Again Thinking

Earthly ambition may sound archaic and one usually associates it with long gone emperors and kings.

Not so sure since the Italian elections.

Perhaps we have just replaced the emperors and kings with the captains of industry and commerce or, heaven helps us, with politicians, presidents and prime ministers?

Monarchs often claimed divine right to rule and even today there is at least one monarch finding out that divinity does not sit very well with the hoi polloi these days.

This is not the forum to go into a full ranging discussion of the good and bad of the monarchy as a political system, but this thought has arisen: How do monarchs or even ordinary policians, think of themselves?

Do they capitalize their title and person even in their most private moments?

Or do they quietly accept their responsibility as a task to be accomplished in the midst of curtailment of liberties available to the commonest of their subjects, birds in gilded cages? What ambition can a bird in such a cage have and how can princely progeny be brought to accepting privation after a taste of freedom? Perhaps we should have learnt from the case of the Last Lord Lee.

The Last lord Lee (Lee Li) was emperor of the Southern Tang which preceded the Sung dynasty in China more than a thousand years ago.

He was a cultured man who wrote very personal (as opposed to the expected formalistic and professional) poetry and in fact was the pioneer of a tradition which carried onto and beyond Mao Tse Tung. He had very little earthly ambition but fell victim to someone who had.

He was not a very good general, was easily defeated by the first Sung emperor of China and carried off a prisoner from his capital city Chin Lin (now Nanking) to Peking .

He was called Earl Li the disobedient for having opposed the earthly ambition of the Sung emperor and eventually, it is said, made to drink poisoned wine.

In his short lifetime he wrote forty or so poems.

But these poems are read and memorized and treated as part of the corpus of Chinese culture and will continue to be.

So what price earthly ambition? We today remember the first Sung emperor more for his capture of the Last Lord Lee than any greatness intrinsic to himself.

Perhaps the Last Lord Lee himself answered this question in one of his most celebrated poems:


a short while ago
there was heavy rain
the wind raged
and the screen rattled
as autumn wept.
shifting shadows played
with dying candle light.

then everything stopped
and turned to silence.

why is sleep impossible
in this quiet hour,
why does unrest await
the sleepless victim?

all earthly achievement
one day washes like water
into anonymity
where only the drunk can sleep -


I hesitate on the threshold
of familiar dreams

unable to sleep



from
the poems and lyrics of The Last Lord Lee
translated by malcolm koh ho ping and chandran nair
Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975

In a few days it will be our thirty third wedding anniversary.

The years have summed up into a happy marriage and three wonderful daughters.

But again thinking, as one always does on anniversaries, I realize it was not ordained that this should be so.

We were from different races and cultures but were unified by a common language (English), a common colonial experience and a common humanity.

We disagreed on many things. We still do. But it did not and it does not matter.

Because we possess the magic ingredient for happiness between two individuals:

honesty.

Thank you Ivy.

The honest poem I wrote then:


bonds

not to scare you, but because we build bonds
words adhere more than we realize,
a word sometimes pauses quite unknown,
implants and lies dormant as life turns;
to blossom into alkaloid reality only when
we have lost the inner eye that shows beauty
as this stream of cold water running
to wash between our toes and minds.

not that I am frightened, that we build bonds.
can we really reclaim our moments of peace
once they fulfill themselves and are gone?
will memory be honest enough to restate
how it was a look could say everything
and a fleeting touch was a cold wind
lingering. a new born faith silent and content
as we lived within our toes and minds?

from After the Hard Hours, this Rain, Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975

Came across a poem I don't remember writing, let alone the when or why of it.

Since it was published in Commentary, the Singapore version I once edited not the US one, in April 1979, I must have written it before this date and it has my name printed over it, so it must be mine.

The poem is titled Voyage into night, an obvious reference to the second world war vintage voyage au bout de la nuit by Celine, the French extreme right writer, whose writing I love as much as I hate his racist ideas.


liar. you lie, to feel yourself alive, to hate.
the world moved ..... you ran to stand alone.
the applause in your ears is your own
but you heard the world
and despised them.

Rereading both poems today, I see myself the angry young idealist who could not understand how someone of such literary talent could have such extreme ideas. But then even today I still cannot understand how so many intelligent people can still harbour similar ideas, long after the last world war, the end of empires and colonies and of divine cultural supremacy and after the advent of the united nations, human rights and equality.

The poem in question?

Again thinking about it, I believe I was putting myself in Celine's mind trying to understand his reasoning.

Not sure I succeeded. Perhaps the reason why it lay forgotten.

voyage into night

songs, from childhood. words gone
astray in memory. tunes faulty.
remembrance of things past.death.
each rebirth brings another death. mine.
yours. resurrected today. bled anguish.
did I feel? your departure? mine?
what is not finished has not begun
to eat the days. we all lie. twitch
pull on days, blanket nights
with demons. walking to your death.

a chorus for the damned, out of tune
voices reach cadences we never heard
the dead walk singing in rain.
you lie waiting for my embrace.

Thinking of the past always raises questions of culture.


For example, what is the culture of one who is born in one place, heir to a culture thousands of years old, who goes as a child to another place and is thrown into at least three other cultures, one of which is that of the colonial rulers and two others equally as old and vibrant?

And who as a result writes in a language not his own as if it were, since he was educated in it.

But can barely read and write his mother tongue?

They say we live in a global society.

By which they mean we can wear western clothes, eat hamburgers and watch BBC and CNN, reruns of american movies and sitcoms in a billion homes and hotels and aspire to this diaphanous thing called democracy, this illusion that it is each individual who has the right to choice.

Within limits, of course.

So what is culture? Is it dance, music, language, history - The syntax of all these set in patterns of right and wrong and sanctified by longevity?

Once upon a time culture aslo defined race but that is unpolitic now with global migration. so what is the cement of culture?

Will future multi racial generations be able to avoid anomie and a sense of unbelonging?

Otherwise the only things we will be able to call our own will be jingoistic appeals to your country right or wrong.

When we start speaking of axis of evil because others do not believe exactly as we want them to, maybe it is already too late.

A poem that is one part of my culture:


ajanta

caves, like minds, have finite depth
yours squat under malignant rock
offer us dead spirit and dying beauty.
but our sun has grown cruel
and hunger has little beauty.
we cannot bear reality or paint
forget how caves grew large
as handheld chisels tore solid rock
to document this serene face
whose dark eyes awake from innocence
into despair


from After the Hard Hours, This Rain
Woodrose Publications, Singapore , 1975

Technorati Tags : culture, society, multi-racial, politics, art, language, ajanta, india,

Thinking about my father-in-law led naturally to thinking of my own father. Especially as I am now reading another poet on his father - ondaatje's running in the family.

An intellectual, my father published his first short story at seventeen.

In the next forty years he migrated from his native India to Singapore, argued politics, exasperated friends and enemies, wrote literary criticism and subtly directed his childrens' inner lives.

Before returning after his first heart attack to his first love and publishing ten successful novels in Malayalam his native language, before death twenty five years ago at sixty seven.

Over these twenty five years it has finally dawned on me that I did not know who he was. I have my mind pictures - the sharp verbal jabs, the dates, incidents and decisions good and not so good.

Sign posts. Not much else.

Not that we did not speak - we discussed literature and most of all politics. We had the same attitude to money - necessary, but not sufficient in itself to require respect. We disagreed.

Now it is too late to ask him who he was. Perhaps it is always like this between fathers and sons.

The poem I wrote in 1970 after a heart attack it looked he might not survive (but did):

trees (for my father)

with age
have come the trees with leaves
branches in thin air
roots in thin soil, growing tall
impossible to put arms around.
sometimes a branch breaks,
a straying root climbs out
into the drying sun.
sometimes a leaf falls
to be swept away and burnt.
with age
the life impulse reaches for buds
hoping with flowers to resist
the drying sun, indifferent laterite
nurturing green pods into grown shoots.
watching
till wind and water
wreak their vengeance
turning innocence into bark
scarred and weather-beaten.
with age
how these old trees
become mirrors of ourselves.



an analysis of the writing of the poem is published in
Idea to Ideal - 12 singapore poets on the writing of their poems,
first fruits publications, singapore 2004.

20 April 2006

Not quite sure I like digital photo albums.

Digital cameras are technically great conveniences and creating and uploading photo albums easy, but I am convinced that if one does not print down photos, after a while memories are lost. We have hundreds of photo albums stored under beds, in the attic etc and even fading black and whites in an old round biscuit tin (mine). Each time we look into one of these albums, memory floods and all the old stories come pouring out.

Will it, can it be the same with a digital album on a CD or DVD? and what if the technology of tomorrow cannot read that of today?

This was brought on by an old photo on my wife's website taken at least forty years ago: my late father-in-law is on his bicycle with his first grandson

This photo led to my recent poem

gamblers never win, but here’s fifty dollars

kong kong loved to ride in buses
especially ones going to Genting
where he admired the view, drank black coffee
and never gambled
but his money did.

his fifty dollars took a while to cross
the blackjack table and when I stumbled outside
the wind was of course misty cold
but my father-in-law leaned head bald
on (what else?) a railing
trademark cloth cap in hand:
his “sucker” and the offer of a beer
cemented years of affection.

since you left
no one rides the bus
to Genting anymore
kong kong.

Footnote: "Kong Kong" is cantonese for Grandfather and was the name we all used for my late father-in-law, Goh Keng Swee (Dec 1909 to 25 Oct 1990), who loved to go to "Genting" (Malaysia's famous casino near the capital Kuala Lumpur), not to gamble himself, but to see how long it took for his son-in-law to lose his "fifty dollars"!

Technorati Tags : chandran, nair, poetry, blog, paris, photos, memories, genting

18 April 2006

A regular thing. Every now and then life stops and is rerun, sometimes lazily most often frenetically, to see if something has been missed. Sometimes again thinking is instantaneous, flashing lights and not much else. Other times deep dark thoughts replay what's been and could have been.

Wrote a poem once when I was young


again thinking

in sunburnt youth, already old in thought
we bought from evenings only darkness
love, risen too early, eclipsed without warning

when others played unconcerned in rain,
there was for us only sombre avenues walking
by themselves, enmeshed by overhead branches
that locked their arms against the sun

today we talk of old love, already uncaring
like old men remembering the patches
branches netted against coming light,
while those first thoughts of love fence
against the calm words spoken, goodbye

we talk of the sea, that echo, lost voice
claiming its hurts for our shoreline, its tears
for our eyes, adoring the violence of waves
against the rocks of our hearts.
we talk of the sky, that mute artist
whose brushes we wield to paint
this deepening darkness into our lives

one day we will have to return the sea
its voice, the sky its colours.
one day we will have to find the sea and sky
in another human face


( from Once the Horsemen and Other Poems, 1972)

Thirty four years ago, I did.