The race in darkness

Exams are nearly over, and the saddest sometimes i guess, is failing at the crux of it all. Its like you just lack that last grit to finish that which you have accomplished before. It is not giving up halfway up the mountain climb, its not falling at the last hurdle. Somehow in those instances, you are conscious and aware of how far you have gone. Its more like racing with a submarine that is piloted by all calculations and theories, you are in the dark about how everything is turning out until the very end, when you realise the miss.

But however it seems like a human condition, i guess it is only through this constant striving that you learn. It is absurd, but absurdity only comes with commitment and devotion. And the exuberance of imagination is what you need, sometimes, to finish that final piece.

Emily Dickinson

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering,

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

Departing is my arriving, wandering is my residence

Sometimes it’s wiser not to think about outcomes when all the possibilities and permutations do is worry you. We do our best to be aware of what we say or do, but when the outcome rest upon human factors, you can never be sure how someone will react. Sometimes it takes so much to understand perhaps this ungraspable dynamics of your relationship with others.

You can never crept inside other people’s mind and perceive their exact thoughts.
Sometimes we would like to think someone does think like us, to ascertain that we are not alone, to drive back the alienation of self. But the truth is, no two people can think exactly alike. The rails which our trains of thoughts run, are not most parallel, never to coincide.

Dear friend, I am grateful for all the conversation and time. Sometimes I really don’t know how deep I can look into the dark recesses of those eyes and assure you something. I don’t know. I wish can have an answer for your forlorn sense of being lost and uproot by everything that is changing around us, everything that seems to fast for us to grasp.

Is nostalgia the only way forward for people who is able to feel any sense of attachment in this place? Is nostalgia the luxury offered to those who are able to think and perceive all that is around them?

For you,

Nostalgia
Carol Ann Duffy 1992

Those early mercenaries, it made them ill –
leaving the mountains, leaving the high, fine air
to go down, down. What they got
was money, dull, crude coins clenched
in the teeth; strange food, the wrong taste,
stones in the belly; and the wrong sounds,
the wrong smells, the wrong light, every breath –
wrong. They had an ache here, Doctor,
they pined, wept, grown men. It was killing them.

It was a given name. Hearing tell of it,
there were those whop stayed put, fearful
of a sweet pain in the heart; of how it hurt,
in that heavier air, to hear
the music of home – the sad pipes – summoning,
in the dwindling light of the plains,
a particular place – where maybe you met a girl,
or searched for a yellow ball in the long grass,
found it just as your mother called you in.

But the word was out. Some would never
fall in love had they not heard of love.
So the priest stood at the stile with his head
in his hands, crying at the workings of memory
through the colour of leaves, and the school
teacheropened a book to the scent of her youth, too late.
It was Spring when one returned, with his life
in a sack on his back, to find the same street
with the same sign over the inn, the same bell
chiming the hour on the clock, and everything changed.

Thoughts upon an afternoon

Sometimes, think it is really wiser to observe silence. It is ironic to me sometimes, to know that your exact utterance will unfold its many meanings to people, and still toy with that notion. Sometimes it is interesting to observe in speech, the common ideologies that people are stuck with. But I guess, to actually expose that would be somewhat Socratic or Nietzchian(along that line), sometimes in our modern day terms, a bit crazy to say.

And I guess you have to be aware of what's prevalent around you. Not many people knows satire. And most of all, people are encapsulated with this protective and conservative bubble of self, to strictly( and i say strictly) observe this line of speech, and not to offend people in any sense. Sadly, Singapore i supposed, to be suppressed and oppressed in thoughts.

W.H Auden
elegy for the German poet Ernst Toller

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

It is their to-morrow hangs over the earth of the living
And all that we wish for our friends: but existence is believing
We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving.

Language and motivation

Past few weeks have been crazy really. I am worked to the point of exasperation for my lit essay and it is really frustrating to really feel the limitations of your own language, not the abiltity to comprehend and understand, but more about conveying your thoughts to others. It is almost to the point of jamais vu to hear have someone tell you the advice offered one year ago. But I must not stop short here, for I believe it is within reach and you can never stop improving if you strive, just like your understanding of biology and literature is never solely one reading one fold.

In a sense, you realise that speech can turn out to be ironic due to the nature of language itself., however we try to reach out to others, there is always to gap in ideas. That which you place in others and in yourself is perhaps remarkable, that lightless and weightless being called faith.

Sometimes it is this faith that survives you through your pursuits, that sustains you when everything else seems to fail apart; and yet, you have to realise, faith can be blind too. How do we know that our pursuits for knowledge are not in vain? And they do not come to zlitch? What survives of that? I really don't know sometimes. I only know it is what I love and I will not be any happier to lead my life any other way.

Conviction in blind faith?

Two songs from a play
W.B Yeats

II

In pity for man's darkening thought
He walked that room and issued thence
In Galilean turbulence;
The Babylonian starlight brought
A fabulous, formless darkness in;
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.
Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.