we're back.

k-a-i.blogspot.com

distance distance distance distance distance.

national day

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

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 :)

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.

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...

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.