day 93

A says:
i dont like to be reminded that things are huge

A says:
i like to see small things

A says:
so i prefer to walk

F says:
micro

A says:
surely, a toddler learning to walk is more fascinated by the act of walking than of flying

F says:
hmmmmm

A says:
because the baby can actually do it

F says:
hmmmmmmmmmmmm

A says:
with flying comes greater responsibility

F says:
hahahaaa

A says:
bombs, poop and 9 people died in Amsterdam ystd

because a plane crashed.

day 94

these journeys i makes, the wayward leaps and jumps-hold your tears-they fall-and we can smile after the lasting effect of a bubble-POP. they gravitate to the fantasy for today - jollygood-jollyjollygoodtime, if i may have a lime to add to his tea and there will some meaning to hold on to as we join i in the classical journeys. Gute Nacht - Schubert.
are we ready for the show? i is not ready for the repetitions. well, he will never be ready for sure. we'll find some other way, the rude shock of finding no message behind the show. are you distracted? distracted by your own interpretation? there are affairs going on, the weaving and the trashing of the mind; little did they know, how bubbly they are, in the planetary systems, galore with exploding and imploding matter -POP. they fall, just as they once came to being by virtue of Chance. but there is no chance involved in this pattern of writing. you read and read and read, till you find something within it, to point to someone, connecting the dots, that you, yes, you are only capable of. But we won't go as far as to say we all die and disappear. to die - let this be the theme - and we die because we thematize. there is a breathing, very labourious and meticulous movement of the fingers to make possible the black text you now read. And there are connections that cannot be listed down now. But we can know, that many centuries have passed to bring the face, your face, to the screen, beneath and after many faces that came and go, and will come after you. And the words may perhaps disappear, and all we have left is a dark room with pure silence - POP. so what if they disappear?
We'll be sure, to meet, whether with fire burning or with universal experience of forgetting in a room of judgement, we can be sure of a certain thing - totsicher/dead certain - that we won't go as far as to say we all die - because 'to die' is certainly not far away. That is the greatest and more profound distraction to life. Nothing else comes close. (and I loves it.)

day 95

it's lovely isn't it?

Alvin. I heard it so many times today that I got sick. of it. of him.

your interpretation please? Alvin.

it's lovely isn't it?

absolutely.

absolutely. utterly. self-depreciating, sense of a repetition that eluded me, almost as soon as I heard it.

I feel dizzy.
dizzy of that name.

Alvin.

day 96

Who is writing these words?

In anticipation of my death.
I die, as I write.

Who is reading these words?

In projection of a life.
You live, as you read.

When we meet,
the ladder of love procreates the fruits of our labour - our child.
Thank you for reading.

Yours,
H.

day 97

where do these letters go?
no stamps. no addresses. just,

Dear...


Yours,
Friend.

We live with, by, the dots. The silence between an action and a reaction.
Who do I send these letters to?
Does it matter?
What do I write? Words of encouragement or words of malice?
Or words to remind people that we're alive or words to remind how we could once write?
How are you? Where are you?
To write to pretend you'll be still alive when the letters reach the addressee? Will they reach?
No one has the right to receive these letters.
No one should be reading words that belong only to the moment of the writing.
Once received, the words become the readers. Gently or violently.

Have you received my letters?

Hope, is the vain tyranny to oneself, if hope, be not attached to the gift of death.

day 98

As the days turn their back and as soon as we begin to perform the back of clocks,
there is one concept that I learn from such a retrograde step backward.

Love others. As much as you love yourself.

I don't remember how much I love myself. Or if there is such a need.

To love yourself, as I shall explicate, is to ultimately be violent to yourself;

To begin with, we don't love ourselves.

This somewhat sounds paradoxical, for surely the cliché is that we often love ourselves too much.
Whether that is true, I do not have an answer for it. For this excessive love for oneself is not somewhat clear to us, for we are often too busy to know if we exercise the will and the desire to please ourselves, or to be more precise, to be charitable to ourselves. In other words, there is always something going on within us that completely escapes our comprehension and thematization. Surely then, the desire to please or to (love) is not motivated by a strong belief built up from a deep-rooted and rigorous sense of faith in which we drive ourselves to the salvation, or a salvation, that once and for all would unleash ourselves from our mortal coils. But that this egoism has ultimately the painful reality of an entrapment - we trap ourselves even further with the egoistical reversal of the love principle, ultimately, as if ad libitum we could return to the paradise within us, as if there is one whole and solid substance within us to begin with. It is a comforting habit or ritual of doing what is obviously not an answer. But it is still an answer. One who receives the worlds in their veiled presences. One receives, and not to give.

If I do not make sense now, I shall make some sense by disclaiming that: It is often hard to express what is really an economy that is only capable of looking at a mirror. The gaze returns, and therein is the self-confession that no one is truly loved, except one self; Narcissus. In other words, how does one truly thematize what goes on in that mirror stage of ours, if the metaphors continue to revolve around the inside and the outside? The moment of confession, or even pre-confession of love, is a suspended moment in which the Self remains largely intact. It can go back and fro, up and down, and still the existent atom or Being is thrown back to his or her mirror stage without asking what constitutes the mirror and how does one break the mirror.

- BUT to ultimately, be violent to yourself.

This solo economy is not quite violent (to oneself). For the perpetual self-destruction and self-love are always at work within a restricted human psyche - the closed wholeness of the self ,who is safe in the knowledge that he or she has only to love, egoistically. Thereupon one then ventures out of the shell, in a retrograde manner, only to return back into the shell. Perhaps, there is not even an exteriority to begin with, for the mirror materialised outside remains really redundant. The reflections are all already done within us; within the impregnable repository of signs and desires that break out in performances and appearances. So this violence is accepted, tacitly. The performer, in keeping up with appearances, really does nothing insofar as to only hide behind the persona, that may be that face that receives all the violence from the outside, leaving, really, the inside intact - utterly wholistic and unshakeable. There is, really a bitch or bastard outside that can be blamed for all the misgivings and mistakes one does. One breaks and destroys the external profile or face whereas the very elusive internal dialogue remains unloved, thus stablised, even if in a chaotic and fractal manner (which is itself a problematic solution). When one knows there is a profile outside that can be broken into pieces, the trick then is to create the illusion of having divisible pieces of a bigger whole. This really means, that one can always rebuild the whole; or wholly outside.

But this is my speculation:

The economy of the other-to-love then is really the actual violence
that is capable of breaking this economy of self.

We are extremely linear. Maybe there is no such thing as a 'here and now' as theatre practitioners like to say. As much as we acknowledge the ephemerality of performance, we also care too much for the discontinuous effects and affects that performance gives. Surely, there is a linear continuity, or the possibility or potential of an irrevocable presence as it disappears, that makes the actual human trajectory a highly linear one. It is so linear and so inexorable, that we are merely trying to master this linearity by receding into notions of fractality or the discontinuous concept in a kind of post-Hume skepticism. This linearity is material. It is material because the potential energy of our beings to be, in being, in becoming, ultimately creates the presences even as they disappear. But it is not just merely potential energy. Well...I am not being too Newtonian here but one cannot misunderstand our corporeality as something intangible, immaterial and disappearing. It is precisely our eventual death (the accidental linearity or I-who-must-run-the-race) that makes us so linear even if I should fade, age and disappear as a trace. It is this linearity that breaks us.

The other-to-love is the ultimate violence that one can take up in a linear project that is simulteanously charitable and violent. It is the I love myself, But - that Paul introduces at every quick succesion of praises and then chatisements in 1 Corinthians. Perhaps, the elusive (and still is in many ways) 1 Corinthians 13:12, next cited out of context, can be understood in the context of my speculation:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I can't see myself, ultimately, if we continue to pretend to find a mirror within you, that does nothing but to obscure our vision. For the face-to-face (my emphasis) is a violent profit that in every negation of myself, I confront the infinite other that makes me speechless, clueless even fearful and trembling in that short moment of indecisiveness before the acknowledgement, the front, the show, the performance, the speech that makes first contact. These moments of violence, prior to the selfish introspective projections, calls for our immediate attention. And these violences, or painful thorns that make us question who we are, and what we are to do in relation to the other who is simultaneously in question as much as he or she is in relation. For it is not accidental that in chapter 12, a discussion of the anatomy of body is discussed, which immediately paints a picture of physical violence, almost in an imagery that evokes the lamb slaughtered at the altar. It is as if we should be unclear of the notion that if I should have a wound on my body, I implicate every part of my body; my distress is for all of me to be shared.

To be more precise in my speculation: the bodily discharges one finds - the saliva of your childish speech - should in some way find an exteriority or one aspect of exteriority, that does a positive venture that kills you (as a human) as much as it saves you (as a child). For what the Other (Christ as the Other atheist/saviour) and the others who alike you in obscurity and fecundity, potentially does to you is that they make you less, as much as it makes you part of greater group; a member. And it is precisely, love or charity, the altruistical gesture of caring for the other actually makes you less yourself; you become impossible, incomprehensiveable, insofar as who you are to yourself as well as to others. Your alterity, for the first time, in a love-relationship, is the focus and the single thrust unto faith, the perfect asymetry (you are but one member of many) that must only be conceived with faith; absolutely blind and absurb faith. So I "know in part", myself as part of a whole that is not within me, but in a differentiated economy - "I know even as also I am known".

The projection then is dualistic - a return and a forward movement. It is not enough that one just loves oneself. The project (of love) is two-fold - love your neighbour as you love yourself. But, it is also crucial to add that one can also reject this dualistic linearity and confrontation with the radical alterity and exteriority posited in the face-to-face with an Other. What is easy, then is to respond and react with excess, or compensatory movements that oblivate the inner stage of de Anima, and build more walls (like the Berlin walls) around our own individual faces. (Or what Paul would describe as speaking in tongues, healing, interpretations and prophesising, all of which are external manifestations that do more to manifest the personal faces than our identities as members of the body, e.g. face of communism, Stalin, Hitler, faces of tyrants.) This excess, then, is the safe passage that forced confinement brings, with its categories, brackets and symmetries, that return deep into the mirror stage and remain them, darkly, as demons within and external performances.

As a ending note, linearly speaking, is my take on "to follow after love" in chapter 14. To follow after, as if it is always in front of us as much as we are behind love, is to give me the motif and motive necessary to discuss once again the linearity (of this charitable violence). To move forward, and to follow, is really to be less yourself as you perpetually become; or in being, you reduce and you give to the other, as you also receive from the other. In your numerous manifestations, appearances and disappearances, with the thorn in the flesh constantly giving you a rooted understanding of your materiality, which is not possible to think inwardly, except to consider the organs and flesh of your body, the inexorable end (made up of plenty of commas and sentence-breaks) will eventually be a guided venture led what is really the immanent Friend ,or the immaterial Spirit who then becomes the ultimate other who confronts you vis-a-vis invisibly. That is true interdependence in a violent way. For it is a mirror that cannot reflect materially. And the mirror, at this juncture is redundant, as it cannot reflect the spirit. What we are left then is wind, the wind that blows us, as much as we reveal the wind's presence, by trembling, shaking, moving, reacting and in some cases, shaken and uprooted by the immense invisible force that blows at us and amongst us, Who is? are? entirely capable of doing the most extreme of violences, in perpetual differentiation and simulitude of identities:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen
2 Corinthians 13:14

To love, really, is to suffer oneself; to make less of oneself, as you come to a relation with wholly other that escapes you as much as the other confronts you, such that the other can come in the same Spirit.

How is that not violent to the Self?

a lesson from the 13 chapter of 1 Corinthians from the 13th Apostle; But in need of further proof-reading and editing.

take time, to love, and pause for the But-s.
in short, don't believe my crap.

day 99

Helmi: I am a Pestbuster. Call me if you need to kill some pests.

H: Then everything falls into a literalness of disclosure, into the hands of interpretation.

I: Are you compelled to interpret your identity?

Helmi: Call me.

H: Then everything falls into the realm of performance, or more precisely the performance of an identity where there is no entry into the alterity that always already present in an individual.

I: Individual. Such an elusive word.

Helmi: Call me.

You: Hallo? Helmi? Kenapa tiadek telefon?

I: Sorry? Wrong number. I think the phone company brought his number back into circulation too soon.

I: My name is +65973*****

Helmi: Where am I?

H: But surely, there is never a whole. And never a pure dialectics. Someone gives, as much as someone loses. Not as much. Maybe never as much or as little. Just gone. Just gone as a number. The number that never existed before the mark.

Helmi: I don't know who I am. Can you tell me?

I: Helmi is a figure of speech. No. Helmi is a person I cannot possibly be. But I can imagine him. He speaks Malay. I don't. I can imagine malay. I think.

H: Let's be specific here. Who are you?

I: I can be Helmi.

H: Are you?
Helmi: You are?

I: I cannot be Helmi. I cannot be myself.

H: Wait. Describe yourself.

I: I have a very simple family. I have nothing to say about them.

H: You. You yourself I mean.

I: I am a Pestbuster. Call me if you need to kill some pests.

day 100

It's hard to decipher those words - those onward marching words that do not end. It is not even a matter of subject/object or the consistency of the matheme versus the obscurity of poetry that some like to think is a music of the 'there is'.
There is, none. For the flashes of presence, always must disappear beneath language, the coffin that is the notion of material presence. What if, there is no Subject, or Object and only language makes the distinction. What if, poetry is not an operation but again the blind codification of a world that violently confronts you as much as it goes about with its own thing. And we are just blind men, finding, scavenging through the refuse to find suitable words to bring this world into our submission. So the lesson of alchemy can be useful here. There is no gold when we mix words together. It is, instead, an atheist's operation to counter the divine Sacred so that the Sacred can hide behind words, and forever be that elusive mystery, haunting us, tenderly, wearily or painfully. We endure words, so that we may die as words. Rest in peace - alas, there is no peace, forever those words shall haunt us, and tie us with knots of hybrids of categories.

If you think a child writing his or her name on a book is cute and sweet. Think again.
It is a submission to the word of the name that one has no choice - except he or she could in future change with exactly another word that the psyche can hide beneath.

The unnameable? Just another category, Badiou.

what we should think, if possible, is death that words teaches us through their repetition - there is no pure repetition. We die our own deaths and there is no way of thematizing that experience. And no way of naming.

I am on a redundant and paradoxical project. My words, fly up, and there they stay. They never once belonged to me. If those words disappear as my voice, it is only because I didn't have one anyway. And I won't have one after I die. So may those words serve as a disclosure - of death and the incarnation of traces, with a corporeality that always preceded me, and superseded me. Words were around before I came about. Words will continue to be around after I am gone. I might have arranged them in a particular order, but I am at their mercy. Perhaps, it is that violent interaction that makes life meaningful a la Job, and we can defeat words by pretending to submit to them after 7 days of silence. Is this economy of death through silence just my short-handed way of approaching life - yes it is. Life is short. Words are too long.

The many detours I make. The many words formed, will not bring me closer to death. This onward march, with faith, shall see me through (to death), with words, as a dance on needles and a pool of blood below.

Only through words do I deny myself. Only through words do I forsake myself. Then life after death can be achieved without too many words, except the name He gave.

day 7

to think in a straight line -- is to approach the linear end of a conclusion. But to begin, many full stops before notwithstanding, is to anxiously approach or depart from the influence, which many texts before, as traces, give birth to presence. So as you read my lines --- you should also know that lines in general (firmament or horizon) are violent. The division is prevalent in almost everything. Lines are violent ---- An open space is separated. A body is cut open. A name is written across a blank page. Another tautological proposition is made in a mathematical problem sum. The beginning of a story, where the end is presupposed, is the call to presence. The presence that has not arrived. But on day 7, as we make another leap backward by moving forward, we come to realise, that I cannot make the separation so clearly. Instead,
as if encouraged by fear, line by line, I move forward. Weary by now, that another reference I have drawn for the purpose of my writing, on the 99th day, it will cease to be what I intended before, but as if drawn by the future that will never arrive, its presence is predicated by the call to absence. If lines are finally hidden, it is only to evolve into a deeper violence.
As if blown by the wind, we meet again.
It is more violent to suspend freely in the skies than to sit and stare in a cave.
The shapes escape us. The lines, a distant memory.
All we have, instead, is the pull of your own weight, as you plunge into a finite enterprise, that is the liberty to live and die. And soon you realise, it is indeed linear. It is indeed a line straight down to earth. |
| only that lines do not always go on forever.


266-1 days more.

DAY 6

WE FIND A GREAT SPIEL OCCURRING AND PEOPLE SCREAMING CHANGE WITHOUT A CLUE TO WHAT CHANGE REALLY MEANS. IT MEANS BIG BOLD WORDS WITH NO REAL CONVICTION AND INSTEAD WORDS WE SAY AND SWEAR BY IT, ONLY TO DISCOVER HOW THERE ARE FORCES OUT THERE, MOSTLY DEMONIC, SUCH THAT ONE CANNOT JUST SIMPLY SCREAM CHANGE, WHEN CHANGE IS ALWAYS ALREADY GOING TO HAPPEN, AND THERE WILL STILL BE OTHER PEOPLE BUILDING BOMBS AND KILLING LIVES. SO IF FOR A MOMENT WE FEEL SAFE IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT WE ARE SAFE, THEN DISASTER IS AT HAND. WHAT WE HAVE ARE BOLD WORDS FROM THE CONSTITUTION AND IMMORTALISED AS PLAGUES IN GARDENS, WHERE FORGOTTEN ARE THE OLD DOCTRINES AND ORTHODOXIES OF FAITH. INSTEAD WE HAVE GREAT MEN KILLING OTHER SMALLER MEN, READY TO SACRIFICE THE LAWS AND PLACE NEW ONES OVER THE OLD ONES. HOW DO WE RESIST THIS? WITH MORE BOLD WORDS. AND ONCE ALL THE VIOLENCE CLEARS THE WORLD, PERHAPS, WE CAN THEN BEGIN TO RISE FROM THE ASHES AND REPEAT HISTORY ALL OVER AGAIN, WITH BOLD WORDS. happy valentine's day.

day 5

the splendour that is the passion for passivity, manifests in ways I will never understand.
the breaths I take, each step I take, yea, the fools will be proud that they're smarter than I am.
gently, the boats have their passengers, who jump, at the slightest rocking, and I'll jump up and down and I will drown for you. Hurray, just be what you want, someone will always watch out for you, least you do not know Him, He troubles himself, to take your breath away. Yes, He kills you.

the mystery that is your own identity, which you reach out for in your endless misadventures, Wearily, with a chance of meeting, our encounters, releases us from the slavery of gravity, the only road we've ever been down. He'll take you there. he'll take you there. she'll take you there. We cannot change. We cannot change the mould that we are. but nothing can take away the last breath, as you say out the name of the quiet day that breaks you, your strength, your courage, your faith to live. Oh, you'll live. surely you'll live. then we can reach out for the safest place ever: where we are forgotten. Don't look up nor down. Ahead, it shall be, in the room of our asylums.

I've never heard my name, in the same way as You call out. Will I burn while touching you? For you have taught me ζωη, and materialised faith in flesh. Will I burn while I hide away? For the axis of knowledge can chained me, but the axis of faith can lift me, and take me to the four corners of the world. With faith, yes, I can. Ahead, it shall be, the four corners of the asylum. Kill me, that I may live again.

day 4

Where is the other that eludes me? Who is the Other that totalizes me?
Are there other ways out of this?
I confront the other; and infinity presents itself as a limit of chance.
and it still eludes me. may I express this alterity?
may I know this alterity or am I simply doing violence to alterity?
I face the other; the other sees me as much as I sees the other. Therein lies the loop of infinity.
and also the beginning of the I that violates with the formal logic that is the Verb.
So what do I say?
Or what do I hear?
I have no voice, and He refuses to say much.
So what we have left,
is the face-to-face with the writing of revelations, and disasters.

day 3

I constantly feel that,

there's something left undone.
there's a sin not confessed.
there's a person I didn't thank.
there's a person I didn't love.
there's a story left unwritten.
there are words left unsaid.
there's a death left to die.
there's a life left unsaved.

but I constantly feel as well that,
too much is done.
too many sins.
too many thanked.
too many loved.
too many stories.
too many words.
too many deaths.
too many lives.

so I constantly say to myself:






,

day 2

Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich
all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness:
for in one hour is she made desolate.

revelations.

under the notable influence of Chesterton, the precision of Borges, and the love from Spurgeon that haunts me till today, in one of my sleepless early mornings I imagined a plot of a dream that I thought I would endeavour to dream about the following night (when I get about to sleep without truly sleeping). Somehow the ingredients to imagining the plot were insufficient and I had to set to task ordering myself in a manner of a pattern with a chronological logic, that its sum total would suffice in replacing the tedious act of imagining in random. This pattern, or logic, would replace the meticulous weaving of foreign and veiled narratives, and it would run on its own to give the satisfactory conclusion that always come with all chronological plots. It is entirely automated and it never fails me.

The order, or the ticking of the clockhand or the changing of numeral digits, followed as such:

8 Feb 2009, 04:02:29AM

8 Feb 2009, 04:03:01AM

Without much a fuss, I managed to begin a plot. Only that this plot would appear to me as desolate. For what matters was not the content but the method in conceiving one. Time is in the essence of all fabrication. For without time, or at least the passing of time, there is no effort or even the potential for time-space to occur and for a content to fall within that time-space. For I forsee in the next hour, even if there are absolute silence and a lack of imagination, the plot will unfold on its own:

8 Feb 2009, 04:06:32AM
Singapore

Alas, my first stimulus occurs. It triggers immediately a set of possibilities that is inherent in the conception of Singapore.

Singapore. Singapore. Singapore. I have absolutely nothing to say about her.

8 Feb 2009, 04:08:04AM
I might want to formulate and justify here some sceptical proposals concerning the imaginary nation that is Singapore. And I can justify it, though weakly, with the number 1965.

1965. I have also absolutely nothing to say about these numbers. But in that particular sequence, I realise immediately the significance that is endowed by others to maintain the rhetorical elaborations that would go on, till this day, to efficaciously affect the imaginations of so many who came before me and more to come after me. (I've just suggested that I'm the bottleneck of an hourglass.) Even if I have absolutely nothing to say, many others have said so much that I can't simply ignore them.
As a matter of interest, I could pick either Fidel Castro or Che Guevara to comparatively study between two nations that also had two significant figures who did the fighting of independence in the 60s. Who would you choose? Personally, I like to think that the plot begins with an individual. Whether it is the individual who threatens to nuke us all, or the individual who duped us all with telecast tears, what significally began a plot now evolved into a poliferated form of a performance. The news at 9 and the soap opera at 9 too.

8 Feb 2009, 4:16:46 AM

Time, which generally attenuates memories, only aggravates that of Singapore. (Borges)
I never quite found the coin that was marked as 1965. (I only found a 1967) Perhaps, that is my way of ensuring its immortality. As long as it remains absent, I can imagine it and it can safely fulfill its function as my next stimulus for my plot (of time). Whether it is 1965 or 1967, the difference of two years is actually enough to suggest a distance that is needed for a trace to be noticeable and to continously, in a discontinous sense, refer itself to the forgone year that changed history. After all, they cannot make any more coins that are from the 1960s. In fact, they cannot make any more coins when a year has passed. But I don't think some people are particular about this. Years are meant to be gone. Just as the supply of money can increase or decrease. I often wonder where unwanted money goes to after it goes out of circulation and fashion. Money disappears. Money is used in transactions. But at some point, besides those that end up in museums, money disappears. Sometimes, they appear once in a while. But nostalgia alone cannot preserve them. If I could in some way gather all the coins of the 60s and ask every person who holds a 1960s coins its story and how and where it had traveled before it could reach me, then perhaps I'd be more than a millionaire. I wouldn't need to queue an hour to buy toto or 4D!

When I stare at a 1967, I stare at its loss. And I stare at a time that is gone. It is desolate. They are mostly melted. I didn't live with it. I couldn't. Nonetheless, it is significant to me by virtue of a gap.



When we think of gaps, we think that they are entirely empty. No gap can be empty if not for the borders that flank the gap. After all, trace is only trace when we can conceive of something that it traced. Trace of a trace? What if, there has never been traces. Instead, within an hour of its appearance, it has already disappear. It is an empty shell but we still enrich it with empty signifiers. Or perhaps, the original is in itself always a trace. A healthy person who wants to treat a sick must be sick himself or herself to give the best treatment.

which reminds me.

"my friends, we may defend ourselves, at any rate for still a time, against the two worst plagues that could have been reserved for us - against the great nausea with man! against the great pity for man!" (Nietzche)

Perhaps, it is not the plot that harms us but the very imagination that we are masters of some sort, and that we could master plots. This nauseating sense of an imagined presence, is best experienced in the most advanced of hospitals here. Everything is in order. You die with the best care. Or you prolong your life with the best forms of payments (not treatments). You're shielded from death. You live long enough to finish the next part of the plot and someone else will pay the premiums for you. You then reduced yourself to ashes (the same fate as coins of 1967!) to make space. They don't bury you for eternity. I think it's better to conceive an eternal heaven or hell than to dig a hole to fill for eternity. Please, stop pitying for our deaths. Stop pitying for our money.

But you may ask:"Why this cynicism?"
That is the wrong question to ask. The tragic course of the national plot is that it judges its own sin with a sequence that is cyclical: gain, loss, gain, loss. Free trade and increased taxes. We're hit by a double whammy. We kowtow to the powerful cooperations of the world: first the EIC then Westerners and then Chinese which is amazing considering how the Malays are forgotten in the equation. It's like a dildo that satisfies all the wholes there are, where we are obsessed with filling up holes and imagining simulations of sexual intercourse. Forget giving birth. I just want pleasure. Childless and impotence. that is what happens when you masturbate. The question to ask really is:
"Why the fall in fertility rates?" I don't think we ask enough about fecundity rates.

Which is fine really. the plot thickens when the same ships that she made rich mourn for her abortions and impotence. Not only could they not have orgies with her, they cannot even go near her. For all the costliness that she had once blessed them with, it has returned to haunt them all, almost HIV-like. Only that it is airborne. It is what you smell when you walk through Raffles Place at 6pm. The intergration of HIV and Confucian ethics seems a bit farfetched and as sudden as my random introduction of Confucius. But when you soon bother to think of hierarchies, casinos are only symptomatic of the confused state that do not when to give free sex or free condoms. So they do it top-down. No wait. Since construction is going to be delayed (which makes a lot of sense), we're strictly holding back AIDS by being belatedly aware of global forces. Since we can't seem to attract Westerners to patronize our red lights, then we shall illuminate our most colourful streets for our neighbouring countries that we have been courting since Mandarin was nationalised. The desolate Tang Dynasty amusement park or the ultimate simulacrum that traces our future without having to wait for our future to arrive, is demostrative of this simple process of courtship, STD and abandonment; then repetition. Not to forget the spreading of the disease to other parts of the world where we can sell guns - both phallic and bloody violent.

8 Feb 2009, 04:57:08AM
I don't have to think far to come out with a plot. Time has conveniently provided me with one that is so bloody rich that to avoid imagining is to be blind and dumb. Though many laws, rules and objects still elude me, if it didn't prevent Kant from being confused, I think I should also try to grapple with theses and antitheses. After all, I have started this story that you may follow me to the end. Because the end is always near as much as it escapes you. Singaporeans belong to Singapore as much as they don't. Maybe we should push our luck as to see how long it takes to make something so solid and material; so real and with a history coming to half a century of narrativising. Perhaps, despite her impotence, a birth (that is not a virgin birth) may still miraculously occur. When the abbots stop pocketing money. And when less trees are cut down. Perhaps, we'll live short enough to know medisave don't save us but preserve the durability of Temasek (and the American!). We don't need to live long enough to know. The nation-state will take care of itself. You've been taken care of.

8 Feb 2009, 05:03:01AM

but really. It's not so bleak. It may be depressing to know the following: that time is the irrevocable factor in any imagination of a plot. (We're going to die anyway) But at least, you know things happen with or without your understanding. They don't give a damn about you. Therefore, the highlights of your life should consist of more such revelations than plagues. If you can't awake to them, then you might as well don't dream. Dreams are precious really because of the impending end that waking brings. Dreams don't just beautify things. Dreams actually haunt and frighten us into a reality that we dare not behold. (Think Daniel) If every trembling and quivering has to be met with tears (Alas! We are alone! without Allah to provide us with material goods), then the more costly treasures that are blood, sweat and nails would never make sense to us. It takes courage to face a dying body. Therein begins life.

day 1

tis' be an occasion for renewal,
perchance to inflict a mortal wound.
with fingers we weave threads and shed blood onto the battlefields.
I jerked myself unto my position. A standing one, to look afar and face my enemies.
Aha! I see her, with her flag and call for revolution. Her nipples suckled and red from feeding those fools who follow her seductive call. What is revolution? I can only resist and fight with my orthodoxy. There are rules unspoken here. Rules that writing eventually unveils. I may, with the disaster of writing, write back and kill us both. I may, with the etching of my knife, carved out the paths of bloody cuts, with thousand daggers and pointed phallus littered all over the landscape. Are you Babylon or the golden sun? Are you Oracle or are you Luck? I cherish nothing but the moment that brings us the encounter. I cherish the projection and the breaking of the day. When lights meet darkness, and triumph over her. I can, with words, unleash a thousand plagues, and a swarm of locusts and have the serpent bite their own tails. In circles they shall tremble. And the quivering of the earth shall invite them to slide, and the dungeons of the world open with the mouth of the bottomless pit, a cage for each cardinal sin. My world is silent. My world is dark. Thy footstools fallen. I can conjure up images and signs that do not have to materalise in full. All I need, is to suggest. And the designation of your doom is at hand. Then...

Alas! The truth turn upon me. All I have been doing is just to imagine. All I can do is to write. And write I shall to slay the giants. My puny hands to cast the stones at them. How cold my hands. How I can strike them and myself twofold. I kill the giant only that I may place myself in the position to lust for more power. All I have left, is the desert of my own designs. Awake! Awake! Spurgeon beckoned. And I ignored the trumpet of his call. Awake! Awake! Babylon is here again. And I, undressed as I am, naked and soon to be pierced by her sting. What do I have left? My words. My written words. My last defence. My sword and my trowel. And with the arrows of faith, I unleash my last poison and breathe my last.

day 7

我，一切占据了我。
I, everything else occupies me.
我们，一切忘记了我们。
we, everything else forgets us.
单，独自，当我化成双时，
singular, alone, when I dissolve into a double,
双双，成双成对，当我们双成单时，
doubles, couples to doubles, when we as doubles into a couple,
一切都斗专心移，
then I will be able to translate,
双成单，单成双。
sixes and sevens, sevens and sixes;
没关系。。。
doesn't matter... ...

day 6

We do what we do. We did what we did. That is all there is to it. There is no success or failure but only the mere chronology of the deed to be done and done - my breathing, my short existence. That is the ideal state of the ephemeral and infinite trace. Where all there is to it is our heart-wrenching, gripping and gasping need to do - hence, to be. So let us not focus on the past (enough to project forward) or threaten ourselves with the need to manifest the future (it lasts too long). Instead, let us focus on the sentimentality, the emotional and the performative affect the doing has on us and them; On the moment in which one tears without a reason, and the moment when one smiles without a reason. Let the doing be the transitory force that brings us to nowhere but alike the mere washing of our feet for the exchange of immanence and transcendence beneath the doing, let us suspend the binaries and exist with love and peace - the violent possibility that peace brings and the healing sentimentality that love provides. Let us then do, that in doing, multiply the possibilities of grace and chance. All there is to it, is peace within and outside of us - inside it is all calm, outside it is war (man kann auch auf Deutsch lesen).

Do you.

Written while listening to
Rachmaninov ~
Piano Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor - Vivace

day 5

I prefer an imperfect moon
which remains to be my own ocular perception
and cyclical forces I do not how they come about.
The imperfect moon presupposes a perfection
which leaves me with an ideal to dream about.

I prefer an imperfect Child
which remains solely in the care of a miracle
perchance to grow up with grace and faith
The imperfect Child presupposes a perfection
which my temptation to write will never reach. Yes, it will never reach.

As a child, I sleep, far away from the imperfect moon.
Sleep is almost unconditional. Sleep is the perchance to dream; to be the ideal state of semblances that I have no proper ties to;
to be 'He' and not entirely be 'I'.
Where the dreamer is not there to dream its own dream. He is in it, as well as outside of it, drifting from one universe to another;
perchance to be the ideal that he does not recognise.
in a strict sense, dreaming is so imperfect and elusive that it is all there is to it; hence, Perfectly divine.
To wake, those terrible nights of insomnia and the days of drifting presence, the simulacra of absence in dreams remind us that we dream alongside our waking dream. I can simultaneously be 'I' and 'He' or even 'She'. And 'We' misidentify and fade, sometimes we disappear, or we take a backseat and witness how resemblances fade in and out.

Dream, your imperfect dreams, usually unsatisfactory and inconclusive. You may have shot a person. Rape your own family. In short, done things you could never have done in 'Reality'. And then what matters? Real or symbolic, semblances of the Same. The difference is in the Touch.

So I prefer to be reminded by imperfection. So I can fly through and know I will never tangibly touch Perfection. Hence, it is simple to love. Imperfect as they are. I don't have to strive for higher places. I will never reach them. I will only dream of them.

Wake me, when I dream. Dream, when I'm too awake. I can love and hate myself simultaneously. I crave for more introspective violence.

I dream, therefore I am.

day 4

we, are, perhaps, not sorry for the things we do.
we, are, perhaps, sorry for the things we didn't do.
we, are, perhaps, a little apprehensive of the things we are going to do;
and a little jealous that others are more sorry than we are.
but, really, perhaps, we have never been sorry.
and perhaps, we have not done anything.
and we are merely little molecules flying around with nowhere to go.

we got to be kidding ourselves. but we're not sorry.
we're sorry that we're not sorry.
or perhaps, we don't even know what sorry means.
we don't believe in doing.
we do anyway.
we open doors to reveal another door to open.
there is a certain logic in there that is beyond my comprehension.
but no matter, we're not sorry that we don't understand.
we're not sorry that things are elusive. we are elusive.
we're not sorry that people stick themselves to other people.
adhesive people are not sorry that they're adhesive.
sorry people are so stupid that they're beyond sorry.
we're not sorry we are stupid.
we're not sorry to hear of people dying and murdering themselves because we'll follow them soon enough.
we're not sorry that we're such pests.
we're not sorry that we're such saints.
perhaps, we're too good, and humble, and meek that we learn nothing. (Chesterton)
perhaps, we doubt so much that everything falls into place and we are safe in the knowledge that we can doubt and be true about it.
perhaps, we are not sorry to know that we are virtuous. we know we have things to fall back on: virtues and morals. We know we can be forgiven. We don't have to be sorry.
Someone or something else will do the apologies. We just be ourselves. All too human.
The content of human life is made up of instances of us pardoning ourselves and compensating the lack of tangible repayment with lip services of apologies that fly away and never come back.
We are not sorry.

I'm sorry for writing this.

day 3

later, late, and always too late.
where comes the confidence to believe in later?
love, lover, always love
where comes the love to love the love?
bye, bye, always byes
every bye is always a last bye.
i won't love you later and I won't say bye.
i'll love you now and always

day 2

Who will I be, if I am there? Where would I go, if I was forgotten? I have too many voices, each a whole tied to another whole. Where will I be, when I remember? Don't remember me. Don't give me a voice. I'll hide behind a mirror. I'll be gone. What is the question? Where am I, when the question is asked? I'll be there, where the answers float. I'll go on, if you stop listening. I'll go on, if you stop reading. I can't say more, I'll say more.

day 1

H - the ladder of love,
for two I-s, met, and tied to the aleatory hyphen.
I'm Happy I met you.
for chance or fate, parallex view of the same,
was what brought us together.

neither up nor down, on the ladder of faith,
we are suspended and given the leverage to behold the in-between.
She's always been there, now Here by grace,
the auxiliary force that accompanies one and the other.

thank you. each dying day, in passing brings alive the dialectics.
(it is not dialectical then), But simultaneously an imagination and a substance.
We are Here. neither Heaven nor Hell.
for all that matters, is Her, the interval between future and present.