What a strange experience, to be back in the same physical location, but to have nothing else concrete to bind one's memories to.  The only thing that now remains of the old hallways and corridors, the only artefact that connects my past to this new present, is the antigue clock mechanism that they'd preserved from the old clock tower.  The mechanism that had been locked away because it was believed that the tower was haunted.  Now the tower was reconstructed, and the ghosts too had found the surroundings too unfamiliar.

It's eerie in a unique way.  It's not quite the same, and yet I can't bring myself to treat it as an alien place.  There is a sense of familiarity, but nothing to attach it to.  It's my restless nostalgic spirit awakened but finding nothing to identify with and bothering me uncomfortably.  It's like seeing through a projection of my memory superimposed on the new building.  This was where I had once been.  But this was also a place where I never had been before.

There's always a risk, isn't there, when you return to a place?  The risk of finding something different, something subtly shifted despite the surface similarity, or, even more discomfiting, something subtly lingering when everything else had changed.  Returning always carries the risk of discovering that something you had held in your consciousness had already died, faded away to the shadowy realms of memories with no substantial grounding, memories that are just one step away from turning into conjecture.  When you return you may unexpectedly uproot yourself.

Of course there's always the hope that you'll find something that remains the same, something surprising that you can grab on to and hold up as evidence that what happened to you was real, that it actually took place.  But thinking about the past, something that I find myself doing muchly these days, is one thing; finding some way to relive it is another.  And in walking those new corridors which traced the outlines of the old, where my old school gathered in shadowy pools under new joints and corners, there was a deep discomfiture - a sense of the past without something identifiable to ascribe it to.  I figure it must be something like being possessed.  Except that it's from the inside.  We carry with us, after all, more than we're normally aware of.

"We looked at each other, afraid to speak, afraid to load our feelings into words in case the words cracked and split.  I pinned my tongue to the roof of my mouth.  Hold in, hold in, one creack and the wall is breached.  I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world.  Bacteria: agents of putrefaction.  My father's decay lodged in me.  Fed on, what is vital is sapped.  I decrease.  It increases.  Bowel to brain of me, this pain.  What words?  What words can I trust to convey this fragile heart?

Stopper it up, heart and words, give the pain nothing to feed on.  Still now, my still heart.  I will counterfeit death as my father counterfeited life.  On that continuum we meet.

Grandmother and I sat face to face over the sepulchral plastic of the breakfast bar.  Common and rare, to sit face to face like this.  Common that people do, rare that they understand each other.  Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca.  Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it.  'You understand me then?'

I wanted her to understand me.  I wanted to find a word, even one, that would have the same meaning for each of us.  A word not bound and sealed in dictionaries of our own.  'Though I speak with tongues of men and angels but have not love...'

'I love you.'"
- Death, Gut Symmetries, Jeannette Winterson

Indeed.  Perhaps, after exploring the vagueness and vagaries of language, we come back to the conclusion that the word that engenders the most sympathy, that enjoys the most commonality of meaning, because of the universality of the experience it describes, may well be love.  The most precise word, the seed for sympathy, something to base our communal construct on, to overcome the isolation of consciousness.  The only word that everyone understands, that is the common point to build our shared and constructed reality on, a connection solid enough to bear the weight of the illusion of substance.

"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends."
- Death, Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

To my pleasant surprise I looked outside and discovered that it's raining. The sound is soothing.

Something I picked off april-da-fool's journal, and she picked it off TVMobile...so maybe it's not totally useless after all...
"Desire is a stranger we all think we know, Truth is a game we all play to win"
I'm not sure what it means, but I've a feeling that it'll come in useful eventually.

And here's something from my trawling efforts for Lit S.  I'm really glad that I chose Sharon Olds now, even though I forgot for a while about doing her work for S.  It's really quite intense poetry.  I like the narrative style she takes, so frank and powerful.  And her life is fascinating, in its own fulfilling, tragic, solemn way.  Especially her familial relations...

Cambridge Elegy
Sharon Olds

                        (for Henry Averell Gerry, 1941-60)

I scarcely know how to speak to you now,

you are so young now, closer to my daughter’s age

than mine – but I have been there and seen it, and must

tell you, as the seeing and hearing

spell the world into the deaf-mute’s hand.

The dormer windows like the ears of a fox, like the

double row of teats on a pig, still

perk up over the Square, though they’re digging up the

street now, as if digging a grave,

the shovels shrieking on stone like your car

sliding on its roof after the crash.

How I wanted everyone to die if you had to die,

how sealed into my own world I was,

deaf and blind.  What can I tell you now,

now that I know so much and you are a

freshman, still, drinking a quart of orange juice and

playing three sets of tennis to cure a hangover, such an

ardent student of the grown-ups!  I can tell you

we were right, our bodies were right, life was

really going to be that good, that

pleasurable in every cell.

Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but

better than the bright corners of your eyes, or the

light of your face, the rich Long Island

puppy-fat of your thighs, or the shined

chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I

remember your extraordinary act of courage in

loving me, something no one but the

blind and halt had done before.  You were

fearless, you could drive after a sleepless night

just like a grown-up, and not be afraid, you could

fall asleep at the wheel easily and
never know it, each blond hair of your head – and they were

thickly laid – put out like a filament of light,

twenty years ago.  The Charles still

slides by with that ease that made me bitter when I

wanted all things hard as your death was hard,

wanted all things broken and rigid as the

bricks in the sidewalk or your love for me

stopped cell by cell in your young body.

Ave – I went ahead and had the children,

the life of ease and faithfulness, the

palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body,

I took the road we stood on at the start together, I

took it all without you as if

in taking it after all I could most

honour you.

People say the most intriguing things. Every time I am reminded that literature's big issues are everyone's issues, and that we're not all that different after all, despite our positions and credits and paraphenalia of one life, I see the importance of a sense of perspective. It sets things right, and rightly so, we need to be reminded to take everyone else seriously, because we all take the same things seriously.

"I feel sometimes sadly as though something in me is already racing forth beyond current times, losing a sort of sprightly innocence somewhat...but yet it is grasping into parts of the future and taking back all the beauty for me, I am living on borrowed beauty, I am living for something reckless I believe for in the world."
- s-urreal, 16-8-05 

"Little, simple, precious memories."
- s-urreal, 17-8-05

"...and one last thing.. i shall start charging u $3 everytime i approach me with a question regarding GIRLS. -evil grins- u blardy arse.. u'd rather buy her a present than buy me MY birthday pressie!? tt shall teach u a lesson.. wahahahahahaha..."
- april-da-fool, 19-8-05

A Military Exhibition
In the eyes of the boy staring over the rope at the grey flanks and slender snout of the staff of thunder and lightning, the magic word "artillery" bears no malice, the long reverberations echoing after the concussive shot bear no death.

"Hate is such a strong word.  It begins with a hiss and ends with a spit!"
 - from an A Level piece put up by VJC's graduating TSD class of 2005

"Simply to make the accusation is to prove it.  To hear the allegation is to believe it.  No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required.  Only a label is required.  The label is the motive.  The label is the evidence.  The label is the logic."
- The Human Stain, Philip Roth

"This is all we're here to do.  Don't think it's about tomorrow.  Close all the doors, before and after.  All the social ways of thinking, shut 'em down...What you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to do, all that, it just kills everything.  I can keep dancing, if that's the deal.  The secret little moment - if that's the whole seal.  That slice you get.  That slice out of time.  It's no more than that, and I hope you know it."
- The Human Stain, Philip Roth

"Death intervenes to simplify everything.  Every doubt, every misgiving, every uncertainty is swept aside by the greatest belittler of them all, which is death."
- The Human Stain, Philip Roth

This bit, from Philip Roth's The Human Stain, about Coleman interviewing an attractive young French graduate for the post of literature professor: "It isn't difficult to understand what she intends for him to understand, especially as Coleman knew something of Paris from being a young professor with family on a Fulbright one year, and knows something about these ambitious French kids trained in the elite lycées. Extremely well prepared, intellectually well connected, very smart immature young people endowed with the most snobbish French education and vigorously preparing to be envied all their lives, they hang out ever Saturday night in the cheap Vietnamese restaurant on rue St. Jacques talking about great things, never any mention of trivialities or small talk - ideas, politics, philosophy only...the intellectual must not be frivolous. Life only about thought."

When I was reading it, I was thinking of all the top JCs. Okay, I was just thinking of RJ. And to be fair, Delphine Roux seems to be at best only a caricature of the stereotypical RJ student, thank God. Yet the echoes are disquieting...I've caught myself expecting things like her, expecting to do well just by virtue of position, expecting to receive praise for this chance endowment of intellect. It's dangerous, this tendency to self-elevate. Must be watched carefully.

From Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries

The book is thoroughly impressive.  Been going through it for Lit S essay, and I find it extremely touching.  I find that I sympathise with a lot of it...the interpretations of religion and love, of the tragedy of relativism, of reality, and most importantly, of memory and communication.  I guess part of why I like this book so much is because it agrees with me so much.  But egoistic tendencies aside, it is a beautifully crafted piece of work, easily understandable despite its fragmentary nature.  Very dense, parts of it are poetry without line breaks.

And it has the best love scenes and death scenes I have ever read.  Atonement's one was deeply sad.  This one's two death scenes are deeply touching.  Reading them again at the airport, I was profoundly moved by them.  Something in her tone and detachment that makes the sadness even heavier.

On Love:
"We risk ourselves for each other, take the impossible step.  here is the knife that kills me in your hand.  To prove it I let the blood myself.  Monstrous, primitive, grand, divine, the one true extravagant gesture.  The only thing I can claim to own is myself, and look, I shall give it to you, a ceremony of innocence made knowing in blood."

Perhaps this is what I am afraid of...
"I do not want to declare love on you as of midnight yesterday.  I do not want to be captured nor to hold a honeyed gun at your head...I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own leve.  Or I would not love you at all."

Sounds sentimental out of context, but in its context, I find it hard to deny.
"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all thigns, endures all things.  Love never ends."

A rather horrific episode when a couple is stranded at sea...
"She was my wife.  I was her husband.  We were one flesh.  With my body I thee worship.  In sickness and in health.  For better or for worse.  Till death do us part.  Till death do us part./ I parted the flesh from the bone and I ate it."

On Memory:
"Stabs of time torment me.  What use is it to go back over those high rocks that resist erosion?  My life seems to be made up of dark matter that pushes out of easy unconscious so that I stop and stumble, unable to pass smoothly as other people do.  I should like to ramble over the past as though it were a favourite walk."

I find this one particularly striking.
"Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view."

"The horological illusion of progress sinks.  The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes.  We tow it down river, people and things, emotions, time's inhabitants, not left on the shore way back, but still swimming close by...The unconscious, it seems, will not let go of its hoard.  Th past comes with us and occassionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear.  Past.  Present.  Future.  When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are."

"What has been, what will be, star-dust that we are.  Uniquely the carrier of history, this vulnerable human cell, cosmos-hurled."

This is very close to my perception of the isolation of experience:
"My time, my father's time, my grandmother's time.  Now separate, now flowing together, and joined with the floods and cries of men and women I have never met, places and years that snag their movement in mine and choose me, for a moment, as a conscious depot of history."

"Space and time cannot be separated.  History and futurity are now.  What you remember.  Whatr you invent.  The universe curving in your gut."

On Communication:
I can't agree more...
"I cannot assume you will understand me.  It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.  Some story we must have.  Stray words on crumpled paper.  A weak signal into the outer space of each other."

As Alice's father is dying...
"I sat by my father's bed, holding his hand, thinking of him, feeling him, not knowing how else to communicate."

This one is really striking too.
"Walk with me.  Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative.  Need to tell a story when no story can be told...Walk the plank.  The rough, springy underfoot of my emotions.  The 'I' that I am, subjective, hesitant, goaded from behind, afraid of what lies ahead, the drop, the space, the gap between other people and myself./ Hear me.  Speak to me.  Look at me."

"Grandmother and I sat face to face over the sepulchral plastic of the breakfast bar.  Common and rare, to sit face to face like this.  Common that people do, rare that they understand each other.  Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca.  Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it.  'You understand me then?'"

"How else can I know you but through the body you rent?  Forgive me if I love it too much."

On Simple Life:
Sometimes I feel this way too...that at root, I'm not supposed to be at the vaunted position that I am in.  Trying to live a simple life and to be normal...
"My father took his hat and scarf and walked down to the docks.  There were men there he knew, idle like him, and they envied him his money and although he was not stupid enough to envy them their poverty, there was part of him that regretted all that he had done.  They drank together.  He drank alone.  he wanted to go with them to the filthy Admiral Arms but what right had he to sit in his cups when they would be going home to cheap rations and unapid bills?  He desperately wanted to say, 'I am unhappy.' How could he say that to them?"

Inasmuch as beauty and perfection lie in simplicity...
"Is crassness bound to win?  To live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to.  Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it?"

"'Be someone.  Be someone.' His mother's words tattooed on his body, his secret skin worn under an expensive suit./ 'I am someone,' he said out loud.  'But who?'"

On Words:
"Perhaps art is an eye problem; world apparent, world perceived./ Signs, shadows, wonders./ What you see is not what you think you see."

On an Italian restaurant.
"Face with a foreign language they ordered by numbers."

"Will you understand?  I am not sure that I understand it myself.  Give me your hand.  Put it to my mouth.  Kiss you.  Tongue, teeth, language.  My words forming in bubbles under your fingers.  Water and air.  Hope.  I want to tell you...and so I go diving for the words, bringing them back in glittering nets, spilled over our feet as we stand amazed at the sea.  I want to tell you how...and so these words are speared for you, tasted for you, fed one by one.  Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh.  Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean.  The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head.  To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, pearl of it, fish."

On America:
"'Story of my life, Alice?' he said.  'The bright boy who loves and hates America.  Loves it because it has given him everything.  hates it because it has given him everything.  The ambivalence of the immigrant everywhere.'"

"She knew that New York could not exist; that it was an invented city poised in the minds of its inhabitants, a hoisted dream."

On Religion:
Beautifully put.
"He didn't believe in God but occassionally, uncomfortably, he had a sense that God believed in him."

On Perception:
"I will see what I expect to see...I cannot see past my three-dimensional concept of reality, bound as it is to good/bad, black/white, real/unreal, alive/dead.  Mathematics and physics, as religion used to do, form a gateway into higher alternatives, a reality that can be apprehended but not perceived.  A reality at odds with common sense.  The earth is not flat."