, living in the Wu-Tang mountains. At worst, a huge cock-up of life's opportunities deliberately missed.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

we goes with the prose

I have been avoiding this post for a month or so. As part of a regular full-scale retreat, from the world, from my mire of contradictory desires pulling me apart, to opposing poles. So thin I've been clinging to the bare bones routine of workdays - work, sleep, and nothing, nothing. Television. Magazines. Nothing of substance. Nothing that might actually cause me to think.

There was just so much noise in my head.

All of it whispered, sneered, pitied me with the same accusation : failure. I'd convinced myself I was somehow immune to the whole concept of failure. By upbringing, by character, by determination, by luck - mostly luck - I was simply meant to be something big. An incredibly indeterminable something, but a big one.

Which is all very vain, typical and young, I know. My middle-aged colleague (let's face it, when you wander into academia at 23, everyone is your parents' age. Plus five years or so) found out I had a highly romantic literary streak and shared love of 20th century history (it's like watching an action movie, but you feel very highbrow)...so he gave me a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I don't know why it offended me at the time. Probably because I fell right into the whole 'mystical conception of destiny' belief. Maybe that's a Gen Y view of life: Go, Be, Better! You can do anything! Go be everything! (OK, my flawed interpretation, yes.)

The quote was this:

“...... Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to willpower – at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will-power & fate have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will-power alone .... The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.”

Well, at least I'm romantic.

Here, I should clarify. To classify the last year as a failure is a bit of an insult. It's like watching Madonna whine about being barred from adopting another Malawi kid - it's ridiculous, self-centred, and almost embarassing. So I feel a little ridiculous, self-centred and embarassed to admit that I could be anything less than totally assured of my own grand vision, replete with a five, ten and fifteen year goal-set plan of attack. Actually, the thought of long-term plans makes me claustrophobic sick. Shh.

So I feel a bit lost. My jobs finish up end next February, and from there, I could go well, almost anywhere. I could recklessly spin the globe, choose a spot, take a plane and spend my savings dry. (Yes, this involves the least planning and as such, is the most appealing.) My brief stint in NYC was a total giddy love plunge, but I have a feeling the halcyon glow might dim a little if I had to actually work there. Perhaps I'll take on an internship somewhere. Like, this international development online magazine, development industry resource site...thing...is offering a journalism fellowship for its offices in TOKYO and WASHINGTON. (tokyo, my choice, obviously.) That could be fun. Learn Japanese. Live in a cubicle. Run through the Imperial Palace Gardens. OK. Maybe I need to grow up and stop choosing jobs on the overriding criteria of amusement/interest/fun. (This is what happens when you have no financial responsibilities whatsoever, and a sensibly growing truckload of savings.) Maybe I should get a serious job worthy of all those years (and dollar bills) spent on study. There's a reporter job at LexisNexis now. That seems like a sensible option. I mean, don't I want a clean, impressive, chic Pyrmont apartment filled with Ikea furniture? Don't I want to fill my life with stuff, with success, with my 2br/1bth contribution to humanity, with coffee table books of naked Greek statues from the Medici era? How else am I going to unravel at age 30 and live out my schizophrenic Fight Club fantasies? (See, there is a plan here.) Hell, maybe I should join the circus.

See: here's the rub. I like my squeaky impressive track record, my unblemished professional CV, my smooth-sailing personal life. I don't want to make a mess.

I suspect though, that life's in the mess.

And I bet that's where the fun is, anyway.