Again Thinking

Sunday, October 29, 2006

musings on loss

Loss is and always will be part of the human condition. How we deal with loss will depend in the end on our formative upbringing (our education as the French would put it) and our capacity to absorb and overcome hurt and disappointment and most of all it will depend on the idea we have of ourselves. For some peoples loss can be both of the personal and of the institutional variety with loss of face - being shamed before others - being the worst of all losses. 
 
One day quite a long time ago now, a high Chinese official with whom I was riding in an official car past Tiananmen Square said to me, in response to my statement that they were only students and being young had to be allowed to express themselves, you should understand, it is a question of face.
 
Having grown up in a Chinese community myself in Singapore there was nothing  I could say to that. For if it was a question of face there was nothing more to be said. But I did say something though, that China would pay a high price for keeping face. For the official it was a worthwhile price to pay. The rest is history now.
 
Whether one calls it face or honour there are certain beliefs and feelings that transcend the ordinary, that seem to be regulated by a supra consciousness which sometimes leads us to act in ways that may  be disadvantageous to the self or the community but which seem to be right .
 
To judge such actions from the outside, to impose our own value systems on them may be to misunderstand, to open up conflict. Today I believe we are doing this where an Islam, that feels undervalued and threatened and has the feeling of a loss of face, is concerned. It reacts by retreating into stringent orthodoxy and an insistence on visual symbolism that proclaim its face against all critique.
 
The dignified way a thousand years ago in which the last Emperor of the Southern Tang dynasty  accepted defeat and all that go with capture and loss (including humiliation and his eventual death, it is said by poisoned wine) is therefore all the more astonishing and a valuable lesson.
 
I will let the poem speak for itself.
 
 
softly, softly rain falls
on the terrace and spring returns.
yet, the chill of dawn penetrates a single layer of silk:
unaware, i woke, unaware, i was
captured,
to live a guest with lavish
entertainment
the memory numb, till this morning
on the terrace i was confronted
by an endless mountain of spring

to depart was so easy,
to return no longer possible;
a flower that has fallen
into a flowing stream

can never reach its home
heaven was my home

 

from The poems and lyrics of The Last Lord Lee,

translated by Koh Ho Ping and Chandran Nair

Woodrose Publications Singapore,1975

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Friday, October 06, 2006

Re:Love

Thinking of my own growth as a poet, I recognize a number of poems - my own and those of others - which define stages of my development. My poem Re:Love while falling in love with my wife, Ivy, was undoubtedly one.

One of the main preoccupations of any young person is undoubtedly love, whatever one understands by the term at any given point. Love is a difficult word to define and can be that which one feels towards an object or person for whom one feels more than a common regard, which itself is difficult to define.

For me, when I was young, love symbolized freedom, the ability to decide for oneself, to unbind the self from the mundane; but the experience of something is never the same as the anticipated intellectual appreciation of the thing.

For love can also be lifelong submission to the point of enslavement, with torment and hurt to follow. So how does one learn what love is?

When one reads the poets one gets the widest variety of experiences and contradictions possible. The whole matter seems irreal and confused.

So what is the truth of the matter?

The truth is that we have to learn to recognize love, to appreciate the validity of the other and come to terms with our own expectations.

No other is going to be exactly what we pictured in our minds and we are going to be very disappointed if we cannot grow with and learn the reality of the other, to have and accept less than our Platonic ideal of the ideal lover.

Poets teach us this by speaking their truth as they have lived it. And whether it is Dante going through Hell for Beatrice, the Sanskrit love poets talking to parrots about their faithless loves, or Shakespeare taming his Shrew, each has a lesson for us.

I believe my reading of Cattalus more than any other was a milestone in my life. What did I do with this precious knowledge? I fell in love and wrote a poem.


Re:Love

from first principles
painfully working the emotions
I learnt love
with almost quiescent content.

love, I learnt from stone faces
that cut sensitivity into anger
that grew within the mind, fences.

love, I learnt from steel-hearted poets
who had thrown flesh and blood
into other hearts and found, furnaces.

love I learnt from those who claimed
torn and bleeding and full of blame:
no soul born now emerged unmaimed.

love I learnt and thought I knew -
love failed, love torn, love possessed.
all these I felt and bore within the husk:
now the rain washes stone-faced memory
and poets of steel lie dead in books.
unmaimed I walk with you
untorn, unresentful and unpossessed.



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









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