Fridgies

Those dried-out things which sit and wait endlessly in the corners of the refrigerator when all else is lost or eaten, those are the things I wish I had kept or catalogued or mourned or buried in decent state — such is the fate of the long-preserved but forgotten soldiers of the last evenings and mornings of the world of men.

I have one last wedge of Stilton entombed in rind, an unlabelled liqueur time out of mind, and you my friend — always you were too kind.

We Never Talk About My Brother

Probably because we talk more about my mother. Haha...

That said, I am now the happy owner of a new Peter S Beagle book, one which I have wanted but which I could not easily obtain when I first wanted it. That kind of thing happens when you're overtaken by life's events: you forget what you wanted as time passes, and it is only serendipity which brings it back to you.

I have imbibed Beagle in five previous doses: Lila The Werewolf; The Last Unicorn ; Come, Lady Death ; A Fine And Private Place; Tamsin. This one comes pre-divided into smaller doses. Yum.

On Hold (Part II)

I think the greatest part of being on hiatus, so to speak, is that one gets the chance to savour moments you would never have been able to enjoy while working. The best moments, aside from the long walks and sheer pleasure of being able to do stuff at any time of the day, have been with old friends made new.

I've been able to meet people I've hardly been able to sit around and chat with for years; valued friendships have been re-established, with unicorns and strange poets, with ladies and laddies, with food and drink. My life is richer now.

It's like cold-drip coffee. You let the vital aromas and essences leach out slowly, concentrated to the fullest and darkest limit of alchemical enterprise. Then you imbibe the fuliginous essence, the atrament, the lightless liquid distillate and excrescence of the bean.

Don't let the moment run; let it flow like the slowest of honeys in the richest of sunlights. Diamonds may sparkle, but amber glows, and the polish of jet — of obsidian, of ebony, of night — goes on forever.

El Toro

I was sitting down with my better half for a meal at Tombola Centre today, when I heard a man call out my name. Right at the next table sat El Toro, his wife of the lovely smile, and their two good-looking offspring.

It's been a long time since I first met El Toro in secondary school. He was one of the thin and scholarly-looking prefects assigned to look after classes in my neck of the barbarous woods. Now, he is still slim, but his scholarship and prowess (and professional acumen in his chosen field) are highly respected. In fact, he is one of the Grand Paladins of the Court now.

He is still a modest and hardworking man. We exchanged details, talked about life, and I discovered that his son was at the Wyverns' Nest. This triggered some more reflections on life and the pursuit of excellence.

Lunch, it must be said, was enhanced by this catching-up with old friends. I am always thankful for such. I think the next paladin I should catch up with is Old Hum-Sup, probably named for his habit of droning while eating. Heh heh.

Catching Up

Sometimes you burn the days off one by one, and then the weeks and months. And then you realise you have submerged the promises of coffee and the meetings with old friends beneath the urgent tide of instantly required responses to other things. They are not yet drowned, but they are whelmed. They have been placed on the back-burner so long that the burner has gone out and what was hot is now old and cold.

Friendships should not be tacitly abused that way. I will therefore plan for more nasi lemak occasions, more kopi tiam sessions with old friends. The idea of the café is an ancient one, but a good one. And perhaps I shall salvage more from wrack and wreck, and be a better friend.

Dynamic Tension

I've realised something interesting about friendship. It is by necessity an oscillation about a mean. The ideal state of friendship is one that lacks tension, and yet it is impossible to call it friendship unless there is a certain kind of tension that leads to engagement.

Take, for example, my friendship with Gnomus. It is great to sit around at a local coffee shop and 'shoot the breeze' or just hang out, happy to have a friend that is like a brother. But it cannot be only that; sometimes, there is duelling with lightsabres and displays of angst. Without those, it wouldn't be half as much a friendship.

Or my friendship with Flower Lady. It's great to sit around and sigh at the pleasure of being alive and just not do anything. But if not for the perpetual teasing I get (and I return), the tension of knowing each other's sadnesses and joys, the jumping-up-and-down irritation of having to choose a place to eat, it wouldn't be so good.

It is the same with the friendship element of my relationships with family. My parents and my siblings are friends as well as family, but without our shared history of gut-curling tensions and fighting-mad pissed-off moments, it wouldn't be so enjoyable to be that way. It is a hard-won friendship, this thing with family.

All these examples, and hundreds more, lead me to think of the difference between dynamic and static equilibrium. A static equilibrium is a broken thing; it is stasis, statehood without change. A dynamic equilibrium embodies dünamis, shifting conditions with force and energy, control and the almost-lack of it.

I am glad I have so many dynamic friendships, tensions and all. I live with the tensions; sometimes it may be more accurate to say I live for the tensions, or even because of them.

Noble

Today I had a surprise message appearing in my cellphone. A most noble lady had texted me to say, "I find comfort in the knowledge that friends I care about are well."

It really made my day. I doubt this person will read this blog, but from the bottom of my heart, I am grateful for people like that. This person was always a pleasure to work with; no politics to mess about with, just a good heart for students, a level head, and a desire to get things done right.

A teacher as an environmental unit must be like that. The calling is already tough enough without having to mess around with morons espousing an imaginary blue ocean or blue sky strategy.

A Neighbour

My former boss, the petite lady who lives down the street, moves her professorial self past the garden once in a while. My sibling reports that this time she asked about me, having heard about my career 'movement'.

I've always had respect for the acuity and perspicacity of that lady. She has always had that capacity to zero in on a specific target and ask the sharpest questions. This time, it was all good. She pointed out why I couldn't have done certain things I was said to have done, and what she thought of me. Then she added her good (and much-appreciated) wishes for my future prospects.

The lady I've come to call 'Aunty' over the years, and people like her — these have been my true neighbours in a trying time. It is this kind of thing that makes me want to stay in Atlantis, and not decamp to Lemuria or some such fantastic other place.

Buried Memory

It's been almost fifteen years since my grandfather passed beyond the veil. I am reminded of this because I was digging. In my spare time, I have become an amateur archaeologist, sifting through the strata of the dig that is my parental digs.

In a stratum near the bottom of the area south of the big desk, I found a single sheet, preserved by some chemical accident. It was from my best friend from the old days. On that sheet, preserving a single email from a long-lost server, was his tribute to my grandfather. In it, he mentioned the first time he met my grandfather, and how the man had summed him up quickly and accurately but kindly.

But the funny thing was the connection between my best friend and my grandfather; it was summed up in terms of the school that all three of us called our alma mater. He said that it was that honour which linked us together, the older man and the boys. And he never forgot that.

Over The Hill

I'm still charging over the top, in many ways. I'm over the point that people call 40, and into the ages beyond. I remember that I once described my life in terms of decades: my first, second, third and fourth decades are all here.

The funny thing about my post on the fourth decade is that I actually thought, almost exactly two years ago, that my last place of regular work would be a more permanent abode than most; barely seven months later, I left it. I was made to charge over the hill, in a manner of speaking.

This present age is a strange one, symbolically. If one becomes an adult at 21, what then can one say about 42? Is it an answer to a question? An answer to a question that is unknown? A symbol of life, the universe and everything? A cross-product of sixes and sevens? I don't know. But I'm strangely warmed by the hundred or so people who this day spent some time to make a link between their busy lives and the life of a person who for some of them was almost a stranger, and who for some of them (hopefully) played a useful or cheerful part in those lives.

Well, stranger things have happened. And I'm still a happy person. Very.

Of Gambles and Gambits

This afternoon I was at Gambler's Town. This two-building edifice in the old administrative centre of Atlantis once boasted the tallest hotel in the region, and is a stone's throw away from the infamous Gambler Inn, Silver Saint Art Museum, New Library, and other such structures of human and social capital.

We were having lunch there, on my side a curious package of tenderly done minced meat, egg and caramelised onions; on the other side a wrapped up but tasty mess of butter prawns in aromatic leaves. Then we saw the couple, and knew them at once. They were old friends.

The slightly corpulent man had been my senior in my younger days as a wyvern. He was now the Old Man's Oldness Man; some people have Wellness Men, some people have Richness Men, the Old Man has an Oldness Man. His wife was (and still is) Nobility personified, with a cheeky smile which goes back almost to the beginning of my life.

We chatted, with their two children B & K hanging off their parents' various limbs. The boy has that smile, and the dimples too.

I noticed the white hair, which somehow bears little relation to the idea of oldness. I think they're a great couple and those children are charming. Sometimes things look like gambles, sometimes they look like gambits. The difference in them is this: with the former you often think you'll win, which is why you lose; with the latter, you deliberately lose in order to win.

Life is full of that sort of choice. That's why when I see happy people, I feel happy for them too.

Three Amigos

I suppose it had to come one day. A former student of mine recently remarked at the staffing situation in a tuition centre on the east coast. He said, "Hey, the three of you were the most outrageous science teachers in our year!" He paused, and added ruminatively, "And in many years before and after..."

I looked at the biologist, who growled, "Bloody hell!" as usual. The physicist was off giving a lesson and he chuckled erratically and menacingly when I told him. As for me, I just laughed and laughed and laughed.

The thing is that we actually were a pretty good team. And it is a great thing that a great team sticks together somehow, even when everything else falls apart.

It is good to have friends. It is great to have friends who make a good team. And being part of an even bigger team is a nice extra. Professional development, I suppose you could call it.

Noo Yawker

I was sitting in a little deli opposite the local Hilton just yesterday. Sitting opposite me was my corvid friend from NYC. He was telling me things I hadn't heard before.

"There's a kind of controlling, power-hungry authoritarianism in charge at that place. Well, you had a learning experience, and everything's good now! I'm glad that you've moved on."

He went on to describe the details of a few things. As always, he offered a balanced view. Claim, counterclaim, justification, defence, everything. Then he told me, "This may be the last year of the program. It's kinda sad because this is our 20th year. But funding's low. The NYT might be closing down."

It was a sad moment. I felt despondent — for a fraction of a second.

He continued, "I'll be retiring soon though, and so will my wife, and I'll be coming out to visit old friends and I might even bring my dawwter with me, she's all grown-up now. We'll do a kind of retirement world tour..."

And the world looked right again.

Friendship

A wise man once said:

He who has a thousand friends
Has not a friend to spare;
And he who has one enemy
Will meet him everywhere

How true! Thank goodness I have only met friends in this part of my journey, from spring this year and into winter.

Food-Brain Synergy

I think that cafés are the most important social-intellectual invention of all time. They are better than debates, arenas, symposia, colloquia or any other social-interactive medium. Just yesterday I was with Wolfberry and Lioness and Elektra having breakfast. It was interesting to see how they had changed since they were new wyverns. There is more edge now, but the charm is still there. And their ideas about the world and how it should be and how they should be are all growing and becoming more solid.

Then there was lunch with the Red Magician, and how that managed to disinter lots of old long-buried interests I used to have in certain disciplines. It is very encouraging to me to see all these things.

I think the point is that the food is fuel, the caffeine is a catalyst that speeds things up towards eventual equilibrium. The time I spent earlier this week with Hierophant and Thinkpad was stimulating too. I hadn't realised how much stuff I'd picked up over the years until I actually tried to explain it to them. Which led me back to one of my favourite people, father Abraham.

All in all, this has been a good week for thinking. But now I have to get back to the grind of writing. Sigh. Thank God for the gift of theobromine and the other xanthines! Truly, theobromos, the 'essence of the Gods', is a wonderful thing!

Spanish Caprice

Sometimes, the oddest musical events bring a tear to the eye and a salute to the heart. They might remind you of friends no longer onstage, but who may yet walk on for a scene or two, or take a final bow at the curtain call.

This evening before dinner, I am sitting in my study listening to Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol. The man who brought us his amusing Flight of the Bumble-Bee and Scheherazade pulled off what was probably his most entertaining tour-de-force when he wrote this piece, essentially an amusement designed around Spanish themes.

It begins with what feels to me like an early-morning fishing scene in the Asturias. The whole drama unfolds here, from sunrise to sunset and beyond. It isn't really Spanish as a whole; the piece is all about Asturians going about their daily business while taking part in the pageant of life, with full richness, majesty and shades of intense colour. "Who cares about the rest of Spain?" the imaginary denizens of this powerful piece seem to be saying with good humour.

What's remarkable from a musical point of view is the fact that Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov seems to have performed many rare feats all at once, such as that of making an orchestra play the guitar without any guitars. It is akin to a ringmaster forcing the human cannonball to clown around while the lion-tamer swings calmly across the trapeze arena. Although such ideas, as they came into my mind, reminded me of old days in quite another organisation, one must still think of what amazing skill (or perversity) this act of creative imagination betrays.

But back to the idea of absent friends. I remember this piece because it is one of the pieces from the time 25 years ago when I first conceived of a love for what I thought of as nationalist music. To my mind, such music was music that showed a particular affinity or affiliation for a specific national cause. What got to me was the idea that a piece like the Capriccio Espagnol commemorated a lost kingdom, now barely a principality and no longer remembered for anything much (I mean, how many of you are Sporting Gijon football club supporters?)

It is for this reason that I memorised Kipling's Recessional and the poetry of Chesterton and Housman. I played through the forgotten art of that canny stage-composer Ketelbey and the odder moments of Russian nationalism. What mysteries were hidden in the nation-forging bravado of Sibelius's Finlandia? Why was Chinese music so much like Celtic music?

And all the while, I was hanging out with a bunch of close friends who till today are still close to my heart. The emotional and physical distance is there and yes, we have grown apart. But somewhere in the lost years is a bunch of guys hanging out in a small room listening to odd music and making Spyro Gyra, Mannheim Steamroller, and furtive piano performances in empty halls, all a part of their lives.

This post, I suppose, is for them all. It's about time.

Birthday Cake (Epilogue)

So it turned out to be an Oreo cheesecake, one of those fine confections with a base of ground up black chocolate cookies and a body of light cheesecake. Somewhere in there, we paid tribute to a forty-year veteran of life who still looks much as she always has, on the thin side of tall; on the graceful side of elegant; on the accomplished side of unassuming.

A good meal was had by all in the cellar room of the Jade Palace. That counts for a lot; and credit for that goes to the padawan, who has never ever disappointed in that category. The company was good. If I had to pick a list of 20 friends I would like to have invited to my 21st birthday party, almost every single one of them would have been there. Unfortunately, I'm now on the transalpine side of 40, so too bad.

And, oh yes, the fried cod was the most excellent fish ever.

=====

Note: She liked the cake and said so. This was a very good thing. *griN*

Corvidae

Rook and jay, crow and raven, we sat and feasted on dragon and phoenix and rare meats. It has been a long time since the ancient fellowship was first convened in 1989 (or thereabouts). We had different names then; we have different names now – but the fellowship remains. Here is an account.

Over the years, we have been Man-in-Grey, Hunt-for-White-Lion, and many other life-brooches of the Aesgarnir. We "have seen the Eternal Footman... snicker," and we are not afraid. We know that we too have an eternal existence, whether in roles or at play or in the communion of the sanctified. And we partake of a brotherhood that has not been sundered for twenty years.

What a gift! What a life!

The Road Not Taken

I have a cloister here. The honey-coloured wood panelling frames me in a distant cradle of light and shadow, like the petals of some enormous blossom. I am cradled to sleep in it sometimes, I hear the diffused echoes of the distant possibilities thunder faintly through my cloister walls. On rare cold nights, I know she knows, and she knows it too – that we are all human and think of what might have been and what might not.

And so, innocent of deliberate intent or malignancy, I remember the other one. It is on the edge of the penumbra, the interface between daydream and nightdream, that I see her barely unforgotten face, white and grey against the velvet backdrop of sleep.

She was a dancer. I told her she was like a gazelle. Some people are always uncomfortable with long limbs, and yet show nothing to be uncomfortable about. We shared few meals, few moments, and our distances were greater than our proximities. And one fine evening, we suddenly realised that we had stepped completely through the minefield of our overlapping fires and into the safe zone.

We are friends, and that is all; even though I sometimes wonder as I reach into the darkness with the last of my thoughts, I know I will not grasp anything but that. It is awkward for the young to think of affection without desire; it is impossible for one to exist without some form of the other. But it is entirely possible for two people one day to have the first without the second.

I know this to be true.

Lunch

I found myself lunching with two old friends. It happens with increasing frequency, as if the forces of chaos which surround us are beginning to squeeze us together. It is almost as if the universe is telling us to stay together because a three-fold cord is not easily broken.

Speaking of which... we've had three challenges so far, and all three have been answered admirably well. Yes, yes, yes. It was also rather funny to watch the victim of the second challenge come in with an accurate answer for the third. Almost like revenge. Heh.

Today's challenge will be a little different for now. Can anyone say what these three characters – 001, 002 and 003 – have in common? Most persuasive (i.e. unambiguous and verifiable) answer wins. And oh yes, for now I will have to say that the young incarnation of J S Bach has been most assiduous in hunting down every secret reference. Haha, yet another secret reference to chew on!