“Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast... What I mean is, maybe it's only us.” 


- Lord Of The Flies, William Golding

Sam touched a scratch on his forehead and then hurriedly took his hand away. Eric fingered his split lip. "Yes. We were very tired," repeated Sam, "so we left early. Was it a good -"

The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge. Sam twisted and the obscene word shot out of him. "- dance?"

Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively. 

"We left early."

- Lord of the Flies, William Golding

Christopher Shannon collage print sweatshirt

perhaps the biggest reason behind the slow expansion of my wardrobe would be my own fastidiousness; i really don't like to settle. i want an article of clothing to drive me crazy with longing and fulfill ALL areas of criteria before i go for it. i used to entertain this ridiculous notion of myself as a "shopaholic" but i realised that i was too nitpickety with what i purchase to qualify as one. meagre purse strings does endow one with somewhat of a stricter eye..

the gorgeous geometric proportions of all the various rectangular blocks, the duality of the beautiful photo.. this sweatshirt from Christopher Shannon does the job almost too well.

Suddenly I know a lot about fountains,
those incomprehensible trees of glass.
I could talk now as of my own tears,
which I, gripped by such fantastic dreaming,
spilled once and then somehow forgot.


Could I forget that the heavens reach hands
toward many things and into this commotion?
Did I not always see unrivaled greatness
in the ascent of old parks before the soft
expectant evenings - in pale chants
arising out of unknown girls
and overflowing out of the melody
and becoming real, and as if they must be
mirrored in the opened ponds?


I must only remind myself of all
that happened both with fountains and with me, -
then I feel also the weight of the descent,
in which I saw again the waters:
and know of branches that bent downwards,
of voices that burned with small flames,
of ponds that, feeble-minded and shunted off,
repeated endlessly their sharp-edged banks;
of evening skies, which from charred western forests
stepped back totally bewildered,
arched differently, darkened, and acted
as though this were not the world they had envisioned...


Could I forget that star flanking star grows hard
and shuts itself against its neighbor globe?
That the worlds in space only recognize each other
as if through tears? - Perhaps we are above,
woven into the skies of other beings
who gaze toward us at evening. Perhaps their
poets praise us. Perhaps some of them
pray up toward us. Perhaps we are the aim
of strange curses that never reach us,
neighbours of a god whom their envision
in our heights when they weep alone,
whom they believe in and whom they lose,
and whose image, like a gleam from their
seeking lamps, fleeting and then gone,
passes over our scattered faces...


About Fountains - Rainer Maria Rilke

*

gleaned this Wei Fen Lee's facebook page.. she'd posted a strand from the poem "perhaps we are above, woven into the skies of other beings who gaze up toward us". intrigued, i went to look it up.. i was rewarded with About Fountains. i love how he dabs on a layer of humanly mien over objects which are otherwise inanimate.


i was just telling kelly the other night, how i use passages and excerpts of books on my profiles - without listing the author - as a manner of sifting. i suppose it would be considered passive-aggressive; the individual who, chancing upon my profile, readily identifies the uncredited passage/excerpt because he loves the book too. to possess the knowledge would be to possess the right disposition? most people would ridicule me for that; after all, what are the odds?! 


but we can't help it, can we?

The more that I know
The more I can see
The older I grow
The more I believe
It's not the length of the life
Or the depth of the grave
In the end we'll be measured
By the love that we gave


- Billy Gilman, My Time on Earth

leaden circles dissolved in the air

“…she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”


- 1984, George Orwell

this excerpt from George Orwell's 1984 shall be my epitaph. i was reminded of its permanence tonight when i passed it on to an old friend from my Soup Spoon days. she'd recently lost her life partner to an accident. it is one of those times where everything that comes out of your mouth seems trite and impossibly inadequate.. 

the best i could do, was to give her the gift of dearly loved words. 

this excerpt has always rang true to me; a singular note of the soul blossoming upon the striking of a lonesome bell. i hope it will sound for her as well. 

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. 


A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. 


Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."


- Michael Cunningham, The Hours

i was drawn back to this excerpt from The Hours after a quarrel with my mom.. the quarrel terminated with what could be considered a pyrrhic victory? if only because she started crying in that wheezing, wounded way of hers. i felt horrid; it's one of those hand-wringing moments when your mom cries.  pyrrhic - victory at a terrible cost to the victor. it is a hysterically beautiful word, both in aesthetics and in meaning.

the moment her voice turned wobbly, i knew it was a lost cause and the light would shine against me. i'd not cried visibly but my feelings were hurt as well. "A liquid ache spread under her skin", wrote Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things. it remains one of my favourite phrases, the notion that pain flows where it cannot be seen, curdling deep inside - a vat of insidious sludge, boiling, bubbles slowly but surely bloating, the promised moment of explosion drawn out most languidly, all the more to devastate.  

i wonder how she would react if she knew the secret i was carrying. no one knows, not a single soul. i bear this secret around every day, though it was welded upon my person without permission. but not even i dare to put a name to this secret. i'm afraid to. the secret is that there is no secret? it's all in the mind? until i take the plunge to find out, i'll never know. like a visit to the dentist, one tries his best to put it off though its invisible presence weighs more heavily on the soul than what is opaque.