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.
all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness:
for in one hour is she made desolate.
revelations.
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
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.
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