verba, non facta

2006-12-23T07:46:00.000+08:00

2006-10-25T05:43:00.000+08:00

distance distance distance distance distance.

national day

2006-08-09T22:24:00.000+08:00

every time i speed past sheares bridge and glimpse the city skyline in all its glory i feel truly proud to be singaporean. london might be the grand old dame of all cities, with its squat victorian facades and georgian squares; paris may have its mid-19th century boulevards and baroque palaces, with narrow streets whispering revolutionary barricades; shanghai, the bund with its eclectic architectural mix reflecting a complex history of neo-colonialism and nationalism; hongkong, its cluttered cityscape filled with sharp-edged skyscrapers and harbour, the portal to china; but none quite matches singapore's orderly and yet slightly asymmetrical business district, blazing under a tropical sky and palm trees, with just that hint of proud old british imperial splendour in the old supreme court, city hall, and victoria theatre.

(by the way, i think berlin's horridly ugly.)

but i know i'm truly singaporean when i stop feeling proud the moment the new supreme court flashes past. because it truly is a blight on the landscape. what kind of message was the architect trying to send out?!?! that aliens had landed in the heart of our historic district?!

stately victorian dome and spaceship doth not a good view make.

the gold-rimmed universe

2006-07-27T21:26:00.001+08:00

i have been wearing spectacles for the past 13 years, since i was 7. out of the 10 or 11 pairs i have possessed 8 were gold-rimmed glasses. put another way - out of the 13 years of myopic vision only 1.5 years were spent without gold rimmed glasses. it does seem to be my first and fundamental criterion as to choosing a new pair of glasses (which up until relatively recently was an annual affair). my first pair of spectacles was a large and clunky greyish plastic monstrosity which sat uneasily on my young (and very small) face; and the other non-gold rimmed pair was a slightly less clunky bmt-mandated black pleastic rimmed spectacles. which i hated. the first i wore for slightly more than a year and the second i wore for about 5 weeks.

anyway the point of this long and tiresome exposition is that i suddenly realised today that i've worn gold rimmed glasses for so long that my entire view of the world has this metallic frame hovering on the edges of my field of vision, beyond which everything just seems blurry. before today i didn't really have an inkling thtat this might actually be unnatural.

i've been wearing gold-rimmed glasses for so long that they've become part of my identity. i am not me without my spectacles. and with each successive reincarnation they've just become more and more like me. maybe they are me now and i am not myself. never mind that these frames are mass produced and quite possibly hundreds or even thousands of other people around the world wear them; every single pair of glasses i have owned are part of me.

so close is this identification that i have never, nor ever will, consider switching to contact lenses. the very idea of it fills me with a mysterious, unspeakable, intangible horror. (a bit like reading HP Lovecraft at midnight.) perhaps it is the force of the traditional taboo against suicide, self-murder, or slaughter. or maybe the fear that, like a horcrux being destroyed, it will weaken my soul at some fundamental level.

i have, however, (and now i admit ashamedly, as one would to thinking of committing a terrible crime), just a year ago, considered purchasing a black metal-rimmed pair of spectacles instead of the usual gold rimmed ones when the time came to replace my old pair. i shudder to think of what might have happened if i did. (the story, by the way, has a happy ending. i stuck to the good old gold-rimmed glasses, but with rectangular instead of round frames. the ones that you see on the bridge of my nose nowadays.)

so here's a tribute to my gold rimmed spectacles which have served me, in various reincarnations, for nearly 12 years. after all this time they still scream "GEEK ALERT!!!" at the world. some styles never go out of fashion :)

2006-07-01T17:35:00.000+08:00

a joke: based very loosely on a real incident.

guy and girl are in paris, walking down a boulevard with short leafy trees and thin overhanging branches. girl, not looking where she is going, almost walks into overhanging branch but manages to brush it aside before it pokes her eyes out. guy chuckles in mirth; he thinks it's funny. girl takes offence, sniffs and says, "in the age of chivalry you would have drawn a sword and hacked off the offending limb."

later on in the evening the girl stubs her toe on an unseen corner; she is unable to move for a while for the pain. guy jokes, "may i offer to cut off that offending limb for you?"

***
loosely based, because the first did happen and crystal did say that while in paris (she must have been a) on drugs or b) reading too many fantasy novels because option c) she is a romantic medievalist just isn't true.) the second incident, however, never took place. i did, however, take a chance to offer to hack off an offending limb of hers; only i've forgotten the context and hence had to invent a wholly different one, and set the entire incident within the form of a generic joke, with no names named.

anecdote requires much effort, sometimes.

2006-06-13T06:02:00.000+08:00

and i am blogging here despite the fact that exams are almost upon me. in 7 days' time, in fact - a week; we humans, according to the Xestobium rufovillosum of julian barnes's novel, are particularly fond of multiples of seven. or perhaps he was just poking a little harmless fun at the best-selling book of all ages, and one of the fastest growing faiths in the world.

in fact i think i blog only when i have nothing better to do than mug. mugging is nasty business, i tell you.

but i was surfing wikipedia today out of boredom and i chance upon an article on european micro-states. it is odd how many relics of history are left lying around in the modern, 'rational' world. we hardly look at them because we don't really understand why they exist; for most the state has come to be synonymous with 'the nation', and in singapore especially the state is responsible for building 'a nation'. yet there are medieval relics in this world which we note with slight bemusement - we take mental note at the fact that the vatican city is the smallest sovereign state in the world, followed by the principality of monaco - but there they are, untouched by the rationalising efforts of the modern world, and defying our common understanding. the vatican, of course, is the site of the oldest combined temporal-spiritual authority, the holy see, a category which used to include a large number of princely bishoprics along the rhine. liechtenstein is the only relic of the holy roman empire to have survived the massive reorganisations of 1806, 1815, and 1871, oweing its lucky existence to a fortuitous geographical location between switzerland and austria. san marino is the only independent italian commune still sitting around, having survived its more illustrious comrades like venice, florence, and genoa by at least two centuries. cavour seemed to have forgotten about its existence. monaco was a genoese trading colony; and would be sisters with ragusa today if the latter had not been swept up by the croatian nation-state and renamed dubrovnik. andorra has been around since the 13th century; today its joint heads of state are the bishop of urgell and the president of france, who, of course, inherited his title from the king of france, who in turn got it from the king of navarre during the reign of henri iv. it is somehow odd that the ultimate heir to the french regicidal tradition has inherited the sovereign rights of royalty.

which reminds me of something my tutor said last term when exploring the barbarian successor states to the roman empire: it's like a series of political/social experiments, some of which failed and some which didn't. whether or not they survived depended sometimes on sheer luck and on whose lands they were sitting on. and even then there were living fossils: what was the last bit of the roman empire still surviving into the middle ages? he had asked - and it wasn't byzantium, or the roman outpost kept by aegidius and syagrius in soissons; it was a part of wales called llandaff where the local notables retained their roman titles and wrote their charters in latin words and conventions. "think of it as a little corner of britain which was forever rome," a rare sparkle of wit from my tutor as he deliberately inverted rupert brooke's war poem.

so there you go: historical coelecanths, as it were, surviving into the present age and pretty much unknown by most other people. which set me on a counterfactual and delightfully irrelevant path down southeast asian history. after all, european micro-states had been accidents of historical evolution; had it not been for the dreadfully rationalising forces of imperialism and nationalism perhaps southeast asia might possess some of these oddities. had the dutch and french and english never arrived, who knows - a principality of bugis, the kingdom of malacca, the federated states of hmong, the karenni free state? might there have been little enclaves within the 'nation-states' of our region today? (and swaziland and lesotho exist to illustrate that colonialism need not have been complete; and we are what we are today perhaps because of a strange quirk of fate or the twitch of a european statesman. and i now think the tunku's bout of shingles had a great deal to do with our independence.) but here we enter the realms of utter fantasy, and i have less and less excuse to be blogging: hence i should return back to the art of louis xiv in order to understand how paintings contribute to the construction of authority...

2006-06-06T08:57:00.000+08:00

my life is so bloody ironic.

something i had perhaps subconsciously wished for had surfaced and at this juncture i'm half-wishing it hadn't. the past returns to bite me from behind. i am ambivalent; i am in turmoil. and i am angry and i am bewildered.

fate and the other people (largely the latter) conspire against best-laid plans. and this is perhaps why history cannot be that of progress, because men make their own history but not in circusmtances of their own choosing, and events progress in an annoyingly circular or spiral fashion. things ought to move on and yet they don't.

speaking of history, it is almost 2 am and i am working on a napoleon essay which is already far too long.

screw that.

and screw philosophy and poetry, the world of ideals, which only serve to raise our hopes before dashing them brutally against the rocks.

2006-05-11T17:47:00.000+08:00

would voice recognition in computers lead to standardisation in speech?

2006-05-02T06:42:00.000+08:00

may day in oxford; at the crack of dawn the magdalen college chapel choir serenades the crack of the first summer's dawn from the top of the great tower with strains from the 17th century - the hymnus eucharistus. they start singing right after the clock chimes, deeply, after six o'clock. down below tumult reigns; drunken student revellers who decide to usher in the month of may with a whole night's worth of festivities (largely drinking).

and both are venerable traditions - the former having been recorded since the 17th century, possibly dating to before that date. having lapsed in the 18th century, it was resurrected somewhere midway through the 19th - and though imaginativeness is not normally a trait we associate with the victorians - may day has been liberally reconstructed, right down to the hymn sung by the choir. the latter, of course, probably dates back to time immemorial, when someone decided that fermented barley made a good drink after all. (it might have lapsed during roman times, though, when britain was warm enough to grow vines and the romans brought in their civilised wine drinking habits.) "those damned magdalen men," as a townsman complained somewhere in the 16th century.

these are both rituals.

***
still, we live in a secularised age. what do customs mean anyway? we indulge in them, empty now of significance, for good fun or because of more than just a tinge of nostalgia. godlessness and hedonism are the emblems of the times. reverence has no significance and neither does revelry. we have lost sight of the distinction between the sacred and the profane. festivals and ceremonies are now empty shells; we see just the riotous colours and the laughing crowds but we do not feel their essence. we do not realise that laughter is mere mockery. we mock the death of tradition.

we light incense but see smoke, not spirit; the sweeping of graves is a mechanical movement; we would like soup dumplings in other times of the year besides the winter solstice, because they are sweet. similarly may day is just one big party. no one knows what the damn choir is singing. it is no longer the reminders of a rural pagan fertility ritual to welcome the months of plenty; we do not witness the complex allegory of the titanic struggle between christianity and the old religions of northern europe. no; it is a tourist event to be gawked at and photographed. we mock the death of custom; we do not mourn it.

it might have been better for the victorians to have left it to pass away quietly.

and one thought remains niggling at the back of my head. what would my grandmother think? i am her flesh and blood, but much more the child of the Enlightenment. with boundless rationalism and optimism the past will lapse with me. it is the death of ritual and the last man. we do not need to build robots to be a society of automatons. we are a world without magic, and empty of all meaning.

what would my grandmother think?

***
another thought: if i disappeared for a week, would people notice?

2006-04-08T04:42:00.000+08:00

if i were rich enough...

i would have some kind of courtyard in my house, with a running fountain. it would be good because a fountain would cool the air, and it would look pretty. also, people will be able to drink from it, roman-style. kinda like dip their cups or jugs or whatever into it, and drink cool running water. (though some people would at this point point out that there is a just-as-functional, probably-much-less-expensive modern equivalent, called the tap. but i say, taps are usually ugly!)

and i would have a book room so big that it could well be a library. floor to ceiling with shelves of books, reaching up so high that one would need ladders to reach the books on the top shelves, and meticulously catalogued on index cards (computer catalogues would be nice and convenient, but nothing quite beats the ridiculous romantic inefficiency of flipping through index cards looking for a particular book you want). there would be so many books that i would never even manage to read half of them. they'd just be there to be pretty. (it would be nice, however, if i did manage to read ALL of them). the shelves of course would be made of some kind of dark wood, solidly carpentered. the room would have large bay windows which would let in lots of light, and perhaps with blinds which can be let down in case there was -too- much light. the room would have humidity control installed to slow down the disintegration of my precious books.

at this point i just thought of making a point about the size and scope of a leisured class and social equality, and bring out a few cases in point, but the thought just flitted, randomly, away, like some kind of butterfly which has only a few hours more to live and is off to have sex with another of its kind.

and therefore i present to you a completely random post which was written when i should be puzzling over the fate of roman fiscal structures following 476.

BAD BOY BAD BAD BAD NAUGHTY ME.

2006-04-01T02:13:00.000+08:00

13 days tripping in a U-shape across germany and there was lots to see. unlike britain germany is a country bombed out and built anew; the destruction wreaked by the allies in the second world war was so extensive that even today parts of the country are still under recontsruction. as a result very few things are 'real' or 'historic' in the same way that things in britain are. (or perhaps, i've just been misled by slight anglophilia and bamboozled by the monumental equivalent of a horse guards' parade). but i think at least part of it is based on fact as well; germany had suffered not just one cycle of destruction; but several, which, ensconced safely on their island home, the british never had to experience. (well maybe except the north irish, but that's quite another story altogether.)

perhaps the best illustrative example would be berlin - half east, half west; part parvenu, part old dame - a 12th century city built on a swamp which was first the capital of minor power on the very edge of germany and then grew to be - briefly - the centre of a world empire. schloss charlottenberg, the old family palace of the hohenzollerns, was built in the 17th century, plundered and looted by the austrians in the 18th because of the failures of frederick the great, rebuilt anew, bombed out again in the second world war, and then recently rebuilt again. the fate of charlottenberg is perhaps symptomatic of german history. large stretches of berlin, along the wilhelmstrasse, once one of the centres of nazi government, lie desolate like a scar along the city, reminding one of the terrors of total war, and of the rigid iron wall (on one side of which lay the no-man's land where many perished trying to cross from east to west) which divided europe and one side of berlin from the other. in munich the 'new town hall' is in fact older than an 'old town hall', because the allies had used the towering spires of the former as a sighting point to bomb out the rest of the entire city.

and yet despite all that the past is something which hangs heavy over germany, whispering out from the crannies to the visitor of old excesses and dead people. germany is a modern industrial nation which perhaps is slightly self-conscious, ever apologetic and always attempting to atone for what it perceives to be crimes against the world and against the abstract liberal principles which its revolutionaries and philosophers, in this "land of poets and thinkers", had enunciated and fought for. one sees it in the little plaques in the ground commemorating jews who had once lived in the city of cologne; in the modern monument to the plaques of the murdered weimar parliamentarians who voted against hitler's enabling act; in the concern for remembering the nazi past and rememberance, which sometimes verges (i think) on slight obsession.

and it is these reminders of the past which emphasies the peculiar circularity of german history. it is circular in a repetitive sense; it is also circular because it oscillates, with alternating progressive and regressive phases. at a risk of imposing moral judgement on the stream of time. civilisation and barbarity have always been inextricably tied for germany - though i will not go so far as ajp taylor, who famously (and rather simplistically) stated that the germans have "known no moderation". but somehow, travelling even today, years and years after memories are fading, brings all these extremes back into sharp focus. german cities show not just two faces - destruction/construction - but four: also the two extremes of civilisation and barbarity.

in berlin the brandenburg gate and the victory column, classic examples of the breast-beating hyper-nationalistic monumentalist architecture, coexist with the huguenot french cathedral; the humboldt university (where helmholtz and mommsen studied), overlooks the bebelplatz, where in the 1930s the nazis built bonfires of the most progressive authors of their day. there is a slight, if tragic, irony in the juxtaposition of militarism with tolerance, scholarship with fanaticism. leipzig, which boasts in its heritage of at least 3 great composers (bach, mendelssohn and schumann) is also disfigured by the massive monstrosity of the battle of nations monument a tribute to the jingoism which had played such an important part in the headlong rush into the first world war. nuremberg was the city and the castle of the medieval holy roman emperors, the barbarian imitators of the classical roman inheritance, who managed to build a sophisticated and creative medieval civilisation; and yet at the same time was the centre of party rallies in the 30s and 40s, the symbolic capital of the nazis who were so infatuated with the romanticism of the first reich. the empty shells of half completed rally grounds and conference halls, conceived on the grandest scale as proof of aryan superiority, stand as testament to just how many were misled by this mad vision. the nation which produced bach, goethe and schiller also elected an austrian corporal into the highest office of the land; the conscientous bureaucrats who had made united germany the envy of the world in the late 18th century put their services (quite willingly!) at the disposal of terror and genocide of 'non-germans'. german history gives lie to marx's formulation that 'history always repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce' - on the second occasion, in 1933, at least, it was both farce and tragedy; a chapter in time which future generations would view with horrified fascination.

but germany is a nation where history exerts its influence over the landscape not in brick, mortar and stone; but in dissonant, even conflicting, echoes; echoes in the landscape which remind travellers of how great and terrible a nation germany was.

2006-02-23T01:05:00.000+08:00

haven't updated since the first essay of term on the late roman empire (yes i know it is a very sad way of marking the passage of time, by counting the essays you do) but 5 essays later i am already at medieval byzantium and this term's been passing immensely quickly. concert was last week (sibelius symphony no. 2 and schumann's konzertstuck), hwachong nite was 2 weeks ago (cf. serene's blog), CNY 3 weeks ago, etc. but anyway it's been passing fast and now i am on the verge of an essay crisis.

so what am i doing blogging here? i don't really know, since byzantium's a really interesting topic, and my essay is due tomorrow. but while skimming through the pages of whittow's pugnaciously revisionist history (The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025) i come across the scribblings of another bored undergraduate historian. copied out at the end of the chapter regarding the initial islamic conquests of byzantine territory in the 7th century was the bard's sonnet CXVI, prefaced with the pencilled words: beautiful. How relevant? and in another hand: Not at all.

Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, although its height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though its rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with its brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

- W. Shakespeare

simple and moving - three-quarters of it consists of monosyllabic words - nothing quite so fancy and baroque. yet, yes, i think it beautiful too.

****

i shall blog about more serious stuff another time :P

2006-01-14T05:32:00.000+08:00

i am supposed to be reading up on the fall of the roman empire now, but what the heck - since i am taking up this little space online, i might as well update and maintain it a little. first and foremost, my flickr thingy is up - www.flickr.com/photos/psellus - though most of the photos are of buildings and not people. somehow buildings make more interesting photographic subjects, for me.

secondly, i am so very disillusioned by the fact that spammers have managed to infiltrate my tagboard. --->
FUCK OFF
(not that they'll listen, though.)

right. sorry but i really really really detest spammers. they annoy me. a lot.

and i forgot what i was supposed to type. never mind - some other time then. for now it's back to ammianus marcellinus and emperor valens. BAH.

P.S. exams sucked. so distressed that i went out for retail therapy, and managed to buy 5 new CDs at bargain prices. (bargain by UK standards at any rate.)

2005-11-28T06:25:00.000+08:00

there is no such thing as a kernel of meaning to anything to be found anywhere. we may dig, and dig, and deeper still we will dig but we will never find it. meaning is contained in a web surrounding us in all directions, forward backwards up and down. but it always has ourselves at the centre and it is constantly expanding, like a universe of galaxies, as we observe the world around us. we will never grasp it in its entirety because our hands are not large enough to gather up all the strands. and there will be patches and holes and the web is fragile; and there will always be gaps because there is an infinite space stretching out from the self and it will never be filled and while we try to fill it up we miss out the little gaps we left behind.

knowledge is a struggle.

to continue on from this analogy - do concepts have a meaning separate from us? assuming the only intelligent life forms on earth are horses, will chairs be chairs? horses, after all, cannot sit. chairs will become pieces of wood pieced together into amusing shapes, or at best, neck rests. they might even be a strange kind of table.

and to continue:

love is blind, but it doesn't exist. not without us, anyhow. it is a cultural construct, i think.

same as justice, which is, similarly, blind. (and somehow, fair.)

i am also bored, and in a i-don't-want-to-work mood.

2005-11-22T18:45:00.000+08:00

i've been listening to disney songs throughout my last two essay semi-crises (i.e. nights when i work to 3.30am trying to finish my essays for the next day's tute... which, actually, is not very xiong by the standards of other people here). all right, please please please do not keel over in shock from discovering that i actually listen to songs with lyrics, for God's sake, i don't want to have any blood on my hands (or the carpet, parquet, ceramic tiles or whatever have you), indirect as it may be, from people reading my blog.

and - i realize - i actually quite like them. (ok, don't writhe about on the floor, it's not becoming.) largely because they're immensely sappy (most of classical music isn't sappy, though it can get cliched) and sentimental. and i realize and appreciate, because i'm older now, some of the themes presented, the motifs, and also the pretty orchestration (kudos to the creators of Pocahontas. one also starts realizing little things like in when you feel the love tonight the strings enter when timon sings the words "romantic atmosphere"; this subtly changes the entire mood and sets the stage for the entry of the lovers. but 'nuff said.) and also because they make me nostalgic. a) because i really liked disney movies when i was younger but also b) because they make me realize what a stupid kid i was back then.

because now, you see, i also hate disney. well perhaps "hate" is too mild a word. i absolutely detest it. it is puerile and full of cute prancing bunnies with big eyes. (well, at least Bambi is.) and all the female heroines are good looking and have perfect hourglass figures. (damn.) and of course, big eyes. and it's always happy endings. and of course, they're so horribly unfair to the villains, who are presented without any redeeming features and are strictly one-dimensional, and who have immensely painful deaths. (now is that fair?) i wouldn't mind so much if it were just some dumb fairytale put on stage, like snow white. but claude frollo in hugo's novel was nowhere the power hungry sinister and cruel character that he was in disney's adaptation. (though i must admit hugo's frollo exercises a great fascination for me.) and disney lies. john smith of pocahontas fame is not tall, handsome, and blonde. he was, in real life, ugly with a huge red bristly beard, who got himself blown up by standing too near a store of gunpowder. so he was ugly and stupid. of course we see modern notions transplanted into the 'historical' disney films, for instance, the american indians were all noble savages on the rousseau-ian model, peace-loving and minding their own business until the whites came. (they were most certainly not. pocahontas's father, powhatan, was a blood-thirsty power-hungry head-basher of other indian tribes.) the only way they were noble savages was perhaps the fact that they didn't wear any clothes at all (including the women) which was not reflected in the movie at any point in time. mulan, of course, is utter nonsense, and you should know why.

but of course disney appeals to the romantic inside, so i'll happily consume the films and music while knowing that, really, i hate them.

2005-11-20T21:04:00.000+08:00

every now and then one gets the thought flashing past of not being good enough, or worse, never being good enough. it's irrepressible, it comes without warning, and goes without one either. and even if brief and fleeting it upsets the complacent balance within.

2005-11-17T23:26:00.000+08:00

one of those rare occasions one just feels WUMPHED by something. like WOW. WHOOOOAAAA WUMPH. akin to being hit by a club, but much less painful i think. but a truly amazing feeling, and so wumphy that i absolutely have to gush about it.

2005-11-16T00:09:00.000+08:00

often you discover old patterns of behaviour and old modes of thought, underlying all those new facades, like scar tissue under a spanking new bandage, except they are far more than just mere reminders of the past and have actually an active role in shaping the present. and you realize that it's not so much that "the more things change the more they stay the same" but more like things don't change at all.

perhaps all which persists is much like gold, untarnished as it remains throughout the ages, unlike greening copper and rotting wood.

***
attended a rememberance day service here on sunday.

it was a simple, moving ritual performed on a windy yet fair morning; the representatives of the university resplendent in scarlet, red and jet, their gowns fluttering in the breeze like the flags borne by the members of the oxford territorial army; wreath- layers from the armed forces sombre in navy and khaki; various other important people dressed up in what seemed like 18th century uniforms, hats and breeches and swords like the duke of wellington, but cockade-less. this is a country mindful of its history.

a lone bagpiper played a lament; otherwise it was quiet safe for the rustling of the gold and brown leaves of autumn, hanging heavy from trees soon to be denuded by the rush of winter. at the foot of the giant cross erected for the dead of the two wars, the city rector intoned:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

And the band struck up a tune then, slow but not mournful; filled with rememberance and hope, the hymn

O valiant hearts, who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle-flame,
Tranquili you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.

but perhaps the most powerful image of that day was of the ranks of veterans (all too probably diminished by the intervening years), some on crutches and some on wheelchairs, but all wearing proudly their uniforms and medals, marching past the assembled crowd to the sound of swelling applause.

2005-11-11T08:58:00.000+08:00

just an interesting thought that hit me as i was reading up on anthropology and the power of rituals in the construction of authority:

why is autochthonous pronounced as autoch-thonous rather than auto-chthonous, which, surely, given its etymology (autos, greek for self, and chton, greek for earth) should be more "correct"?

also, why should agnostic be pronounced ag-nostic rather than a-gnostic? (a - prefix meaning 'without', gnosis, greek for knowledge).

anyway it does warn me against amateurish attempts at reconstructing etymologies from a) pronunciation and b) what we are used to in normal english consonants (which do not usually include sounds like chth, zd, gn, or ps, like say, greek.) and i did actually try searching for 'autoch-' as a greek root before realizing that "-chthonous" looked similar to the word "chthonian".

i also stumbled upon an interesting article online insisting (and making a lot of sense) that the word forte in english should be pronounced in the french way (i.e. like 'fort') rather than italian (i.e. 'fortAY') because the etymology was french. after all the modern definition of the word is "strong point" which is the meaning in french, and not italian (where it means 'loud'.)

and then there is the whole esplanade (rhyming with spade) esplanade (rhyming with marquis de sade).

and also nonchalant. (non-shel-ont? non-chair-learnt?)

words are, as always, fascinating.

**
AH FUCK i'm just bored by stupid anthropology, which waffles endlessly about symbols and power and witchcraft. GGRRRR.

2005-10-30T22:12:00.000+08:00

it is almost definitely autumn here now: the leaves are turning red and yellow on the very boughs and branches of trees. a sight to behold, certainly - before they fall, and the branches, denuded, proclaim the accession of winter.

but still, scarlet and gold reminds one of war, of blood and money which are its twin engines. and along parks road where the leaves fall in their hundreds or perhaps even thousands, trampled by the feet of students into the pools and puddles on the pavement, formed by yesterday's rain, and there they lay rotting, so much like the bodies of a fallen army.

M: "what a fine body of men you have there, eh, blackadder?"
B: "yes, general, soon to be fine bodies of men."

***

now where did that come from? ah well. london past 2 days, i never fail to feel that this place was once the centre of a great world empire. here the history of the world echoes in the streets, in the buildings and in the monuments. even the animals which had fallen in war have their own memorial here, reminding me so much of kipling's Her Majesty's Servants especially since the statues were those of a yoked ox and screw gun mule.

or maybe the allusion was deliberate, a clever little insertion by the sculptor now cast in bronze.

st paul's cathedral in any case was a fantastic building where the dead seemed to speak, their voices pulling the hearts of the living from the crypt, and still christopher wren's genius thunders down from the top of the magnificent dome.

i saw flowers placed on the tombs of admiral nelson, and of alexander fleming.

it would be a frightening thing if the past left no echoes and the dead no memories.

2005-10-26T03:43:00.000+08:00

3 weeks into school - on the way back to keble college from oxford high street i have to cut across the cobblestoned catte street. on the left looms the radcliffe camera, a magnificent georgian neo-classical building with blue-grey dome and yellow limestone; on the right the forbidding walls and gate of all souls' college, (perhaps the very epitome of ivory towered academia that oxford supposedly symbolises) an academic community of scholars with no students.

the sky was, of course, darkening early, because at this time of the year the axial tilt of the earth causes the northern hemisphere to experience fewer hours of sunlight a day than the southern; and the lighted windows of the libraries were standing out in stark contrast.

and somehow, magically, floating on the chill of the biting wind, comes the warm sound of a viola, the familiar tune of bach's allemande from his suite in g major for unaccompanied cello. the welcoming expansive chords of a stately dance form draw my feet half consciously to where the busker was standing.

she was a grey haired woman, and she flashed me a smile as she hit the highest note of the movement.

(this felt like my first welcome to the cold city of oxford, really, since i arrived.)

i smiled back and walked home, fingering the notes on an imaginary fingerboard resting on my palm.

2005-10-24T17:16:00.000+08:00

it is amazing that a single line of words from so far away can strike chords so deep within you; like chords in a chapel, arranged in an imperfect, incomplete cadence; issues unresolved and tensions unrelieved, hanging heavy in the air and reverberating obstinately.

and yet, there is also this feeling of having been disabused before, your head telling you, firmly, that even while you are in the city of dreaming spires there is no point pursuing nebulous fantasy and elusive illusions; illusions elusive and ephermeral as the mist that rises from your breath on a cold foggy night and disappears even before the wind picks up to draw the last vestiges of that expiration into the darkness.

let the spires dream, you think, and please, please, let me finish my work on king george iii.

2005-10-19T06:06:00.000+08:00

"The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passion, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cock-crow."

- G.M. Trevelyan

9th of august

2005-08-09T11:04:00.000+08:00

today singapore celebrates 40 years of independence.

we are an artificial state, and not quite a nation; a freak of circumstance born from the detritus of empire like so many other failed countries around the world.

singapore ought not exist.

we have no real continuous history and no real tradition. we were built by european adventurers, chinese peasants, indian convict labourers, and malay fishermen who got lost. we are the children of rootless immigrants who settled into a great colonial port with no driving force and no ideological underpinnings but mammon. (arguably, today, we still don't.)

we were an unwanted bastard of malayan geography and colonial history. an odd one out to be despised and envied.

our independence was a sob story - it wasn't supposed to happen.

and yet we are still here.

somehow something ties me back to this soil and makes me loyal (most certainly not national education or NDP) and induces me to pledge allegiance to this unnatural plot of land in the south china sea. (quite ironically, the "soil on my face" of the saf soldier contains a significant proportion of indonesian sand.)

happy birthday singapore.

***

meanwhile, a few thousand miles north and sixty years before, a city was flattened by a fat man.

people sure have very efficient methods of killing each other.

matroyshka

2005-07-17T21:27:00.000+08:00

russian dolls - you know? - matroyshka dolls they first made in 1890 but have since become a quintessentially russian product. a doll within a doll within a doll within a doll, each doll becoming progressively smaller. you always have to crack the doll open to find the next one, all the way until the smallest one, right at the very centre, right at the very end.

when i see a matroyshka i can perhaps tell you all about it. its make, its vintage, its materials, the dyes and paints used (and also that, irrelevantly, purple dye was made in phoenicia of the shells of crushed sea snails - phoenica, for purple). i could make a guess at the style and period and place of manufacture, and what, most importantly, was all so special about it.

but i would never have the courage to open it - to find the smallest and yet most important doll, right at the very centre, right at the very end.

life is full of regrets sometimes.

4th july

2005-07-04T22:30:00.000+08:00

The Patriot, fresh from freedom's councils come
Now pleased retires to lash his slaves at home.

american independence day. somehow these two lines summarize my thoughts about america - often so idealistic but also all too often falling short of its idealistic expectations.

if there is any nation on earth today founded upon universal values it is the USA. this is what makes it sometimes so oddly noble, its actions in history somehow transfigured by its founding principles.

and yet this fledgeling republic of the free had among its foremost citizens slaveowners. claiming to foreswear the corruption of old europe it was among the last countries in the world to abolish bond labour (only brazil was later, in 1881). it was also an expansionist and land hungry state, dispossessing and then exterminating the amerindians, swallowing up spanish colonies and bullying mexico, all in the name of manifest destiny. this was the country which saw the most horrific racial pogroms (in california 1860's) and racist segregation (in the south till the 1950's)

but still it is undeniable that america was a land of opportunity for many; that on its shores people found the freedom and equality lacking elsewhere.

this history is reflected in the american psyche today, and in american policy, and in american writing - this duality of thought and purpose, the selfish and the selfless. strategy with moral objectives. geopolitics and ethics. (just read anything by kissinger) sometimes the fusion is done effectively, sometimes it isn't; this leads to fiascos.

perhaps what describes america best today is the phrase "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" inscribed at the base of the statue of liberty - the traditional symbol of hope for immigrants escaping the squalor and poverty of the old country, and also of the oppressed peoples of the world who rally around the symbol of america - but it is a phrase that rings at once both hollow and resonant.

***

sometimes i think it's not the accumulation of a vast store of facts that matter but the way you draw lines between them. the more lines you draw the better - sometimes you just feel that these lines are an infinite pathway along strings of facts going on and on and on; quite often it's the discovery of some new connection somewhere that you'd overlooked before that really exhilarates, and not the discovery of uncharted waters in the limitless sea of facts.

and even more exciting, the feeling that these links overlap and overlay and affect each other in the most subtle ways, creating layers and layers upon layers of meaning over meaning such that a simple object can be seen in so many different ways from so many different angles.

http://inkpot.com/classical/images/Bachmonogram.jpg

how do you view this?

mass in b minor

2005-07-01T21:50:00.000+08:00

friend bought me a very good CD of Bach's Mass in B minor from america where she was holidaying. performed by boston baroque, telarc digital recording.

and one word to describe it is, WHOA.

really regret not being able to have bought tickets for the live performance by viennese academie earlier this year. :( they were sold out.

BUT - now i know exactly why they were sold out.

because the mass in b minor is truly bach's magnum opus in sacred music, a work of stunning complexity, power, emotion, and faith.

a work like this, i think, could be a religious experience when performed.

***

it is said that when the pagan grand prince vladimir of kiev sent emissaries to constantinople they were overwhelmed by what they saw:

They led us to the buildings where they worshipped their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. Every man after tasting something sweet, is afterward unwilling to accept that which is bitter.

and this missive converted the russians to orthodox christianity.

many historians (who can be quite a cynical bunch - this comes of studying humans too much) attribute this quote to invention by later hagiographers romanticizing the conversion of a pagan prince much given to sexual debauchery. (incidentally he is now a saint of the russian church.) his conversion, they say, was more a result of cynical calculation; aligning himself with the growing power of basileus basil ii of the byzantine empire, and moving his principality into the orbit of civilized europe, thus earning recognition and respect from the foreign merchants who flocked to the prosperous city of kiev to buy russia's furs and honey.

but i'd like to think that the beauty of the hagia sophia - the great church of justinian, and the majesty of byzantine liturgy and church ceremony played a part in this; that aesthetics and not just pure calculations have the power to move men to courses which change the history of this world.

transition

2005-06-18T14:30:00.000+08:00

i feel like i am on my way, in transit between worlds.

it is an odd kind of emotion really, in transit - the curious feeling of rootlessness, almost of weightlessness, that you don't belong where you currently are now. somehow the gravity of the old world isn't pulling you down anymore and the gravity of the new hasn't started to act on you yet. perhaps it's like being on a figurative spaceship, blasting out from earth, you know? though i haven't ever been on one.

all i know is that somehow halfway on guard duty there was this strange moment of clarity during which i didn't feel like i was really there at an unearthly hour prowling around a deserted (and f***ing large) camp. but then again it didn't feel like i was anywhere else.

so it was a feeling of being nowhere, or rather, being half in and half out, neither here nor there. which sort of qualifies as a nowhere, i suppose.

***

i know analogies are beguiling, but come to think of it, human relationships are so much like the theories of the firm.

well except perfect competition. which more or less never happens.

you see, large groups of friends are just like monopolistic competition, where people just try to stand out and get more attention. product differentiation, in a sense.

while cliques are just oligopolies. which may explain 'nonprice competition' - e.g. backstabbing, badmouthing, etc.

and relationships are just monopolies. which is why perhaps some people crave for it. they use it to leverage on their importance to the 'market' in order to maximize profits.

a wedding makes it a legal monopoly and raises the barriers to entry much higher.

=)

***

and then, there's astor piazzola.

how can one describe the sensual, almost erotic sound of a violin descending chromatically?

i can't. but it sends a shiver down my back.

doubt

2005-06-05T00:02:00.000+08:00

I have largely been a sceptic. Education, or perhaps my short-lived experience, had conditioned me for some time now to doubt; such that it has become a sort of second nature. somehow faith is something difficult to engender, harder still to hold on to. So much so that other people's faith sometimes sits uneasily with me. (or perhaps i'm intolerant and bigoted. Who knows?)

So much so that what I suspect are sometimes deeply held intuitive I-just-know impulses are simply dressed up by myself, subconsciously, in order to make it palatable to my conscious mind. (Unsettling thought? Something once suggested by kai, food for thought till now) I just have to find that heap of substantiation to justify thoughts and decisions.

And yes, there is fairly strong evidence that points towards the truly creative leaps of the human mind, the real historical decisions made by people who matter, and other people who don't matter until in aggregate; are in fact made intuitively, in a vacuum, an instinctive empathy with what is "right" (tricky word here: chockful of normative significance) with no facts or insufficient knowledge of facts. the statistics, the logical process, etc etc, are not the means to the end. they are there merely to justify what had already been grasped, there to appease that monster of the Enlightenment - Doubt - in our post-industrial society, indoctrinated to believe in the absolute Gospel of the Scientific Method.

Perhaps, just sometimes, I feel the little twinge of envy of the people who do not doubt. Somehow, they just know. And it is very disturbing, I can assure you, for a doubter and a convinced sceptic who needs Proof, with a capital 'P', for most things, to run up against the brick wall of people who know Truth with a capital 'T'. Sometimes, if one thinks about it, the experience leaves one more than a little shaken. It is not something that I can simply discard as other people being dogmatic, especially since I have admitted once to someone else that the need for Proof may be a dogma in itself.

And so while some people go charging straight into what appears to them the clear light of day (of Truth) I equivocate, seeing only shades and greys and dilemmas abounding. Precious little is certain, most things do not matter, and that is sometimes discomfiting when people seem to be so assured and confident in the face of the world.

And yet there was a time when I could accept most things unquestioningly. It was also a time I can still remember; and when Doubt was first planted in my mind I could feel its delicious impact, the startling realization that what was previously established could be wrong, that with enough effort more could be uncovered and rectified. It was like a drug which intoxicated.

Since then the effect has become a lot more muted as I realized how much is actually around and established and convincing. I started thinking if doubt merely makes very small little dents on the great sea of ignorance or it simply leads to ignorance of a different sort. In other words, Doubt turns on itself and I doubt Doubt, how effective and important it actually is, whether it is simply another dogma to fool us all.

But on better days Doubt remains thrilling as ever. Disputation comes like a shot in the arm, the sudden shock of realization, of enlightenment from a temporary resolution seems to last forever in a moment. Maybe the beginning of doubt is the beginning of knowledge. Perhaps the real Truth will never come with more Doubt, but at least we improve on our existing version of truth. Perhaps we will never reach Truth; much like the speed of light, we can only approach it, progressively yet asymptomatically.

Somehow this continuous striving seems to me something which is actually dynamic, something moving and alive and active. Far more than the assertion that the Truth is already here and we don't need to find out more - we can just sit around till the end of days. This is an immensely static vision, medieval in its simplicity and complacency. I believe that this is not the attitude that befits our modern day and age. And this, I think, keeps my faith in Doubt.

***

And so even though we do things intuitively quite often, it doesn't hurt to doubt to make sure. After all, I'm quite sure that quite a large number of Germans never really doubted Hitler, but accepted what he said unquestioningly.

And like now, it's perhaps even fun to doubt Doubt, every now and then. =)