to cousin noel

Cousin
--------

our past knows a way,
homing us in wonder.

this is cousin noel and me. playing soldier-cowboy-wu xia ying xiong sagas whatever... messy chronicles of childhood games (or perhaps it was police and thief?) back in keat hong kampung (where cck mrt line now runs) in 1982(?)

geeky we. one was cat-eyed, super slim. the other, eyes round as planets, crystal-clear innocence in shine.

look at us today. one, a suave hue of bespectacled and warm humanity, while another resembles a tuft-haired reflective-awkward-wannabe, like a thoughtful exiled equator-bronzedblacked penguin. (pix ahead!)

we are still very much in touch today. meet once awhile for teh o and char bee hoon along commonwealth crescent. granny's homestead.

we bear witness to each other's growth. the unforgotten childlike escapades we still laugh about today. the empty teenage years where each was left to cope with physical throbs and heart-rending spells. now father-to-be and brother to many. we walk on the same road again. an adult calendar of obligations and secret struggles to cope and simply...to be happy again.

of course we arrive to more definitions of 'happiness' these days.


we took this on a granite outcrop in ubin. i had returned for holiday. the past had never become more whole that hour, when we posed precariously, and risked a shot

smiling.


our gladness colliding in gratitude all at once.

a sense to truth. in kinship.










our presence to what we share-
you calling me









cousin













now meant much more than
what we sought.

Change Alley -a poem

Change Alley

Alley of change utterly changed.
The name of the place names
the lost decades, the places and times
gone with our belongings, migrated
along the routes buried or closed
to the country of changelessness.

Many dark tunnels ago, a child rode
on his father’s back through the trade of tongues,
the bazaar of puzzling scents and smells,
an underwater world of sailors
stale from the sea and travelers
drowned in dreams of home,

floating through its length skeined
with striplights and bare bulbs, the stalls
spilling over with imitation wares
for the unwary, watches, bags, gadgets and tapes;
in each recess he heard the conspiracies
of currencies, the marriage of foreign tongues
holding the key to worlds opening on worlds
for the waking senses of the child.

But most it was the laughing boxes
secreting peals of ghostly glee
derisive and disembodied, which held
the mind, kept the child listening
and fantoming still through the years
as if future was then held foretold
before the alley’s enchantment broke
in the dazzle of a weekend afternoon.

Later the grown man in loneliness
would return as evening snuffed out
the life of trade and the Sikh nightwatch
hauled from its silent depths a worn string bed
of questions to plumb the depths, to fetch
the echoes of consequence and distance
off all the alleys he had watched.

It seemed he had come through the changes
unchanged, searching still the place
for signs leading home, or out of the streets
emptying into loss, whichever way he took.
And while he waited the country flipped
the book of changes; street lost their names,
the river forgot its source, soaring towers
policed the skies and before the answer
could come like the laugh heard changes ago

the alley packed its stalls and followed
the route to exile, its nomadic spirit
inhabiting now the country of the mind.
All is utterly changed, the map useless
for navigation in the lost city. Only an echo
remains, the man haunting and sniffing
where the alley had been, measuring
its absence till the spirit of place returns,
till a door yields at the end and he walks
out free, changed beyond all changes.

boey kim cheng (from Days of No Name, 1992)

p/s: to kim cheng, sincere apologies for gross presentation. i didn't mean to distort the form. was faithful to every letter and spacing. after countless times of reform, i surrender to the fact that the blog has a mind of its own. mercy.

bidding for time: changi village

former student, cuili (class of 2001) asked me to pen a few reflections for her hons thesis at uni. she wrote a paper on changi village. we converged on many points. still, she asked me what i really felt about the place...am glad she took well to this... thanks again for helping me excavate what i needed to share.

27 march 2007

Dear cuili,

I am in the least academic of moods when I penned this so forgive me if I left an ambivalent trail of sorts that is least likely to lead you back to your thesis.

I offer you a poem, a vignette, another article on lorong buangkok (which I used for several field trips while teaching boey’s poetry) and this piece of writing. I hope they might come together to give you another imprint of change you and I have yet to see…

Blessings on the remaining days of your thesis. May your short journey bear fruit in your soul long after these hard days are over.

Best wishes and fond regards always,
kohkoh. mr (ed)



Remember only this one thing
The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them.
If stories come to you, care for them.
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
This is why we put stories in each other’s memories.
This is how people care for themselves.

B Lopez. Crow and Weasel (1998)


---------------------------------------------------------------

changi is but one of the many places which i return to each time i need a break or brief respite from city life. it draws me with its quaint architecture; a mix of low rise flats, a thriving hawker centre and a scattering of simple shophouses catering everything from a unexpected craving for midnight snacks (or bbq / fishing equipment!) to emergency bike rentals to cycle across permangil, just across the jetty. there are many similar places with the same nook or charm in singapore. changi is somewhat different from the rest- its sandy landmass stretches out to sea, while its shorelines are lined with coconut and frangipani. i see scores of families (mostly from the muslim community…did anybody ask why?) staying by its shores on the weekend. lovers always handholding and friends sit silent, pondering on the patient chore of the fishermen. place and family gatherings. the sea, salt and wind painting other stories beyond its horizon.

place, sense and changi. it is regrettable that even nostalgia has been subject to theoretical hijack from sociological theorising. it seems the very opposite to what c. wright mills (1959) proposed about the sociological imagination. for ordinary people like me (and having to take a conscious stand away from my own intellectual training in sociological thinking), a place can be read in ways that removes us from its essence or essential spirit. this is formed and retained by the voice of many peoples who claimed to have lived under its canopy. many times i wished the tourism or heritage board here could invest a little more in changi and make intelligent and sensitive policies to tap into its rich history; the lore of tall trees, hauntings of sook ching massacre, a rare parakeet population inhabiting the angsana heights and otherworldly dark mass of floating tales on decrepit lands…changi hospital. the transgender community gathers in the back carpark. meeting others, mostly straights, mostly married men. surprised? laughed at by many who term them ah-kwas. some are the same raw hound of hooters, who seek them. themselves unable to confront their own shackled lusts. themselves uneducated and unaware in conscience. a most terrifying prison known. this place holds stark secrets we dare not share. no government board would be keen to marshal the difficult respect for its rich dirt and grime when everyplace shines best in darkness, and humanize sterile blueprints and formal identities. the real stuff of life you extract out of everything.

changi like lorong buangkok, spells out the substrate of human yearnings. a potential site of pristine telling of stories. sadly some are quick to brush away its value in the name of social construction or economic worth which basically debilitates any need for dialogue and attentive unpeeling of place, time and story which changi holds. it is the same scenario happening to other deep sites on the mainland. a thoughtless and intellectual rape of place.

the poem Change Alley removes much of the jargon and clutter that litters the sociological mind. at times. a place speaks its stories best for itself. you could say i am the child or the old man in that poem (Boey’s Change Alley), personas of time and place which lend themselves easily to the many residents you have personally spoke to (not just interviewed along changi). and don’t forget the glee of the teh terak mamashop bollywood boss who serves you the smoothest beverage to jumpstart your morning, taking you beyond the blue yonder & sudden sky-roars of planes cruising overhead. he too, grows keen to share his stories.

on bad occasions, grand theories scrap away any authentic links we have with place, its enchantment known only in the secret recesses of memory that ties a resident permanently to its state. i too, have found ‘dreams of home’ in the times i visited changi. its relatively quiet streets and noonday torpor pervade my senses and trigger a needed release from the unending chatter of progressive city life around me. perhaps, everything is mere psychology, some might say. still the ‘country of the mind’ comes back not to singapore as a state landmass but a rich stretch of scents, stories and emotional sensibilities that pepper the changi coastline. this is one of the few places i will miss whenever i come away from singapore. when i return, i come back to the same place for whatever reason it may hold. i still learn to unpack my decisions this day.

to theorise is tempting. to allow silence to speak its voice when i lodge myself on an outcrop near the boardwalk or stand in line to buy my favourite packet of nasi lemak is a heavier struggle to bear. i cease to ‘think’ (as i was trained to think i should) and stroll on or stand in queue like an ordinary man, just being. conscious & present to the everyday where nothing significant happens at all, yet what is passing before me holds enough meaning to live by. content to know & live by its ‘prodigal’ past, knowing some still care to remember, and willing to share its older ‘maps’ everytime i bend low, and know the silence can be heard. then the grounds offer their oldtime song. so listen closely.

rekindling merton

Merton speaks for me even as i recall finding...
and gladly adopted this little book along Chapel Street.

He walks the space between one life of silence and the throbs of city-streets and daily befriends the secular world, and brings it to birth within a struggling depthing faith in Christ.



Death. Fear and uncertainty of dying young. Yet grateful for being born. I returned to familiar grounds today...







"Why was I always half-convinced I would die young? Perhaps a kind of superstition - the fear of admitting a hope of life which, if admitted, might have to be dashed. But now 'I have lived' a fair span of life and, whether or not the fact be important, nothing can alter it. It is certain, infallible - even though that too, is only a kind of dream. If I don't make it to sixty-five, it matters less. I can relax. But life is a gift I am glad of, and I do not curse the day when I was born. On the contrary, if I had never been born I would never have had friends to love and be loved by, never have made mistakes to learn from, never have seen new countries, and, as for what I may have suffered, it is inconsequential and indeed part of the great good which life has been and will, I hope, continue to be."

Thomas Merton: Daily Meditation with his Journals (2004)

Cooking SPREES

what's for lunch today?



nah, need not be lunch. dinner's just as perfect. much depends on sudden cravings that sweep you from the middle of a solitary languid afternoon. no need for cheap carbos for this meal. a fresh sea pack of protein-filled nuggets will do.


dish number one-
basa skeins and butterfish bast with the purest tasmanian olive oil, dressed with sage and placed in an old rickety toaster-oven. its radiant-dark friendly waves warming. the sharp aromas of wild pepper rising, surround the dish.



dish number two-
a platter of swimmer crabs. alluring like aquamarine. i am drawn by their blues. a near-perfect fusion of fantasies for an unknown species and my corresponding spellbinding love for crusteceans well-cooked. followed mom's kampung recipies. simply dash with sunflower oil, seasalt and pepper whites. wrap in foil and then, its inevitable steam.

i tasted the sweetest blend of ocean hues ever contained in that blue tang of filmsy shell. the flesh is eager and soft. i slurped them to maximum delight, a rich swell of plump locked in soft sweet blends of pacific, some say atlantic waters & crab sluice!

dish number three-
a compulsory set of rockets and self-dressed olive, capsicum and tomato portions. the italians term it carpaccio, just that mine comes without the heavy slash of beef. the green bestows a grateful grant of vitamins on an otherwise cholestrol-laden dish. who cares, really!

i now want my house-white even if it comes poured in a cheap plastic cup.

i will.

no one to watch me as i eat a quick serving of paradise set before me.

sleeping around, which i did.

certainly, that wasn't my first time.





yeah, i admit.





i did sleep around.





since my undergrad days...





with each of them, but one at a time.





could i help it? could i choose not too?








- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -





























those books, that is. hehe.





i slept around, freely with each of them.


at least i tried to!








those are the texts i try to flirt with. i prop them beside my bed when i fail to seduce them completely. they lie there, stony and silent, like a wall of knowledge that pretends to hold more than what it does. the grammar of pretensions are rife in them, rabid to the core; woven, stitched and sticky wriggles of words attempting to spawn insight and one occasional piece of bricolage. i try sometimes to strip them bare. those soft strands of meandering straps, which hold up empty & voluptuous balls of argument. most are born out of intellectual wedlock, an accidental marriage between spurious thought and seductive expression. they rape my mind, exile the senses. bear no lasting fruit for thought. i want to amputate their virile marrow spines.












there are days when i long for a simpler landscape of readings comprising the crisp clear air of language, well-ventilated by clarity, confidence and authority.

this is not to be.

i fail this night and once again, find myself sleeping with the enemy i claim to disown
and wage battle with....





still some secrets should remain so. this is a public blog and the ones near me maintain the hearth where a still fire burns. you know my sharing. our common knowledge. it is still. the silence heals and is good...





our books...chapters, histories, time-wounds...

zimbabwe

on my mind...







news of people suffering in zimbabwe continue to be the focus of papers here. i feel wrenched within. at mass, my heart is with them. the gulf between comfort and disturbance separating my life and theirs' unsettles. today, i read the papers drawn towards a portrait of a zimbabwean child languishing from untreated state of aids infection. he lives in a fly-infested slump within a country on the brink of famine and civil war. he fends fellow child-soldiers and adult militias from his father's property, or whatever is left of it.






it is easy for me to curse the corrupting leadership of robert mugabe and his mindless set of militia hounds. i pray many times that he be removed from power, right now... so that peace can be restored in the land. yet mugabe's weakness is but many of history's tyrants and dictators who have ruled their nations with an iron hand. yet history, humanity and yourself have borne them patiently from ages past. we fall and fall badly into ruin.

to throw labels at them does not help either. neither am i willing or able to detach myself from daily reports of senseless violence, hunger and injustice that stain my breakfast as i read the papers.

i pray in silence and often in a helpless state, trusting with bare faith that the little i do can help place the love and saving mercy of God in a land where evil seems to thrive. what i wish to think becomes a mere shadow of an unsaid prayer. i do not know how to pray in a time like this. it is easier to wrangle & think than to struggle and pray.

Lord, take me away from the convenience of rhetoric and place me near the centre of your call, where in prayer, i may be placed in the midst of my sister and brother in war-torn zimbabwe.
Be present to us in our helpless state. Give us faith to believe for certain, that you will come to deliver us from this evil.

O Lord, listen to my prayer
and let my cry for help reach you.
Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress.
Turn your ear towards me
and answer me quickly when i call.

The nations shall fear the name of the Lord
and all the earth's kings your glory,
when the Lord shall build up Zion again
and appear in all his glory.
Then he will turn to the prayers of the helpless;
he will not despise their prayers.

Let this be written for ages to come
that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord;
for the Lord leaned down from his sanctuary from on high.
He looked down from heaven to the earth
that he might hear the groans of the prisoners
and free those condemned to die.

pslam 101

----------------------- www.missionariesofafrica.org/articles/sr

autumn pick

autumn comes mixed

with warm breeeze by day and unexpected chills

near evening...

i handhold a sprig,

pose awkwardly...

try to capture,

remember.

still, beyond all days

a quiet dream

from childhood

coming true,

sensing an earlier mystery,

unlearning a kind of peace that rests on falling leaves