Binary: Chances are.

Goodbye.

My IB Lit student got the equivalent of an A in her finals! I am happy and proud.

One of my GP kids has decided that the timeslot (Sunday afternoon) is too inconvenient and quit. Another has cut session time from 2 hours to 1.5 hours. Both mean less pay for me.

Still. At least they're all improving.

English: ravage
=> Japanese: lavaj
=> French: la vache
=> English: cow

There they go, drifting idly by
in the mottled green light of their heaven:
these buddhas of water, knowing nothing but now,
in their last birth before the deep silence.

Bred for their beauty, bland unfinished faces
stay unlined by both sorrow and silent fish-laughter;
here in the blue-tiled bounds of their universe
only the placid prevail.
Streaming minds no longer remember
the cullings of childhood, the hungry mothers’ mouths;
each life long since filtered through trials into patience,
they stay in midwater, in continuous meditation –
each mind with its world a confluence of rivers,

and when, each morning, manna breaks their sky
and faith, rewarded, rises to meet it,
they come, never questioning what lies beyond –
electric lamps, broad leaves, strange huge faces,
and other minds, caught still in the dusty webs of spiders.

I often think about the current vogue - prominent especially in the last five years - for the songs of the earlier part of the last century, roughly from the 1910s to the 1960s, especially the standards and showtunes. Why did it spring up, all of a sudden? You hear them everywhere now, in cafes, on the radio, in bars, on television, sung by friends in idleness. There has been an equivalent surge in popularity for certain styles of dance - lindy hop, swing, salsa. Ten years ago an interest in these things, outside a fairly small circle, would have been considered quaint and idiosyncratic. (I was vaguely interested in the old songs then, demonstrating, once again, my unfortunate instinct for being interested in the right things at the wrong time, and thus remaining permanently unfashionable.)

So why now? Possibly it's the result of a new generation of young bourgeoisie wanting to demonstrate their sophistication. But that social group has always placed great importance on being fashionable, and might in the present instance simply be following and perpetuating the trend, rather than originating it. (Lord knows, I very much doubt the fat - or, currently, gym-honed - prosperous children of the capitalists ever get around to creating anything of value, though they naturally consume a great deal of it.) So perhaps there is more to it than that.

Perhaps the trend is musical. The singers who appear to me to be highest-valued, currently, are not Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee or even Nina Simone; rather, they are Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Nat "King" Cole. It is the men, in other words, who are ascendant. And perhaps this whole new trend is a pop-cultural reaction to a form of music that had become unpleasant, insipid and excessive: the boybands of the late 1990s. Take That got plenty of approbation; their successors were not so lucky. Perhaps what we are seeing is a redefinition of masculinity: a turning away from groups of dancing boys to the more self-assured, urbane image of the older men. This conceivably explains the success of Robbie Williams - someone who could adjust his image to fit the times - with Swing When You're Winning, and the stunning failure of Westlife, who could not, with Allow Us to Be Frank.

And since the fall of the boybands created a kind of musical vacuum - and since their female counterparts, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, et al. - are often spoken of in the same disparaging breath as Paris Hilton - perhaps it is natural that the old genre should again take its place.

And perhaps there is more to it than that, but that's all I can think of so far.

Here's the last poem from the cafe...

The other side of darkness

Softness
brushed my fingers this morning,
as I put out the shopfront sign.

I looked;
a pair of appleseed eyes stared back
from their fuzz bed of grey paper –

a moth,
an unnoticed guest staying over from the night,
now narrowly missed by my blind, bumbling thumb –

but lucky,
and so still alive. There it sat, staring out
at the world’s huge unfamiliar illumination,

not blinking,
not moving. And perhaps, in that tiny mind beneath those wings,
the ecstasy of candlefire multiplied

a million million times and exploded into

a vision
of celestial glories, of primal mystery,
of the awful, unveiled face of the divine,

and perhaps
in that moment – as I carried the signboard into brightness –
that faded remnant speck of night

longed only
to be dissolved into the day, blent into hosannas of radiance,
and burned, a mote consumed in the searing ecstasy of inward flame

there, on the easel,
beside my clumsy fingertip.

Looks like Daniel Wang's Star Wars (Episode 4) Singapore comic is finally done:

http://www.sgdanielwang.com/comic2/index.htm

http://www.bjeri.org/jukebox/08-Negiah_El_Hachalom.rm

My first encounter with Israeli pop, and it had to be this lovely piece! Many thanks to legiblescrawl for this (where do you find these things??).

Wish I could understand the lyrics though. There are English translations out there, but I don't quite get them...

Well, there goes the teashop job - and with it, almost 40% of my income. Stated reason is that they can't afford to employ two full-time staff. Given that last week, from Monday to Friday, we had only four customers - all of whom were friends of mine, to boot - it sounds plausible enough.

So if anybody wanted to drop by the shop and see me sometime, you are too late! Too late! Haha!

Now I've got a ton of free time. I think I'll go catch some sun, tidy up some poems, look for new work, and maybe take a holiday. :)

Tried my first-ever Baihao oolong today, and it was good stuff! Not cheap, but I can understand why the Japanese keep trying to order the Dongfang Meiren every time they come in, and why the American tea reviewers seem so crazy about the stuff. The leaves look very nice - not rolled up like most oolongs I'm used to, blackish-brown and gold. It doesn't taste like any oolong I know either; more like a black tea, in fact, but much smoother and more flavourful. This thing beats all of the black teas I've ever tried, including whole-leaf flowery orange pekoe, which is still a bit rougher.

I'm not a black tea aficionado, though; the only black teas I bother with (not counting aged teas like Pu'er) are Earl Grey and Lapsang, which are both flavoured teas (oil of bergamot for the former, pine woodsmoke for the latter). So I don't really see any reason to stock up on this one, except maybe to serve when black tea drinkers visit me. Which almost never happens.

Maybe I'll get some for Amy for her birthday. Amy Marlina, that is, who favours black tea and herbals, and not Amy Yeong, who prefers white. Perhaps I ought to start calling them, for the sake of differentiation, AmyBlack and AmyWhite. Heh.

Off to brew some gyokuro.

This midnight SMS conversation with Mayee - at least, as far as I remember it - left me absolutely tickled:

Len: ...since meeting up with people is so incredibly difficult, have decided to fall back to the telephone from now onwards.
Mayee: Har. Good old telecoms... prosthetic for presence
L: You’re the one interested in media. Am old-fashioned no-substitute-for-physical-presence type, but these are difficult times and we are embattled people.
M: Hahaha. You got that right!
L: Ah, the poverty of these times, in which so much gives us so little!
M: It’s capitalism, I tell you.
L: Down with commodification! Down with mercantilism! Down with the profit motive!
M: Neo marxists unite!
L: Labels, labels! Is not the naming of things the beginning of commodification and control? Get thee from me, insidious bourgeois ideology!
M: Har. Not to mention a christian-based ideology reaffirming the patriarchy. And what praxis would you suggest?
L: *wicked* The praxis of paradox – the act of non-action – wuwei, in other words. :)
M: Ok whatever. I need to bathe.

We are both so full of shit.

From the same guy who brought you the Matrix Architect's speech in Hokkien: Plot summary of Revenge of the Sith in heavy Singlish.

Because of the mysterious disappearance of the person I was supposed to have lunch with today, I made a dinner appointment with somebody else. Who cancelled on me too, fifteen minutes before time.

This kind of thing is really now more the rule than the exception, and has more or less ceased to mean anything more than a permanent background disruption, like a broken television that can't be turned off. You can get used to anything given enough time.

It's true I do feel abandoned sometimes. After all, I'm the one working a long seven-day week, with very little free time indeed; yet strangely I'm always the one who's free, I'm always the one arranging meetups, and I'm always the one getting cancelled on. Things almost never happen the other way around. People, even those I count as friends, get caught up in their own lives, do whatever it is they think they have to do, and - since even with friends I have seldom been anything more than peripheral - I am always among the first to go.

But all this has happened to me before, and will no doubt happen again. And as I walked out of that other time unbroken, with head held high, so, I suppose, I will again. And things are, really, a lot better now than they were in that other time, when many other things were happening all at once, and when even God - until then such a comfort, such a pillar of strength - decided to turn his face away. I am learning to forgive, but it does not come easy, as most of you probably know.

But I didn't emerge from that other time unchanged; when everything finally came together again I was different at certain fundamental levels, a discontinuity so great that I still understand it as a time when someone died and someone else replaced him. I am the replacement - the second, well, unitary personality to occupy this body (all of whose cells have by now also been replaced) - and perhaps soon it will also be time for me to give way to somebody else. Something always remains, of course; this mind's like a palimpsest, and fragments of the original are still there. The very fact that I work in a cafe now - it was something he wanted to do, and this whole life of mine would perhaps have pleased him very much. But it is my life now, not his, and I wonder if another great change is coming, and who, for that matter (if anyone), is coming next.

Or - I wonder, with a sudden shock - is he perhaps here already, and is the person doing the wondering only a ghost of the past, an agglomeration of echoes and memories?

Both tuition kids have canceled class tomorrow. Which means, for the first time in ages, I will have a free day!

Unfortunately the person I was supposed to meet for lunch / tea has not been answering my phone calls for the past two days, and has not called either. I assume our appointment has slipped her mind.

This sort of thing happens altogether too often.

Why do I keep thinking about 2046?

Feature in the paper today about that Hong Kong guy who claims to have discovered the remains of the Ark on Turkey's Mount Ararat.

I rather think he was looking in the wrong place; after all, the story goes that the Ark crash-landed into the side of a dormant volcano in today's United States four million years ago, after it was attacked and boarded by elite Decepticon forces.

I have begun to wonder: is poetry an outlet, a coping mechanism, by which all these tumults of the soul - these hates, these fears, these hopes, these loves - are transfigured, changed and given meaning?

Or do I, subconsciously or otherwise, pursue these heights and depths - these tears, these frenzies, these teeterings on madness - simply because they help inspire poetry?

I can't go on, I'll go on.
- The Unnameable

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
- Endgame

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Worstward Ho

It's been a bit of a dry season, this past couple of months - have been busy, haven't done much writing. The steady push of inspiration that gets poems written - that's been missing for a while. I can start, but I can't finish. Things fade to shades of white and grey.

And again I find myself longing for inspiration, for some skyfallen spark that'll ignite the dry paper of my world, throw me onward into new, glorious conflagrations. Not even dry, now. Damp. Soggy. Most things are, round here.

I'd say I need to get out more, except that I already spend most of my time out - but working. Once again, I need to meet new people, see new things, find new places.

I'm sure I could still find inspiration by paying quiet, close attention to the minutiae of everydayness, but something in me now wants bigness, wants vistas, wants new horizons.

And I realise that this last year doesn't even feel like an ending. Rather, it's that which comes after the ending: the sweeping, the tidying up, the turning out of the lights.

Step after molten step,
from anger’s dark twists and the black hole of hate
I bring you forth, fruit of damnation,
beloved, bloodstained, screaming child.
Neither nose nor ears nor eyes
mars your huge infant simplicity;
flesh of dripping flame
gapes only in a shriek
at your gullet,
shuddering in abyssal frenzies of want
to swallow the universe whole.
You hunger. Drink, then,
of the poisoned lodestone of blood at my breast,
and let it turn you, point you like a needle in the heart
to the others who birthed you –
who fathered this rage –
and consume them; grow beyond your beginning,
beyond seed and fruit and the burning, burning,
into ferocious, magnificent flower.