11 August 2006


my gourmet slaughterhouse...


The taste for exotic seafare knows no bounds. Managed to buy a whole eel from QV during the closing hours and had to negotiate like crazy to get the kindly fishmonger auntie to cut that elongated creature for me. She bargained with me saying she'll charge me $2AUD less if i could do it myself! Knowing how notorious eels are (slipper slimy speedy smooth like orang minyak impossibly to grasp textures), i stuck to my request and she promptly slammed the slender blade on the 'dead' creature with forthy blood oozing from the ends, crimson-fresh like never seen before and nudged mr / ms whatever anguilla rostrata (from the anguillidae family of species) into a clean paper bag. She begged me never to ever make her chop an eel again. Gross supreme she said. Immaculately bound in plastic bag, i took it home. This includes a 45min visit to an asian grocer where i found precious wodges of kiam-chye for porridge. It was salvific.

Dinner over (1 hour), i poured the chopped contents on the sink and began the butchery.

The thing moved.

Not the head but a fleshy chunk of its body...i flipped the knive like a madman, horrified by its resilience, and deep in me, the first scenes of Alien Trilogy rocked my mind and shook the very foundations as to how creatures live and die. Yeah...ok ok i'll be honest...dramatics aside, i jumped...

............literally

from the sink, hair-stood on ends and simply horrified by the Texas-chainsaw massacre cut cum black-fleshed Sadako wriggling on the floor scene...appearing to be re-adapted and shown before my very eyes. Freezed over, i shouted at Adrian, my flatmate to have a look. Bored and sleepy as usual, he took out a camera instead and began to take savage delight in filming (forensic style) my first attempts to terminate the slithering afterlife of a quarter-chopped medium-sized freshwater eel who is (was) supposed to die.

The remaining chunk of flesh tightened, with no head and tail even as i tried to remove its innards from the flesh. It tingled and moved, almost in near-delight, tickled by the sharp contours of stainless blade coursing over its veins. I didn't know what else to do except to mentally spin several horror-macho tales to beef up my intention to end this sad thing of a remnant life, forever. It refused to die.

Every damned part of its body was literally swimming in neurotic currents except its flabbergasted head...open-jawed, shocked and probably laughing at the visual squirm i had on my face even as its serpentine body eluded those hopeless fingers of mine. Glorious slime and all, river-fresh, zero fishy smells yet resistant to the core!

I jumped a few more times as i cut through a near-moving mass of bottom-end flesh, pulling out every discernable piece of organ...a tightened heart, white intestines, pear-shaped stomach. I even tried to stake that lump of a heart, convinced my literary knowledge and mastery of Stoker's Dracula would prove handy this time. It didn't. Quite.

Then, from nowhere, there appeared in my mind a slow vision of my secondary school days where i excelled in Biology (and obtained constant distinctions...ahem) and i began to remember vaguely that the central nervous system in most invertebrates was centered in the spine. The neurons make their home in there, it must. Armed with all possible kitchen weaponery at my side, 2 large blades and my trusty scissors (with adrian still silent and filming the morbid scene like some psycho out of australia's last asylum), i worked deep into the flesh, and snipped with evil intent at the single line of bones that held the decontextualized life of an eel together. Still, the chunk of flesh tightened like a resistant serpentine alien from outer-space, suspense cringing at the tips of flesh, curling, meandering, mucked-filled movements which lay sprawled luxuriously on the sterile kitchen sink, rebelling and refusing still, to die.

The scissors snipped the spine. A deathly load of silence hung in the air. I breathed deeply. The half-chunked horror of a-once-upon-a-time-full-grown eel finally lay silent, taut and potent to the last seconds, (Post-gothic Freudians, please refrain from other irresistable interpretations)...then it flattened out, last crinkles of nerve all gutted out and finally,

IT DIED.

9 August 2006




The Smile

I shot a smile into the air
It came to earth I know not where,
Perhaps on someone else's face
In some forgotten quiet place.

Perhaps somewhere a sleeping child
Has had a happy dream and smiled
Or some old soul about to die
Has smiled and made a little sigh;

Has sighed a simple, final prayer
Which lifts up gently in the air
And flows into the world, so wild
Perhaps to wake the sleeping child.


-a collected poem found outside a lecturer's door, while taking a break during evening class...was it by leunig (?)... still, a brief respite from the intellectual drone. Pictures taken during Mongolian expedition, June 2005.

Today's reading from Prophet Jeremiah 31:3
'With age-old love i have loved you;
so i have kept my mercy toward you.'

God says to us-
"Come. You always have a welcome with me. I forgive you. I believe in your goodness.
I will wait for you to grow and change and while i do, i accept you with all my heart... "

sr joyce rupp, osm

portrait from willow tree (www.demdaco.com)

8 August 2006











INTO GREAT SILENCE
Germany, 2005 (Documentaries)
Into Great Silence was winner of a Special Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.Nestled in the French Alps, the Grand Chartreuse monastery is home to the Carthusian Order, one of the most strict and reclusive orders of Roman Catholic monks. Eschewing outsiders, the order has never been photographed or filmed until now.Philip Gröning had to wait 13 years for permission to film inside the monastery and, even then, he wasn’t allowed a camera crew – he had to enter alone. Into Great Silence is the result of six months spent living among the monks and observing their daily rituals, repeated across the turn of the seasons.With no commentary, no interviews, no score and no artificial lighting, this is documentary film stripped of its usual devices and the result is an apt meditation (of close to three hours) on the tranquility and stillness of life within the monastery; perhaps a tonic for our noise-filled times.

(extracted from melbournefilmfestival.com.au)

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Caught this film screened at the Melbourne Film Festival last night. It started at 9pm and ended close to midnight, drenched in silence and harbouring little if any form of unnecessary editing or the visual pillage. The director followed the cycle of seasons and accompanied a novice and the community on their daily activites, from the cell all the way to the church and into the gardens. windbells, stone-steps, sundown, plain breads, frostsnow, nightingale, streamlines, rosary, pine cones, chapel walls, votive lights, vespers, planting, sowing , playing, salt, celery sticks, cleaning, sewing, living and dying...all these in deep, intense, intimate and profound knowledge of what it means to give up everything to be a disciple of Christ. The cell becomes an enclosure of hidden prayer, in union with a hidden God who in turn remains in solid faith with other captives around the world, be it prisons, homes or asylums which do not touch the garment of salvation. One more life is saved because of the monk's mysterious sacrifice of love, given solely to God who is free to love and tend the soul in his loving disposal and embrace. Fidelity and radical love. Mystery to a rare calling. Fools to others and sanity for a lost world.


http://www.parkminster.org.uk/






7 August 2006


Lord,

I will be meeting my course coordinator and associate dean this week. Please help me to convey my opinions clearly and let them know that even SAF can be more understanding about some policies than they are. Some lecturers are pedantic to the core and they should be more consistent about their stand.

Help me to 'fight' / speak/ argue / duel well like a Jedi, calm on the inside and focussed on the outside.

The lecturer and bits of the system are like Darth Maul- elusive, lethal and impersonal.
Help me to be like young Kenobi- persistent, forceful and polite.

I will work, discern and move in Your name,

amen.