Again and again

I keep on starting and stopping and restarting and starting new blogs. Partly because - life starts again, it feels like, one starts to read again, write again, hesitantly, in fits and spurts, the old blog is too much in the past, and too private, and yet I don't want to delete it. Let it stand as my reminder to myself. So: once more.

this.

Except that as my friend you might feel you have to tell me that everything will be all right, and as your friend I might feel I have to pretend that everything is now indeed so. This can but only increase the likelihood of fatal flying dogs.

A moment of silence

for Adrienne Rich. I didn't bring her poems with me this time; I may not have brought them to Cambridge either, two years ago. But for a long time they were a touchstone for me, even after the Twenty-One Love Poems stopped being my favourite love poems. The poems were tender, tough, practical, rueful, passionate; they were a lesson in living honesty, in political and poetic truth. There is an Adrienne Rich phase, isn't there, like a Sylvia Plath phase? Except that a Plath phase is inward-looking and angst-ridden (and brings to mind Julian Barnes' description of a teenager as someone part willing, part consenting and part chosen for), whereas an Adrienne Rich phase could have stimulated greater thought and action on behalf of others. Could have. But still; a moment of respect.

Things I have learned to say in Teochew

The machinery is old.
How now, brown cow?
I would like some teochew porridge.
What are you saying?
Shall we go for tea?
So clever.

In praise of scribes

More found notes, this time from the Met's mini exhibition on Thoth, roundabout March/April 2011

Let us praise Thoth, the accurate plummet in the balance; who rejects disorder and accepts one who is not inclined to transgression; the vizier who judges affairs and resolves conflict peacefully; the scribe of the mat, who fixes the scroll; who drives off falsehood but accepts the bearer of a healthy greeting; who supports the oath-taker in the midst of the Ennead of gods, who raises up the one who has been ignored, who has a wise face for one who has gone astray.

He who remembers the fleeting moment, who reports the hours of the night, and whose words remain forever; who enters the netherworld, finds out what is in it, and registers them in his list.

Wishing you a keris for the new year

Found not in an old notebook,  but in an old, unlabelled collection of photos downloaded from my phone, probably from an exhibition at the ACM, probably some time earlier this year. There are the obvious differences in note-taking - in the labelling and sequencing of notes, in the serendipity of ideas on the same page, in the translation of experience to the page (my photography being as unmediated by art or skill as is possible to be) - but some of these differences may just be romance.

The keris was one of five things, along with a home, a singing bird, a wife and a horse, that all Javanese men believed were needed for happiness in life.

So this is the new year

I used to wish, or say I wished, for peace. In addition to happiness and health for all I guess - those are the standard wishes, like Chinese New Year greetings. That was in the university years. Then for each year to be different - in the civil service years. That was true enough a wish to keep me going for a while. And now? A clear eye, perhaps. And the courage to see.

Vaclav Havel

First time I heard of Vaclav Havel was in an interview by Lou Reed in a compilation of reportage (edited by, I want to say, Hanif Kureishi). Lou Reed had been invited to the newly democratic, newly independent Czech Republic. Performed in a private jam session - just Havel and two hundred of his friends. Was given a samizdat version of Velvet Underground lyrics. This was in the New College library one night, probably in my second year. I read all of Timothy Garton Ash's books on the underground democratic opposition in Eastern Europe (Central Europe?). I read about Solidarity and the discussions at the Magic Lantern theatre in Prague. I read Havel's "Power of the Powerlessness" essay, his idea of living in truth. I read Adam Michnik's essays. For a little while this was my secret not-quite-obsession, more delighted in for having stumbled upon it accidentally. I almost did an undergraduate dissertation on democracy in Eastern Europe on the strength of all these essays. I can't say I put into practice anything I learned from them about speaking truth to power; I didn't end up doing an undergraduate dissertation; I didn't end up doing anything remotely radical. But the romance, at least, has stayed all this while.