3resilience

How do these things come together to form a spontaneous and immediately captivating harmony? A message on a box: "14 June 1894 - As I was approaching Ovsiannikovo, I looked at the lovely sunset. A shaft of light in the piled up clouds, and there, like a red irregular coal, the sun. All this above the forest, the rye. Joyful. And I thought to myself: No, this world is not a joke, not a vale of ordeal only and a passage to a better eternal world, but one of the eternal worlds, which is good, joyful, and which we not only can, but must make finer and more joyful for those living with us, and for those who will live in it after us."

And, at the bus stop opposite the Cathedral, across the rumbling road, I spy a lady and a man in the doorway to the nave, talking earnestly, heads together, as a film camera and boom microphone hover over them. Another man in black t-shirt and cap holds a clapboard casually. What are they saying? What am I seeing? And how is it that I can read meaning from their unintelligibility?

And this morning, in bed with a new book, the scent of new paper like a promise, a commitment, and I begin to read: "As I began to climb, the noise fell away, and the crowds started to thin out. Soon I was far above the town, alone in a world of lanterns. For on this, the Night of a Thousand Lanterns, lights had been placed beside every grave, to lead departed spirits back to Buddha. And I, somehow, without knowing it, had found my way alone into an ancient graveyard. For many minutes I stood there, in the company of ghosts and shivering lights."

Sometimes, the pattern that I can see out of the chaos, the pattern that makes itself so evident without my calling it forth at all, is so compelling that I have to stop and admire it. Beauty that is so unlikely, and so arresting, that it is portentious like a miracle and privileged like a blessing. Times like this make you fully aware only of the present, of everything you experience, and of its transience, its temporality - well, what of it?

*

Finished Winterson's The Stone Gods yesterday on the train downtown, and read the last pages in Borders, where I had bought it in the first place. The book ends predictably; she has used echoing narratives before, where characters quote each other throughout the book, invoke the past or a future that is yet to be, make a Gordian knot out of the timeline. But in her latest book she throws out any effort at a linear plot, which I think is a mistake. What made Gut Symmetries so compelling was in part because the plot was still linear, even though she bent the timeline way out of shape. Everything fitted together so nicely at the end, into a neat linear timeline that highlighted a beautiful pattern, and this craftsmanship was a testament to her skill. But The Stone Gods is perhaps too postmodern for my taste - the temporal knot that I see at the end is inelegant, confusing, haphazard, like a device used out of pretentious intentions rather than for an artistic purpose.

But she does make an interesting point, in the end. After all that humanity has done to itself and to its planet, if we were given a second chance, we would commit the same mistakes again. Humanity cannot learn, even if it remembers; human nature is intrinsically self-effacing, self-destructive. And second chances would only be squandered, again and again; we cannot change what we once were, and what we will therefore always be. "Everything is imprinted with what it once was," she writes. And yet, this is not a doomsday declaration, because you have to take all our art, our compassion, our worth together with our depravity and destruction. If the grand historical arc of humanity inevitably tends to apocalypse, then at least individuals can act out lives of love and sympathy, or art and respect, of understanding and aspiration, against this backdrop of condemnation. And perhaps these individual moments of epiphany make all the great pain of the human collective worthwhile.

*

Been doing up some work for my old teachers, going through their students' CCA testimonials. I can understand if some current students will feel offended by the thought of this, and demand that teachers, real teachers, do the editing of their testimonials instead. I can only say, understand that the teachers are also confined by the temporal laws of physics, and among all the tasks they have to do to look after your welfare, this is the least important.

I have some philosophical objections with the way the testimonials are done. They are written by students for themselves, but presented in the third person, which I think is an inexcusable sleight of hand, amounting to fraud. It allows people to blow their own trumpet and make it sound like someone else's testimony. Of course, it is likely that if the teachers wrote the testimonials it would sound bombastic and congratulatory too, but how can you allow yourself to be so superlative towards your own achievements if you know that you are blowing them way out of proportion? Reading the testimonials, you'd think that a CCA would fail if a single ordinary member didn't attend every session diligently. You'd think that an actor has as much responsibility in bearing the school name as the President of the Student Council. We may live in a postmodern world, but to accept these viewpoints is to abandon all functional concepts of proportion and perspective. This constitutes self-delusion on an alarming scale.

But such is the state of affairs that the system demands of teachers more work than they are humanly capable of, and we settle for the next best alternative. But it makes me shudder, thinking about how so many young people are making themselves out to be so great and capable, when in reality they can't even straighten out their own grammar. And as if that was not bad enough, they can't even straighten out the spelling, let alone the places to put the words they write. One even managed to misspell her own name. Twice.

Don't even get me started on what I think about the people who actually believe what they are writing. It's too depressing.

*

In other news, planning the trips, and it's almost time to begin. Leaving for Australia on Thursday, and I hope that the company proves to be fun, because I reckon we'd end up spending more time travelling than actually visiting any single place. Time is, as always, the problem.

Against this, there are the reports of the five Singaporeans who drowned in a freak dragon-boating accident while on vacation. And then there are reports of ethnic unrest bubbling up in KL. And investigations continue for a murder of an American student on holiday in Italy. The modern lore makes travel out to be so glamorous - this stepping out of comfort zones, throwing yourself wholeheartedly and without possibility of repreive into a new culture. The cloying and seductive tastes of a new place, a new experience. But this comes up hard against the realities of the unknown, the freak chance, the unforeseen development. We have all these grand plans to travel, but we really are playing with such high stakes, aren't we? The prestige of exploring still comes with the danger of trauma, injury or death, although we no longer sail up the Congo with Marlowe.