he plugged his guitar in, and played it over the phone. the beginning sounds like whales. he says that’s intentional. and that the song is about us. my bedsheets are blue. I lie back, close my eyes. the guitar strings quiver, the amp catches it, passes it to the shitty secondhand phone he borrowed from me, and then to my ears. by then it sounds staticky, underwater. it’s long, too. he doesn’t usually make long songs. he’s in one of those one-minute bands, who scream. but the song is long, pretty, and poignant. I float until he lifts up the phone and asks me how it was. I’m technical, I say the last minute was drowned by static. Well, he says, it’s about our arguments. And our crazy differences, the language barrier, and constant misunderstandings, but how even though they happen over and over, I’ll still love you despite of it. I… I don’t know what to say. Would you like to hear it again? Yes. I even say are you mad, I want to hear it all night long, but he has already placed the phone away, and is playing again. I squeeze my eyes shut. I’ve never had a song made for me before. I am trying to learn and memorize, in case he forgets this tomorrow.

my life is small, small enough to ask a few free tastes of. but I’m not sure how much to give out. how many tiny pink spoons will get you to the bottom of all thirty two flavours in all its deep cold tubs? I’ve lost track. but okay, we can do this.

now pick a flavour.

I know that even though I seem vegetative to myself, I come off as doing so many things. But I never cared. I thought it’s okay to be adventurous ambitious experimental and fickle now (in alphabetical order), even if it’ll run me into the ground. When I grow up, I didn’t ever want to have regretted not trying something earlier. I needed to know what fit me better and what didn’t. Even at the price of being accused, ignored, denied or forgotten. If it really mattered, I will make people remember me again, or at least ask them to. Better than being old and remembering something I never got the chance to do.

Obviously this rationale backfired on me.

Yesterday, I lost a valuable chance. The biggest chance of my life. And ironically, I wondered if it was because I was trying to do so many different things that pleading for that one thing I loved more than anything else came off unconvincing in the end. Maybe my future work, my entire being, should have been pointing to POETRY POETRY & NOTHING BUT POETRY instead of ’situation: everywhere! who knows? that’s the fun part!’

But you know how it is. I just thought I could have been both all along.

Understandably there has been much fuss over great men like Voltaire, Rilke, Nietzsche, Freud, Descartes, Prophet Muhammad, etc. But when I read about their lives, what always distracts/strikes me most are the women they fall in love (or at least interact) with.

“… I lust after this kind of soul” - Nietzsche on Andreas-Salomé

Both Rilke and Nietzsche felt a deep connection for Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was 17 when she decided to get educated in theology, literature, the works. Over her lifetime she challenged the roles of gender with the combination of her indifference to moral conventions and insatiable intellectual curiosity. At 21 she met Nietzsche (who was 37), 36 she had an affair with Rilke (who was 14 years her junior), and later Freud in her fifties. She won the hearts of all three, and carried correspondences with them, famous on the literary map.

How could anyone express what took place between us? We made up for everything there was never time for. I matured strangely in every impulse of unperformed youth, and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart. - Rilke, in To Lou Andreas-Salomé

At 24, Elisabeth von der Pfalz (or Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia) read Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. He had heard of her and wished to meet her. At 25, she wrote to him saying sorry they never got to meet, and proceeded to exchange letters with Descartes for years until his death. She spoke six languages, was great at math, and was the person who would pose to him the famous question of the mind-body problem, debated and unanswered till today.

“Although in your metaphysical meditations you show the possibility of the second, it is, however, very difficult to comprehend that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and habit of reasoning well, can lose all of it on account of some vapors, and that, although it can subsist without the body and has nothing in common with it, is yet so ruled by it.” - Elisabeth, 1643

Émilie du Châtelet was 28, Voltaire was 40. She wasn’t pretty, but was fluent in Italian, Greek, German, and Latin by 12, studied literature and science, danced, sang opera, played the harpsichord, and was also an actress. She studied mathematics with Maupertuis and Clairaut, translated Newton’s Principia into French with her own commentary included, and published a paper with formulae successfully disproving Voltaire and Newton’s theories. But she usually wrote in secret, as men always overshadowed women in academia.

“Judge me for my own merits,” - Du Châtelet

She received a higher rating than Voltaire in a French Academy contest with an essay on the physics of fire. She was absolutely smitten with Voltaire, and him with her, and although she was married, she took him in as a lover, a practice accepted by France at the time. They lived in a chateau at Cirey. Together they wrote Elements of Newton’s Philosophy, an extremely influential book, which caused the French to abandon Descartes and pledge allegiance to Newton instead. Voltaire eventually got disillusioned with her once it became apparent that she was smarter than he would ever be.

In the chateau at Cirey, they did not spend their time cooing. All the day was taken up with study and research; Voltaire had an expensive laboratory equipped for work in natural science; and for years the lovers rivaled each other in discovery and disquisition. They had many guests, but it was understood that these should entertain themselves all day long, till supper at nine. After supper, occasionally, there were private theatricals, or Voltaire would read to the guests one of his lively stories. - Will Durant, Story Of Philosophy

When reading excerpts like these, I always end up putting my book down and going on tangents to find out who these women were. Also, reading things like these make me all the more inspired to conquer my insanely daunting calculus textbook.

I don’t know how to be social, or someone who is considered fun at random. The truth is I was brought up in a very serious environment full of books and mythical landscapes. I lived in the narratives of others in different countries and timelines. Some of that has moved from pages to real life people– I like being their surface friend because I don’t think I have what it takes to go deeper in without ruining everything with my hasty clumsy approach, my childish excitement & neurotic paranoia. I forgot how to be young so I couldn’t be fun, I had to grow up fast and go deep. I retrieved a fair bit but must learn to live with the fact that most of it never came back. This isn’t a disclaimer, but I suppose it could function as a sort of explanation, or a warning. Above all, this is a reminder for myself to not try so hard at being what I’m not, and not to get carried away, since I dislike the extra attention.

I’ve been staring at my grandmother lately.

When I’m home, I sit near or around her, sometimes behind her. She sits all day in a wheelchair, asking for people alive and dead, forgetting things. And I’ve been trying to feel a connection with her because I know it’s important to have something tying us together that isn’t our failing memories. That is still a project in progress but this was a recent dream I had from all that staring and thinking grandmother thoughts.

—

I dreamed that my grandmother died, but not only that, my grandfather was alive and died too for the second time. I was the wife of a governor, burdened with obligations and recited to people who sat in front of a classroom for the class open day. My friends wanted to sit in the front but they couldn’t. I had to learn how to sing a song called Glory by holding an infant toddler and having him recite the lines to me.

We were in a school because the family had moved to the canteen. All of us. Then all the women in the family found out their children smoked, cousins and all. But my sister and I were the only girls who did. We decided to leave in sets of convoys.

In the car she was in (a truck actually), my grandmother tried to open a tin of biscuits. She opened it wrong, jolted, and the truck she was went into a manhole. The manhole caved in and the truck sunk underground. It was a smoky mess. I put my face into the manhole (it was suddenly only big enough for my face) and screamed out for my grandmother. I remembered thinking my grandfather was okay because he had died before. I only saw my cousin’s daughter walk out and look up. It’s the daughter that looks a lot like my father’s sister, even though it’s my mother’s family I’m dreaming about. She’s only a toddler. I knew the others were dead. She was crying, but her mouth was shut. Her eyes never left me.

I have a problem with the ‘how’re-you-doing’ approach of keeping up with someone. Everyone feels obligated to give the latest in news with them instead of emphasising what made them so close to begin with; not their shiny new accomplishments in the life away from the person, but what brought them together, like noticing silly details from being stuck with each other all day in school.

I’m not trying to rework the fundamentals of human communication or anything, it’s just that I’m unsatisfied with the usual and common approach of keeping in touch with someone you love. It doesn’t suffice to ask how they’re doing and take turns, because for me, after sharing latest updates I still come off from the experience feeling like something is missing. I don’t understand who came up with this approach and made it a formality, because it feels so awkward for me. I don’t like trying to keep in touch with people by telling them as much as I can about myself. It doesn’t feel right because it was never about me, or him/her, it was about us, the dynamic we used to have & how we got it.

I’m not saying skip all talk of the present, but it’s not like it’s the present that keeps anyone together anyway. We’re social creatures & therefore we’re driven by nostalgia and sentimentality in all our contact. Rewriting it with today’s accomplishments of you, and me, doesn’t work in the big picture of us.

Basically I could be the president of Finland tomorrow but it won’t be what made us friends in college. If that is what ‘keeping in touch’ is, then I don’t want to do it. What if I ‘lose contact’ then? Well, I can lose contact with someone just as easy by overexposing myself to them online. It’s like they’re not there but they never left, they linger in form of networking profiles. I don’t want to collect profiles. I don’t think I can get the same satisfaction out of replacing my old friend with a profile. And I want that satisfaction, that refreshing feeling of having a cup of coffee with someone from high school you bumped into on the street, or screaming up and down and over your cats when the phone rings & they’re just as surprised your number is still the same.

So don’t throw a fit at my supposed silence. I haven’t forgotten.
I’m at home, waiting to guess where we left off.

The fuel price hike will change the way my starving self lives. As it is, my bank account has shrunk to a pathetic 3 digit state within the first week of June. For those of you who know me in person, expect fewer chauffeur trips, less socializing and weight loss. Like most of the rakyat, I don’t have any other option. I just feel sorry for my mother who pays taxes like everyone else and works every month to sustain us, only to see the money go to hell. I haven’t been as self-sufficient as usual. Well, holidays are over. Back to class, back to my brainblocking freelancing hunts.

I am a little unsettled. I’ve heard that love changes people & that in every relationship you go through you learn something from & grow & therefore shouldn’t regret. This is all well & true & tried & tested for me, but what I am curious about is how do we change?

While on a deleting spree, I decided to read some old chats before axing them. Past relationships. It’s 3:11am & I am not exactly at my most coherent but I remember reading these chats pretty quickly, then glancing back at the names. I was surprised to find that lines that I lazily assumed I wrote were actually theirs. Mine, eagerly surrounding their sentences, were… cringeworthy. I would have never said them today. These were people whom I have touched laughed & talked with, people who don’t talk with me anymore, who probably don’t think of me from that period in time. Just like how I don’t think of me from that period in time. Then one day I see how they eventually found me icky, because I read what I wrote & cringed the same way.

Is this why more people become similarly jaded or as tough as nails, or why some forms of art have been basically similar for centuries, why cults actually get followings & movie scripts include magnetic reencounters between former lovers, why the city seems so small, and everyone you meet reminds you of someone you once knew, and although you get thrilled to find that you have so much in common with someone it’s upsetting to see too much of yourself in them? How much of them becomes hardwired in me?

Having said that, I still dream of a few of these people, & then wake up perplexed.

Google says my site “might harm your computer”. And apparently so does Firefox. It says the same about my hostess so I suspect it’s not specifically my subdomain. I’m not sure what to do to fix it if it’s true. I’m sorry if you’re having trouble clicking around here. I obviously did not make this website malicious. There are other, more creative ways to inflict malice.