PAPERCLAY
A ring of gold and the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.
- The Couriers, Sylvia Plath
MORE LUCID, LESS FUTILE
What matter? Why, it will not hurt at all,
Our youth is supple, and the world is sand.
- Three Rompers, Wilfred Owen
THOSE DAYS
in the dream i stood at the top of the chilly church tower looking down upon twisted domes and the sad cypress while someone chanted a melody which went on forever, insistently iambic – the night wind swirls in-the sky and sings – pablo neruda.
art history left me with an inordinate suspicion of cypress trees (van gogh) and all postmodern art (duchamp, mostly) but the church tower used to be the bane of my careless mind – in expurgating all i knew about the eleven stars, the horizon, brushstrokes et al onto examination sheets i would invariably leave this “compositionally essential” building out everytime, as if through subconscious force of habit. i went through academia largely in a narcopletic stupor, allowing habit to propel me from classes through mistakes to graduation.
it feels scary to be evaluating such a huge part of your life in a general, hazy retrospect. with adulthood it seems comes the cheery acknowledgement that the entity “those days” exist, and slowly the dreadful acceptance that “those days”, of the infinitely carefree and fresh lifestyles you would define yourself by, become increasingly nebulous, like waking from dreams.
1918
You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait. Be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
~ Franz Kafka
i return perpetually to this paragraph when i am helpless and frustrated (thankfully rarely) ; it is so luminiscent.
SILAS STRANGE
Do you have a treacherous mind? Is it restless and petulant like the tempestuous sea, whispering to you of your myriad fallings? Does it imagine, unleashing hypothetical fates upon strangers like a malcontent dictator, stories burnished strange and wondrous in the light of your inadequacies; do you wonder, by your lonesome, about the people with things to do and places to go and lovers to hold?
Silas does.
HELLO IT IS GRAMMAR NAZI MOMENT
unless in jest or at knifepoint.
COULD HE BE DREAMING?
The disgraced usurer Yankel D took the baby girl home that evening. (…) He made a bed of crumpled newspaper in a deep baking pan and gently tucked it in the oven, so that she wouldn’t be disturbed by the noise of the small falls outside. He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise. He watched her chest rise and fall in rapid succession as her fingers made fists and released, and her eyes squinted for no apparent reason. Could she be dreaming? he wondered. And if so, what would a baby dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife. When he pulled her out to feed or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint. TIME OF DYED HANDS IS FINALLY OVER! MOUSE WILL HANG! Or, SOFIOWKA ACCUSED OF RAPE, PLEADS POSSESSED BY PENIS PERSUASION, BECAME “OUT OF HAND.” Or, AVRUM R KILLED IN FLOUR MILL MISHAP, LEAVES BEHIND A LOST SIAMESE CAR OF FORTY-EIGHT YEARS, TAWNY, CHUBBY, BUT NOT FAT, PERSONABLE, MAYBE A LITTLE FAT, ANSWERS TO “METHUSELAH.” OK, FAT AS SHIT. IF FOUND, FREE TO KEEP. Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn’t written on her, it wasn’t important to him. – Jonathan Safran Foer “Everything is Illuminated
i seem to be unable to regard this lonely-old-man-with-singular-preoccupations archetype with the same derisive, anti-sentimentalist glance as i do much many other parts of fiction, having been absolutely weepy for eddie maintanence, silas marner (my cat’s namesake, naturally. what, why’d i have named him after that ridiculously handsome albino from the da vinci code or a cool street brand?), santiago, poor stasi wiesler, the grandfather whose clock stopped, short, never to go again when the old man died (my virgin literary bawl which was done behind a songsheet and really alarmed the nursery teacher) and now yankel d. seriously, how is one to not emphatise with geriatric hermits? answers like generally when one happens to a fully functional young adult don’t apply.
p.s.: JSF wrote this book at 25 – to friends, please forgive any consequent bouts of melancholic existentialia.
p.p.s: photo from HERE.
HELLO WELCOME AGAIN TO FAVOURITE WORD PROPAGANDA
potamophilous = river loving
JANUARY RANDOMS
week01 
have a wonderful 2009.
week02
when this cheapskate peruser is reading 
“You working for our man then?” asked the bearded man. He was not sober, although he was not yet drunk. “It looks that way,” said Shadow. “What do you do?” The bearded man lit his cigarette. “I’m a leprechaun,” he said, with a grin.
and re-reading 
Sister Mary’s error might have been noticed by the other nun had not she herself been severely rattled by the Secret Service men in Mrs. Dowling’s room, who kept looking at her with growing unease. This was because they had been trained to react in a certain way to people in long flowing robes and long flowing headdresses, and were currently suffering from a conflict of signals.
neil gaiman is a dream and has charmed his way into my stubborn list of favourites (which more or less features a singular terry pratchett) ; very selfishly i fret about running out of gaiman titles to read and wish he’d live (and thus write) forever.
week03
this mural played out to be the most languid and breezy project – done in my own space, time, grimy singlet and cotton shorts. suspicious as i am of contentment, this activity gets me as gratified as my gangster cat, watching on, curled against mugs of expired coffee.
week04
finds me engaged in the profitable annual enterprise of finding out just where the mother hid the mini-popiahs. the patriach, in a rare display of ingenious proactivity, has taken to hanging the bee cheng hiang parcel off his bedpost, bells attached. happy chinese new year y’all and i hope barbequed pork featured more prominently in your festivities!
week05
school is putting on the pressure. if my resolution of creating two sketchbook pages daily is anything to go by, today is 04 January 2009. =( here is to consequent abstinence till the semester ends. 
goodbye january, it’s been a languid, perfect first month.
THIS WEDNESDAY IS CHILLY
nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
green glass, goblin. why do you stare at them?
give them me.
no.
give them me. give them me.
no.
then i will howl all night in the reeds. lie in the mud and howl for them.
goblin, why do you love them so?
they are better than stars or water,
better than voices of winds that sing,
better than any man’s fair daughter,
your green glass beads on silver ring.
hush, i stole them out of the moon.
poem: overheard on a salt marsh, harold monro (excerpt) // pictures: ENGLISH RUSSIA
