Again Thinking

More than a thousand years ago the poet Lee Hou Chou, who was also the last emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty of China, asked of himself

hatred and sorrow
who can avoid their knowledge?

Today our daily headlines bring daily hatred and sorrow into our lives. But for most of us it's other people's sorrow and other people's hatred's.

We feel safe behind distance, our daily certainties and the fact that it can never happen here (except of course if you happen to live where it is already happening - Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Kashmir, to name but a few).

Yet how sure can we be that something won't change tomorrow at home, where we live? Because we live there and know our neighbors, have a good democratic system of government and have a reasonable standard of living? Nigerians would have told you that in the mid sixties before Biafra, South Vietnamese would have said the same before the conflict that made boat people of a great many. So if it could happen to them, then why not to us?

There are stirrings based on extremist religious movements in South East Asia; Eastern and Central European republics are beset by separatist movements driven by national identities linked to religious differences and colonial pasts; in Latin America numerous rebel movements fighting governments base the justness of their cause on racial exclusion and oppression; while Africa smolders in a welter of corruption, ethnic and tribal conflicts and poverty.

For some it is only the installation of the democratic system ( even if this has to done by force and with the deaths of a great number of people) that can change the situation and ensure world peace, for others education is the key to allowing individual progress. For yet others it lies in one word," modernization". A counter-movement says return to the roots, eschew modernity (and some would even impose this return to the past by force).

Lee Hou Chou wrote his poem as a prisoner of the Sung Emperor in Peking, having lost everything but his life (he was soon to lose this too). Is there no lesson we can learn from him?


hatred and sorrow
who can avoid their knowledge?
yet to devote the soul
to love eternal of one's land
and wake to find only
a patriot's despairing tears:

what greater hatred or sorrow?

can anyone match
my height of desolation?
long shall I remember,
stare afar as I remember
autumn

how empty can the past be?
was it all a dream?

tell me, tell me


from The Poems and Lyrics of the Last Lord Lee
translated by Koh Ho Peng and Chandran Nair
Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975

There are moments in life when sadness overwhelms you, becomes sadness unending.

You wonder at the unfairness of it all and fall into the why me? mode, till you remember you have been there before, have outlasted the last all-crushing blow and found the courage to go on, to hope for better things.

Someone else called it The Courage to Be. Sooner or later all of us will need to find this courage to be - it could be called for at the advent of an illness, at the loss of a loved one or at the loss of love itself.

Whatever the reason and timing of the call upon our reserves of inner strength, it is never ever going to be easy to live the day to day as if nothing has happened.

One should not live a single day as if nothing has happened. Things happen all the time, good things, bad things, indifferent things.

Accepting things for what they are (and not for what we think they are) is the first step towards the courage to be.


A long time ago at 24, before accepting that the courage to be has to born from within, cannot be an external covering even if woven with love and tenderness, I attempted to portray



sadness unending

because love is torn from the mind
of a small boy in the hurt aftermath
of death, its colour is black.
there is no joy in death
for the small boy to bear to the edge
of impending manhood, only the colour
enlarging the dark mind with black
asserting the sameness of love,
to the death wish of flowers
dying in the sun they adore.

because death is the god given choice
of lovers they choose to live
as priests of their destruction
deified in the colour of death
love walks in us all
walks, talks and turns from faces
of impending death, from the corner
of a loving hand, into eyes
a soft melody in a mournful flute
of a young lover drowned
in the sadness impending.

because death is around some corner
we walk in avenues of love
deifying idols cast in our images
challenging the voice of the sea
mocking the sour poet
walking alone in his mind
singing of death to himself
gathering dew in his night eyes
aware that no morning sun
will dry the tears of the dead
or the dying.


published in Commentary Vol.4 No.2, January 1980
University of Singapore Society, Singapore