Fear

Dearie and I were talking, and Dearie said: "Is it solitude, or just an overwhelming sense of fear?  Solitude is beautiful, but fear is uncalled for!  Fear is still different from caution, and helplessness a much more benign sensation than fear.  When do you experience fear?  I, for one, experience it when I know for certain that the person in front of me, whom I believe to have known very well, begins to act unpredictably.  It is, most likely, a sign of my own weakness.  After all, I am so weak, and I cannot be proud of that.  And yet, sudden bursts of fear are not just about my own weakness.  They also embody what I might call the world's total potential for misunderstanding --and alienation.  It's in the air, and is also in my head - oh yes, I can feel it - and it frightens me so much that I begin to feel as though everything was a flat pie."  I asked Dearie if she meant a "lie," not "pie."  She was sobbing so hard now that she did not respond, yes or no.

In the Night

In the likeness of a quiet mirror,

I sing

Silent songs that are but flashes of light

In the darkness of a moonless night,

I travel

Across plains lit up by the still, crystal air

Dare You, Dare Me

O masters of the universe,

Who complain, very kindly, of Tapan's cultural insularity

Have you ever thought that the very insularity of

Your own mind

Is also partly to blame?

O global citizens,

How willing are you

To listen to what the insular culture is truly saying

And to listen

To what your own glob-insular heart tells you now?

Summer

The sounds of cicadas do not leave my ears

I must tire myself tirelessly

To forget

But the sounds of cicadas cannot, and do not, leave my ears

A Didactic Moment

What is self-confidence?  Or just confidence?

Humility ought to serve as the root;

Gratitude as the leaves;

But in the end, what makes the clouds billow and the rain splatter

Is mirth: o mirth, the Muse of all things!

The Past-less, Living We

Sometimes we cling onto our past too tightly

But the past never becomes past within a person's lifetime

So keep building

Until that day when our past, present, and future

Finally pass into the realm of stones and fossils.

Change

I believe in change

And I have always believed in change

But what needs to change

Is for everyone in the world, each in his or her way,

To realize that the world may never change, for better or for worse

So that we can begin to hope

Over and over again: in cycles.

The world has always been changing

And the change is not getting any faster

Than what our faulty and ignorant histori-meter tells us.

What dealing with change means, at least for me,

Is coming to terms with the fact that we cannot change

And drawing a big picture in order to see that fact.

Remember: change is relative, and subject to whims of the skies.

A Snobbish Song

The Aha-moment comes and goes

Like carousel seats

Or the flashing silver in mirrors

O le trompe-l'oeil, time, and philosophy

(Courtesy of Art Effects)

(Photo by Compri in Iwate, Japan)

Morbid Dreams

Does art flourish particularly in times of collective crises, especially when the collective crises have psychological, non-empirical dimensions that are somehow more significant and pressing than the purely materialistic demands?

More unrelated than related to the above: I have been to Oslo and am shaken by the news of all the violence the city experienced on Friday.  All of us need to be confronting the violence within each of us - constantly.  (Ah, well, some of Munch's paintings may have lots to teach us.)  As much as I despise the perpetrators of any violent acts, we have an imperative to trace and understand, very carefully, why and how the perpetrators chose violence.  We do not need to sympathize with them, but we also do need to put ourselves into their shoes - because none of us are truly innocent.

Pigeons

I parted with humbleness a million years ago, when my fifth ancestor was born.  But tomorrow, I shall be reuniting with humbleness.  Will it forgive my very sporadic e-mails and my excuses for not writing?  O humbleness, I have missed you terribly, and yet I cannot believe I have lived for so long away from your side, in corners of the globe that are not particularly humbleness-friendly.   But o Earth, you are not a humble planet, are you?  Your skies are too clear, and your water too good to taste.  Tomorrow,  I shall return to the muddy pool and reunite with humbleness, but I know the muddy pool is only sold on Fifth Avenue, Ginza, and Orchard Road.  (Why, you may ask.  The muddy pool is a luxury!)  I will most likely be too lazy to head out to any of those places, and two of them are beyond my empirical, if not imaginative, reach in any case, at least for the time being.  So is my reunion with humbleness to be postponed to a day after tomorrow, or even later?  Only the pigeon knows.

Letters

A world filled with letters, just letters.  Letters as in letters in the alphabet, but also as in thank-you letters, love letters, and such.  Will there be envelopes, too?  No!  There shall not be any envelopes.  Only letters.  Just letters.

Puffs

At a later hour, at this late hour, as at any late hour, but no, at this particular late hour,

The quenching humor that meanness - o flashes of anger mixed with explosive laughter - can inspire

Fascinates me beyond measure.

Music can do that, but words, o stinging words, and violently waving arms

All combine to stage a theater after theater of cruel shows of verbal acrimony:

At this later hour, all combine to explode in a puff of sugar and salt.

Nachtmusik

In the blank corner of my eye, a feeling of doom resides

Helplessness without pain, choking without panic

A moon, the moon, creates a halo above the forest, a forest

As I face a baby, a cat, or both, and their moonlit eyes

Muddy Path

Fumbling for anger

I stop short:

My being teeters on a balance, and the balance keeps sliding

In favor of an almost unattainable ideal.

But this shall be how I live

And breathe, at least for the time being.

Solilo-kwayteow: Hunger at Midnight

O narratives, they do hate me so.  Or so I thought.  Memories, o memory, thou art in fragments, or even worse, in shards.  Rags and shreds: non-recyclable, except as rags and shreds.

Will you sustain me, o memory in shards and shreds, will you remember me?  You are not a person, though; you are a region in the universe where dust comes and goes, va et vient, o traffic!  No lights, please.  Only sounds, and only sounds of grass shaking, and of roots speaking underground, under the hills.

Hungry for memory, and memories, you do comfort me so.

Rain on Hold

Transformative light is all my muted vocal chords can pronounce

At this late hour

When flower petals sink to the bottom of a bottomless pit

And still they rise:

Mist and rain, wind and thunder.

We have forgotten to walk

Instead we speed past, we speed past

Ever more slowly than we can ever see

Game Theory

Jurong said: "It takes more courage to do something badly than to do it well.  In America, I would never have dared to do anything badly.  Never on purpose, at least.  But now I wish to fail all I can.  Failing is the sculptor's chisel."

Turong said: "Now you're talking.  But actually, you are hardly alone.  The excitement of failure is incomparable and compulsive.  This at least partially explains the proliferation of contests, competitions, man-made challenges, oh games!"

Jurong said: "Ho-hum.  But games are games.  Perhaps you have never experienced a real failure?"

Turong said: "The real failure is when one fails to recognize the levity in all failures - and realize that failures are never final, and that games are, in theory, never-ending."

Silences

The beginning of poetry is song

And poetry the beginning of song;

The end comes with the breeze

When the breeze stops, the song ends;

But the music never stops

In the shifting rays of silence

That surround us

"En sourdine" (Muted) Verlaine/Faure/Souzay

Tomorrow

Exodus and ecstasy are one and the same thing

Before you have left, you have already arrived;

The excitement of arrival always arrives before one actually arrives.

Moss and pepper, you, too, are one and the same, though just for tonight and tomorrow.

Transparent Light

Happiness gapes at me from behind a watermelon rind

Sleep awaits, but here, a little sweetness

Pupal

Deep in my throat I know a pupa lives and breathes

But that pupa refuses to stand for transformation, growth

I don't know what it wants to be or do

No idea at all;

I only know it likes the sound of rain and the smell of wet leaves

On a cold-warm night

Belonging and Language

In the tight, tight space of my unruly mind, I have always talked, to myself and to others, at times out loud but often voicelessly, about what belonging, or a sense of belonging, could mean and do. And I knew, or thought I knew, that language always stood in some relation to one's sense of belonging and its opposites, which may or may not include various kinds, and modes, of drifting without end.

When you have decided to drive your stake down into the soft, brown earth of a language - notwithstanding my incredulous belief that a singular "a" can crown such a divisive word-concept as language - the world takes on a certain new form. You begin to dream that the world has become multipolar, with you as one of its many minor, but integral, poles. The world is not one, as it never was and will be, but as a preserver of one language out of thousands, or millions, that exist now and have ever existed - and to clarify, albeit in an abstract manner, a language is not a bounded territory or necessarily a community, but a rolling wheel, or perhaps a pair of rolling wheels, that can travel over distances, far and near, and make crisscrossing marks on the grass - you know, with the spokes of your language set close to your beating heart, that you are verily close to being able to participate in the construction of a polyglot world, where understanding will necessarily almost always take place in something other than the language, or languages, that you have adopted as your own.

The Imperative to Rehearse

Talking to a wall: you know the wall will not respond to you. But first, you will need to know that it's a wall. The wall is an inanimate object, and as much as it could protect you, and as much as you might look at, caress, think about it all day and all night long, the wall will not reply to you, nor will it think of you in any way. But you know, too, that you are rehearsing when you find yourself in front of a wall. Right now, you may be talking to a wall, and only to a wall, but soon enough, you will be talking to live things and people, who will, in some way or another, respond to what you are saying and have said.

It is always both too early, and too late, to give up.

In a Strange City

Meandris said: "Get used to solitude. Now."

Meandris continued: "Or else, how will you live?"

Oreo asked: "But is life necessarily so lonesome?"

Meandris did not reply.