Cranes…That’s not me in the pictures. Imagine someone pudgier with a bigger butt, and badly-cut shoulder length hair. That’ll be me.
Flapper
Japanese weave. Photos: Antipodean
PRETTY dresses make me happy…I don’t shop all that often; when I do, I go for pieces that suit my style. Am very happy with the haul today! :)
*
I’m very glad for the lessons I’ve taken in these six years since graduation. For one, money is not important to me. I’ve seen how it breeds dens of vipers. When you’re out with certain people you can see how they judge social value. What firm do you work for? What do you do? What does your father do? Which bank is he in? Which school did he go to? What does her husband do?
I say bullshit to all of that. Character is judged by what a person does…over CNY we talked of how someone’s father had died and she’s helping to take care of the mother and how the burden of care often falls upon certain children or grandchildren in the family when others “default”. One of my best friends has a sick grandmother and father to take care of at home, and she shows up again and again, day after day, with patience and fortitude. These are the people I admire, the people who matter to me, not so much the materialistic braying yock-yocks.
At some point I pity them too, for I’ve friends caught up in the cycle — but I’ve learnt to distance myself from the users. You’re able, you’re ambitious, you’ve the brains, yes. But you’re also fucking self-serving, and desperately insecure.
To a certain extent it’s encouraged by the Government throwing wads of money at us. I say: Bullshit to that. Bullshit to carrots and sticks. Bullshit to binary distinctions between fear and love. Bullshit to the black-and-white thinking that critics must be exocet-missiled and obliterated. And really, fuck the fear of the ISD — I’m pretty sure I do worse things to myself with my finely-honed sleep-deprivation techniques that I’ve developed since I was an angsty teen.
Some things are non-negotiable, and you can never buy a sense of public service, or my sense of integrity, of who I am as a person. So here is *my* manifesto: I won’t ever be a running dog of those in power, who seek to intimidate with power, who use all means to hold on to power. I spit upon the wads of cash you think will solve all problems. Tennis courts, Mercedes Benzes, plastic surgery for your wives, cocktail parties for your husbands, oh yes I can play the game, but please have the common sense and decency to see it all for what it’s worth: It’s just a game. Don’t take your bourg lifestyle so fucking seriously. As the Chinese say, na de qi, fang de xia. (Sorry folks, haven’t sorted out my Chinese input software yet.) And David Marshall once said in an interview that justice “is a meld of law and humanity. Decency in concepts”. What I see is worship of the Golden Calf. What I see is seeking of vengeance. What I see is insecurity at work — hence the need to seek to try to control others.
Am reading LKY: The Man And His Ideas again…there’s lots to admire. But what I take umbrage against is the idea of treating human beings like dogs, like things to be trained, like you can jerk a leash and jolt them and get Pavlovian instinctual behaviour. It goes against everything I stand for. From Timothy Radcliffe’s What Is The Point Of Being A Christian:
However, if denunciation and accusation become the main way in which human beings view each other, then we shall indeed be sucked into untruthfulness. Sometimes we must accuse, but we cannot do that until we have first seen the goodness of the other person. Good people do bad things. In this mistrustful and suspicious society we need a different sort of press, freed from its Enlightenment limitations. We need a different sort of political debate, where the goal is not to trash one’s opponents but to arrive at a shared understanding of the common good.
I don’t think I can change all what I see as wrong in this society, but I can be sure that I won’t let these things change *me*. As JJG says:
Belle, on ira
Et l’ombre ne nous rattrapera peut-être pas
On ne changera pas le monde
Mais il nous changera pas
*
Modern Declaration
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never having wavered
In these affections; never through shyness in the houses of the
rich or in the presence of clergymen having denied these loves;
Never when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors having
grunted or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of those loves;
Never when anxious to land a job having diminished them by a
conniving smile; or when befuddled by drink
Jeered at them through heartache or lazily fondled the fingers of
their alert enemies; declare
That I shall love you always.
No matter what party is in power;
No matter what temporarily expedient combination of allied
interests wins the war;
Shall love you always.
*
The Queen And The Soldier
Lyrics by Suzanne Vega
The soldier came knocking upon the queen’s door
He said, “I am not fighting for you any more”
The queen knew she’d seen his face someplace before
And slowly she let him inside.
He said, “I’ve watched your palace up here on the hill
And I’ve wondered who’s the woman for whom we all kill
But I am leaving tomorrow and you can do what you will
Only first I am asking you why.”
Down in the long narrow hall he was led
Into her rooms with her tapestries red
And she never once took the crown from her head
She asked him there to sit down.
He said, “I see you now, and you are so very young
But I’ve seen more battles lost than I have battles won
And I’ve got this intuition, says it’s all for your fun
And now will you tell me why?”
The young queen, she fixed him with an arrogant eye
She said, “You won’t understand, and you may as well not try”
But her face was a child’s, and he thought she would cry
But she closed herself up like a fan.
And she said, “I’ve swallowed a secret burning thread
It cuts me inside, and often I’ve bled”
He laid his hand then on top of her head
And he bowed her down to the ground.
“Tell me how hungry are you? How weak you must feel
As you are living here alone, and you are never revealed
But I won’t march again on your battlefield”
And he took her to the window to see.
And the sun, it was gold, though the sky, it was gray
And she wanted more than she ever could say
But she knew how it frightened her, and she turned away
And would not look at his face again.
And he said, “I want to live as an honest man
To get all I deserve and to give all I can
And to love a young woman who I don’t understand
Your highness, your ways are very strange.”
But the crown, it had fallen, and she thought she would break
And she stood there, ashamed of the way her heart ached
She took him to the doorstep and she asked him to wait
She would only be a moment inside.
Out in the distance her order was heard
And the soldier was killed, still waiting for her word
And while the queen went on strangeling in the solitude she preferred
The battle continued on
*
Two Tramps In Mud Time
by Robert Frost
Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.
Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.
A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.
The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.
The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.
Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.
Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
