Momotom Random

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

2006-07-05T01:40:00.000+01:00

I once wrote an impulsive post on Dr Mabuse on how moved I was by the film theory of the French critic André Bazin (with an unspoken implication of how tired I was of constantly encountering misread and misled Bazin-bashing). In one of the comments that followed, Scott offered a figure which I wish I had also brought up, and which I shall do so now: Roland Barthes.

There are many texts of Barthes's I can bring up which move me ("Third Meaning", "That Old Thing, Art..." were momentous) but the most inspirational is undoubtedly a slim book on photography, titled Camera Lucida. In CL, Barthes explores numerous concepts in photography, from the status of its referent, its noeme, its air, to madness (I love this one) and, of course, the well-known studium and punctum. (Small aside: Word's dictionary automatically corrects "studium" to "stadium" - not unexpected, but certainly something I had to watch out for!).

Like all his other works, Barthes's theory is not ponderous, yet profound (in the best sense of the word) and typically earnest, optimistic, humanist. Yet CL is different from all his other works, and this shift is quickly noticed in Part II of the book (which is divided into two Parts): the theory in the first Part, primarily of studium and punctum, rapidly gives way to his real motivations for studying photography, which is to grieve the passing of his mother, to "find" her again in the photographs he had of her. Yet he could not: "I never recognized her [in the photographs] except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else." His seeking became almost frantic in its perceived futility:

Straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false... Confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.

The ending of the story of Camera Lucida - whether he actually does or does not find his mother (and yes it does go one way or the other) - I shall not give away. My point is my shock at how the theory had unravelled: from the erudite depths of Part I into this patent demonstration of an almost unbearable grief. Yet it is not an unravelling of logic or sense, for Barthes remains as lucid and discerning as ever, but an unravelling of tone and predisposition - subtle yet emotional. There is a lot of theory in the book, but underpinning it all is not the bald drive of intellectual rigour as one normally assumes, but the voice of a desperate, tragic mourning. And reading Camera Lucida became more than just being moved, but transmuted into a terrible voyeurism, not into a murder scene or an illicit bedroom, but into something from which I would give anything to avert my eyes - the stricken depths of someone's heart, inconsolable and despairing.

This is theory that matters - does that make sense? It is so "easy" to propound theory dry as dust (try any film theory from the 70s) or senselessly radical (try almost anything from any period) - change for the sake of change. But this is theory that comes from life itself - no matter how private or terrible - informed by experience, laced with emotion, yet always dignified and intelligent.

In my awful upgrade exam (how quickly trauma fades!), I was given this comment: "You sound like you are trying to write another Camera Lucida." It was meant as a criticism and I acknowledge it as such, for it is rational feedback on how a thesis should be conceived, thought through and written. But on another level, in a very private corner of my heart, brazenly misconstruing the comment I also take it as a high and wonderful compliment, at which I could not help but smile, and glow a little inside.

Take the moment

2006-06-24T15:23:00.000+01:00

Take the moment,
Let it happen,
Hug the moment,
Make it last.

My thesis on cinema and epiphany concerns a great deal the philosophy of "the moment" - that idea of this one instant in time where something flashes through you - your mind, your life, your soul - and something in you is changed forever. It is akin (but, very crucially, not identical) to, for example, cinephilia - Willemen's notion of revelation (which Keathley also takes up) - or Barthes's punctum... this idea that there is some thing in cinema that can reach out and grab you, onto another level, into another kind of experience. In a larger picture, it is also an exploration of the transformatory, transcendental potential and power of art.

I think of this song alot - "Take The Moment", from the Rodgers-Sondheim musical "Do I Hear A Waltz", particularly as sung by Mandy Patinkin, as he is at his best - when his voice is tender, almost callow, accompanied by lovely solo piano.

All the noises
Buzzing in your head,
Warning you to wait,
What for??
Don't listen!

And so it is with epiphany, and so it is with life, isn't it? This perpetual grasping of a moment from distraction (yes, how Benjaminian) - this frantic "warning you to wait", this paranoia that something is constantly slipping by and we're not going to have enough of it and we're gonna run out of it (time! Time! I need more time to write/prepare my thesis/upgrade). Maybe we invented epiphany to delude ourselves into thinking there is this singular experience which we could get hold of, when it is really a product of our terror and fear.

Or maybe we could just stop being scared and let it all go. What for?? Don't listen. Let it happen.

Let it happen,
Take the moment
Make the moment
Many moments more!
Make for us a thousand more!

Another try, another night

2006-06-24T15:08:00.000+01:00

I just wanted another try
I just wanted another night......

I can't describe how much these two lines from Julie Delpy's "A Waltz For A Night" really get to me. There's something about the way she sings those two particular lines, something about the way those two lines are particularly lifted into the modulated minor key. The song, fittingly, has no chorus, for in essence it is a song which is, simply and calmly, narrating an unended love story. Instead, the structure of the song is made up of beautiful modulations between its main theme in major key and a lovely four-bar chromatic melody which it will suddenly slip into on the song's emotional high points - in its moments of confession, anguish, love, regret:

"You were for me that night... (everything I always dreamt of in life)"...

"It was for you just a one-night thing... (but you were much more to me, just so you know...)"

"One single night with you, little Jesse... (is worth a thousand with anybody...)"

"Even tomorrow in other arms... (my heart will stay yours until I die...)"

But the modulation of "I just wanted another try, I just wanted another night......" is different. For one, it extends the minor modulation from four bars to eight. For another, it signals a subtle change in the general ethos of the song - from understated love, regret and memory into a more poignant cry. But most of all, these two lines signify to me something infinitely more significant: hope. Another try, another night. Hope translates to desire ("isn't the lack of desire a symptom of depression?"), desire translates to action, action translates to a future.

Is that why I'm so moved, so caught, by those two lines of lyrics? In Jean Anouilh's play, Antigone screams, "hope is a whore". Perhaps that's why she died. And perhaps that's why Celine will continue dancing, and Jesse will continue watching her, his eyes filled with love.

Choosing to speak

2006-06-24T15:06:00.000+01:00

Hast Du etwas Zeit fuer mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Dich
Von 99 Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont

In the opening pages of Iris Murdoch's "A Severed Head", the novel's married narrator, Martin, and his lover Georgie discuss the secrecy of their affair:

"You mean its being clandestine is of its essence," said Georgie, "and if it were exposed to the daylight it would crumble to pieces? I don't think I like that idea."

"I didn't quite say that," I said. "But knowledge, other people's knowledge, does inevitably modify what it touches. Remember the legend of Psyche, whose child, if she told about her pregnancy, would be mortal, whereas if she kept silent it would be a god."

But the question of clandestineness is more than the discretion of an extramarital affair - it is also the presentation of an unmitigated, absolute choice: does one speak, or does one remain silent? And this choice, in turn, transmutes into an issue of integrity: How much should one say? How much should one defend? How much should one shout to the world, to state, vocalise, defend and stand by - one's morals, one's ideals, one's values, one's principles, one's beliefs?

It seems to me that nowhere is the idea of choosing destiny more stark than the choice of keeping quiet or speaking up. You can choose your god or your mortal - the differences between heaven and earth. Antigone, who went against her uncle's, King Creon of Thebes, decision to bury only her one brother, Eteocles, but not her other brother, Polynices, chooses to speak up and as a result casts herself and her tale into tragedy, whose end results not only in Antigone's death but also those of Haemon, her lover, who stabs himself after Antigone hangs herself, and Queen Eurydice, Haemon's mother, who cuts her throat upon hearing about her son's death. And, bizarrely, I also think of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, where Flipper's (Wesley Snipes) and Angela's (Annabella Sciorra) parallel (though unrelated) decisions to reveal their inter-racial affair leads them into broken, cast out and disgraced lives. They who have chosen to speak.

And myself? How do I choose?

Heute zieh ich meine Runden
Seh' die Welt in Truemmern liegen
Hab' 'nen Luftballon gefunden
Denk' an Dich und lass' ihn fliegen

Beethoven 1st and 9th, LSO, Bernard Haitink

2006-06-24T15:02:00.000+01:00

The concert tonight was the LSO playing Beethoven's 1st and 9th at the Barbican, conducted by Bernard Haitink - a programme no less than magnificent and, in a way, for me, weirdly profound.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 in C Major. I remember having a discussion once about keys with M, a wonderful and wonderfully wise friend, many years ago in law school. I announced that my favourite key was E major (!) - absolutely no idea why I said that - and asked him what his favourite key was. And I vividly remember M sitting still on the university steps for a few seconds, before he turned to me and said, "C major". I complained that C major was boring - it's the first scale you learn, turning childish fingers stiffly and painfully on the keyboard; it has no fancy sharps or flats; it's banal and lacklustre. And M smiled.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. What - and I ask this rhetorically - can one say about the Ninth? For a piece that finally articulated itself in words with the human voice, implausibly I find it impossible to write anything about Beethoven's Ninth. This music has accompanied some of the worst years of my life - my desperate, terrified final term in law school; my first year in London, among others. Years in which, even if I didn't know it at that time, my life changed or was changing like leaves in the wind. I used to relish (and M knows this) the loud, angry parts - the terror fanfare, the D minor resolution to the acceleration of the arpeggiation in the 1st movement introduction. Those were my favourite parts. Yet, tonight, I realised that the music which caught me most were not those, but, instead, a series of moments in the third movement: dolce, cantabile sections with pizzicato for the strings while the flutes trill, or the clarinets climb a scale.

The third movement used to bore me silly. It was then that I realised, and realised how much I had to go through to realise. Simplicity. Clarity. Tabula rasa.

Hell On Wheels

2006-03-30T16:39:00.000+01:00

It is time to wax lyrical about the bicycle again.

When I was in Vancouver in March, the first thing I bought was a Rocky Mountain ice-cream; the second was the DVD of Pepe Danquart's Höllentour (Hell On Wheels) - a German documentary on the Tour de France still unobtainable in the UK. Danquart filmed the Tour via the Telekom team whose principle riders were green-jersey wonder Erik Zabel, mountain king Rolf Aldag and Klöden "Klöedie", who still rides with T-Mobile today with, of course, the (in)famous Jan Ullrich.

How can I explain my immense fascination with the Tour? It's like learning to appreciate a fine wine - you can't explain how something very simple yet profound can change one's entire philosophy - not necessarily mind-blowingly like a violent epiphany - but subtly, quietly, simply... by adding that much more of a little light in your eyes, that much more of a little colour in your life, that much more of a little rush in your ears, so that you look up to see the world only a little different, but a little brighter, a little clearer, a little more beautiful.

Part 1 was about riding and perseverence; this post is about riding and integrity.

(1) Integrity in the bicycle

To me, there is an indescribable beauty in the purity of the bicycle. I read somewhere that the design of the bicycle has barely changed for a hundred years. The following paragraph is also self-explanatory:

"With every other innovation, costs as well as benefits don't need dwelling on. The internal combustion engine almost defines 'blessing and curse': it has hugely enhanced the lives of millions, in the United States first of all and then elsewhere; and, in the course of the twentieth century, five times more Americans were killed in automobile accidents than died in war. So it went with powered flight, and nuclear fission. The bicycle was and is unsullied. As one of Iris Murdoch's characters says, "Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. The bicycle alone remains pure at heart."

- Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, Geoffrey Wheatcroft

(2) Integrity in suffering

This, of course, is very easy to say as a sport spectator - but there is also almost a sort of an integrity to the sheer suffering involved in the Tour de France. The Tour is by far the most gruelling race of all sports - I read somewhere that each day of the Tour is equivalent to a complete marathon, and you do this, over and over everyday for 23 days with only 2 rest days. You have to watch it to understand how utterly tough it is - the 80 degree climbs, the hairpin turns, the dizzying descents, the unforgivable weather - baking sun, pouring rain, mist through which you can barely see 5 metres.... they go through it all. Compared to the millions of dollars for tennis players, or golfers - isn't Tiger Woods a billionaire already? - or (urgh) footballers, there is very little money in competitive cycling - what the riders go through for what little they earn is for pure pain so honest it breaks your heart. Tyler Hamilton grinding his teeth to their nerves while he completes a stage with a broken collarbone. Riders cycling with the terrible road rashes from "contact" with tarmac. The superlative crashes while going at 120mph. Riders working so hard they shudder with every breath drawn. The pain in their eyes as they climb an ascent so steep the team cars could only follow in a droning first gear.

Höllentour. Its subtitle: die Tour der Helden (the Tour of Heroes).

(3) Integrity in courage

This is one of my favourite lines from the documentary.

Erik Zabel: "Sitting in the hotel room you wonder, 'Is it smart going down a hill at 95km/h on 2.5 centimeter tires with a classic wire pull brake?' You'll say to yourself, 'It's not so smart.'"

Is it blindness, foolhardiness, or recklessness? Or sheer courage, plain and brittle - no games, just integrity.

"La courage, l'humanité, c'est le Tour."

Moolaadé and The Man In My Basement

2006-03-29T15:19:00.000+01:00

What I read and watch seem to pick themselves: Two works - a film and a book - in two months on the same themes of freedom and the imprisonment of a society:

(i) Moolaadé, the 2004 film by the esteemed "Old Man" African director Ousmane Sembene: an African village's overcoming of the ritual of female circumcision;

(ii) Walter Mosley's "The Man In My Basement": a novel-fable which prescribes the means for a black man's achievement of freedom, namely, by the white man locked in his basement. If this sounds vague, it is meant to be - Mosley's book is easy to read but difficult to deconstruct, and his conclusions remain highly controversial.

The two works present a similar yet diverse deliverance: knowledge is the only key for a society locked in the chains of ignorance, hierarchy, fear and tradition. In Moolaadé, this comes from the modern world outside the little African village, transmitted crucially through media: this was clear from the radios which the women carried that played the music they danced to, and most importantly, imparted what little education they had - it is not a coincidence that Collé Ardo, the main inciter against the ritual, is also the character portrayed to most cherish her radio. When the men, angered at their women's resistance to "purification", confiscated their radios, piling them up into a bonfire, the message is clear. So is the message of the final two shots, in the style of Kubrick's famous cut in 2001 - a shot of an ostrich egg atop the mosque, the egg having apparently been there for eons, replaced by one of a television antenna. Modernisation is therefore that which will advance civilization - it will do away with a barbaric past and bring forward freedom, rights and justice.

In "Man In My Basement", summarily put, knowledge comes about only from the white man who locks himself voluntarily in the basement of the black man and confesses his heinous crimes against the world - the money he has stolen, the people he has killed, the children he has slaughtered etc. This is knowledge of another kind, one not gained, but only given - the knowledge of forgiveness. Only with that can we even begin to start on understanding a free world.

Yet... is anything so easy in such a hideously difficult world? Mosley's proposition is almost glib: Anniston Bennet appears one fine day on Charles Blakey's doorstep and pays the latter to lock him up in his basement so that he can absolve himself. To me, therefore, Sembene's work is the wiser but at the same time the less hopeful of the two: Collé Ardo's resistance worked because she invoked Moolaadé, a power of protection probably as ancient as female circumcision, signified by a string of colourful yarn which she ropes across her doorstep - no one may cross that rope, or she will be killed by moolaadé. The saladina draw back, afraid. The men, equally powerless, end up beating Collé Ardo to make her undo the moolaadé, to equally no avail. The only forms of life which/who paid no heed to the signification of the yarn were the livestock, and a small toddler who simply crawled underneath it when he found it too difficult to cross it. Freedom may be simpler than we think, though at the same time infinitely more difficult.

Back on the bike

2005-12-04T16:20:00.000Z

We've all experienced it before - That Setback which punches you in the gut, deflates you like a burst balloon, makes you feel utterly miserable, close to tears, empty and hollow with deep despondency and frustration. Even as, all the while, you still try to bash through the disappointment, rationalising to yourself: it's ok, this is not the end of the world, I'll do better next time, don't be ridiculous this obviously doesn't mean I'm going to be a failure for the rest of my life, rejection happens to the best of us - think Sylvia Plath, May Sarton (on the rejection of her poems - "I feel as if all twelve of my children have just been murdered"), Vladimir Nabokov, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad..... Yet you can't help but feel that structural damage to the self-confidence, get shaken by the hit it took, the poisonous, insidious clammy gnawing of self-doubt and inferiority. Everything becomes confused and unravelled: even as I was allowing myself a little cry, inside my head I kept snapping at myself, "stop it, you're being so pathetic."

The wonderfully wise and totally dynamite Professor Naomi Segal (at the University of London School of Advanced Study) once said to us: "Get back on your bike" (I still have a copy of her Powerpoint slides to prove it). She meant it as a figure of speech, of course, but it couldn't be more apposite to me, as cycling is one of the activities which most appeal to me and, more importantly, Lance Armstrong is one of my heroes. One of the strongest impressions I retain from Armstrong's biography It's Not About the Bike is his early experiences of being run off the road by trucks and cars while training, leaving him lying by the roadside spitting a mouthful of dust and waving a finger at the driver (no, not the index, ring or pinky). And then back on his bike. Throughout his cancer and recovery, he always, almost heartstoppingly, went back (or tried to) onto his bike. Then, after crashing out again and again in his first pro races after his cancer, he quit Europe, went back to America, became, in his words, " a bum". And then that now infamous ride at Boone... he got back on his bike, started training for what would be his first victory in the 1999 Tour de France. And then his second, and then his third, until his seventh last year.

"Get back on your bike."

The funniest thing that strikes me about getting back on the bike is this anecdote I recall reading about Lance Armstrong, the most tested athlete in the world, fielding yet another never-ending question about alleged drug-taking, common in competitive sport and very much so in the Tour de France, and which Armstrong, in light of his victories, always have had to face. Asked "what are you on, Lance?", he replied:

"What am I on? I'm on my bike, 8 hours a day."

Allez, Lance, allez, allez. Go Armstrong.

Hide under my invisible cloak of domesticity

2005-12-02T15:15:00.000Z

To supplement the Turkey Twizzler portion of my reading diet, I always take an unabashedly trashy novel with me to the gym to read while I pedal on the stationary bike. It works fine: (a) a novel is practically nerdy in an environment awash with Vogue magazines, Daily Mail tabloids and ringing with Black-Eyed Peas' "My Humps" lyrics; and (b) I get a vague sense of being human in that I'm actually reading something that has a plot and not written by a dead European intellectual.

The trashy novel du jour is Joanna Trollope's Other People's Children - her books (yes, plural - I've actually read more than one - hey, they really aren't that bad) actually give a fine insight of English village life, and I'm all for anything that can give me fine insights of the English - from CP Snow to Muriel Sparks to John Mortimer. Apropos to nothing, a particular paragraph from the book caught my eye yesterday:

There was something else, another wanting, the desire, from the position of being a single, professional woman, for the peculiar domestic power of the married female: the presiding, the organizing, the quiet, subliminal dictatorship of laundry and Christmas turkeys and frequency of guests, the knowledge that one's own decision-making - based, very largely, on what one did and didn't like - lay at the heart of the things.

It took me a year, but I've finally learnt to manage a household as efficiently as the next houseproud matriarch. I know exactly when the cumin has run out, when the milk will expire, which vegetables in the fridge need to be cooked first before they rot, I can make my rounds in the supermarket blindfold, I can skin and chop up a whole chicken in 15 minutes (although I can't gut a fish and I refuse to - that's what fillets are for), I make my chicken stock from scratch by boiling and simmering the carcass with onions, garlic cloves, leeks and a carrot. I don't like people in my kitchen, and only I know how to load the dishwasher right. So yes, tell me about peculiar domestic power.

Except that I have this sneaking suspicion all this domesticity, this peculiar power, is sometimes just a facade. A beautifully run house - are all those chores done simply for one's own ego and desire for power or an implicit, unspoken appeal for appreciation and acknowledgement? What, exactly, is the line between a domestic goddess and a tired housewife?

And that, I just realised, is of course the winning concept behind a certain current hit TV series. Sigh, sometimes my ideas do come too late.

French Cows

2005-11-02T15:40:00.000Z

They do not suffer from an ennui, which society can remove, because their coarse feeding and their ruminant habits make them somewhat stolid. Neither can they love society, as monkeys do, for the opportunities it affords of a fuller and more varied life, because they remain self-absorbed in the middle of their herd, while the monkeys revel together in frolics, scrambles, fights, loves and chatterings.

- A.S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale

This photograph was taken in France, on our way to the Col d'Aubisque in the Pyrenees. I snapped it in the car with the window rolled down (I don't believe in getting close to big animals without a solid metal sheet between us and a window that can be rolled up again in a hurry). Now, I ask you, is that adorable or what? I'm not big on animals - any animal - but this sight of mother and calf actually made me feel kindly towards them.

Reading the Byatt book now, and coming across the quotation made me think of the cows I saw in France (and I saw alot), which was what sparked off this post. It all came rushing back - the icy air of the mountains, the ridiculous weather, the clanging of cow bells in the stillness, the endless foie gras, the 3-hour dinners, the shopping in the morning for a fresh baguette from the boulangerie, cheese from the fromagerie, jambon from the charcuterie (yes, you have to buy 3 items from 3 different shops (and queue 3 separate times) - it is quaint, but I think if I had to do this everyday I would go mad), the exquisiteness of its countryside (all paid for by EU subsidies, of course, but to hell with that, and anyway I'll rather pay for the upkeep of rural France than, say, 6-lane highways in Spain).

I know I was seeing France through a tourist's eyes, but I can't tell you enough how enchanting every day was, how achingly lovely everything - the hills, the trees, the mountains, the vineyards - looked. How can a country be this beautiful?

I have discovered the worst way to die, or, how I fell incredibly ill one week, or, a story about sinuses

2005-10-31T15:36:00.000Z

Those of you who know me also know that I'm unceasingly morbid - death is never very far from my mind. I watched a bit of Alison Hargreaves on K2 in a documentary last night - well, basically, she died climbing it; got blown off by a storm - and it came over me again: that's probably not a bad way to go, rite, in the middle of doing something you love? (Notwithstanding that, upon my articulation of this view, I was promptly informed that, blown off by a storm of that magnitude, she was probably in the air for a long time - for all the advantages of doing stuff one loves, speed in death is definitely a big, big plus.)

When I left practice, I told the firm partner: "I don't want to die in a law office, thinking I would always leave and realising then I never will." (Which is kind of just poetic speak for "fuck it, I've had enough".) This is, of course, the same man who subsequently revealed to me that the one thing he coveted most in his entire life was a Mercedes-Benz. Well, anyway, each to each's own, and so it is, even with death, which is the topic of a post I wrote earlier this year, and which I'm pasting below. And I know this is all incoherent, but some of us are under a fair amount of stress, so......

***********************

Monday, April 18, 2005

I received a rare revelation on Saturday night - I got to find out what must truly be the worst way to die.

For those who knew (or not), I fell very ill last week and pretty much spent the last six days lying in bed in a daze. It's some cold-flu-virus thing that I got (not that it really mattered what I got, since the G&B (aka Grey & Bleak, aka London) doctor, whom I actually managed to see (!), said there is nothing I could do about it "except rest and take paracetemol". To which I wanted to splutter, "well, then what the f*** do I see you for?!" but that is another story for another day about life in the third world) but it made me utterly, totally, completely miserable. I don't think I've ever felt so ill in my life, not even the time I fainted three times in 10 minutes in the middle of the night. I mean, all I did that night was pass out - this time I spent 6 terrible days thrashing around in bed, unable to sleep, painfully awake every minute, gasping for air like a fish out of water, every part of me aching like sinews stretched on a rack - even my teeth were aching. My lips were raw, my nose was raw, my eyes were streaming. But, of course, there was nothing I could except "rest and take paracetemol" and, oh, feel vaguely suicidal for all the misery I was going through.

But it was during one of those long-suffering nights that I got my revelation. I've thought about the subject many times before, of course - or, rather, I've often thought about the reverse, as in, what would be the best way to die? ("In your sleep" ranks pretty high up, I can tell you). But it's hard not to think about the best ways to die without also thinking about the worst ways too. The excellent and almost sickeningly talented Zadie Smith wrote out, in her second novel, The Autograph Man (which, incidentally, is not even a fraction as good as her first, White Teeth, so don't bother with it) what she called a "Big Five List":

1. Cancer
2. AIDS
3. Poisoned Water System / London Underground Gas Attack
4. Permanent Neurological Damage (in youth, through misadventure)
5. Degenerative brain disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. (in old age)

Which all this time I had pretty much agreed with. Until Saturday night, when I discovered the big winner.

And here it is: the worst way to die is to be buried alive.

And this is how I knew: I was lying in bed at about 3am on pretty much the worst night of my illness. I couldn't breathe - my sinuses were jammed shut, I was trying to breathe through my mouth, but the air was barely getting in, my throat was parched to breaking point, my mouth was hurting with the dryness. My duvet was suffocating me. My head was spinning. The darkness of the night was closing in on me. At that witching hour, what was an unsufferingly terrible cold became a grotesque difficulty in breathing. What was a grostesque difficulty in breathing became a rising nausea. What was a rising nausea became suffocation. What was suffocation became panic. What was panic became the fear of God. And right there and then: I felt like the whole world was closing in me. I felt, how would the French put it? Enterrement terrible.

I thought (many, many times last week) of Katherine in The English Patient, left alone in her slowly darkening cave as her light gave out. I thought of Kit and Port in The Sheltering Sky, of Port being so deathly ill, and Kit all alone with her own American patient in the dusty, abandoned room in the Algerian desert. I thought of the lonely grave of Paula Schultz. And then, insanely, I thought of Woody Allen in Manhattan Murder Mystery, his claustrophobia acting up when he was stuck in the lift with Diane Keaton, how he gasps and clutches at his throat, telling himself, "I see meadows, I see blue skies......" What was hilarious to me when I first watched it suddenly became a nightmarish vision, a joke like the laughter of ghouls.

This must be what it is like to be buried alive. With that terrible closing in, of darkness, of emptiness, that terrible loss of air and life. Suddenly, even my duvet threatened to jump into my mouth, cutting off the only means by which I could breathe. When I shut my mouth for just one second, instinctively my nostrils gather to draw breath, only to find that they can't. It is a terrible thing to discover you can't breathe. It is an even more terrible thing to discover that slowly, painfully, agonisingly, over the period of one long night. And that is how I came by the revelation of the worst way to die.

For a variety of reasons, I have been thinking alot these days about karma. I am realising great evil can be done by people, even ordinary people, not Hitler or Khomeini or Saddam Hussein. Great hurt. Great evil. And I have been thinking alot about things that go around, things that come around. I have, sadly, not always been a good person, even though I do try, even though fundamentally I believe I am a good person. And now that I have come to realize the worst way to die, I do not want to die this way.

At this point, my sinuses went "pop", and for two blessed seconds, I could breathe through my nose, although my nostrils were totally raw and it hurt like crazy. And then jam, they closed again. But two seconds was enough.

From today, I will strive to be a better person so that I may accummulate good karma and not die a terrible death. I made a mental list of all the things I will do, all the things I know I must do. A little self-sacrifice is worth it if to avoid the worst way to die.

I have had a most terrible week (actually, I have had the most terrible two weeks) but that's all over now. I'm better, I'm recovering, and I've had the most interesting revelation in the course of it. How many people can tell you honestly that they've been shown the most terrible way to die? I've been through a hell of alot of pain recently, but in its own way it has been a privilege, and I shall not take it lightly.

The deliverance from responsibility

2005-09-28T14:58:00.000+01:00

Responsibility goes both ways. Sometimes it can be a real bitch - you feel the whole world weighing down on you; you feel trapped, stifled, walls closing in etc; you feel the resistance of every fibre in your soul, against which you are inexorably driven only by the sheer call of conscience, and everything is torn or near collapse from the pressure.

But sometimes it can be a source of strength - that which will *cough* make one a better person. That which calls becomes a rallying cry, from which one derives courage, tenacity and the determination to see things through because it is a responsibility.

The former is, of course, a source of irritation, and most times a great deal of distress. Occasionally, it can be tragic. In an early chapter in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, Ned has just escaped from his captor, Harry Power, to whom he had been unwittingly apprenticed by his mother. He rode home not in fear or even to flee, but primarily because he felt responsible for his family and for the land on which they had staked. After a near epic journey, he finally arrives home, hoping for (but perhaps not anticipating, or even daring to anticipate) a joyous homecoming. His younger siblings were ecstatic to see him, but his mother (his father is dead) was distraught at his appearance, and later hysterically demands money from him. When Ned Kelly says he has no money, his mother goes berserk:

You can't come home I paid the b----r 15 quid to take you on. You are his apprentice now.

The mother and the son stood separate in the middle of the home paddock the chooks all droopy and muddy the pigs with their ribcages showing through their suits the waters of the Eleven Mile already receding leaving the spent and withered oats lying in the yellow mud. The son felt himself a mighty fool he'd been bought and sold like carrion.

Ok - now for the movie. I found myself making comparisons to the attitude of the eponymous hero Donnie Darko, who, tasked with the duty of saving the world, effectively winds up killing himself (rather ingeniously) so that the world may not come to an end. It is a responsibility which he takes on with surprising equanimity (but then the dude has been so troubled and distressed throughout the whole film you figure it would take nothing short of relieving his duty to save the world to calm him down). Donnie's voice-over is, at long last, full of hope and, almost, faith:

I hope that when the world comes to an end I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to.

While I thought the film in general tended to be a little overloaded with mood and drama, it was nonetheless an extraordinary ending. As the camera pans past the various characters and Tears for Fears sings "And I find it kind of funny/ I find it kind of sad/ The dreams in which I'm dying/ are the best I've ever had", it is almost cathartic: light from darkness, life from death, hope from fear, deliverance from responsibility.

Damage, by Josephine Hart

2005-09-13T14:35:00.000+01:00

Right now I'm reading "Damage" by Josephine Hart (lent to me by - who else? - the inestimable E, who has introduced me to the most wonderful books and shishas and olives and crepes and weird drinks).

Writing an e-mail to another friend tonight, I brought up a quote from the book:

"We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep. All this we say, as we sleepwalk our time through years of days and nights. We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over. And just another Monday."

I say:

The only way to deal with life is to let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never-ending. To have to grasp at the uniqueness, the irredeemability, of each and every day would be unbearable - it would be the seeing of an untold void, a chasm of infinity that would drive one mad with its possibilities. The only way to cope is to clap on the blinkers, so all one sees is the path ahead, and thus in that way duly ride the journey to its requisite end. To see the world and life in its untold vastness would be to see insanity.

Komodo memories

2005-09-12T14:49:00.000+01:00

When upset, I calm myself best by thinking about diving. It's quite hard to explain to people what exactly is the edifying effect of falling into the sea with a tank on your back and breathing through a regulator, so I'm not going to try. But I thought I'll share some selected pictures here from my trip in Komodo early April this year, where I had the best holiday in my entire life (and that's a fair number of holidays). In one line: ref Komodo I didn't think it was possible to get so close to paradise. And when I'm sad, I can always go back to this post and look at the photos and call up my memories, and remember that life can be very, very beautiful.

(Ok, the photos are really crap, I know, but.... well, they are meant to be memories, not photographs... if that makes sense.)

There are many critters I love in the ocean, but my favouritest dude is surely the peacock mantis shrimp (odontodactylus scyllarus):

Spotting a mantis shrimp never fails to make my dive. These guys have tons of personality. They live in little burrows in sand bottoms or coral rubble, and you can always identify their homes because they have a front door and a back door. If you gently (gently!) tap their front door, for example, the dude shoots up and peers out with this "what the eff do you want" look on his face, I kid you not. Then you try gently tapping the back door, they spin around and pop out the other side to see what's going on. I could play with them for hours... toss little pebbles, wave my fish pointer around - they are astonishingly intelligent creatures. And they are utterly fascinating too: Look at their eyes - humans have 3 classes of colour pigments in our retinas; mantis shrimps have ten. Humans have binocular vision; mantis shrimps have trinocular. I can't even imagine what their world must look like. And get this: their claws have the force of a 22 caliber bullet - they could smash your finger if you got in their way... serious dudes! While they are not uncommon, it is hard, though, to find a free-swimming shrimp, and when you do... what a sight. Their iridescent, incandescent colouration always takes my breath away.

A speedboat taking divers out to the reef - a sight which never fails to ignite in me paroxysms of delight. It's like... the lights dimming in a cinema, the tuning of an orchestra, the revving of engines at an F1 race...... the sights and sounds of pure anticipation. Who needs drugs? Just these are opiates enough to send my heart racing.

Ok, me. Nothing interesting there.

This is a random picture of the dive guide, but to me a visual epitome of the heaven of diving: surrounded by rainbow ribbons of little fishes, a sturdy, healthy coral reef, a rooting turtle...... and just hanging out, chilling, perfectly buoyed, weightless and suspended, in water, in beauty, in daydreams......

The bats at Satonda - and the most amazing land sight I've ever seen. The photo does them no justice - they filled the sky, like the flying monkeys in Dorothy of Oz. If you kept really quiet, you could hear the beating of their wings; if you looked hard enough, you could see their odd flying motions, totally (obviously) unlike birds. As dusk falls into darkness....can one also believe in the stuff of nightmares?

And, of course, the Komodo Dancer boat herself - my favourite being the bottom right, with all her sails puffed out on a clear, blue afternoon. I don't think I had ever felt so contented, so at peace, so tranquil in my life as those days on the boat, feeling the warmth of the sun, staring at Gunong Agong, my dreams filled with swimming fishes, my life, for a little magical while, floating on an unruffled cloud.

Emperor Concerto, 22 October 2005, Barbican Hall (Emmanuel Ax, BBC Symphony Orchestra)

2005-09-11T14:41:00.006+01:00

1. There is nothing...like the (oxymoronically) gentle cacophony of an orchestra warming up, each playing in their own little world, in the minute or so before they fall into an amorphous silence for tuning. And then the uncertain placement of the vaguely synchronised "A" chord, and then the anticipation, and the applause for the lead violinist, the conductor, the music......

2. I was 2 rows away from the stage, right in front of the pianist. While he played, I could hear him humming to himself in a rather Jarrett-esque manner (though he did not kick the piano, but pedalled most gracefully). And I remember thinking to myself: how many of us sing while we work?

3. Ax was strangely (if possible) more lyrical in the first movement than the second, which in retrospect seems almost impossible. But then, listening to his performance, I realised that, for all the gusto and bravado of the Allegro tempo, like the human soul there are moments, too, of insecurity (the accaciatura phrases), darkness (the modulations into the minor key), vulnerability (the arpeggios), sometimes heartbreak......

4. There must be few things more ethereal than that suspension before the appogiatura in the second movement, hanging for one breathless moment on the most delicate of threads, before floating away into the high B-flat.

What an evening! Bravo, bravo, bravo.

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me

2005-06-16T16:49:00.000+01:00

Today I watched the play "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me", written by Frank McGuinness. As someone more familiar with cinema than theatre, I tended to compare it mentally to, of course, Hector Babenco's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, the irony being KotS was a play to begin with (though I would love to catch it some day, not least because Wong Kar-Wai has said before that its playwright, Manuel Puig, was his greatest influence).

Both plays have the same premise: prisoners stuck in a cell, trying to survive fear, madness, loneliness and the physical hardship of incarceration, not necessarily in that order. KotS has two prisoners; SWWOM has three - an American, an Irishman and an Englishman (which sounds like the beginning of a bad joke; but believe me, I swear that is the opening line of virtually every review I read). But therein the similarities end. KotS, with a tighter, more coherent and ultimately better formed structure, had its faultlines clearly drawn: the sexuality differences, which cast and were used to play out very effectively the conflict between the two characters; and ideology, which subsequently lifted the play to a transcendent level. SWWOM, on the other hand, never really took off. There was no clear-cut conflict on which the play could cut itself incisively. Of course, there were the usual jibes about each nationality, and the acting was powerful enough to give out the occasional emotional moment. But ultimately it felt like three guys stuck in a room making snarky comments at each other; there is no transcendence, no illumination, and ultimately nothing redeeming. The ultimate antagonist seemed to be boredom; the ultimate lesson: try not to be either American or British when you travel to potentially hostile countries (in the play, the characters were locked in a Lebanese cell. The American got killed; the Irishman was released; and the Englishman's fate unknown - there's a lesson in there somewhere......)

There is a great temptation to compare the confined cell to the Platonian cave: "the ensconcing of our blindness in a confining interiority, seeing 'literally nothing but the shadows of the images', while truth resided outside as a world of sunlight, water and spangled heavens." (I wrote that, though elsewhere.) The prisoners in both plays play games, tell stories and create fantasies to try and take their minds off their dismal conditions (at one point in SWWOM, the Irishman and the Englishman pretended to drive a car, which eventually started flying, and (yes) both guys started singing "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (where Chitty is female). I gather from the reviews that didn't happen in the Broadway version - maybe because they didn't have the very musical playing in another theatre literally next door.) And is that not what we do as well in our Platonian cave - those of us enlightened and still trapped? Unable to get out, we play games to comfort ourselves, cherish false dreams, imagine for ourselves the dappled outside world? The ending of both plays, however, do not bode well: in the end, Ed, the Irishman in SWWOM, was released because of his green passport, which is no good: too literal. Valentin in KotS "escaped" through death, hardly of any comfort.

So what do we have left?

Just keep dreaming, just keep dreaming......

Lolita

2005-03-21T17:26:00.000Z

Nabokov's "Lolita" is one of my favourite books - it's ultimately a tragic love story, heartrendingly beautiful and awfully well-written. Yes, you're right - it's also perverted. Yet that's the key to its genius - it still manages to be incredibly finely balanced: dark enough not to be saccharine, beautiful enough not to be hopeless, right enough not to be wrong, wrong enough not to be right. One of those things that are balanced so much, the gold dust falls off.

"What did the world weigh? It weighs, but is not weighed. Sometimes its scales are crooked. It weighs life and labour in the balance against silver and gold. That'll never balance. But fast and ruthless, it keeps on weighing. It spills alot of life that way, and sometimes a little gold."

- Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

How it all began

2005-02-04T15:04:00.000Z

It had all started with Ben Hur. It was the Easter weekend of 1999, and Ben Hur was being shown on terrestrial TV (Singapore's television station not being terribly original). I wish it hadn't been a religious movie, cos that gives to mon histoire de l'origins a shade of a religious overtone, and I'm uncomfortable with the thought that what should subsequently change my life forever might actually have something to do with divinity. But be that as it may, Ben Hur it was, and Ben Hur I decided to watch that fateful weekend......

But it wasn't that simple. Had I just merely watched Ben Hur, none of the following would have followed. That same weekend, my dad decided to take advantage of some Easter lunch-buffet special (I come from a country dedicated to food - everybody eats at every possible occasion, including religious holidays) and the whole family had to go. As a result, I couldn't watch Ben Hur. So I had to tape it.

But more to come. My math not being very good, with a cursed inability to add or subtract the simplest figures, I forgot to time the tape properly. I knew it was a long movie, but (see above factors) still I popped in a 3-hour tape, which was the longest I had anyway. To cut a long story short, Ben Hur is something like 2 hours 50 minutes long. Add the ads every 10 minutes (terrestrial TV, remember), it hit hard on 3 and a half hours.

Be that as it may. But for some unearthly reason, I was somehow oddly taken with the movie. I was engrossed. I was hooked. When I discovered, at the end of the tape, that I had missed a good half an hour of the ending (obviously I knew what was going to happen, but I wanted to watch it), I was distraught.

Again, no matter if it had just stopped there. Then I mentioned it to a good friend of mine at college, who gave me the bright idea that was to change my life. He said, "why don't you check out the film at the university's Media Resource room? Then you can finish watching it."

It was in that Media Resource room that I discovered films (and thence the relatively strange path my life was to follow). I checked out their database (which was in some primitive monochrome DOS-based form (the main database in the other parts of the library had just been converted to being web-based - clearly the Media Resource room was not part of the Library IT department priority list), but I loved it) and stumbled upon a gold mine. Looking back, I remember staring at that screen like it was the golden light beaming out of John Travolta's briefcase. There were all sorts of weird names - some I have heard of, some I vaguely knew, some I had no clue, but all I desperately, desperately wanted to know.

I discovered early on that they (the university administration, the librarians, the government - I don't know) censored anything even vaguely suggesting the unclothed human body (things have moved on a little since in Singapore and they've now got a public film library, but I understand that, get this, they still do, which sorely tests my faith in the country) . Basically, anything found to be objectionable was fuzzed out, and after one memorable episode of watching about one and a half hours of fuzz on Atom Egoyan's The Agent, I kept my film diet to everything before the 50s, all of which were relatively safe from the fuzzers. And I discovered Chaplin, and Murnau, and Capra, and Tati, and Welles, and Leone, and Hawks and Hitchcock. Ok, so (now that we know a little better) I could have given myself a better film education (at least include Godard), but I watched randomly, I watched whatever I could find, for everything was gold.

There are so many other things I can wax lyrical about the Media Resource - how it was tucked in the basement, so it was like descending into a vault of treasures, how I would time my free periods (and frequently including the lectures too - I wasn't much of a student those days) to the films, how I would go back every single day of the holidays (I think I went to school more times in the holidays of my third year than I did during term-time of my first and second years collectively) etc etc. It is now appalling how I even watched anything there - the equipment was primitive, the VHS tapes were terrible, the headphones were decades old, there was always a bunch of Chinese students watching The Dream of Red Mansion and talking really loudly (why put on the headphones, then talk over them?). But an unexplored world always looks beautiful, simply because you have never seen it before. And despite all that, nothing, nothing can ever replicate that sense of wonder, that astonishment, that feeling that you've finally found it, the one thing you could care about, the one thing that could break that awful ennui. And believe me, there was alot of ennui.

And so it goes, and here I am now. I blogged this because this evening I was thinking about two things: films, and my relationship with God. I have always been very neutral about the latter topic. But if there really is a God and if it really was He who showed me the way and brought me here, would I still be such a non-believer? The answer, of course, is: obviously not. I would go down on my knees and thank Him with all my heart, because He had truly saved me.