I am also writing in exile. Exile from my country that does not exist

I am also writing in exile. Exile from my country that does not exist

my English grammar is perfect, but my worldview is a mess

my English grammar is perfect, but my worldview is a mess

The Cafe (transcribed)

The cafe displays fake posters of a real revolution and some old books from the xxxxxx Foreign Language Press as if, like most cafes, only for display and not meant to be read. But when this cafe, which seems to be another cafe for hipsters' and designers' ahistorical nostalgia, is closed, the books are removed from the shelves and read. From the outside, we noticed that the lighting is much brighter when the cafe is closed fro the day. But this cafe is not a bar or club. ***** We discussed how poster designs degenerated in that country during the 80s. ***** '...but this is not an issue about the intrinsic quality of the English language itself. Just as much as I dislike the fake accents I heard on this humid island, I abhor the tone of the colloquial English here which is only a parody of slangs. Especially its vocative expressions, especially when I hear it from kids, and thought about the future of this island they called a cuntry. This republic of silence has been mocked by her intelligent and educated citizens for not voicing out. But for me, an inhabitant not as intelligent or educated like them, the problem with this republic of silence is not because it is silent, but that it is not quiet enough. We should not express ourselves too much if we do not have a language of our own.***** During the meeting, the teachers were joking about the students who mispronounced the word 'memoir', the condescending discussion of how unforgivable it was. but it is quite normal, most of the time, I have heard insincere laments about the quality of the students, and the students about the teachers. What is the point of proper pronunciation, diction and grammar for English. English is a bastard language, and 'memoir' is a borrowed term. And we are no less another kind of ideological bastards suffering from colonial hangover. To speak 'proper' English, to write when my English grammar is perfect, but my ideology is a mess (it is a mess if you think ideology only refers to communism or nazism or islam fundamentalism). I hear the echoes of the word 'imperial' in the guise of global - and the misused 'international'. This imperial language, 'my English grammar is perfect, but my worldview is a mess'. The real joke is the that English is the first language here, the myth that it is universal... and the problem of foreigners from the third world who don't use this lanaguage. When your grandfather is sodomised, and grandmother was gang raped your language becomes a dialect. The antithetical gesture of retaining the syntax, and some Asian dimunitive interjections is the greatest parody. No James Joyce will emerge, those who started learning Thai aren't Samuel Beckett who wrote in French. There is no Dante to poeticise a vulgar tongue, or turning it into a national language. The native writers are fortunate. They can return to admire Malaysia or adopt Indonesia. The others would usually despise their origins. They hate the new immigrants or foreign labourers because they are like the ghosts of their forefathers who have returned to do more or less the same kind of labour, occupying the same social positions. We have tried so hard to change our accent and language through education, and adopting another religion with fake Michael Jackson as pastor, we encountered these 'cousins' we do not want to acknowledge, who returned to smear our social status and expose our origins. According to a writer of another once colonised continent, literary tradition is the muse, and literature is a tone of voice, but this island has neither. The local writers and national librarians will disagree. But when we vacilliate between fake accents and parodic colloquialisms, I repeat, we have neither. But I do not write to peddle them this idea. What's the point of writing properly when you are not reading properly or confined to anglo-american literature. It is not even a matter of method but the content your ideology draws you towards. A PhD research with the conclusion that it is fine since language is basically meant for communication disappoints the hope I had for the conversation. It is not the problem of grammar deteriorating in the recent years - but why is it a problem. A problem for who? Who does it serve? For your master to understand you? Or to write about your anglicised asian tongue and Singlish when you are living in New York because you are so witty? ***** We never disagree that this country is a parody.***** I am also writing in exile. Exile from my country that does not exist.***** I was consoled when you told me about Malayan English. But Malaya does not exist anymore. My grandfather is not a Malayan, I was born too late to be considered one, and have no wish to become one. I do not need these petty alternatives. I am Han, who was once an imperialist too, and will return as an imperialist again.'

Proximately

a crowded train
I was, once again, forced-fed minutes
to scrutinise the back of another stranger’s head
in front of me

unlicensed rear end phrenology

some hairy terrain
uneven tufts and sweat

straight, wave or curl
water spiral and plug hole
all the same

some glossed scalps
might be fate foretold
of hair
loss or greyed
the back skull he knows from reflections

the smell of her shampoo reminds me
of the smell of her and another shampoo.

Chronicles (Sunday 9 Jan 2011)

the smouldering tip of a lit cigarette

between fingers

is it the wind, directing
or an invisible vacuum sucking
the fume

a praiseworthy moment,
when we wore our sixth finger
when the slender smoke spiral screen
the living room or another scene.

a praiseworthy woman,
when your figure was either
framed by the dusty and neglected window or creaking door
when the clock we smell to tell our time together is obsolete
now the burning incense could only whisper our minutes
that could not be converted into hours, days or weeks.

My ears are open
the tune playing in the other room that drifts in is well-muffled by the distance
the variety of your voices in my head are songs I failed to forget.

Without horoscopic bullshit from cousins of economists
without generalities or false details – that is
without ‘experts say’ or what ‘public thinks’
without reports of where world leaders are now congregating
without the vulgarities of seeing tragedies juxtaposed to the polished smiles and expressions of models sent to reinforce the jargons of the sales and marketing teams…
what’s your fucking ‘Asian perspectives’ with such an accent.

my laziness is the discipline
my bad posture when slouching on the sofa is another stance
to avoid reading the newspapers like chronic plague.

Shampoo in Supermarket (29 Dec 2010, 4.56pm)

Tearing as resistance
Her tears as

resistance against one departure.

Silent
it drops without echo,
unlike a pile of books in the library.

Silent
it drips, just one arm,
unlike those suicidal commodities
found along supermarket shelves

wanting to attract our attention
for only a brief moment
with buffered carton

or muffled cardboard bangs
it was heard
before we noticed them on the floor.

Yet we always prefer to deduced otherwise,
some other reasons

rather callousness
rather carelessness
rather that they were previously stacked precariously
close to the edge of the cold metal horizon

than logical suicide.

The shelves that reminded one
of cooler temperature
of colder blood.

I have told you before,

‘only when the shampoo irritates… only tears in one eye at most.’

'Poetry’ and News (4 Jan 2011 (10.40am)

We undermine not one but two
I shall not term it failure or success

like when a petit-bourgeoisie decides to read a little Burgess or Borges.
but they belong to those who used their lives to exemplify to us
what not to do

What not to write
What not to say
Not to summarize life as hope and rememberance
Not about your clichéd aspiration

or the broken silence of your emotional strands
fallen from your head

onto

the

half-eaten plate.

What not to show,
neither to friends nor acquaintances
Which is either sympathy or condescension
What not to suggest
Who not to collaborate with
Not to be always next to – ‘hanging around her like a bad smell’ (Bolaño)

Not to carry it with you when you are out,

inside a bag like a street peddler.

No.

Don’t say they are poems or writings
Don’t self-publish,

no limited print runs,

no independent bookstore.

Don’t do the design and layout yourself,

don’t trouble your close friend to help with the editing.
Don’t say they are accumulated over the years,

from the last few years
in between your chief preoccupation as
lawyer, doctor, engineer, banker, teacher, politician, bureaucrat…
Or postman, policeman, fireman, nurse, nun, clerk, monk, bookstore assistant, administrators, painter, hooligan, traveller, prostitute… whatever.

Let what is old get old
Like the newspapers piled up over the weeks
The density of the stack
the weightiest of trash.

So Abel and Cain,
So poetry and journalism are separate things, separated like ‘twins separated at birth’
The weightiest of trash

is the least material of things, the closest to dematerial:

words.

Tower Sunday

the tower is closed today.

well, it's a Sunday,

and like those who want rest.

the Sunday for all eyes to

shut like the graffiti eyelids of shop shutters without guilt.

The view of the city wants some rest, likewise.

The panoramic view must be tired

and wants some rest from our gaze,

from people,

from admirable stares or touristic snaps.

It is not speech

but a gesture

I am sure it isn't speech
but the gestures of tongue and lips.

Still

I plan to smoke as much as you do

Watching Time Pass (May, 2008)

...Time Indeed Passes, and We Pass with It. - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

About three months ago, he began to realise his self-indulgence in procrastination. Upon realisation, he began to trace, as far back as his childhood, the many other time wasting habits he was susceptible to. After mentally drafting out a more or less complete inventory list of these tarrying activities, he somehow managed to identify the 'progenitor'. It must be the many idle afternoons and lazy mornings he spent staring at the mechanical clock on the wall in his bedroom.

Sometimes he spaced out with a blank stare, and became only aware after; sometimes his thoughts drift untamed, analogously from pointless recollection to restless anticipation and ridiculous imagination. But often, it is just the mere counting of the seconds and minutes gone by following the clock’s ticking.

It was during one of these sessions, as a kid, that he realised the irreversibility of time, experienced an overwhelming sense of devastating ruinousness, and thus, full of pessimism, viewed every moment of his growth, since birth, as decay. Despite the circular movement of the clock hands, made especially obvious by the seemingly disciplined and inexhaustible rotation of the second hand, the clockwise movement indicates temporal linearity, of Time as a one-way street. This experience is, in a way, an antipode to the devastation Nietzsche felt when he realised the notion of eternal recurrence. Perhaps it has to do with his mediocrity, or misunderstanding of the idea, but he could not grasp the apprehension of this German philosopher who eventually gone insane. He does not understand why one would forsake the return of the best moments just because it entails the return of the worst.

Time watching is indeed time wasting, even in other more practical circumstances. Two days ago, when he was early for an important appointment (and being early is a rather unusual experience for him) he checked his watch repeatedly... for the time to come. But yet, how meaningless it is to ease one's anxiety by looking forward to the clock striking the appointment time, when it does not affect the actual situation of the impending arrival. The arrival of the appointment time does not equal the arrival of the person... he thought to himself.

This unproductive pursuit does create a sense of guilt if not stupidity, and one perverse way to lessen this guilt or to console an idiot would be to find others with similar fault or indulgence (although he hardly felt any guilt now). Perhaps this is why he was quite consoled to discover this physically inert activity in the protagonist of a story by Raymond Queneau. A form of consolation similar to the assurance of finding other puzzled faces in class when a rather complex equation were being explained by the math teacher in an arid manner: an assurance of either his average mental capacity or mass stupidity.

…All he had left now was the very vacuity of time. Then he tried to see how time passed, an undertaking just as difficult as that of catching yourself falling asleep. Sitting at his cash desk he would watch the big clock above Meussieu Poucier’s shop, and follow the progress of the big hand. He would manage to see it jump once, twice, three times, and then he suddenly found it was a quarter of an hour later and the big hand had taken advantage of this to move without noticing it. Where had he been all that time? Sometimes he had been back in Madagascar, sometimes he had relived an episode from Flash Guy or Mandrake, his favourite heroes, sometimes he had merely re-eaten a meal or re-seen a film, more or less fragmentarily.

At the end of two months of application, he managed to register three jumps of the big hand, but he never got up to four, not remembering this occupation until much later, being then lost in a fun-jungle, or repeating to himself like a scratched record some conversation he had had with Housette, Virole, or one of his other neighbours. He couldn’t manage to make his mind a blank.

Raymond Queneau, The Sunday of Life (Le Dimanche de la vie), P. 113.

Typeface

About the countless last cigarettes
I counted the nineteen butts in the ashtray
what a methodical way to measure time

The clock has stopped many years before we were here.
5 hours of 12.35
– and we both know this isn’t a clock.

The green window panes and old window frames,
nice to imagine we are in some scenes of some movies
that outlive intricate plots and directors’ names.

Another watery square or rectangle she drew
on the wooden top with a coasterless glass.

[‘A proper meal? He’d rather fill the mouth with words unsaid.’]

Baroque elaboration of a recent decade in a life,
Is Truncated Minimalist Sobriety an eventuality?
How would we compile the history of our correspondence
with these fragments stolen from the history of art?
Does it come with pictures?

I should be listening to their conversation
about photography, light and goldfish eyes
but my thought was led
to the tired eyelids of all cameras
resting on the table that a plate would slide at times.

Letter: Some thoughts to share

Hey XXXXX,

I have some thoughts to share:

1. We like to say that Bolano's writings are 'plotless' and about 'nothing' actually. But still it intrigues us. Maybe the reason lies in the word 'nothing' which is the other word for life, our lives.

2. Baudelaire said one must be drunk! I was drunk on my reminiscence over Olivier Rolin's 'Paper Tiger'. Drunk with the kind of despair and disappointment, drunk with a nostalgia for the May 1968 I have never experienced. I want to read it again and again, if I have the time and energy to spend. If not, I would waste it on 'The Ogre' by Michel Tournier. Whenever I am overburdened by work, the mere thought of sipping Cortazar's 'Hopscotch' to quench the thirst, returns the smile on the face I kept in the closet of my brain. But sometimes, it's difficult to get in. His writings, his texts, are like the popular bars in town often overcrowded with the complexities of his thoughts and emotions. I don't like to wait outside. I read it as a form of rejection. If only I could drink them like the melodies and words of songs I have downloaded for free.

3. I really enjoyed the part in Paul Auster's 'Brooklyn Follies' about the Christian sect. No, not about the Reverend asking Aurora to suck his dick, although the manner he made the request in such theological rhetoric was funny and frustrating. Fucking charlatans! But the all those ideas about sacred/profane, beatitude of silence, no telephone, no music, no TV... and the discussion on the Chapter 1, first verse of the Gospel of St. John. (the Word, God, beginning) Aren't we not that far off from such hypocrisy and sanctimonious ideologies?

4. I told Samuel yesterday that Love and Boredom are just as counterrevolutionary as Package-Tour and Backpacking to see the 'world'. Stupid seekers of the 'evental site' (Badiou) in this manner. I was questioned about romance (what a mouthful of cliche! in the form of a single word, not even a sentence is enough) I have to admit we can't avoid the use of these terms to 'get the idea across'. I do see the sparks of excitement in the beginning of relationship as romance. Rather, the commitment to certain mundane weekly activities is the True Event, all the more 'romantic'. Since, what is a bank robbery compared to the opening of a bank: what is a fling or fleeting passion compared to a marriage. The event of living it thru's in a singular non-evental form. Building Nothing from Something, the topic of the lesson you gave?

5. You told me Tolstoy condemned Baudelaire for being a dandy. Few days later, I found an article by Louis Althusser on Lenin criticising Tolstoy's faith in art to change the world. Well, Lenin is 'troublesome', he also rejected Gorky's invitation to discuss philosophical questions with some philosophers because revolutionary issues weren't meant to be discuss but practice, Althusser use the anecdote to expound on his notion of 'theoretical practice' if I am not wrong. Well, anyway, today is Lenin's birthday, although it has nothing to do with us.


Cheers.

I am not an Idealist

No
I am surely not romantic or idealistic
I hate being labelled as either
it is precisely because I am practical that I behaved in a seemingly idealistic way.

For those who are practical, they are the true idealists who live on a regular diet of action/horror movies, special effects, romantic love comedies

- What was it about?

- Not about the view of that line, which divides water from clouds, but ruptured by the ships' stagnant lull. Neither there for the sand inside my shoes nor the ants crawling - they are either not bright enough to see the difference between me and the bench, the trees, the shells or the pebbles. Or audacious enough to try telling me about the similarities I share with those things. Whatever its intention, they are courting death. To be taunted by an ant's crawl, turned murderous. How pathetic!

- Close enough to the shore, but you are under the shade.

- At that point, I nearly wanted to register it as million frill fingers of the breeze... caress, etc. It is not like it is any better now that I recognised it as feathers. For me to say how the feathers of the breeze brushes lightly, how the feathers of the breeze burshes light, through my hair, illuminating the gaps between the the fabric weaved to cover.
Only wanted to describe the sensation properly, the form correctly, before I leave the place and this thought. But a way Beckett would reject, expressions she would mock. And today is surely not the day to be rejected by them. But do I really care? Or rather simply, I was tickled by the breeze, the tickling breeze... but it wasn't exactly ticklish. I was reminded of those humid, windless days at the same place, and that's it.

- Is that all?

- Once again, what's mentioned is another set of abstraction which didn't cover his presence; what he told me about the twigs of Casuarina when I asked him for the name of the trees lining along; of the crow above, a spider beneath; of how I didn't see him emerging from the green sea; of the insignificant passerbys that interrupted as episodes; of what I was reading; of the caramel glass shard I picked from the sand; of me telling him why it is irritating to listen to him, when he only gives lectures when he speaks; the difference between dialogues and monologues; of our differences like chlorinated water from the faucet, and salty water from you know where...
'Last Evenings on Earth' by Bolano, I was once again reminded. Only that fight, which is a death invitation, could reenliven the relation.

Like the story, my dad was once a boxer too.

Long unpolished mirror

Reverse and reserve,
After the rain,
the road could be described as a long unpolished mirror.
The headlights reflected are like boats of searchlights, floating in pairs.

The road is a river, we have heard it before
the stock-image scene, we have seen before
of the vanishing point
of parallel lines
across deserted plains
or body of a snake

Three Songs

The world with three songs
Plays before the cheap curtain that divides
The room from the night burns

War and Renovation

All over the floor
Are these fallen leaves or confetti?

If only colours and shapes could tell
Whether marriage is luxurious living-on-the-top-floor, the penthouse,
or ordinary hell

She remembers the various proposals they went through
She understood them as proposals to renovate their love

He remembers the sun that was
easy on the trees,
easy on the pavement,
easy on the their back,
to him it was a treaty, based on the policy of appeasement:
They were Chamberlain and Hitler proclaiming geometry of love exists

All over the floor
Are these falling petals or confetti?

The living room arrangement, the colour of the couch,
Wasn’t it a consensus agreement to leave a gap between the kitchen cabinet for the fridge?…

All over the floor,
one of us would have to sweep it
There’s no bitterness,
there’s no war,
there wasn’t an explosion
These aren’t shrapnel but broken glass pieces and ice cubes
soaked in a liquid map with sweet minerals that would attract ants to colonise and drown in

oil reserves

Your beauty,
'oil reserves drying up'

Black and Gold

(It was that period in life one seldom has to be up this early
when youth is just how late we stayed up.
We were like Cesare Pavese's devils in some uncertain hills of Piedmont
But to gather there at eight we were told
And together in a car, east I drove
On the highway the sun simplifies the colours of this scene
to only the difference between charcoal and gold.

This is much more than a reminder of the true function of sunglasses.)

I pointed to you the exuberant colours the 'dying daylight' has painted on the tree
your attention was to the path and how the sun turns everything gold.

I am glad to acknowledge this inaccurate definition of alchemy.
I am generous enough to forgive the sun for impersonating the touch Midas once gave.

eating paper: an umemployed metaphor

Message: Bought Teck Kee 'pao' to eat. In my hunger think I ate a bit of the paper at the bottom!

Reply: Haha that happened to me before. But more often with wrapper of 'fruitella', the sweet I used to eat

Message: Ok i think its more forgiving to eat the pao paper by mistake than the fruitella sweet paper! Although its also the hot weather melting the paper on the sweet so it gets stuck

Reply: I am always just too lazy to peel the wrapper off properly,

and also because I hate the feeling when
bits of the sweet get stuck on my nails,
when fingers are sticky -
generally, the same category of inconvenience when superglue dries the tips of my clumsy fingers (where for both situations, I would reach for the tissue despite knowing it won't help much)

I know eating the food wrapping paper
is different from our common experience
of eating an orange together with its fibre;
the banana with the skin (which is unlikely to happen);
'the few strands of hair on her cheek when you kiss her'
(I kissed her and the few strands of hair on her cheek'...
that few strands across her cheek... that one strand in my mouth I licked off, and now on my tongue...);
and definitely not, the awkwardness a guy feels when the girl brings her friend along during the first date

it is of another category, definitely

but all these experiences are surely not the experience of eating the 'white rabbit' milk candy which has the edible wrapper as the gimmick