Aubade

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
 Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
 In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
 Till then I see what's really always there:
 Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
 Making all thought impossible but how
 And where and when I shall myself die.
 Arid interrogation: yet the dread
 Of dying, and being dead,
 Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
 The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse -
The good not done, the love not given, time
 Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
 An only life can take so long to climb
 Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
 But at the total emptiness for ever,
 The sure extinction that we travel to
 And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
 Not to be anywhere,
 And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
 No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
 That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
 Created to pretend we never die,
 And specious stuff that says No rational being
 Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
 That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
 No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
 Nothing to love or link with,
 The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
 A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
 That slows each impulse down to indecision.
 Most things may never happen: this one will,
 And realisation of it rages out
 In furnace-fear when we are caught without
 People or drink. Courage is no good:
 It means not scaring others. Being brave
 Lets no one off the grave.
 Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
 It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
 Have always known, know that we can't escape,
 Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
 Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
 In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
 Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
 The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
 Work has to be done.
 Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

- Philip Larkin

This is an unfortunate and very true diagnosis of my desire to be useful, and especially of my desire to see young people at their best (which can be magnificent, despite the utter depths of evil that can be their worst). Perhaps it drives not just me but everyone. Larkin has put it into words far better than I could ever have.

No newspaper or government-approved message, no numbers or figures, can acknowledge this darkness behind our copious consumption, our economic creed, our need for forward momentum. An oath on anaesthetic and opiates! We might make light of it, but what light we can make only casts the longer shadow.

Arcana VIII: Strength

Words condescending but wise. To be fair to the writer of this thing, I too might feel tempted to be condescending if someone came to me whining about having 'nothing to do'. This is the fallacy of individualism: a sense of entitlement and ennui, a guzzling sense of the world failing to succor a vacuous and bloated 'I' when all one really needs to do is to produce worthily -- and grow strong. If you're feeling helpless, help someone. Aung San Syuu Kyi. Quod erat demonstrandum.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/fashion/the-family-stories-that-bind-us-this-life.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0#h[]

I also ran across this very interesting article about the neccessity of the community in the formation of the self.  Like some of the commentators below I too have reservations about the kind of family history that children grow up with when they learn under the grip of trauma and negativity. But I do strongly believe that we find ourselves only through storytelling, and not just within families either. We draw ourselves from a wider world of logic and literature. Who am I to my mother and my father, to the centuries that precede me, and the centuries that will continue without me? What are villains and heroes, what is suffering, what is determination, what have others done so that I too may do if I must? What is love, that I may love? Whole tropes of behaviour and paths to choose from, to deny or adapt and learn from, all from the simple and fundamental act of conversation: of interpretation and interaction, of eschatologies, of narrative.

For here too are the tropes of tragedy.

SALARINO
Why, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not take
his flesh: what's that good for?

SHYLOCK
To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany
you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

-- The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene I

Fierce, flagrant, incorrigibly biased, by God, and though it certainly doesn't place Shylock anywhere near a moral high ground for wanting to gouge out flesh from one of his erstwhile bullies, and legally too, he makes me recognise in myself what drives it. I spent three quarters of the play rooting for Shylock out of pure gut feeling. Later I realised that it was because he stood for the impotent rage of the oppressed. I never want to be his position and I certainly never want to be like him, but I think this rage is something that everyone can understand, and it makes the question of permissibility even knottier and more difficult. Every character in a narrative, conversational or written or visual or otherwise, is a foil and a mirror to the reader's own.

We are learning every day. In reference to the picture article above, I do actually think the world owes me a living. If I didn't, I'd be dead. But the way I see it, the world has offered up to me all the living that I could have wished, suffering and love and wealth and shame together, and what I owe it is what I owe it in return. What I owe is that which I make of my life and the abolishment of all that fails to support life. And my strength is the strength that others can lean on.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 -W.B. Yeats, 'He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven'

One day I will do a piece of beautiful artwork embroidered around a hand-calligraphed rendition of this poem as a gift to myself and a reminder of what I must do for my students. But that will be for when I have time.

Words, words, words

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Henry V, William Shakespeare

As of now there is a debate on the dangerously low volume of Singaporean students who choose to take Literature at the 'O'-levels. I have many ideas of my own but such similar sentiments have been articulated so well by others -- friends, colleagues, scholars, writers -- that there is very little left for me to say. In the prologue to Henry V, the audience is asked to ride the line of ambiguity that is the suspension of disbelief, and so doing conspire with the play to create worlds. Literature, the study of words, applies the critical spirit to this suspension of belief, and if correctly done it is the means by which this abstract new world ruptures into a painful awareness of one's own. It means to read the insidious craft of the wordsmith and reveal its unresolvable human preoccupations. Technical to the last, it binds deeply to the instinct of the reader, and challenges him to respond intelligently -- and honourably. It prioritises the voice and the story; it creates an awareness of historical identity. Text and life, each reflecting and illuminating the other, engender with these mere words a dangerous playground of questions, forcing the mind outwards at last into feeling the webwork of prejudices that have shaped them into who they are.

These are some reasons for why I see value in Literature. They are not, as one might say, safely 'vocational'. Neither are my sentiments 'pragmatic', not in the commercial sense of the word. But surely there must be some value in training children to see the world as the facet-ridden, equivocal place that it is, and furthermore to critically navigate the mazes of words that they will encounter even in areas as 'pragmatic' as politics and journalism. And, just as surely, to acknowledge how the vestiges of minds long dead remain in cultural consciousness because they professed vital truths on the vexed issue of living. In the words of Jeanette Winterson,

'To the bean counters and economic gurus, a poem looks like the most useless thing on earth. It is not a money machine, you can't sell it to Hollywood or use it for product placement. You can't say long it will take to make, or how long it will last, (how maddening in an economy that depends on throwaways, that a poem can last forever). The poem, by its very nature, questions the dominant values of our world, and as William Carlos Williams put it, 'it is hard to get the news from poems/ but men die miserably every day/ for lack of what is found there.''