The Trouble with Malaysia

'The trouble with Malaysia is that too many people like to tell others what the trouble with Malaysia is.'

- Brian Yap, 'The Trouble with Malaysia' in New Malaysian Essays (PJ: Matahari, 2008), ed. by Amir Muhammad, pp. 13-56

Outgrown

When do you know you're outgrowing an author?

When you start correcting them in your head.

Sandra Cisneros

Quotes from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros:

'In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.'

(of grandmother) 'And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow ... I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.'

'... a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.'

(Friend Cathy, French descendent, moving away) 'In the meantime they'll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in.'

(comical, of fat lady) 'Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too.'

'Meme has a dog with grey eyes, a sheepdog with two names, one in English and one in Spanish.'

'What matters, Marin says, is for the boys to see us and for us to see them ... And Marin just looks at them without even blinking and is not afraid.'

'All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight.'

'The Eskimos got thirty different names for snow, I say. I read it in a book.'

'And then she [Sister Superior] made me stand up on a box of books and point. That one? she said pointing to a row of ugly three-flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into. Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn't my house and started to cry.'

(of Esperanza's aunt) 'You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn't know what she meant.'

'And then she died, my aunt who listened to my poems. / And then we began to dream the dreams.'

(after reading to Ruthie, who cannot read, needs to visit eye doctor, used to write children's books) 'She took a long time looking at me before she opened her mouth, and then she said, You have the most beautiful teeth I have ever seen, and went inside.'

(of Lois, girlfriend of Sire) '... she smells pink like babies do.'

'Sire. How did you hold her? Was it? Like this? And when you kissed her? Like this?'

'They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here ... Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.'

(of Mamacita, 'big mama of the man across the street') '... a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume.'

'Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it's not the same you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would.'

'Cuando, cuando, cuando? she asks. / Ay, Caray! We are home. This is home. HEre I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ!'

'And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heart on T.V. / No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no as if she can't believe her ears.'

(of Rafaela, locked indoors by husband because she is 'too' beautiful, leans out the window plenty) 'Rafaela who drinks and drinks coconut and papaya juice on Tuesdays and wishes there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet sweet like the island, like the dance hall down the street where women much older than her throw green eyes easily like dice and open homes with keys. [autonomy?] And always there is someone offering sweeter drinks, someone promising to keep them on a silver string.'

'Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt ... Sally, who taught you to paint your eyes like Cleopatra?'

'Cheryl, who is not your friend anymore ... not since she called you that name and bit a hole in your arm ...'

'Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn't have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs ... all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy.'

(of Minerva, who is only a little older but with a husband and two kids) 'Next week she comes over black and blue and asks what can she do? Minerva. I don't know which way she'll go. There is nothing I can do.'

'I don't tell them I am ashamed - all of us staring out the window like the hungry. I am tired of looking at what we can't have. When we win the lottery ... Mama begins, and then I stop listening.'

'People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth ... / One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. / Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumble. / Rats? they'll ask. / Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy.'

'Nenny says she won't wait her whole life for a husband to come and get her ... She wants things all her own, to pick and choose. Nenny has pretty eyes and it's easy to talk that way if you are pretty.'

'I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. / In the movies there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away. / I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.'

Esperanza's mother: 'Shame is a bad thing, you know. It keeps you down. You want to know why I quit school? Because I didn't have nice clothes. No clothes, but I had brains.'

'Until one day Sally's father catches her talking to a boy and the next day she doesn't come to school. And the next. Until the way Sally tells it, he just went crazy, he just forgot he was her father between the buckle and the belt. / You're not my daughter, you're not my daughter. And then he broke into his hands.'

'Somebody started the lie that the monkey garden had been there before anything. We liked to think the garden could hide things for a thousand years. There beneath the roots of soggy flowers were the bones of murdered pirates and dinosaurs, the eye of a unicorn turned to coal. / This is where I wanted to die and where I tried one day but not even the monkey garden would have me. It was the last day I would go there.'

'... something in me wanted to throw a stick. Something wanted to say no when I watched Sally going into the garden with Tito's buddies all grinning. It was just a kiss, that's all. A kiss for each one. So what, she said.'

'Only his dirty fingernails against my skin, only his sour smell again. The moon that watched. The tilt-a-whirl. The red clowns laughing their thick-tongue laugh ... He wouldn't let me go. He said I love you, I love you, Spanish girl.'

'She [Sally, after young marriage] looks at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as a wedding cake.'

(of three sisters/aunts, las comadres) 'When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street ... / ... for the ones who cannot leave as easily as you.'

'And the thought of the mayor coming to Mango Street makes me laugh out loud. Who's going to do it [make Mango Street 'better']? Not the mayor.'

'I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head ... / I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." / I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn't want to belong.'

'... what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to.'

'I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free.'

'One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away. / Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away? / They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.'

Piano Crave

I'm sure I've posted about this before, but there it is. I'm watching someone play 'That's Why You Go Away' by MLTR on the piano and I'm just like - I WANT.

I suppose I'll try to go brush up some guitar skills and make do with pathetic guitar strumming (only pathetic because it's me, bahaha).

All righty.

Nicole Krauss

Quotes from Great House by Nicole Krauss:

'What I thought was a simpler, purer prose, more searing for being stripped of all distracting ornament, was actually a dull and lumbering mass, void of tension or energy, standing in opposition to nothing, toppling nothing, shouting nothing.'

'In her work the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.'

'I began to suspect that instead of exposing the hidden depths of things, as all along I'd supposed I was doing, perhaps the opposite was true, that I'd been hiding behind the things I wrote, using them to obscure a secret lack ...'

'... a fraud who hid a poverty of spirit behind a mountain of words.'

'... to learn from the painful lessons of self-scrutiny, and correct a little, to find the way out of the maddening circular game where we are forever eating our own tails.'

'And what of it, Your Honor? What of my life? You see, I thought - One has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon.'

'Such is life, my boy: if you think you're original in anything, think again.'

'What is it like, I once demanded of you, to be a man of such high principles that no one else can live up to them? But you only turned your back on me, just as you turned your back on everyone who betrayed you with their shortcomings.'

'... Lotte was content to live in a perennial state of misunderstanding. It's so rare, when you think about it, a trait one can imagine belonging to the psychology of a race more advanced than ours.'

'If I wanted her, I stood at the bottom of the steps and called up.'

'... the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind - the relief and the horror.'

'I thought of stopping to ask her what was wrong, maybe even taking her out for a drink ... but in the end it was too out of character for the person I have been all my life, whether I've liked it or not, and I kept walking.'

'Suddenly I wanted to cry. Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the center, the always-moving center of the woman I loved.'

'Then came a period when she became scared, aware of how much she was losing by the day, perhaps even the hour, like a person slowly bleeding to death, hemorrhaging toward oblivion.'

'... what they did, they did without compromise, free of the complications imposed on the rest of us by indecision, wavering, regret.'

'... but also for the magnitude of life, for the extremes of all it has been given to us to feel.'

'... written in handwriting that will die with his generation (shaky, mangled by its forced leaps from language to language, dignified in its illegibility) ...'

'... and our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.'

Ah, the Paralyses of Art!

I am aware that it is not a competition. It is not a race to see who is better. The worst thing anyone could do – worst because it is shallow and most definitely silly – would be to disregard something because it is good.

Nicole Krauss, I have found, is a genius. Philip Roth, yes, is another genius. And before them, J K Rowling. And Jodi Picoult, at the right times. Natsuo Kirino too, for Grotesque. 

So how do you compete with all that? I ask myself. How do you put yourself in the game when, after reading some extraordinarily profound, poignant and flawless piece of craft, you come away feeling like there is too much you don’t know to even begin writing? And what right, really, do you have to write when there are writers the likes of them?

The answer is, really, not an answer at all. Perhaps it is more a turning away, but I prefer to think of it as an awed sort of acquiescence – the answer is that you don’t compete with them at all.

Instead, the only thing you can do is to learn from them, pick out how they’ve honed their voices into finely tuned instruments, individual as the shape of one’s shoes or cushioned chair, fashioning a brand that rises out of the page to yell ‘This is Nicole Krauss!’ You read and re-read their work, jot down quotes that – at the moment of reading – have you nodding along in breathlessness.

What right do you have, you ask then, to write? Well, that’s easy. There is no right, ever, that has to be earned in the name of art. 

The Essential Human Flaw

Quotes from rom The Human Stain by Philip Roth:

'... that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography - a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.'

'... thereby ensuring that I would do anything I could think of not to bore you, including dropping out of contact, if necessary, so as to avoid the risk of becoming boring.'

'Surprises. Thirty-four years of savage surprises have given her wisdom. But it's a very narrow, antisocial wisdom. It's savage, too. It's the wisdom of somebody who expects nothing. That's her wisdom, and that's her dignity, but it's negative wisdom ...'

'... that scrappy, I've-seen-it-all laugh - you know, the coarse, easy laugh of the woman with a past ...'

'I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience - or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism - to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.'

'... and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.'

'The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially one's own intensity, is to organize the silence ...'

'Lisa was always morally in over her head, but without either the callousness to disappoint the need of another or the strength to disillusion herself about her strength.'

'Learn, he told himself, before you die, to live beyond the jurisdiction of their enraging, loathsome, stupid blame.'

'"Did you kill anyone when you were in Vietnam?" Was there anyone he didn't kill when he was in Vietnam?'

'You're battling now in a world where nobody's ruthlessness bothers to cloak itself in humanitarian rhetoric.'

'Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity ...'

'That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if ... if only such things were understandable.'

'... because she had the wisdom that is solid, thinking-for-yourself common sense.'

'Why would things happen as they do and history read as it does if inherent to existence was something called normalcy?'

'... all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line about yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one's that interested.'

'This was it, the solution, the secret to his secret, flavored with just a drop of the ridiculous - the redeeming, reassuring ridiculous, life's little contribution to every human decision.'

'Did not see at all what it had to do with me. Everything there was just so concentrated that any sort of pride I ever had was diminished.'

'Yes, she's a contender, this one. Her transcendence into independence, her transformation into a Village girl, the way she handles her folks - she seems to have grown up the way you're supposed to be able to.'

'There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color - there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.'

'... she seemed to Coleman to step up to the very edge of the big change: the point of turning, as the elderly do, into a tiny, misshapen being.'

'This wonderful language they all have - that they appear to believe - about their 'lack of self-worth,' all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything.'

'Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost 'self-esteem'. Hitler lacked self-esteem too.'

'Letting him listen. Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms it into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him.'

Yeats

Used to love this half of Yeats's poem, can't remember when I read it (A-Levels?). Anyway, here's the first half of The Second Coming -

' Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. '

Chinua Achebe

Here's what he said before - 'Art is, and always was, at the service of man.'

Ten Rules for Writing (Fiction)

Came across this article on the online Guardian and thought I'd make my own list. So, my ten rules for writing fiction: 

1. Write. 

2. Read. 

3. Write again. 

4. Read what you've written.

5. Take five months off and come back. 

6. Read what you've written again.

7. Take another five months. 

8. Bunk off writing and move to Manchester.

9. Write about Manchester. 

10. Send updated script (with detailed description of industrial Manchester) to an agent. 

(11). Await rejection. 

--> I can be so bored at times.

More Krakauer

More quotes from Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer - 

'Everything had changed suddenly - the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute - life or truth or beauty - of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded.'

'McCandless took life's inequities to heart.'

'For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'

'He could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption.'

'... he had been smitten by the vastness of the land, by the ghostly hue of the glaciers, by the pellucid subarctic sky.'

'I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing - to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on showshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows - a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.'

'Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.'

'By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything - the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds, to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.'

'I was twenty-three, a year younger than Chris McCandless when he walked into the Alaska bush. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scattershot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzsche, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards ...'

'I had convinced myself for many months that I didn't really mind the absence of intimacy in my life, the lack of real human connection, but the pleasure I'd felt in this woman's company - the ring of her laughter, the innocent touch of a hand on my arm - exposed my self-deceit and left me hollow and aching.'

'It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.' 

Of Chris McCandless

Quotes from Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer -

'At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.'

'The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible.'

'... relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it.'

'Over the past 15 years, I've run into several McCandless types out in the country. Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble. McCandless was hardly unique; there's quite a few of these guys hanging around the state, so much alike that they're almost a collective cliche.'

'In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had more wild adventures than ever before. And what magnificent country I have seen - wild, tremendous wasteland stretches, lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward from the vermilion sands of the desert, canyons five feet wide at the bottom and hundreds of feet deep, cloudbursts roaring down unnamed canyons, and hundreds of houses of the cliff dwellers, abandoned a thousand years ago.'

'For two days I couldn't tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and twisted in the heat, with swarms of ants and flies crawling over me, while the poison oozed and crusted on my face and arms and back.'

Quoting Roth

Quotes from Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer -

'I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around ... And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?'

'The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me like a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.'

'But what else was there? If he played the violin or the piano, then he might have had some serious activity other than reading to occupy him when he was not writing. The problem with just listening to music was that if he sat alone with a record in the afternoon, he soon found himself turning the sentences around in his head ... '

'... but mostly it was the drama of that face, combined with the softness and intelligence in her large pale eyes ... '

' "If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you'll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years." Lonoff made "Fantasy" sound like breakfast cereal. '

'... carried away by the idea that if I were a perfidious brute, I at least would be a truthful perfidious brute ...'

'Ordinary human pleasures have nothing to do with it. Ordinary human pleasures be damned. The young man wants to be an artist.'

'I beg of you - I'd rather live and die alone, I'd rather endure that than another moment of your bravery! I cannot take any more moral fiber in the face of life's disappointments!'

'It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.'

'I loved him! Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity, the estrangement; love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self; love for the artistic mulishness and the suspicion of nearly everything else; and love for the buried charm ...'

'... the writer whose absorption with "the grand human discord" made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling ...'

'We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.'

'Oh, what sitting ducks I had for parents! A son of theirs would have had to be a half-wit or a sadist not to make them proud.'

'What set of aesthetic values makes your think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime?'

'Maybe if I were locked up again in a room somewhere and fed on rotten potatoes and clothed in rags and terrified out of my wits, maybe then I could write a decent story for Mr. Lonoff!'

' ... the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews.'

' ... a ceremony lasting about ten minutes - and that was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not even take that much. It took nothing - that was the horror.'

'Let her see how noble and heroic you are by the twenty-seventh draft.'

'There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!'

'But what do I know, other than what I can imagine?'

First Sentence

Something that made me laugh:

'I always forgive my authors their first sentence. First sentences subsume 94.73% of the time an author spends on a book"”give or take. They are the most over-wrought, over-thought, contorted pieces of writing there is.'

- Susan J. Morris, www.blog.shelfari.com -

The Forest

I think I must go to a forest soon and trek among the trees. Not a garden, not a beach, not a poor river that chokes through the city. I must trek through a proper piece of nature with real trees and uncarved barks and roots the size of a man, and sweeps of light filtered green by the overhead leaves.

Voldemort

Today I caught sight of Voldemort.

I love the look on your face right now. It’s true, I did see him. On a bus, his pallid face looking straight at me, wand raised. It is advertisements like this that remind me that Harry Potter is a story – a very clever one, yes, but still a story.

I used to imagine that Rowling was committing a breach of magical law, that she was telling this story to us Muggles and would therefore have Fudge (or another equally incompetent Minister for Magic) on her heels for upending a long-held secrecy. I suppose this cannot really be real, but just in case she's in Azkaban between interviews –

Thanks, Joanne.

You Who Are You Who Are

When you see yourself, are you ever surprised with what's there?

Also, think about how you'd cut up this made-up phrase: You who are you who are. 
You who are / you who are
You / who are you / who are
You who / are you who / are

I love it when a phrase has personality. Whoopadoodadoo.

Tree in Garden

The tree is ten yards into the garden, but I see it as though it were in front of me, every detail – the jagged cracks in the bark, the way its arms yawn and sigh – brushing against my cheek like the wind. But what I see cannot possibly be. The tree is completely hidden in the shadows, and it is dark. The entire garden is dark. Oh look, look at my feet, they’re in the shadows too, I can’t see my shoes at all, and look, further up, I can’t see my knees either. I slowly lift my fingers to my face. All I grab is air. There is no light.

Play No More

What's wrong? What's amiss?
I'd be engrossed in something – some book, some study goal, some boy – and then I’d always be the one left. It’s like being kicked out of a shared house, and suddenly you’re on the street, your packed bags on either side of you. There are taxis that slow, windows scrolled down, drivers asking you if you need a lift. You shake your head. No, thank you. Because where would you go?

You could try to scale Mount Rushmore. Maybe try out the scene at Hollywood, just for fun, just for a little while, even if everyone thinks it’s superficial. You could aim to be the next best journalist, win the next award, try freelancing for Greenpeace, save a hectare of trees. But by now you know, you should know, that wherever you go, you take your emptiness with you. And it gnaws.

For a while I convinced myself I was burnt out. I fought too hard, I aimed too high; of course I was burnt out. I’d had enough of the chasing and working and one-minded ready-set-goals, and now my candle was out.

In hindsight, burning out was just another label for what I think really happened as I found myself in my mid-teens, and later in my late teens. Two things happened. Firstly, I’d reached a crisis that I didn’t understand and didn’t want to admit, because the chances of resolving it were zero. It was a spiritual crisis that still plagues me today. I was constantly on the hunt for something, any obsession, that could give me purpose and vision, but I was beginning to see how fruitless and temporary they were, and how I would have to start another cycle when the last one ended. Secondly, I’d realized, however unconsciously, that I had no sense of self. I based who I was entirely on my surroundings, on my personal achievements, on the people I hung out with, on what I could or couldn’t do, what I could or couldn’t appear as.

I don’t like this game so much anymore. I am fully aware that it is artificial, and rather spiritually devastating. But, as you see, I’m stuck.  

The Abandonment of God

Let me tell you exactly what’s happened to me in the past couple of years –

I’ve lost.

That’s what it feels like, and that’s what is true. When I think about what I’ve achieved in the past two and a half years, I draw a blank. If that isn’t scary, it damn well should be. I have been ebbing and flowing, going where the tide takes me, sporadically lifting my arms in the air and saying, Whatever You wish, God.

But I never trusted God. Not in the way that is wholesome or healing. I’d bargain with Him, plead for A-stars, beg for unconditional forgiveness when I was at fault. I’d be on my knees, my heart on my sleeve, be terribly exposed, and experience a quiet cleansing, a quiet peace. Then I’d stand and screw it up.

I don’t know what it is. Part of me has always believed in God, another part of me is sure that God is only my inner self and therefore not God. I don’t know what I want, but I know I’m wanting. And in all honesty? God let me down. He abandoned me and left me to hurt, and gave me no answers. I spend days and weeks and months in agony, alternating between praying and being very angry. Angry because He doesn’t sweep in and help, angry because He doesn’t help me resolve doubts, angry because I still find no one by my side, that I’m still alone.


In the past couple of years, however, something worse, if not the worst, has taken place. I am now completely deficient. At first I'd thought that it was necessary to peel away my willfulness so that I can be open for some sort of spirituality. What I have learned is that, really, I've peeled away whatever little I had left.

It's not in writing, but I've just waged a verbal four-letter war.

Why Is There No One Else?

No one else, in terms of searching and being fed up with the search.

I do sometimes wonder whether it's a personal defect that I seem to so easily turn my back and look the other way whenever Faith gets too tricky. I say this in a most polite way, even if my mind is a raging ball of confusion. Confusion and frustration and fed-up-ness.

Do I care if I never come to know, to follow, an organized religion? Should I care?

How is it possible to want to believe so badly, and not believe at all?

And in believing, how much of it is really brainwashing?

Makes me wish I was brainwashed as a kid, and brainwashed with a certain ferocity. Maybe then I wouldn't be sitting here wondering, asking, and finding answers that piss me off.

Waiting

Just my personal noting of quotations:

'I have tried, again and again, to turn my addictions into a spiritual source. Addiction failed me, as it fails us all.'

'When we doubt, we learn to accept that we may not ever know. When we question, we learn to ccept that there may be no answer. When we shout our doubt into the universe, we learn to accept that we may be met with a silence we do not know how to read.'

'In accepting doubt, unanswered questions, and unknowing, we accept life on life's terms.'

'The suggestions of the second Step is that we come to believe - over time, in a process entirely personal and without rules - in something much simpler than we try to make it: something bigger than us. So we can call it whatever we like, and we can conceptualize it as anything we want. What matters is that our spirits respond to our sense of it.'

'We fight, I think, out of fear. And there is so much that we fear. We fear that we will lose what we have, will not get what we need, will not have enough, will never be who we think we should be. We fear we will not be happy. We fear we will not be content. But the people who are content, I think, do not fight.'

'... we want desperately to know, because we think if we know we will less adrift, less scared, less lost. But I say this quandary is also one of the best aspects because it forces us to come to grips with what and who we are.'

Oh dear. We humans perpetually elude ourselves, don't we?

Kindle

That's it! I'm getting a Kindle!

Don't get me wrong; I am a huge fan of paperbacks. Huge. But when you're down on one knee trying to pull up a fifteen-kilo bag of books (and realize that this is only Bag No. 1), something's not working.

The only thing that stopped me before was that not all books are on Kindle yet, so what was the point of buying a Kindle without the books I would want to read? The way I see it now, there are about half of all the books I want to read that are on Kindle, and if I can save the weight on them, my former argument loses hold. Besides, I hate that I have to choose between keeping certain books and giving others away just because they're too heavy to bring home.

Closing Doors

I was just reading an interview by a friend the other day, and something her interviewee said really struck me. It went along the lines of: At some point, you'll have to choose and you'll have to close doors, and that's what's so painful.

Trust me, I don't handle pain well. But there's the rub, isn't it? One day we'll all be 30 and we'll have mid-life crises and we'll wonder how we ended up doing the things we ended up doing. We'll realise that in all of the ten years before the three-oh, we'd have made all of our choices and closed all of our other doors. And with all that post-choosing, the pain will be there. The pain of what-ifs, of it-could-have-beens - I cannot believe how I haven't been able to see that that's what's been plaguing me for so long. I am putting off the closing of doors, fighting to 'keep my options' open, standing for nothing.

No. That's not even totally right. I'm not putting off the closing of doors, I've just been unable to accept that I have had to close them at all. And I have been running away, running and running and running because it's all I know to do, trusting the fantasy that when I escape, I can step through a crack in space-time and emerge in a parallel universe where there is nothing that I fear, because there is nothing that matters.

Lots of us are emotionally stunted. And spiritually stuck. For so long, I have been unable to identify that gnawing hollowness that envelopes me the moment I wake up, the moment I fall asleep, and the moments in-between. I hardly exaggerate. When people try to tell me it's a spiritual emptiness, it is all I can do to not hurl the words back at them.

You don't know what it feels like! I want to say. You don't know what it means to be so dysfunctionally desperate! 

And I want to shove their Bibles and their God-inspired words back into their outstretched arms and I want to continue, God wants too much! God is too simple for my complex life! God is man-created, God is only a belief of belief, God takes too bloody long! 

Then I start to intelletualize God, and God becomes a concept that reminds me too much of Positive Affirmation, something else I want to hurl back at the self-help industry. Maybe God is just a spiritual version of me, or a faith of faith (and maybe it is a faith of faith that warrants the miracles, rather than God), or God is a Jumanji of Coincidences with a really large round table that keeps shifting itself to present new coincidences.

I know what you'd say. I've heard it all before. It's because I'm making my intellect out to be God, or I'm putting myself above God, or I'm not allowing myself to be vulnerable enough and believe, for just a split second, that He could really exist, and that His existence could be the most astounding and beautiful thing there ever was.

And then I look back over my last sentence and yes, God could really exist. See what happens when I use positive words and positive feelings and Positive Affirmation?

I am truly going insane. I am chasing my own tail and going insane and I'm still chasing.

On Spirituality

Lately, I have become more interested in spirituality and the living bases of faith and trust. This is, in part, due to a long-standing personal struggle that I have been facing, which has been catalysed by a path of solution that I once took on. I say 'once' because it has since stopped being my solution, but I still believe it to be a path I needed to take in order to reach a place where I can now even start to believe in something that isn't myself.

It is difficult to describe exactly what the words 'faith' and 'trust' mean to me. I have been programmed to keep people at a distance with a ten-foot steel pole, and I whack everybody who tries to reach within that locus. Without trying to be melodramatic, I have a soul sickness so intense that only the very determined or the very ruthless can get past, and even then it is within moments of my consent. When I talk of emptiness, it is just talk, but then I talk of hollowness, and it's like this pit within me that still hasn't stopped digging itself out.

I have learned that I am an incredibly dishonest person. I will never forget this, because it's one of the most valuable lessons I've learnt this year. Dishonesty is what cuts me off from the people I most love, it's how I manipulate and scheme and go in search of a material achievement that continually trips me up, it's what eats me so completely from the inside that I'm only left with a shell. It's my ten-foot steel pole.

On to my topic for the day ... So what does it mean to be spiritual? Is it being 'in the moment', as so many have suggested?

I don't deny that 'living in the moment' could be part of the grand solution. But for me, I just don't think it's enough, because when I'm suddenly forced to stop and stand still, I don't know why I do it all: why I go through every day, why I try for internships for some future-job that I'm not all that interested in, why I'd put myself through hard work when I have only been discontented with any results.

If I start to believe in God, am I weak? It's like throwing myself into the sea without knowing there's a boat nearby. How strong can my faith be if all I've ever known to believe in is Positive Affirmation? Even then, Positive Affirmation fails because it only depends on me.

As you can see, I am in the in-between. I am frightfully aware that 'me' is not enough to give me purpose, but I still need to let go, and keep letting go, to trust that there has always been something else keeping me alive all this while.

I suppose my greatest question is this: What if I throw all caution to the wind and believe, and believe and believe and believe, and then find out there wasn't anything to believe in in the first place?

The Wilde Thought

Why was I not told, 
that in my brain I hold, 
in one tiny ivory cell, 
both God's heaven and God's hell?

- Oscar Wilde -

Shakespeare

'What is madness but to define madness?'
- Shakespeare, Hamlet

It's true! Shakespeare's as mad as I am.

GR

Don't you dare put me in a box, because I break every fold.

Piano

I miss my piano. I miss putting fingers to keys, reading a totally awesome sign language, and making music my way. I miss dicovering new scores, I miss the sight-readings, I miss the elation when you get a whole piece right.

When I go home this summer, I want to have learnt 24 new pieces, you hear me, future self? Three for every week. Ack! I'm gonna start looking for 'em scores now.

Mary Shelley

'As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories'. Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air - the indulging in waking dreams - the following up of trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator - rather than doing as others had done, than putting down the suggestions of my own mind.'

- Mary Shelley, 1831, Introduction to Frankenstein (or the Modern Prometheus)

The Stench

Death approaches on self-pity
It has a stench, like that of rat-infested longkangs
Strong, silent, of rotten eggs and cow-dung
Filling up the nostrils 'til they fume out

You can smell it, silence puncturing the air,
So you watch how, how it punctures it black
You are terrified it will suck you in
Your eyes limp, faces spent, muscles slack

Why are you afraid?
Life still echoes down your spine
Your brash youth has yet to recede
Why are we afraid?

Perhaps it could be contagious
Perhaps we too could start crying for ourselves

- Shu -

Sometimes

I truly thank God for all the people I have in life. There is this amazing level of love in me right now and I am feeling very contented.

My gift is writing, which is something I've known for a long time. It is hardly arrogance, because this inevitably includes the admission that writing is the one and only thing I can do without batting too heavy an eyelid. But I am changing. I am growing and improving and finding the transformation incredibly exhilarating. And the writing is changing - the lexicon increasingly exact, the drama less intense. Je me demande si c'est bonnes nouvelles? Because I know that my writing lives on roping people in on a do-or-die ultimatum, and often has a dramatic, almost surreal, edge to it that compulses a certain imagination.

What does this mean for me as a writer if I can only write when I am in my own pool of self-pity? Have I traded in my creativity for my sanity?

Maybe what I have to remember is that when I was 'insane', the creativity was induced. Now, perhaps some sort of real creativity will ensue. It has to.

Please.

God-structuring

God found me. This sounds as though God could never find me before.

I found God. This sounds as though I have more power than God.

Either way, the phrases don't work. God and I found each other. I was lost and then I was found. Why does 'found' sound so accidental?

Jane Eyre

'Hush, Jane! you think too much of the love of human beings; you are too impulsive, too vehement: the sovereign hand that created your frame, and put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self, or than creatures feeble as you.'

Email

Got this quote from an email:

Did you cry a lot? ... you were cleansing the soul.

We Fall in a Fountain

All the things I used to believe in fall in cascades around me.

I am one person, in the land of broken spirits.
I stand up and try try try to believe.

All I do is try try try to write.
I tell myself often enough.

But obviously not enough.
Finally, maybe, hopefully.

A bear-hug, a kiss, a warmful of love, and maybe we can heal each other.
This is the day. 

And tomorrow I stop dying.

- Shu -

Buffo

I had wings the other day
With sparkly manik sewn on them
They were pink, gold, green, grey
And ginger for my spinal stem

Like Buffo the Great, the Master Clown*
I wore everything inside outside
So when my soul was beaten down
You could see my bladder all cried out

With poppy seeds the colour of beige
Hanging on my nerve-ends like false earrings
Heavy and strange they made me weigh
But still I made myself back-hand spring

The clown did not smile for me
Neither did I for him
But when she told me she was a lady
I cried and gave her my wings

- Shu -


* Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter