Again Thinking

Year End, Year Beginning

2006-12-23T10:59:00.000Z

So ends another year. The world has not become a better place and many more will die of war, starvation and disease in the coming year, as they did in 2006. As individuals we will all have had our high points and our low points. We will continue to talk of Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, North Korea and maybe add to this list of troubled spots.

What compassion can/must one have for those who through no fault of their own are born in the so called undeveloped countries and find themselves victims of history, geography, avarice and brutality? We who have the chance to be living in reasonable security and comfort take it for granted and sometimes feel (in unguarded moments of which we are probably ashamed) that those who suffer thus must have deserved it in some way - perhaps because they believe other than what we believe, perhaps because they accept doctrines other than what we know for a fact to be given truth.

It is always easier to condemn someone if we can persuade ourselves of their inhumanity and inherent evil. But unfortunately this is a coin with a reverse side. We are the other side of someone else's coin and seen as the evil ones who will get their come uppance one day. What shock and horror!

We speak of globalisation as a done thing, with the ubiquitous trousers and shirts and blouses and skirts and most of all jeans rolling over robes, kimonos, mundus, loin cloths, saris, baju kurongs,kebayas,etc in the wake of two hundred years of colonization and the cultural annexation by a global language. For trade, of course and the greater good and who cares that age old languages and dialects die and cultures wither.

We the privileged are able to mouse over to anywhere and click into futures that were once science fiction. And play poker online. We can order, pay and receive without leaving home. We speak of the internet as the democratization of peoples forgetting the billions who have neither the infrastructures (water for one, electricity, sanitation) nor the means to afford what for us is instant access to everything.

So yes as this year ends I am sitting at my keyboard saddened by my own hypocrisies - I have spent a quarter century working in these so called developing countries and seen it all at first hand and cannot deny what exists: the dirt, the grime, the sickness, the poverty, corruption, brutality etc etc. But also the dignity, the joy of being alive, the compassion of one for the other, the love, the aspiration for better things.

When aspirations are smashed, old beliefs which are wielded by those who would revert to darker times (because those were times of power and hope) may prove beacons against a globalisation that does not care........

Years end, Years begin

We go on...

Wind

and on the coast
a wind, not high or strong
moves along the surface
gathering momentum to howl
fury worked from resentment.
this storm breaks bonds, tendons
forged in furnaces; bellows in hand
a misshapen god stokes embers -
calloused hands and vengeance run
molten metal into the mould
fate conceived.

invincible the armour, unsurpassed.
sandal firm against the heel,
the heart of death almost full
save only his own, the sand was warm.
and blood,
quivering like the javelin thrown
resurrects for one moment,
achilles, alone.

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

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interior landscape

2006-11-24T10:30:00.000Z

The human condition has always been, and still is, a fascinating area of study.

My childhood in Kerala and Singapore, adulthood in Singapore, Pakistan and France, with work-induced travel all over the world and now "la troisieme age" in France, have provided opportunities to view at close hand the sameness of human aspiration but, sadly, also the sameness of the way in which we manage to turn these aspirations against ourselves through a belief that what we hold dear is sacrosanct, the only divine truth, and that all those who deny this truth must be put, (literally unfortunately in many parts of the world) to the sword.

Human evolution perhaps once demanded that one defy the next family, the next tribe in the perilous search for shelter and sustenance. Natural selection perhaps did enhance ruthless selfishness to the extent that even when cooperation in group activities garnered better safety and richer rewards; the push to kill, grab and run remains paramount.

One is always afraid of loss, always afraid of the other. This has in time become the driving force of group consciousness and evolved into the political doctrine that what the others believe is false and reinforced the comforting belief that truth and justice were always behind one's own actions.

But our own ingenuity in making travel easy and in making international and national barriers porous has breached the bastions of belief and called into question so-called facts that less than half a century ago were held to be "incontestable": that some were divinely ordained to be the masters of others.

Called into question but not dispelled, as the wars in the Middle East, Sudan, Afghanistan and other places prove on a daily basis. Once upon a time when I was young, I tried to comprehend:

from The Interior Landscape of the Heart

I

the interior landscape of the heart
against which days are held
for photographs, recorded moment succeeding
other moments laid end on end conspire
into one life: there are no new landscapes
to discover, we have forgotten
computations for the angle of the sun,
the use of light on a fading day
to measure distances between hearts.
the hands we hold against our sides
do not reach to find the universe,
only the shutters of the mind expose
this inertness.

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musings on loss

2006-10-29T17:13:00.000Z

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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Re:Love

2006-10-06T21:14:00.000+01:00

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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Again Questioning

2006-07-21T10:08:00.000+01:00

The headlines speak again of war and natural disasters.

Add the human designed suicide bombers and we can say we live in normal times.

The United Nations is again speaking of the need for peace and sustainable development. That too is normal as that is what it was designed to do.

Policy makers worldwide are busy making policy. And all admit that this policy is geared towards the well being of nations, peoples and the world.

So why is it that there is so much conflict, uncertainty and suffering in the world today, and yet more on the horizon?

Is it that humans are biologically driven to conflict and destruction by their evolutionary past where only the toughest and meanest survived?

Is war and destruction a result of unsustainable populations eking out lives on meagre resources or is it due to the unfair distribution of these resources? Perhaps our misuse of nature and its bounties in the recent past has hastened and magnified the condition. Are we at or fast approaching the point of no return? Or is it that destruction of humans by other humans is merely the representation of our cultural diversity and therefore there is nothing to be done?

Questions, questions.

Resurrection

shades in the black night confess eyes
we come within seconds of total light.
something palls and no affirmation comes -
we have seen tenderness as leaves
unfolding into the morning light,
watched with vengeance, seen the play
straining into the darkest night,
resisted human love as roots
that grow between carefully welded days,
denied hopeful beginnings the right of life
and prayed for some sort of rain.
we have heard thunder speak its anger
cringed before its scorching tongue,
lost all and reduced to nothing
found human tenderness in love unsung.

else resilience impregnates our wounds.
we resist only till the core is breached.
when love dies there is no imagining
the hardness a human heart can reach.

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

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Hatred and Sorrow

2006-06-13T11:13:00.000+01:00

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

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Sadness Unending

2006-06-05T17:14:00.000+01:00

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

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Drowning in Questions of our own

2006-05-26T13:47:00.000+01:00

These days it is difficult to not lament the human condition.

But then it must have always been so - a distant ancestor probably stood leaning on the wall of his cave looking out over the plain lamenting the human(?) condition.

Most of our myths and legends incorporate at least one tale in which the hero has to solve riddles or answer trick questions in order to survive. Asking the wrong questions could mean death of the individual and his/her family. When persons of great responsibility wrongly answered such questions personal and national suffering ensued.

Our questions today are no less tricky - can we say he has weapons of mass destruction? For example.

When our leaders ask either the wrong questions or get the answers wrong there is also loss of life and great suffering , but today batteries of minders immediately swing into action to ensure plausible explanations and plan strategies of recuperation where the buck is subtly passed elsewhere.

I have always been drawn by the simplicity of the direct question, the straight forward answer and the immediate reward/punishment scenario. The Sphinx has been for me a symbol of the human condition, that part of ourselves which questions our most secret selves and judges without hiding behind self pity. We are all Oedipus when we confront our internal Sphinx but even when we get the answer correct it does not necessarily mean the story will end happily.

The Sphinx (after Cocteau)

I

if not the sun, then the rains wash
us into suffering, as always the gods
forget, we are mortal after all
capable of small lust, great expectation
and contempt: the pharaohs built
their monuments in sand, today we
understand their geometry
if not intent, regret the loss
of need for monuments. a sphinx
walks the twilight land smiling
as we drown in questions of our own.

II

to have met the sphinx, noted shaded eyes
coolly assess the possibilities,
is to have dreamt aloud, known again
laius succeeded and the young child
died on some mountainside. antigone
waits to be born to her fated end.
or else the sphinx reborn
taunts our growing arrogance
with one short swipe, " the life
I lent, you've almost spent".

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

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Role Playing

2006-05-21T20:04:00.000+01:00

The human mind is driven by the need to know. Even when some knowledge is useless, the fact of possessing it is often considered positive, for one never knows when it can become useful. We are forever imagining roles for ourselves and/or producing scenarios where others - friends, relatives, politicians, priests, colleagues - interact to produce living drama. We identify with actors and actresses who role play for us in films and stage drama. For the poet, the business of imagining has to be tempered by form and at times, function. What is the poem for? What does it mean to say? Why is it significant the way something is said? Of course poets do not so matter of factly ask and answer questions of this sort when writing their poems. But the craft of poetry demands that they work on successive drafts and it is not possible to avoid answers to some of these questions. The role of the poet in the context of the poem is something a reader needs to understand and maybe even identify with. Catallus will forever continue speaking as long as Lesbia continues to live. Poems start in different ways: after a happening, feelings of joy or sadness, anger at an injustice, the warm glow of love. And sometimes from imagining roles. But no question is perhaps more interesting than What If? What if one could wave a magic wand and change things? What if there was no hunger and no pain? No injustice?A long time ago from within my mind I asked

What If

what if there were no flowers

and no rain, no incense to burn.

what if today means as much as

the night's darkness,growing.

and the sun, what if it wakes

in a public sea, no waves.

what if there was no single tree

to hang from, what if the lone flute

played and we couldn't hear

and the darkness never dissolved

from our closed eyes: no form

lines stretched, curved over people.

what if your eyes never light up

and the clear sky becomes mulled,

if the smoke in the house thins

and we still do not see: no lips

what if I said or didn't say,

what if you said or didn't say,

if the palm fronds lose symmetry

and find pieces of sky born from trees

without flowers or incense,

without smoke, without eyes, glowing.

what if I said: love is dead.

from Once the Horsemen and Other Poems

University Education Press, Singapore, 1972

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Picking Flowers

2006-05-15T14:24:00.000+01:00

Flowers symbolize beauty and softness and gardens; the peace and bounty of a higher power in some religions. We, however, tend to speak of nature in the past tense these days.

Yet the enormity of what man is doing to the planet was voiced a long time ago. The book, Silent Spring, was hailed as a chilling prophecy by the concerned few when it appeared more than fifty years ago, but was little heeded by those who had the authority to act, just as with today's warnings of global warming.

For the poet and songwriter a flower is a magical construction - it stands in for love, death, resilience; and colours, scents, shapes and sizes allow a pleiad of emotions to flow into words and music. We can ask in sadness where all the flowers have gone, compare our love to a red red rose. . .

For how much longer?

tenacious

there is in this orchid tenacity,
a refusal to fade and fall.
dirty white petals framing a circle
converge upon a central simplicity,
beauty.

the stone mind rejects flowers
crushing petals in harsh grip
protecting its isolation:
mutilating flowers in a garden
re-organising the mind's blossoms,
throwing away the blooms that remind

from The Stone Mind
Once the Horsemen and Other Poems
University Education Press Singapore,1972

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What A Poem Is

2006-05-09T14:17:00.000+01:00

If I remember correctly, Aristophanes in The Frogs makes a character state that it is the poets who must save the nation because they embody all wisdom. In another age the same sentiments were held but about philosophers and in our day and age scientists have the edge.

Alas.

The truth is: (then as today) the only ones who have the power to save the world are the politicians and they are not about to. But that perhaps is not a reason for not thinking about poetry, which like music speaks to the soul (if one believes in the existence of souls).

Great poetry, like great art and great music resonates beyond linguistic and cultural borders, though it is easier to understand a poem if one knows the language it was written in. Early poetry was meant to be sung and many poems have been set to music.

But what is a poem?

An arrangement of words in some accepted order which has a rhythm of sorts and expresses feeling or ideas in an encrypted allusionary sort of way? A puzzle which the poet sets before us so we can uncode the language and enter into his/her mind? Or a piece of history which helps us understand the ethos of time and place in the evolution of a feeling or synthesis of happening?

All of these and yet more with a magic that is impossible to define?

It depends perhaps where the reader is at that given point in time - my definition at the age of twenty six when life had hit a blank wall, would not perhaps be that of today:

what a poem is

a poem

is an abstract

colours darkly exploding

words of one whiteness

guilty words together

on some sinister canvas

pushing tired into decline

a poem is the mind

waging war slashing canvases

into further suffering

from After the Hard Hours This Rain

Woodrose Publications, Singapore 1975

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Remembering Our Dead

2006-05-06T18:31:00.000+01:00

Sixty one years after the end of the second world war, the number of those who personally lived through or fought is diminishing to vanishing point. But memories are kept alive in museums, books and films. But such memory is selective and is sometimes contested.

New challenges have risen to confront the victors - former belligerents have become allies (and some allies after having been cold war enemies have turned out rather uneasy friends). Old (Eastern) Europe has broken away from sovietization and become New Europe. Asia and Africa have been freed and the emancipation and emergence of India and China as major economic and military powers are beginning to recast international relations.

Ruminating over this raises the question : What value the sacrifices of those millions who died? What would they say to the world of today?
How do we remember them? Should we remember them or should we get on with our own lives?

Every country, town and village has its monument to the dead of its various wars. What exactly are they remembering?

I first asked this question a long time ago, when they decided to build a cenotaph in Singapore to remember those who died during the Japanese occupation. Around the acrimonious negotiations over what the Japanese should pay as reparatory contribution towards the construction of the cenotaph, much ink was spilt over war-time atrocities ( on the one hand) and the heroism (on the other).

Finally the monument was built - on land not far away from my old secondary school, The Raffles Institution, (which itself a historic monument, had to give way many years later, to the fact that for over a hundred and thirty-odd years it had occupied an economically strategic site).

The poem below was first drafted during the arguments over how much the dead were worth in reparations

Japan is among the largest foreign trading partners of my country.

Cenotaph

they have built a cenotaph
to remember that you died.
long ago heads on bamboo poles
adorned bridges, we remember
but understand memories can't be thicker
than joint projects.

we will come with abacus
to calculate among your bones
the veneration due you
in churches and mosques
you never prayed in, forgetting
that your bones are temples
you often walked in

Ceremonial Destruction

2006-05-03T19:50:00.000+01:00

Many years ago I wrote articles, a poem and spoke against the Vietnam War. As a student leader it was normal to do so with feeling.

I have not written against the Iraq war, even though I have very strong views against what is happening. Have the thirty odd years that have passed made participation and speech less necessary? Is it a sign of maturity at last? Or an admission that it doesn't matter anyway what anyone says - they will do what they want and all we can do is get on with our own lives and hope for the best.

This of course brings up many questions such as what is the true meaning of democracy? By the people for the people of course. But by which people and for which other people? On what terms and conditions? Is it actually democracy when small caucuses in political parties select candidates so the majority can rubber stamp their choices and eventually say one candidate has won universal confidence? Or is this just another form of skewed choice ensuring only those who have sectarian interests get the chance to have their name on ballots? What difference then with a system where the ruling persons allow ' free' ballots with carefully chosen opponents and score 98.75% of the votes? Of course democratic elections are not that bad.

But this again begs the question:

Maybe war is just part of human nature. Are we not after all the killer ape?

the war

today as yesterday, the day before
the land stalks her enemy:
history does not lie,
the land is war prone
though the people are by nature
gentle, their souls peaceful.
it is the old instinct for blood
that detonates bombs, creates swamps
trains innocents to exult massacring
the next tribe, in the old hunt.

in another hunt
in Vietnam, today the killer ape
sacrifices to the old instincts,
crawling through this booby trap of a nation
into the daily news, lamenting the loss
of ceremonial destruction.

from Once the Horsemen and Other Poems
University Education Press, Singapore 1972

Death and the Sour Poet

2006-05-01T18:02:00.000+01:00

We don't usually bother too much with it but death touches all of us sooner or later. The death of someone close can be devastating if one is caught unprepared. But how does one prepare for loss and the grieving that follows? The death of my mother was something I had long prepared for. She was after all past 80 and her health had deteriorated. But when it happened it was still a shock. The five thousand year old death rites I performed with my brothers and sisters brought the necessary distancing between raw emotion and a controlled grief, but has not dimmed the sadness.

Humans have since earliest times invoked the continuation of the spirit in another realm. Protected and cherished if one had been good, persecuted and tortured otherwise. Belief in continuity eased the pain and if one believed in reincarnation the cyclic nature of life made loss less finite. Animistic beliefs gave way, became religions.

Religion was and still is a primary concern of humans, though the differences between religions and their followers have resulted in injustices, wars and suffering and death and is a factor even now with calls for holy wars and talk of axis of evil.

Religious rites are sold as the correct way to do things and have normally to be interpreted by special individuals who have been instructed - priests. Since time immemorial the priestly class has exercised a certain control over death and its rites and in doing so exercised real political power.
This I had realized early in life but had forgotten, putting death and its rites away to study, work and raise a family. But one cannot really escape death; it comes at you from the front pages, the news bulletins and the passing of loved ones.

All one can do is try to understand and hope. Or else mock the sour poet:

from sadness unending

because death is around some corner
we walk in avenues of love
defying idols cast in our image
challenging the voices 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.

stanza 3, sadness unending
Commentary Vol 4, No. 2
University of Singapore Society, 1980

Earthly Ambition

2006-04-29T13:18:00.000+01:00

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

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Anniversary Musings

2006-04-26T23:00:00.001+01:00

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

Voyage into Night

2006-04-24T20:09:00.000+01:00

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.

Global Societies and Culture

2006-04-22T16:26:00.001+01:00

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,

Fathers and Sons

2006-04-21T14:36:00.000+01:00

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.

Old Photos

2006-04-20T10:30:00.001+01:00

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

Again Thinking

2006-04-19T12:22:00.000+01:00

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.