Home of myself

You would sometimes imagine a country that was entirely happy, a little quieter and unself-conscious. Parts of Singapore that are content to let the future be something that happens somewhere else.

A certain sense of place

“Wind blows through a landscape. If that flow of air that is not visible to the eye can be felt in the picture, then I would venture to say that the photograph successfully fulfills one of the goals of landscape photography.”  - Shoji Ueda 

At twenty

“At twenty we travel to discover ourselves, at thirty for love, at forty out of greed and curiosity, at fifty for a revelation” –Cyril Connolly

Just had to stop the car and take a picture of the landscape I would like to live in for a while…for something

Imagine you are driving

At importune times amidst the madness that is curriculum planning , you have the great luck of being oh so quietly stunned by one of the poems that falls into your lap. That one piece that says the most, that represents what you were trying to capture all your life, the destination that you are also hurtling towards with that metaphorical dead dog in your boot.

Imagine you are driving

nowhere with no one beside you;

with the empty road unravelling and ravelling

in sympathy as the road turns in your hands.

On either side the wheatfields go shimmering

past in an absence of birdsong, and the sky

decants the shadows of the weather from itself.

So you drive on, hopeful of a time

when the ocean will rise before you like dusk

and you will make landfall at last –

some ancient, long-forgotten mooring

which both of you, of course, will recognise;

though as I said before, there is no one beside you

and neither of you has anywhere to go.

- John Glenday

“few are awake”

I must collate all these little pieces, all the signboards of one’s peculiar gnosis through life and make meaning out of them. It’s funny how when I look back the all the past posts, you can pinpoint with such sharpness, the key to an emotion at that particular time.

The singer of owls wandered off into the darkness.
Once more he had not won a prize.
It was like that at school.
He preferred dim corners, camouflaged himself
with the hair and ears of the others,
and thought about long vowels, and hunger,
and the bitterness of deep snow.
Such moods do not attract glitter.

What is it about me? he asked the shadows.
By this time they were shadows of trees.
Why have I wasted my lifeline?
I opened myself to your silences.
I allowed ruthlessness
and feathers to possess me.
I swallowed mice.
Now, when I’m at the end, and emptied
of words, and breathless,
you didn’t help me.

Wait, said the owl soundlessly.
Among us there are no prices.
You sang out of necessity,
as I do. You sang for me,
and my thicket, my moon, my lake.
Our song is a night song.
Few are awake.

- as usual, Margaret Atwood, unsettler of things.

The photograph I would spend the years trying to catch…

Personally, I don’t think any other picture comes closer to approximating the beauty of a landscape, or that of a sad goodbye, or simply saying how far one should travel from home.

Change your life

If you believe in the magic of language,

then Elvis really Lives,

and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin.

If you believe the letters themselves

contain a power within them,

then you understand

what makes outside tedious,

how desperation becomes a rope ends it.

The circular logic that allows senator to become treason,

and treason to become atoners.

That eleven plus two is twelve plus one,

and an admirer is also married.

That if you could just re-arrange things the right way

you’d find your true life,

the right path, the answer to your questions:

you’d understand how the Titanic

turns into that ice tin,

and debit card becomes bad credit.

How listen is the same as silent,

and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

Once

Within every photograph, there is also the beginning of a story, starring “once upon a time…”

Every photograph is the first frame of a movie, often the next moment, the next release of the shutter a few steps further on, the subsequent image, that is, is already tracing this story’s progress in its very own space, and its very own time.

So over the years, at least to me, taking pictures has more and more turned into “tracing stories”; with every second picture the “montage” is already on the way, and the story that has announced itself in the first picture is now moving into its own direction

defining its sense of space

and portending its sense of time.

Sometimes new actors appear, sometimes the alleged lead proves to be just a supporting part

and sometimes no person at all is at the centre, but a landscape.

–Wim Wenders

You have a wish.

You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does. You want to give something to the world, something truer, more beautiful, more painstaking, more serviceable, or simply something other than what already exists. And right at the start, simultaneous with the wish, you imagine what that “something other” might be like, or at least you see something flash by. And then you set off in the direction of the flash, and you hope you don’t lose your orientation, or forget or betray the wish you had at the beginning.

And in the end, you have a picture of pictures of something, you have music, or something that operates in some new way, or a story, or this quite extraordinary combination of all these things: a film.

-Wim Wenders

Rough weather, Sublime Poetry

To share with you this rough, divisive weather
And not to grieve because we have to share it,
Desire to wear the dark of night together
And feel no colder that we do not wear it,
Because sometimes my sight of you is clearer,
The memory not clouded by the sense,
To know that nothing now can make you dearer
Than does the close touch of intelligence,
To be the prisoner of your kindnesses
And tell myself I want you to be free,
To wish you here with me despite all this,
To wish you here, knowing you cannot be—
This is a way of love in our rough season,
This side of madness, the other side of reason.

–James Reeves (1909-1978 )

I was confounded by the syntax of this sonnet at first, but then realized a way round it was to divide its train of thought in 2s. (the commas are indicative of this) So this is my rusty attempt at paraphrase:

Lines 1-2: To share with you our woes is not an occasion for grief.

Lines 3-4: You and I are cold despite the absence of grief.

Lines 5-6: (The “because” is perplexing because it does not answer a previous query; I can surmise that raw emotion is breaking through here as it seems like a recollection of love)
I remember you best through memory untouched by the senses.

Lines 7-8: Nothing can bring you back except cold rationality of these lines?

Lines 9-10: This is a very confusing line to a mere mortal like me. I am entrapped by your qualities (ie kindness) but I want you to be free from me, but ironically i am not free from you. A paradox or some impossible wish the speaker is making?

Lines 11-12: I wish you were here (x2), but it is impossible.

Lines 13-14: These are the strange currents of our love. Binaries: Madness/Reason, Absence/Presence, You and I. Don’t you just love complicated relationships and the madness that comes from it? There is simply no resolution and you wonder why poetry indeed makes NOTHING happen.