The Morning After

I am no different from what I was. But what I fear is that I will be viewed differently in ways that are unhelpful to some.

I remember my first encounter with Deleuze, and the idea of everything being uniquely and differently on the same level. I also remember the bad pun his contemporary made, about how the 20th century might turn out to be nothing but Deleuzian.

The fragments of my work churn in and out of my head, helped by the remnants of the pasta and Cabernet Sauvignon. It has been a long, strange journey. Along the road, I have been helped by unicorns and gryphonesses, by titans and cyclopes, by a flight of wyverns and a parliament of rooks.

But this is the morning after, and I am about to close the chapter for a while.

Destiny

In about 24 hours' time, I go back to the place of my ancestors, in a way. My great-grandmother served there; my late grandfather was schooled there. And I will serve for a time there. It has been a very odd journey indeed.

Pilgrimage

My reflections, or perhaps peregrinations, are inspired by a former colleague's brief but very meaningful meditations during Eid ul-Adha. Some days, it seems as if the metaphor of journey is tiresome because every transition seems to be part of a journey — if the metaphor is seen everywhere, it becomes meaningless.

But the idea of pilgrimage is different; whereas some might argue that the journey is the whole point, with a pilgrimage, the destination is the point. In the English-speaking world, there is one particular piece of allegorical literature that is all about that — I refer, of course, to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

The story isn't quite one for every faith, and it is horribly ponderous in parts. Yet, as Bunyan's allegory unwinds, the journey and the eventual destination of Mr Christian become more and more familiar, like something frequently seen out of the corner of your eye.

I think that the part that grabs me most is the hymn somewhere in the middle of the journey. It is the only one Bunyan is known to have written, and I first knew it as He Who Would Valiant Be. The first verse goes:

He who would valiant be
  'gainst all disaster,
  let him in constancy
  follow the Master.
There's no discouragement
  shall make him once relent
  his first avowed intent
  to be a pilgrim.

It is a stirring piece, but more than that, it contains good advice for any pilgrim. For a pilgrim who doesn't quite reach his destination is only a wanderer, and perhaps that much less for it.

Long Journeys (Part II)

The poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot is a lot about long, cold journeyings and the things that one finds on arrival. Sometimes, the arrival is the arrival of one's self within one's self, so to speak; sometimes, the destination is the anti-climax to the journey itself. 'Little Gidding' is the fourth of the Four Quartets he wrote. It is the one that I recommend all visitors to England read, either before or after the visit.

In that poem, the last words are as follow. I couldn't find a shorter excerpt that would convey the beautiful weight of time and humanity conveyed by it all.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

It is stuff like that which makes one despair of ever being a poet. When you read this kind of poetry, there is the sensation that somehow, the deepest root of language has been tapped; the wellsprings of human history and legend are being drawn from and drawn upon.

More important, the sensation of his 'midwinter spring' at Little Gidding is one of having found the destination, that the journey has ended and we await the welcome of the King. It makes one realise one's weariness in the place of the world, and just how long a journeying it can seem.

Long Journeys (Part I)

Long journeys are the main course of a literary diet. In some cases, the journey is such an epic one that it takes on a life and significance of its own, eventually settling down as the cultural ballast for an entire civilisation.

This was the case with the Hebrews and Moses' sojourn in the wilderness (and to some extent his antecedent in Abraham, whose journey from Ur covered the entire Fertile Crescent and the Nile Delta), with the Greeks and Odysseus' eponymous voyage around the Aegean Sea and parts unknown, and with Aeneas and his flight from Troy (funny version here) which ends up with being the basis for both a legend of Rome and one particular dream of Ancient Britain (vide Geoffrey of Monmouth). It is even the case with Dante's phantasmagoric La Divina Commedia, and its resonances (or reverberations) on Italian culture.

In each case, the idea of the journey is that of a great and complex and divinely-inspired test of the protagonist. By the ordeal of the journey, he is made fit to assume legendary stature as the leader of a people and the founder of a nation. By contrast, modern nation-building myths are not so heroic, and have to be conflated, inflated and insufflated (by the adoring masses, of courses) before they reach the same effective stature (if ever).

The old-fashioned heroic story-telling, I think, was about excellence: the protagonists looked larger because their peers and accomplices and friends (like the Paladins of Roland, or the Fellowship of the Ring) were great in their own right or grew to greatness with them. Since the protagonists excelled even these, they were champions and heroes of even greater merit.

Nowadays, sadly, the norm is to make the protagonist look bigger by tearing down his rivals and diminishing his peers. It is all very depressing.

Yesterday

Yesterday I stretched my legs and made the long walk from the Eagle's Cage to Old Cathay. The path through what used to be an orchard in bygone days has never seemed so un-orchardlike. But it was pleasant to make that long, long walk.

I think I am in some sort of decline into a graceful middle age; I cannot bring myself to be outraged and may be trending towards indifference. This is very bad.

On the other hand, the most powerful neighbour of my old lord seems to have endorsed me. In one week, four job offers. What a week! The eagles may fly, but the ravens will win.

=====

In other news, I was somewhat amused by the new book arrangement. The Hierophant might be a tad displeased. What happened was this: the packers were very efficient in numbering the bookcases and shelves, so that one box might be marked, 'Bookcase 1, Shelf 4,' for example. However, the unpackers were not always the same as the packers. So some of them differed in their interpretation of shelf number, counting from bottom up or top down as their conscience dictated.

This was not always a good thing. Some of my bookcases looked extremely top-heavy, almost dangerous. My dearest brother helped out by reshelving. But I suspect a certain professional and his friends might want to say something in June.

An Unusual Journeying (Part 1)

I was born with a payload of odd genetic traits. I'm sure many of you have them too, but perhaps not all at once. I have an odd form of colour-blindness, some missing enzymes, odd bands around my arms, functional ambidexterity, a brain which is resolutely neither left-biased nor right-biased, and some other stuff. I used to think, when I was a child, that I wasn't entirely human.

Now I am older, I marvel at the range of humanity and people we call human (and who look human each day) and realise how human I really am. But one of my genetic traits had an unforeseen and deeply empowering result in my life, and I will discuss this later.

An aside first: the Latin word peregrinor is an interesting verb meaning 'to be different, to be unusual, to be strange or foreign, to wander, to voyage, to journey in foreign lands'. Try to understand that its sense is somewhat akin to the Greek xenos, as in 'xenophobia'. It is the word from which we get the name of the peregrine falcon - i.e. a falcon which appears to be always wandering or travelling.

When I was about five years old, I contracted a nasty illness because of one of my genetic traits. I began to haemorrhage everywhere. My quick-thinking grandfather ensured I was rushed to hospital, whereupon I was hooked up and treated to a complete blood transfusion. I felt no fear. I had been having these nosebleeds ever since my return to Singapore from the land of my birth. I bled easily, scarred easily, had learnt to endure the daily inconvenience and the finger-pointing of my peers.

It crossed my five-year-old mind that I might die. I resolved then, at that very young age, that dying was OK. It was quite peaceful in the hospital, with the regular and muffled sounds, the enforced visiting hours and meals, the solitude and quiet. And the next stage, as far as I knew, was death. So be it.

My mother and grandmother thought I was being excessively morbid. When I recovered, they always got upset when I spoke of it. The menfolk were more mysterious. They had a secret. I'm not sure know if it was the one I now know they have.

You know, when you have decided that dying is OK, life holds no terrors for you. You don't become more reckless; who wants to die in some crazy and violent incident which leaves you in a semi-dead state or an extended condition of pain and suffering? But you become more composed. And very little that people can do to you will change that. Inducements, threats and blandishments are irrelevant, since you or the other person might well be gone before they can take effect.

And you don't go crying to God in fear of death and the afterlife; if you go to God, it is in conversation during the still silences of the night, during the sliced moments of the day, never with human fright, but with rational fear.

The attitude that people perceive you have will also be unusual. Many people will not know why you are like that, why you will speak in the darkness, or do the peculiar, or endure the insane, or attempt the impossible. Not that I do all these things, but that's just my opinion. In my next post, I'll be more specific about the outcomes of journeying in this state of mind.