Spacing Bodies

I am most interested
In the play of forces
Manifest on surfaces.
The game of forces
In the non-space
between bodies.

You educate,
Investigating in truth
Terrain for the taking.

I am entertained,
Finding that
Walking the wind
Is novel,
Being swept off
Your feet, literal.

The game of forces
Spacing bodies.

Shocked by size,
You tell me tales of
Unimagined corpulence
Seen:

Stomachs substituting tables,
Chair overflowing posteriors,
Meals priced for four
Picked at with beefy fingers,
Ingested by one.

My disinterest caught
Out, shocked that
Running the cold
Is impossible:
Inside, numbness gnaws.

Forced to play at what
Surfaces make manifest,
Sharp, sun strokes
On narrow brick
Cannot brush the chill
Off my feet.

The Body tightly wound
Toned musculature disciplines,
Inscribes violence along
A nexus: desire.

Collars and chains
Cannot enslave.
But coiled and kept
Under skin,
Articulated by joints,
Distributed in flesh,
Forces are checked.

Briefly, hand grips pen,
Pen picked up,
Pressed on paper:
A point made is
Pressure built.

Crudely, tongue cut
Is precision turned
Into mummery.
Lips trace a
Fluttered apology.

I am most interested in
Torsos:
Ripped apart
Then stitched together
With seams, left
Undissolved in
Eveloping flesh.

Work in Progress

Of Delany and Derrida

In Samuel R. Delany’s fantasy series, Nevèrÿon, there is a constant consideration of structuralist and post-structuralist theory within the frame of the narrative. By incorporating a highly self-conscious application of critical theory to what could easily pass for typical sword and sorcery fantasy writing, Delany manages to enact a working out of theoretical concepts, not by reading a separate text (as is normally the case) but by constructing a text. This has several implications. The notion of critical theory as an act of close reading and re-reading is shifted onto a different modality: it becomes both an act of creative reading and writing. Also, dramatizing critical theory in a fantasy universe re-aligns the philosophical assumptions / heritage that critical theory often has to engage with. Setting his stories in an unidentified time-space “reality” that seems on the brink of civilization, Delany allows for a re-consideration of the critical theory enterprise, which is itself very much a reaction to and product of a very specific philosophical inheritance. It is precisely because Derrida, in Of Grammatology, reacts to this heritage of Western philosophy, what he calls the “logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence”, that “exigent, powerful, systematic and irrepressible desire for such a (the transcendental) signified” (49). Thus, the displacement of the critical reading project into a world that is unburdened of the specific philosophical assumptions creates an interestingly de-stabilizing application of deconstruction.

In this paper, I will examine some of the forms that this working out takes, in the second book of the series, Neveryóna. In the process, I will suggest that enacting theory through the conventions of speculative fiction offers the potential of concretizing .... At the same time, by making these concepts “concrete” within the narrative, the text exposes severe “limits and presuppositions” (Derrida) that plague the deconstructive enterprise.

Of Collars and Chains

One of the key theoretical enterprises that Neveryóna engages with is the particular mode of reading in Derrida’s work that de-stabilizes conventional binary relationships. For example, when reading Saussure, Derrida makes complex the interior/exterior relationship that seems apparent in the distinction between speech and writing. In particular, he shows that by re-considering the assumption that one term is privileged over the other, a presumption rehearsed over and over by the traditions of Western philosophy, not merely subverts that relationship but more profoundly, emphasizes how intertwined the concepts are. In doing so, one of Derrida’s key argumentative moves seems to be to demonstrate how the identity of one term depends inextricably on the other, rather than in the confidence of a “transcendental signified”:

The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside is always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside and vice versa. (Of Grammatology 35)

Via a similar gesture, Delany explores this binding of binaries in Neveryóna. More specifically, he interrogates the stability of the opposition between slavery and freedom, showing how each term continually derives its meaning from the other, how each term often wanders into the terrain normally associated with its other. However, while Derrida’s reading of Saussure deals with the inside/outside binary as they appear as conceptual terms in Saussure, Delany locates the slavery/freedom binary in symbolic objects: the slave’s collar and an astrolabe. The deconstruction of the binary is enacted through showing the complex manifestation of these objects as signs in the narrative.

The collar ostensibly represents the institution of slavery. This occurs most literally in the fact that individuals that don the collar, or rather have the collar placed upon them, are most assuredly slaves. This fact is demonstrated when Pryn first encounters Gorgik who is wearing “a hinged iron collar” (60). She is immediately consumed by the fear of encountering her first slave up close:

She had seen slaves in the Ellamon market and more recently on the road. But she had never talked to one, nor had she heard of anyone who had. To be standing in a strange city, facing one directly – and such a big one! (61)

Pryn is certain that the man with the collar is indeed a slave, demonstrating not only the ubiquity of institution but also the absolute signification of the collar in Nevèrÿon society. The fact of the man’s slavery quickly overwhelms all other impressions that Pryn may have had of this man and he is objectified as a slave, through the repeated anaphoric reference --“one”. Of course the irony, and hence one de-stabilization of how the notion of slavery is represented, lies in the fact that Gorgik is himself not a slave but “the Liberator”. He wears the collar in solidarity with those who have yet to be set free:

‘I’ve sworn that while a man or woman wears the iron collar in Nevèrÿon, I shall not take the one I wear from my neck.’ (90)

So Gorgik, who fights against the institution of slavery, designates a new public meaning to the collar, one that potentially subverts the received meaning of the collar. Yet Gorgik’s particular designation, one of identifying with those that still suffer as slaves, merely re-inscribes the singularity of what the collar represents in Nevèrÿon: the institution of slavery. Thus, not only does the collar literally represent the institution of slavery, it also represents the tyranny of institutionalized signs suggesting that a reader of such a sign (Pryn) is enslaved to interpreting them narrowly and that the attempt to inscribe new meaning (Gorgik) is contained by the tenacity of conventional readings.

In apparent opposition to the collar, there is the astrolabe. As far as the narrative is concerned, there is only one astrolabe as opposed to the ubiquitous presence of the collar on the necks of slaves whenever they appear. Further, if the collar is a highly public sign whose meaning is immediately and obviously accessible, what the Astrolabe is and represents, remains a mystery for most of the book. In fact, when Pryn notices it on Gorgik’s neck, just several moments after she notices the collar, it is left unnamed, unidentified:

On the copper chain hung a bronze disk the size of her palm – really it was several disks, bolted one on top of the other, with much cut away from the forward one, so that there were little shapes all over it with holes at their points; and some kind of etching on the disk beneath ... Around the rim were markings in some abstract design. (63)

But it is precisely this object that is yet without a name that represents imaginative possibility. The astrolabe is not dismissed as an unidentifiable object. Rather, Pryn is visually attracted by the complexity and artistry of this multi-layered object. She notices the decorative details that await interpretation, the “shapes”, “etching” and “markings” seem to be pregnant with meaning, waiting to be read. Unlike the “hinged iron collar” (60) which is immediately identified in a terse phrase, the astrolabe seduces Pryn’s imaginative faculties.


More literally, the astrolabe represents an invitation to venture beyond the urban confines of the city of Nevèrÿon. Gorgik, when conferring the object onto Pryn, suggests that the “astrolabe is, in its way, a map of just that southern-most peninsula” (257) that lies beyond the control of the Imperial High Court of Nevèrÿon. Indeed, in contrast to the ordered rituals of the Court and the political-commercial dealings that characterize Nevèrÿon, the south is “monstrous and mysterious” (256), a geographical space that is yet untamed by the centers of political and economic power found in the northern port city of Kolhari. In fact, when Pryn receives the astrolabe from Gorgik, she is given the injunction to “Take my gift ... into the south” (259). Not only is the astrolabe freely given (unlike the slave’s collar), it comes with a blessing of sorts, for Pryn to venture into lands unknown. The astrolabe thus comes to represent the freedom of physical as well as imaginative movement.

Yet even as the binary relationship between the slave’s collar and the astrolabe is constructed, its stability is consistently questioned and undermined. The collar, for instance, is never a clear representation of slavery. As was earlier mentioned, the collar mis-represents (at least to Pryn) the fact that Gorgik is not a slave but is in fact the Liberator of slaves. This theme, that the institutionalized sign never unambiguously signifies what it is meant to, is taken up at various points in the text:

A tall woman at the corner newel was fastening a white damasked collar, sewn with metallic threads and set with jewels. It was one of the decorative collar-covers house slaves in wealthier families sometimes used to hide the ugly iron band all slaves wore by law. Having trouble with the clasp, however, the woman removed the cloth to shake it out. Her long neck was bare. She raised the collar-cover again. (57)

The collar is expected, assumed to be present beneath the decorative cover but its presence does not need to be assured for it to have its effect. This description is not an effacement of the collar as slavery is still denoted by a collar, or at least the original expectation for it to be on the woman’s neck; is gestured at by a masking of the physical reality (its ugliness) of the collar. What this moment demonstrates is that the functioning of the slave’s collar as a sign of slavery can take on a very complex nature. A fair amount of toying about with coherent and clear meanings takes place in this moment of signification: the absence of the collar is masked by the cover that is meant to both signal its presence yet hide its materiality. The complex manner in which the sign makes meaning here seems to derive in part, by the Derridean attempt to subvert an “ultra-transcendental” origins of writing through the contradictory notion of the “arche-trace”:

(T)he value of the transcendental arche must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of the arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. ... (O)ne must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that concept always destroys its name .... (Of Grammatology 61)

The contradiction of being felt and yet erased, again characterizes the symbolic value of the collar when Gorgik describes a “freed retainer” of the “Baron Inige”: “Notice how she holds her bristly chin high, which means her neck once wore an iron collar – wore it for many years” (78-79). In this case, the collar has left its mark as a symbol of slavery and its very absence indicates

Perhaps the most fitting demonstration that the collar is at best an ambiguous evocation of slavery occurs near the end of the novel when Pryn helps to rescue an old woman, Burka, from slavery. After cutting the ropes that bind Burka, Pryn is taken aback when Burka seems to take apart the iron collar at will:

The old slave grimaced, slipping two fingers of each hand beneath the iron collar at each side. She pulled.... The lock separated and the collar came open on its hinge. (488)

This slave’s collar does not even function properly – “the lock’s broken ... (but t)he hinge is tight so it holds” (488). Like a collar with a broken lock, the collar’s integrity as an unambiguous signifier of slavery can only function with the willing co-operation of reader of signs. Once the reader of the collar decides to appropriate the collar for other meanings, even meanings that are conventionally held in opposition to the notion of slavery, the collar gives. In fact, the mechanism that enables the collar to be closed around a slave’s neck, the hinge that holds despite the broken lock, creates an illusion of the collar’s integrity. It is this very mechanism that has allowed Burka to take it off at every night because the collar “chokes” her (488). Similarly, it is the very fact that the collar is a sign of slavery, at one remove from the notions of slavery itself, that enables it to retain the semblance of an unambiguous signification slavery while subversive meanings are continually attached to it.

One of these subversive meanings takes the form of the personal erotic attachment to the collar that Gorgik expresses: “The itself may be a sign of all social oppression – yet its wearing can also be an adjunct of pleasure” (249). Not only is the collar’s secure relationship with the notion of slavery undermined when it assumes the status as a fetish for Gorgik, this transformation of the object gives it an intensely private meaning, undermining at another level, the institutionalized, and hence public nature of the collar as a sign of slavery. Another subversive use that the collar is in the way that Gorgik and his lover Small Sarg use it in their modus operandi to free other slaves. The collar enables them to infiltrate the slavers’ camps and attack the slavers from within. In this sense, the collar symbolizes a kind of political empowerment.

This is not to say that Gorgik’s particular attachment of meaning to the collar remains uncontested. In fact, his lover, Small Sarg, argues that “its oppressive meaning debased love” (249). Thus, at the same time that Gorgik is involved in a radical reading of the collar by associating it with sexual pleasure, the reading is irremediably tinged with meanings carried over from the collar’s more conventional meanings. One might argue that perhaps it is precisely these trace associations with slavery that allow Gorgik to find sexual pleasure in the collar. Such a reading effaces the collar’s potency as a sign and merely replaces it with the notion “slavery” and re-instates slavery as the absolute meaning of the collar. This is the mode of reading that Small Sarg advances. After insisting that the collar’s primary significance corrupts love, he later maintains that Gorgik cannot wear the collar and play the part of the slave because Gorgik is “contaminated by the secret productions of lust” (251). Sarg may allow for the collar to assume different meanings but he insists that the effect of the collar is entirely conditioned by an unambiguous transference of essential meanings into other contexts: “(f)or Sarg, the collar was social oppression, as well as all asocial freedom” (255).

In contrast, I believe that the narrative gestures towards the fact that the tension between the sexual, political and institutional significance of the collar cannot so easily resolved by an explanation where meanings are transferred via the sign. In fact, to insist on one primary meaning for the collar, even if it is a subversive one, oversimplifies the complex process of signification that the text assiduously develops. As Gorgik puts it:

If a sign can shift so easily from oppression to desire, it can shift in other ways – toward power, perhaps, and aggression, toward the bitterness of misjudged freedoms by one who must work outside the civil structure. (255)

The is a mode of reading that characterizes the sign in a ceaseless shifting, a movement “toward”, rather than into an absolute position of signification. To a large extent, this is notion reflects Derrida’s recognition of the danger of insisting on positivistic descriptions: “The trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is? and contingently makes it possible” (Of Grammatology 75). Hence, the question, “What is the collar?” is never given a simple answer.

In another sense, the collar subverts its position as an institutional tool with a fixed meaning, by itself being a symbol that inspires contested narratives within the text. It is through explaining the significance of the collar that Gorgik manages to recount the adventures that he had with Small Sarg, indeed, manages to contest an earlier narrative where Small Sarg accuses Gorgik of selling him to slavers. In this way, the collar is a plot device that encourages the telling of stories precisely because of its ambiguous status as a symbol. In fact, the imaginative possibilities associated with the collar fascinate Pryn. Leaving the house of her employer, Old Rokar on the eve of her visit to the Earl Jue-Grutn, Pryn faces the anxiety of not knowing why she has been summoned to the Earl. She turns, in a dream-like moment to the collar:

Pryn felt a moment of disorientation which imagination answered with an image, not of the Liberator, but of Pryn herself wearing the iron collar. She was astonished to feel before the image a relief as intense as the previous anxiety, an intensity as strong as any desire, sexual or other, she’d ever known. (377)

The imaginative relief that Pryn finds in the collar underscores its value as a sign that moves toward multiple meanings. Further, Pryn allows the collar to organize her fantasies of political resistance. She imagines a sequence of confrontations with Rokar, where wearing the collar is calculated to shock Rokar and protest against his own use of slaves:

Sometimes she would arrive for the encounter already wearing the shocking iron – that she would get a smith to forge for her from the growing collection of small coins under her straw pallet with which Rokar was paying her. (377)

In this imaginative manifestation of the collar Pryn does not merely wear the symbol of slavery in order to subvert social categories of “slave” and “free”. Instead, she re-constructs the collar with the very markers that undermine the notion of slavery, paid labor. Hence, the disruptive practice that Pryn imagines involves re-configuring the signifier itself and not merely its signification, perhaps alluding to the fact that the very signifier of slavery can indeed be constituted by the notion of freedom. possibly D 73 – both faces of the sign

If this re-making of the sign indicates the liberation of the imagination that the slave’s collar inspires, re-configuration of the signifier can also undermine the imaginative possibilities inherent in a sign’s apparent complexity. The astrolabe, a mysterious object for most of the narrative, is shown to contain very specific, if discrete meanings. Indeed, it loses its status as an object of imaginative possibility when the Earl Jue Grutn’s son, Ardra, dismantles it and sets it up to show how it “works” (442). While the Earl uses the idea of the astrolabe performing a function rather ironically, for its workings show that it really does not function as an instrument that accomplishes a task, the fact that the astrolabe has to be taken apart and put together through a very specific series of steps – “(t)hat’s the part I thought he wouldn’t remember” (445) – demonstrates a particularity of function that compromises its mystique as a symbol. Further, the patterns on the disks of the astrolabe are not merely decorative. In fact, one of the disks traces the outline of “Gauine”, the non-existent constellation of the dragon (446) and the markings on the rim of another disk merely constitute “a circle of numbers counting nothing” (447). So while there are very specific meanings produced by the astrolabe, these meanings do not transform the astrolabe into a powerful instrument nor amount to a broader theme / principle / key that unleashes imaginative possibilities. In fact, fully assembled, the astrolabe is not a device that guides individuals to Mad Queen Olin’s fabled treasure. Instead, it denies the imaginative impulse for adventure any satiation.

Indeed, summarized, the astrolabe is a negation of secret meanings in particular and more generally embodies a kind of reading practice that is always aware of textual spaces where the desire for absolute meanings can never be fully satisfied:

(I)t is not a key to open a lock; it is not a map to guide you to the treasure; it is not a coded message to be deciphered .... It’s an artfully constructed engine that, by the maneuvering of meanings, holds open a space from which certain meanings are forever excluded, are always absent. (448)

Thus the astrolabe comes to represent a sign that is constantly arranges meanings in a manner that never offers closure. There will always be “excluded” meanings, a kind of possibility for the imagination perhaps, but not in the way that Pryn has thus far understood it, as the capacity for a positivistic experience that is directed toward a goal or imaginative closure. Rather, this opening of a space is in tune with the resistance of “a metaphysics whose entire history was compelled to strive towards the reduction of the trace”(Derrida, 71).

More literally, the liberation of the imagination and action first associated with the astrolabe is complicated / compromised when Burka and another slave notice the astrolabe on Pryn’s neck and relate to her the taboo that Pryn is breaking by bringing the astrolabe south:

To bring that back into the Garth is to is to unleash on us the madness of Olin herself.... You should have never set foot in the Garth Peninsula... When the Vygernangx Monastery thrust even the tip of one tower over the tree tops within the circle of your vision, you should have turned yourself around to ride, run, crawl away as fast as you could go.... (362)

For the slaves, the astrolabe represents not freedom and possibility but a destructive curse. Also, the terror it evokes in the slaves hints at the way the symbol controls the imagination. Their horrified reference to the myth of the Mad Queen Olin (first encountered in the text when Norema tells Pryn the story then later reprised near the end when Pryn imagines herself within the myth) indicates that the astrolabe invokes a myth that has congealed into a cliche. The formulaic phrases – “when the Vygernangx Monastery thrust even the tip of one tower” and “ride, run, crawl away” – of their warning sound like an incantation received in childhood, and reinforced by the telling and re-telling of the myth. In a very real sense, the astrolabe represents the enslavement of the imagination to narrative and myth.

Indeed, the phrases are a formulaic incantation in another sense: Delany’s first book in the series, Tales of Nevèrÿon offers the exact same lines when Gorgik is allowed by his patroness, the Vizerine Myrgot, to leave her service. He is told “never to set foot on the Garth peninsula” (Tales 44) with the exact same injunction that he should abide by the same taboo. It is also then that the Vizerine gives Gorgik the astrolabe though the injunction to never transgress into the Garth is not stated as a condition for owning the astrolabe. Does the transformation of the astrolabe in Neveryóna into an object that embodies the taboo then signal our penchant for fixing myths, for insisting that narratives to take a particular form or shape, for subjugating ourselves to cliched stories that enslave the capacity to imagine?

This is at least true for Pryn, who is disappointed and disconcerted that the astrolabe does not represent an actualization of the myth of the Mad Queen. In response, she re-creates the lost city of Neveryon and the gigantic dragon, Gauine, in a hallucinatory sequence. Trapped by the need for narrative to manifest itself in her own experience, she seems to have come under the power that the slaves attribute to the astrolabe. The re-creation of the scenes earlier narrated to her by Norema and the insertion of herself in the role of Queen Olin are not merely evidence of wish-fulfillment taking place but demonstrate how Pryn’s imagination, fixated on what the astrolabe should mean, enslaves her mentally. In a dramatic gesture, Pryn offers the astrolabe up to the dragon:

“Oh great Gauine, I have come to give my treasure ... !”
... Pryn hurled the astrolabe as high and hard as she could.
Gauine roared.
Gauine beat her wings.
The sea and the winds leapt to answer.
And Pryn ran. (476-477)

Thus if the collar enables to Prynn to imagine herself in a position of resistance and power, the astrolabe has an almost hypnotic effect on Prynn, enslaving her imagination to a narrative from an earlier part of her adventures that she vaguely remembers. This in effect, demonstrates how intertwined the collar and the chain are even though they appear to represent polar opposites. Through this complex investigation of the signs of slavery and freedom, the narrative undermines the straightforward distinction between the two terms by showing that the very signs that evoke either slavery or freedom could very well be constituted by the opposing concept. This twinning of opposites is succinctly summarized in moment before her visit to the Earl Jue Grutn, where she imagines how she might act when she meets him:

She envisioned herself removing the chain from her neck and tossing it to him – or presenting it graciously to him as a gift – in either case, the same sort of amusingly arrogant gesture as taking on the collar. And probably as unnecessary. (379)

While I have demonstrated that Neveryóna constantly presents acts of de-constructive reading, I now wish to propose that these acts of de-construction are necessarily circumscribed by the very elements that de-stabilize meaning in the first place.

The process by which the de-stabilization of binary oppositions takes place depends very much on the meanings that the slave’s collar and astrolabe take on throughout the narrative. While the fact that they are at one remove from the concepts of slavery and freedom, which they constantly undermine, affords a certain mobility of signification, this gap between the conceptual and the material circumscribes the de-constructive movements of the text. In order for the collar and the chain to remain effective as representations of the tendency in reading to cause slippages of meaning, they can never be fully occupied or substituted by the concepts that they represent – their status as material objects has to persist within the narrative. However, their material presence as objects in a world of things becomes a problematic fact that limits the de-constructive impulses of the text.

Firstly, there is the lingering presence – both actual and implied – of these objects throughout the narrative. As has been pointed out, the various manifestations the signs of the collar and the astrolabe have taken in the novel go a long way in disrupting the notion of the transcendental signified. Yet the very fact that they continually make an appearance, precisely because so much attention is given to them as privileged objects within the world of the novel, the penchant for a metaphysics of presence draws a limit on the deconstructive movements of the text. Pryn, the character that comes closest to the character that is most exposed to the various transgressive and libratory readings of signs, ends up still under the sway of the presence that she might find in these objects. Near the end of the novel, Pryn keeps Burka’s collar after she frees Burka and her fascination the collar leads her to put it on:

(She) pulled the iron collar from her sash and raised it to her neck. She pushed the iron semi-circles closed – a small click.... She felt a tingling over her entire body. No one seemed to be watching. It struck her for the first time as she dropped her chin almost to hide it now she wore it, that the collar was not particularly comfortable. (503)

Pryn’s act demonstrates the difficulty a reader of signs encounters in effacing the prominence of the very objects that became so because they were consistently re-iterated as points of contested meaning. Because the collar as a sign still retains its material presence as a collar, and has to in order to be read as a slippery sign, there is the possibility of the object re-asserting itself in a most narrow and literal way. In spite of the dramatic readings which liberated the slave’s collar from merely signifying slavery and showing that it could very well be allied with notions of freedom, Pryn still experiences the collar as a technology of bodily control. And it does not end with the physical. Pryn joins a group of slaves and tries to locate the difference that marks slaves out as slaves apart from the collar:

Certainly there must be something that marked them as different, marked them as belonging to the collar – which, now she had become part of its meaning, was, after all, only a sign. (504)

Her recognition that the collar is “only a sign” does not come with the attendant realization that there is nothing inherent or natural in the disposition of slaves that makes them slaves. She does not realize that even if she finds a distinguishing feature, that too will merely be a sign of slavery, indeed, only “marking” them as different. In effect, the liberalization of meaning that has been dramatized through the de-construction of the binary relationship between symbolic objects is never set free from a lingering notion of transcendental signification lodged in the objects themselves. These readings still “belong to the collar”.

Secondly, despite the radical destabilization of meanings associated with reading the collar and the astrolabe, the objects seem to exist on the exterior of the transgressive discourse, seem to become figures for the notion of “trangressive discourse”. This emerges when one considers the fact that the majority of the acts of transgressive reading begin as attempts to understand the significance of these objects or to re-interpret them. In a very literal sense, these readings take place in the light of these objects. The long discourses by Gorgik on the slave’s collar and by the Earl on the astrolabe take place because the objects are indeed placed at the center of discussion. However, by the end of novel, the accumulative effect of these varied and temporally fragmented moments of discourse, accumulative because of the plot moves Pryn through these moments of discourse, is one that posits the slave’s collar and the astrolabe as existing in order to allow those discursive explorations. This perhaps is the difficulty of working out critical concepts through a fictional world: the objects of that world quickly become subordinated as secondary to the principles of reading and writing that seem to be more internal to the message of the text.

Morningside Heights

We couldn't be more different.

I, seeing dark punched out of
Light, drawn by the
Sweep of a wasted city --
Fuses blown, black soot
Halos -- what pulses
Forbidden, misplaced?

I, raising my eyes to steel
Teased out of sky -- desire
Elongated -- vertical lines.
Framing its own picture
Starkly against grey.

Building blocks of dark.

You laugh,
Tugging on leashes of
Our obligation:
Darkness on a body of light
Is a dangerous gash.

Traces

Deconstruction -- misused to mean taking apart and then to analyze discretely. Heard misused since I was an undergraduate. Misused by everyone from clever students to maths teachers. Of course used correctly if one never knew about DECONSTRUCTION. But probably safer to approach the thought through its specifics: its paradoxes, the collapse of metaphysical certainties, the questioning of "natural" binaries, the erosion of "presence", the rubbing of the interior against the exterior, the play of writing, the violence of writing, writing as inside language as language, and always, traces.

Overheard --
Int: "So what is it like to see your theories, like deconstruction, being played out in popular culture?"
Der: "?"
Int: "Like the American sit com -- Seinfeld. Critics have said that deconstruction has influenced comedies ..."
Der: "Seinfeld?"
Int: "Yes, it's an American comedy ..."
Der: "Deconstruction is not about comedy."

"Rousseau knew that death is not the simple outside of life. Death by writing also inaugurates life.... Death is the movement of differance to the extent that movement is necessary finite." Of Grammatology

Logocentrism (or another scene of domestic bliss)

Another delightful evening finds our protagonists sitting in their living room cum study. Both are peering into books that have been assigned for their respective courses. On the chair by the window, ET sits, reading a book on the evolution of race and biology while GL tries to make sense of Culler on Saussure. We intrude into this scene with a keen awareness that both out readers are in deep thought, though what they are thinking about is not apparent to the other person ...

ET: I've got so much reading to complete by the next lesson. I've got to finish this book and other stuff ...
Me: Yup -- it's like that for me too ...
ET: But it's different ...
Me (now vaguely interested): Why? There's as much reading in Lit ... we do two to three books a week ...
ET: Yah. But I'm reading about theories. You're ONLY READING STORY BOOKS...

What was exchanged after that would be of interest only to the parties involved but needless to say, words were exchanged. But let us take a step back from that last remark, "You're ONLY READING STORY BOOKS ...", and consider it in the light of Logocentrism.

The assumption in a comment like that can trace itself to a the binary relationship between "form" and "content". In effect, Logocentrism (a neologism derived from the Greek Logos -- the Supreme Word -- and somewhat popularised by that mad brilliant Frenchman Jacques Derrida) is an insistence that the REAL/CORE/ ESSENTIAL/the TRUE should be privileged over APPEARANCE/ REPRESENTATION/ SURFACE. Derrida exposes this as a myth that has been handed down by the Enlightenment but there are implications even before one tries to overturn the distinction.

A Logocentric view of language and knowledge takes "language" as a transparent, objective, uninvolved vehicle of "ideas", privileging the latter over the former. Hence, language is merely the receptacle used to contain the vastly more important "ideas", merely used as a mode of communication. Implicit is the idea that "ideas" exist prior to language; that under different circumstances "ideas" could be transmitted without "language" anyway. We see this insistence of the Logocentric in EVERY English/GP/Humanities class where are essays and writing are the issue:

"It's the ideas that are more important than the grammar or style what. So why are you penalising me because of my language? It's only language what."

"Can you proof read this submission? It's for the Maths/Science/Physics whatever. You don't need to bother about the content -- just look at the language."


Roland Barthes has pointed out that the "science" (under which he includes the social sciences) has been most guitly in promulgating this position, believing that "language" is an instrument that knowledge can confidently deploy for its own purposes. In opposition stands "literature" where the distinction between "form" and "meaning" are endlessly collapsed and questioned. it is then the study of literature, of how forms disrupt the confidence with which we presume the ascendancy of "meaning". Story books have already discovered every theory that psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and the hard sciences have. But they evade the tyrannical confidence of Theory by self-consciously privileging the "act" of knowing rather than presuming it.

Gary, when are we going to do some writing?

An interesting occurrence in class today. After about 30 mins of talking about the Freud piece that we were supposed to be reading in preparation for a long writing assignment, one of the students, frustrated, asked me, “Why are we doing all this? isn’t this supposed to be English 101?” And I had a mini-coup on my hands.

People started piping up, “Yeah – when are we going to do some writing? All we’re doing is talking about ideas. We’re supposed to be writing!”
“Aren’t you going to tell us exactly what we need to do in the writing assignment?”
“We need to know exactly what the 101 course is about!”
“I don’t get this stuff. It’s just too hard. I need to get writing.”

I desperately tried to explain that we would get to the writing soon. But they weren’t appeased. After the lesson, a group stayed back and explained the situation to me.

Several had been taking ENGL 095, an even more basic writing course where they dealt with paragraph structure, points of grammar and essay structure very explicitly. They’d been told exactly what to do when writing an essay. They wanted the same thing. They wanted to write, or be told what exactly to write.

Which struck me as rather significant.

First – no student, in my time teaching in Singapore has ever stopped a class where we were having a discussion about ideas (and mind you, the lesson this morning WAS an animated discussion of ideas) to insist that we should be writing.
Second – the age old question: can we write without content? The students wanted to write BUT they did not get the Freud. How much understanding of ideas is required for writing?
Third – the pragmatics of the situation manifested itself.
• “Do you know it’s taken me two years to qualify for this class!” ie I’ve spend two years in remedial English and I need to pass this class!
• “If I don’t pass this class, I don’t get my financial aid and I can’t continue ...”

My compromise? Instead of discussing the passages some more – we were supposed to apply the Freud to a short story, I said we would do writing in the next lesson, based on the Freud alone. I actually don’t think this is a satisfactory situation because it means that people will be writing in a vacuum. But at least it’ll allay some panic about being prepared for the exam and it’ll get some work done.

Dinner Conversations

Over dinner last night, a strange conversation. Slurping down our third meal of instant noodles and dumplings for the week, the following:
Me: You know I’m reading this Delany book, it’s a memoir of his time as a struggling writer, when he was 18 and married to Marilyn Hacker. It’s intriguing that he managed to explore his homosexual instincts so freely. I mean, he goes into a subway toilet at 125th street, looks over this other guy in the stall, they exchange smiles, then they get it on.
ET: Should I be concerned that you find homosexual explorations intriguing?
Me: No no – the point here is how easy it was. He just looked over and smiled. And it’s like a public toilet.
ET: You really need to protect your mind while you’re reading all this stuff. You don’t need to be homosexual to be good at Lit. And don’t go and try smiling at people in the toilets here.
Me: That’s not the point.
ET: You mean you’re reading the book because it’s full of homosexual encounters. If you tell me you’re homosexual, I’ll jump off the Brooklyn bridge ...
Me: Ok. I don’t go around smiling at people in the toilets. I don’t even use the urinals. I go into the stalls and close the door. But I read Delany because he’s probably the best contemporary writer I know. It’s just that when you want to have a conversation about a books with people, you need to pick out the sensational bits, to make conversation. Look here (flip flip flip) ...

“Every once in a while I would get up to wander into the kitchen to stir the skillet full of spaghetti sauce I’d done up from a recipe on the back of a small white-and-green cardboard box of oregano leaves, the counter still flaked with bits of onion and three fugitive pieces of tomato. Or I’d wander into the front bedroom – just as another arc from the hydrant below broke between the black fire escape slats to sing across the grass, and five hundred purple crescents would gem and drool the pane, while I stood watching the motion of light in water.”

He’s obviously writing in retrospect and thus poeticising the mundane. Still, this is some of the keenest description of the mundane that I’ve seen in a long time. The alliteration in the first two lines is varied with the subsequent consonant and vowels fusing the repeated “s” into the sentence, such that they don’t stick out and draw attention to themselves but bring energy to the line so that its length becomes seductive rather than laborious. And that wonderful synesthetic image of a jet spray “sing(ing) across the grass” having those twin effects -- “gem and drool” – the ornate and the primal, all on an evening of living, young and poor, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

I'll make a comment on the Comments

A response to the truly "Anonymous":

I think it's quite a keen observation, about students feeding on ignorance -- like vultures you say -- an image that does imply that their quarry (would you even call it that since vultures don't hunt) is already dead and, well, rotting. The image is "productive" (a word I'll come back to later) in that it proposes that ignorance alone is not that which students will pounce upon and have for lunch ... It's ignorance that possesses stale, rotting air about it. It is an ignorance that refuses to budge from its position of not knowing, that refuses to move from the assumption of its "rightness", in spite of its incomplete knowledge, that students sense in teachers and love to tear apart. Then again, like vultures, I don't think many students actively engage most teachers about their own ignorance. Instead, they take a nibble here and a bite there whenever they can, rather opportunistically. In fact, an out and out showdown in the open, that would actually be healthy, I think for classrooms where the students are less than satisfied with the quality of the teaching / teacher.

Second, "hunk!?!?!" As Harris would point out, "hunk" is significant, not because of what it means denotatively but because of its contextual significance. Here, one finds the opposition between a "paragidmatic" versus a "syntagmatic" view of language. After more than one year of playing out the "hunk" ritual while morning announcements take place ... hey "hunk" comes to represent a lot more.

Third, "ewww how proletarian." "Proletarian" followed by "ewww", what does one make of that? A certain disgust? A mocking, screwed up face? The danger of the following comments is that they may romanticise poverty and the working class but I firmly believe that to use the "proletariat" as a marker of derogation, designating the working class as a demonised and impoverished "Other", is an indication of the commodity culture that has infected our societies. To think of the "proletariat" as the lower classes, is indicative of a class consciousness that is a product of affluence. Not a revolutionary class consciousness as Marx would have, but a lackadaisical assumption that the working class and their concerns can be readily dismissed. "Ewww how bourgeois" would be my response. Now if the comment had said "Ewww how 'village people' " ...

Last - to tie it all up (through an amazing stretching of ideas / boundaries). The students where I'm teaching at, BMCC, ARE the proletariat. They don't have nice cushy backgrounds. They come to school for an hour in the morning, work a normal work day, then come back for another lesson at night. I don't know how much "passion" one can have for ideas / abstractions given that kind of challenge. It's a real challenge for me, coming from a background of immense academic privilege, to locate myself in that kind of classroom, not in a condescending manner, but in a manner where I can help these students achieve their goals (which is a college degree so that they can get a better job ...) To push the argument further, the question of whether Lit is at all relevant to the concerns of the "proletariat", is fundemental, in helping these students see that the knowledge they acquire in the classroom is worth their commute, is worth the baby-sitter that they had to employ, is worth the overtime pay they they're missing out on. Lit Crit has, for too long (in the Singapore school system at least), been confined to the narrow formalist modes of the New Critics who believed in texts as "Artistic works, complete, whole objects" to be appreciated, mixed in a little with some reader response theory -- "what does this wonderful work of art say to your emotions". But very little has focussed on an ideological- productive view of the literary ie, how literary works, in their production, consumption and intepretation, demonstrate the class biases of a society or indicate ways that might abolish inequalities. Does thinking about "Hamlet" force one to think about the patriarchial systems that dominate modern society are a product of inbreeding and incest (culturally speaking)? A critical reading framework that takes into account Marxist theory and cultural materialism is needed to unmask some of the hegemonic ideological illusions that bourgeois readings have promulgated.

Is it all worth it, these intellectual acrobatics? Or as the pencilled margin notes in this book that I just borrowed "The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World" put it, is it all "meaningless mumbo jumbo" ...?

To Harris and Andrew (who also posted comments) -- don't feel left out ok?

Being Observed

Finally, I started on "the new life" today. I taught my first lesson today ... actually I don't think I taught anything ... just went through some of the class policies and some of the things that the class should expect. As always, I did not get much sleep the night before. It's the day before classes dread that I get in Singapore as well ... Ms Tan gets it ... and we'll like stare and the ceiling the day before a new term and ask each other, intermittently, "you still awake?"

Anyway, last night there were like people in the street outside our window talking really loudly. They just parked their car in the middle of the street and started to have a conversation at the top of their voices. So at least there was a reason for NOT getting enough sleep. An excuse, more like -- I doubt I would have slept very well anyway.

So being typically anxious, I got out of the apartment really early -- which actually turned out to be quite fortunate as there was a train delay later. I got to the college, "the Borough of Manhattan Community College", about 1/2 an hour before ... which was just nice ... got waved through the NYPD officers on security duty -- yup all CUNY campuses have NYPD security officers ... I think because we're a university that is run by the city ... columbia for eg, employs their own security people ... -- and found my room.

Of course my paranoia materialised in the fact that there was a blackboard (which I have not used since ... lower sec ...) and no chalk on the board. Of course being paranoid (and slightly obsessive) also means that I had made a mental note of where to get fresh supplies of chalk from (the Dept Office photocopy room...) when I visited the college two days ago. Come to think of it, it's these tiny things that make me most anxious. It's not the content of the lesson ... it's like where to photocopy (nowhere for now as I don't have authorisation), where to get the name list (nowhere for now cause the Dept hasn't made up one) and where the rooms are located. Actually, I ended up directing new students to their rooms cause they kept coming into mine even though the number of their schedules said something different -- I guess people are attracting to a classroom with lights on, nevermind the room number says "N 736" and not "S 722".

Anyway, the students in my class -- students, not pupils, according to the MOE powers that be because they're all over what age is it, 14? -- drifted in throughout the hour long lesson. They couldn't find the room, went to the wrong room, etc. They're an immensely mixed bunch -- I got them to write their names and we have (a sampling) ... "Kimberly Ramos", "Shi Jie Tan", "Peteulah Charles" ," David F. Narvaez", "Vllanda Barnett", "Alan Aramburu"... so - a real hodge podge of ethnicities. Assuming that position on the teachers' desk does wonders for your credibility and authority. I just sat there and they came in very respectfully and sat very quietly in their seats. I could have been just another student faking it ...

The nice thing about the class was that they were quite spontaneous. When I asked for the different kinds of writing that they knew, hands went up all over the class. They were pretty eager to show what they knew. I was actually rather relieved about that. Nothing like being in a totally alien environment and having a totally silent class. Anyway I amazed myself at how anal I was about going through the class guidelines ... I normally don't but teaching cross-culturally, I decided it was proabably appropriate to do so.

So after going through all the required stuff, I introduced myself and asked them where they thought Singapore was. One girl said "Next to Malaysia!" Someone said, "In Thailand" Most said, "In Asia! Near China!" I needed to explain South East Asia -- which they immediately understood because of Vietnam. To establish more credibility, I explained that I'd taught at several places (which is true) and in High School (which is true) and that I was a PhD student (which is also true). THEN ...

Me: "Any questions? Nothing too personal now ..."
Girl: "How long you've been here, in NY?"

Me : "Long enough to know what TriBeCa* stands for ... Now for your homework assignment ..."
Me : "How long have I been here? What is Time but a shred of that complex fabric called Existence? To account for the Time that I've been here would reduce my existence to random threads that precariously stitch together the patchwork of my life ... Now for your homework assignment ..."
Me: Errrm ... Two weeks...

At which point the class breaks up in what seems to me to be an enthusiastic uproar -- but I'm autistic so they might actually have been protesting ... : "Woah that's crazy man!", "You gotta be kidding me!" "Two WEEKS? Man!"

Ok. So I'm slightly worried now that I've blown my cover. But actually, why should it worry me? Ah well, we'll see how the next lesson goes. Hopefully they'll turn up.



*TriBeCa actually stands for "the Triangle Below Canal (Street)" so that wouldn't have been a lie either. Somewhat like SoHo, which is often mixed up the London's once seedly now uppity Soho, which stands for "South of Houston (Street)".

Some observations -

There a tensions in this city that rest just beneath its surface, errupting occassionally but in a somewhat frightening manner.

Two days ago -- as part of the administrative pilgrimage that I've been hopelessly sent on while I've been here -- I went to get a social security number, after finally having the right documents (several letters from my school) to make an application. I need the social security number to work here -- at least to work here legally and to get paid. Anyway, we were waiting in this lift lobby -- a small crowd of us, about 15, waiting to get into the lift that would bring us up to the offices. The security guard on duty (black) limits the number of people that get into the lift -- to six I think -- of course he does this in a rather callous manner, rather brusquely issuing instructions about how to queue up and stopping people from getting in the lift. Anway, this white guy just in front of me, tries to RUSH the lift. He actually propels his (rather rotund -- I feel miniscule here) body into the lift and tries to get it going. The security guard (equally large) WRESTLES him out of the lift, much to the horror of the people in the lift and much to my consternation (I'm next in line, remember ?) Then the insults begin:

White guy: "YOU FIT in the lift, you fatso. Why can't I get in? You're fatter than me."
Guard: "You fat asshole. There's a limit."
WG: "Yeah? What's the limit? You don't know do ya?"
Guard: "You fatasshole."
WG: "What is it you said? Could you repeat that?"
Guard: "You heard what I said ..."
WG: "No I didn't, cause I WASN'T paying attention to you, you fatso."
Guard: " You're an asshole"
WG: "You can't count can you? You can't count how many ..."
Guard: "You're on medication aren't you? I can tell ... you're on medication ..."


Then in the lift, this white guy picks on ANOTHER black guy. And they have a staring match right over my head. In the meanwhile, I'm desperately trying to avoid all eye contact.

Then again. Yesterday, at an outdoor concert, there was a Black Dance group whose dance incorporated some poetry. The poetry was very nice. Full of images of richness and opulence that harkened to an imagined Africa (eg "paths, made of mother of pearl" ). Anyway, some white guy (again) stood up and starting cursing the whole performance. Condemning it as black nationalism. The security people had to come in to diffuse the situation.

So far -- it's the white people who aren't behaving themselves.

My only encounter about MY ethnicity so far:

At the registrar's office ... a clerk (who isn't really helpful -- with an italian accent ...)
C: So waddaya STARdying?
Me: English.
C: ENGlish? That's reFRESHing you know, that's a nice change. I LIKE that. Cause you guys NORMally do the Phee-sics, the MatheMAaaatics, you know. ENGlish... that's gooooood.

Leaving on a Jet Plance

Is a song that I've always thought was very cheesy. Not least because John Denver sang it. But if songs provide the unobstrusive haunting background music of our lives and we look to them to provide some form of release from the otherwise mechanical process of checking-in, queuing up, sitting down and flying off, here's a song for the moment. Of course the specifics are all inappropriate -- but that line -- "All my bags are packed and I'm ready to go ..." it gets me.

I'm glad about the chance to go. to do something different for a while -- not that different considering that it's all Lit and teaching still. There is a stubborn romantic belief that I need to know about what living "over there" is like -- if only for a short while. I have no grand ambitions about moving away "for good" or "making it" elsewhere. I remain firmly believing that it doesn't really matter where you are as long as your read the right books, think about things, keep the music always playing in the background of your mind. But when the opportunity presents itself -- or rather -- when I've worked so hard to make this "leaving" happen, I can't help but invest a certain amount of desire and anticipation in the event.

Of course leaving isn't going to be easy. It's probably easier for me than Ms Tan, who has such strong ties with family and friends here. I know I will try very hard to keep in touch -- with people who want to know about what's going on, with people who have shared special moments with me -- but I also know that we're creatures of presence (believing or caught, intensely entangled in the metaphysics of presence, exposed, if not denied, by Derrida but affirmed in the redeeming illusions of touch, whispers, sighs, smells) and that being so far away will make casual coffee breaks, long lunches, and the occassional dinner meeting onyl cherished memories. I'm bringing as much of my life as I can, the books (26 in all -- an assortment of sizes ...) and my CD collection, diligently translated into 10 gigs on my imac) and I suppose that'll help. But the quotidian will be missed. Mush missed, I suppose, only when I'm there and face a new set of mundane challenges without the friends and acquaintences that make life just that little bit more interesting.

So -- a silent good bye.

Big Hairy Deal

Ok so my fashion ambition in life is to have long wavy hair and to look good with it. Of course, I've been disuaded constantly by just about every family member, the people I work with (in varying intensities) and just about everyone else who has an opinion on the matter. The nicest thing anyone has said about my attempts to keep my hair long: "Just do what you want ... as long as you're happy ... " Hey! It's not about being happy -- it's about looking nice. Then again, many hold the opinion that with the face that I've got, there isn't much that can be done to improve the dire situation.

Anyway the long hair look isn't supposed to end me up looking like one of those Taiwan Boy Band boys ... it's supposed to be "Eric Clapton in the early 90s" -- or "Nick Drake before he comitted suicide" ... pictured here:


So I asked Ms Tan -- late last night -- ok honestly -- do you ever think I'll look like that. She kinda laughed and said something about my face not having the bone structure -- ok so it's all in the face. To sort of verify this, I decided to have a look myself:



(shoot -- there's that double chin flopping around as well ...)

Well -- I suppose most people are right about that. Instead of the high cheekbones and cleft chin, I've got a somewhat mooney face. Add my normal stuporic look -- I guess the long hair just says, "drug addict", "unkempt" or "potential terrorist".

So I decided to give in -- against my better instincts -- and get a hair cut. This I did after collecting my new IC. Yes turning 30 in Singapore means you get thmub-printed 3 times -- twice on a cool scanner thing and once in ink -- oh, make that four -- you have to do one yourself when you mail in your new ic application ...

Anyway -- at least my IC has me with the long hair. I don't think there's much difference in the way I look between the various ICs that I have ...

This is the one I made in 1991 -- when I was 17. Note the damn retro specs and ever futile attempt at a smile.


This was when I re-enlisted for NS in 1998

And the latest installment -- I look like some pasty buddha in this one -- check out the fat cheeks man and trademark greasy hair...


Ok so I've got my hair cut and collected a new pair of specs. Here's the new look:

Face like that -- not much can be done, I suppose. As long as they don't stop me at immigration and say that I'm holding on to a fake passport ...

Weekends

This must be the greatest National Day weekend of them all. A FRIDAY of celebrations in school (which I conveniently skipped) then the actual thing only happening on MONDAY which means we get TUES off as well. Which is just as well as I've got too much to do in too little time. Besides the immense amount of marking that I've got lined up, I'm also supposed to finish writing those all important documents called testimonials and look at Project Work reports. Too much too much too much to do.

Anyway -- on this great weekend -- I've realised that I have nothing significant left to say about anything because I'm too damn busy with the trivialities of life. sigh.

OK -- I think this has become the story of my life -- I'm great at making everything the NON EVENT. I was just thinking -- actually I've been in the last few days talking consistently with Ms Tan and thinking about the ways we're saying GOODBYE. Given that we're both going away for a couple of years (hopefully -- if I don't screw up and end up failing) I'd say that it's a valid kind of experiment. An uneasy pattern has been developing. For example:

Scenario One
ET: You know what happened in school today?
Me: What?
ET: Some of my colleagues came up to me and said goodbye, then started crying ...
Me: Really. Wow. They really love you huh ...
ET: I don't know -- I don't even know them that well.
Me: You know what happened to me?
ET: What?
ET: My HOD came up to me and said, "giggle giggle, looks like we have to work you to the bone until your last day ..."

Scenario Two
ET: My sec one girls are MAD!
Me: What did they do?
ET: They said they wanted to take photos of me and chased me snapping pictures of my back.
Me: Wow -- they really love you.
ET: They're mad.
Me: I've got a photo story too ... I was made to sit in the front row of the dept photo -- I almost got away with standing behind until the stupid photography teacher in charge noticed I was the only male in the back ...
ET: How is this relevant ?
Me: You tell me ...

Scenario 3
ET: How, I feel so bad -- my friends got me so much stuff (ie shoes, trip to Bintan, Creature II Speaker System -- which guess who has to lug to bloody NY)
Me: Wow -- your friends love you ...
ET: How, I feel so bad ...
Me: I also got a lot of stuff -- got marking, got June marking, Testimonials, US Applications, plato to read ...
ET: *Killer Stare*
Me: oooops ...

Scenario Four
ET: I've got so many notes to write to my class, I can't finish. I need to make all these cards, how? Then tonight I'm going out to watch dim-sum dollies with the RGS pple, how?
Me: Why do you even bother?
ET: Because I've got things to tell them. It's closure. If I don't tell the girls these things, their blood is on my head ...
Me: Eh - you very intense ... you're like a teacher that slams them, whacks them, scolds them then when you leave you must leave with a parting shot ... and they love you ... I'm in awe ...
ET: How how to finish?
Me: I also got a lot of stuff -- got marking, got June marking, Testimonials, US Applications, plato to read ...
ET: *Killer Stare*
Me: oooops ...
(yes when conversations with your wifey start to end the same way ... better stop talking and go listen to Billie Holiday and watch NDP Parade so that you can Kao Pei one last year ... Fine and Mellow man)

On "Home"

They appear like apparitions, dark silhouettes waiting to take shape by the "river that gives us life". The light shimmers but we cannot quite make out gender, race or individual identity. But some things are clear – they are children, young and energetic, and they are Singaporean. Welcome to the latest installment in the Great Singaporean Music Video.

When Dick Lee's homage to being Singaporean, Home, made its debut as a National Day song in 1998, people noted its honesty. It wasn't filled with the jingoistic injunctions ("Stand up, stand up for Singapore!), insecure declarations ("We're going to show the world what Singapore can be"), repetitive and flawed logic ("This is my family, these are my friends/ We are Singapore, Singaporeans") or the bare-faced lies ("Every creed and every race, has its role and has its place/ One people, one nation, one Singapore!") that had characterised previous attempts at the Singapore Song. In fact, it seemed to blend the intensely personal experience of finding one's place in Singapore and being rooted to the Singaporean landscape in a sincere and unobstrusive manner. No one was telling you that you were Singaporean or what you had to do to be one. Instead, there was a recognition that each individual's everyday experiences – knowing every "street and shore" and "winding through my Singapore" – were enough to authenticate one's sense of belonging to the country. This was certainly a Singapore Song with a difference. The fact that Kit Chan – a recording artiste that had made good internationally – sang it, seemed to underscore the fact that at last, here was a Singapore Song that was more than a mere collation of slogans. Finally, Singaporeans thought they had a Song that didn't need to be coerced from the vocal chords of thousands of school children, but one that could be enjoyed and taken seriously, precisely because it didn't take the task of Nation Building too seriously.

So what happens when there hasn't been a memorable Singapore Song in several years? The National Day theme songs in 2002 (We will get there) and 2003 (A place in my heart), were frankly, forgettable. The last decent attempt was Tanya Chua's 2001 composition, Where I Belong. In 2004, the Ministry of Propaganda (also known as the Ministry for Information and the Arts) has decided to take a hint from these dismal failures and forgo commissioning a song this year. But every true-blue Singaporean needs his daily shot of patriotic feeling, especially right around the end of July. The solution? Re-package the most popular Singapore Song in recent history as a feel-good music video. But as with every re-fashioning of art, and especially when the goals are explicitly ideological, much is sacrificed.

"20 Locations"

This is a music video about space. It seems appropriate, given song lyrics which emphasise the location of memory and the feeling of belonging in the tangible personal experience of specific spaces. But while the lyrics appreciate the particular experience of space, the images in the music video exteriorise space, turning it into a bland background of reductive symbols. Primarily, there are the images of water (the Singapore River, reservoirs, a coastal location), sky (poetically bleached from blue to white) and grass, lots of grass. Buildings when they exist, are either idealised fragments (an early shot of the columns at the Supreme Courts, the skyline of the central business district), empty (an interior of an exhibition hall) or too far in the background to be significant (a very distant long shot of HDB flats). Even as the children who are featured in the video go about experiencing Singapore's sights, they are shuttled through unseen streets and rivers in open air buses and boats, the over-arching sky and buildings devoid of life always streaming by in the background. The experience of Singapore's spaces is detached, touristy.

"63 kids"

The stars of this music video are children, school children from several local school choirs. They wear the same clothes, a white traditional-looking top and black trousers. One cannot make out which ethic tradition this type of dressing derives from, except that is vaguely Asian. The video is thus not one that acknowledges the ethnic diversity that is a fact of life in Singapore but a simplistic attempt to over-ride the complexities of culture via the short-cut of dressing everyone uniformly. While portrayals of equality between the races in Singapore are usually conveyed by casting the requisite number of representatives from each of the major races in a music video, this video goes further in attempting to erase every mark of ethnic identity. In fact, this blurring of ethnic identity is so effective that even gender becomes erased. The formless costume obscures, except in close-ups, the distinction between the masculine and feminine as well. The Singapore identity – shapeless, vague, mere voices in harmony.

Noticeably missing from the video are the vast majority of Singaporeans called "Adults". It seems strange, given the accumulated memories of places, experiences and relationships that form the central thrust of the song, that Adults, who would be prime repositories of these memories, are absent. From every single shot. In fact, there seems to be a predominance of the very young: with only fleeting glimpses of teenage students, the images that pre-dominate are of pre-adolescent children. What would they know of Singapore one asks? But it is not what they know about Singapore that is important. It is the message that Singaporeans can be nostalgic about their memories as long as they retain the energy and vigour of youth, regardless of age, that matters. As long as they do not try to actualise their pining for "that" Singapore. "This" Singapore, is a country for the young. The old (regardless of age) burdened by their memories and lived experience, are irrelevant.

"1 mission"

I could suggest that the impending handing over of the State into the hands of new Prime Minister who wants to be seen as a fresh young successor (he turns fifty-two this year) to the dynasty that is now rightfully his, might motivate the political symbolism of youth. I could suggest that the sanitised images of Singapore merely confirm his reputed aversion for the common man. But no one would believe me. Or I could suggest, that old men wait in the shadows of Cabinet, appearing like apparitions, dark silhouettes waiting to take shape by the river that has brought us life ...

The Video

On This Day

I taught two new classes. J one classes whose teacher has just given birth - standing in teacher. I wonder about the whole thing. It's been several years teaching but I think there is something infinitely testing and challenging about having to do a lesson with a new bunch of faces. Anyway -- did a pretty run-o-the-mill video lesson -- nothing sparkly or flashy.

I really feel like I'm never going to leave cleanly. I've just got too much that isn't moving. I've still got holiday marking to do -- yes -- stuff from JUNE, a J one Comprehension, Testimonial to write (those are moving, thank goodness) and a Compre to set for the Prelims. In my time of dying, I will be found with a Red Pen in hand muttering. "Truth ... truth ..."

Wish I could put away most of this and start concentrating on saying goodbye. I suppose the rush of things that I am doing means that I won't really realise that I'm going to miss faces, places and bodies -- until I'm gone. Which, perhaps, isn't too bad after all.

Have you wondered

if you'd take my in your arms and tell me that the charms that flow from your milk-shake hair will envelop us in a mueslin cloth floating free from time? I often think of half-felt impulses, words caught by the web of propriety in my throat -- words stumbling with the lub-dub of my beating heart but becoming formless in the noise of consciousness. Thickly, there is no heart that would bear this. You paddy foot around with strange ideas -- rejecting sanity like the distant barking of dogs or the rattling exhaust pipes ill-fitted on ramshackled lorries.

You looked at the fillets of sting-ray waiting to be barbarqued and wondered about the oozey slime that gives their skin a sheen and makes chomping pleasurable. Cartiledge and bone confused and compressed in my chomping jaws.

Brigning it all back

I attended an inane MOE schoarship presentation today -- not because I was interested in qwhat the minister -- who has never been a teacher -- had to say but because I affirm the life-gigving impulses that all who want to teach have -- inherent in their mixed motives and less than altruistic aims. I nbo longer side the machoine with its impulses and superficial comments abot refoire. I am my own institution -- I believe in the idiosyncratic melange of curiosities that spring from tbe heat oppresssed brain. I pay back every bond in full knowledge of the social condemnation that teachers must sufgfer oince they decide to exist within the System. Once you call yourself an officer of the MOE , a Head of department or a supporter of the initiatives, YOU yes you (not me) are a cog in the system -- a willing servant in the machine -- a willing victim waiting for your moment when you can stop pretending and spring from the camo of being liberal and unmask you puritanical conservativism -- your need for the inante order your need to stuff everyone's loose ends into your own arse, into your own broom of the system never keeps clean but mops up the excrement that flows from the looseness of your ever-refined never tight enough system. Youir speeches about blue skies, innovation and screwing enterprise, are a prize gem gangrened and rotting like an amputated limb that twiches and squirms and will not declare that its end is nigh. I forsake you ALLL -- you screw balls high on political correctness and polite applause -- you believers that you will change the methods of divide and conquer -- there is nothing more. I screw with tartlets and cream, reigning supreme in the dream of vast empty spaces where we are left, finally alone.

I attended a scholarship presentation today. You could tell, from the eager faces and the firm naivete who is gonna be the one screwing my ass in ten years time. Work hard -- you screwers -- then you can tell me to file my ass in your purple and pink folders in tens years time -- and demand that this wine that I consume be bled form me -- like the sap from a trunk that has lost its loins! Now's the time to wonder how archaic memory is when it remain lost and searching in the peninsula of half forgetting and purple fortutide. I am so pissed on red -- I am missing my every other key stroke. I have the precision of a padfoot -- pronged and screwed inside out by and inceipient desire to be different -- an original taste of the never more ever after.

It's the Same

I've shuttling too much in the real world for the longest time.  I've been most pragmatic about what living entails.  I've been paying my dues and concentrating on work, tying up loose ends and making sure things that need to get done are properly done.  In a moment, the rain will stop and I will feel that urge to be unreflective and entirely dull to these pulses that rise.  Perhaps it only takes two moments -- one the immediate present and then the confused step to re-create that moment in writing, circling the moment, turning it on its head, confusing the moment in time, with time.  An observation that grounds writing in the real world:
 
I went to borrow books today -- at the Orchard Library.  Borrowed two Tim O'Brien books -- both on Vietnam.  I must confess that I am often disappointed by the NLB system because books that are supposed to be on the shelf often go missing, are placed in the wrong section or have disintegrated into the pages of more frequently borrowed titles.  Anyway -- I was pleased that I managed to get what I wanted.  There is a dread I feel when I borrows books that has haunted me all my life.  I actually have this strangely silly fear that I won't read borrowed books -- that'll they'll merely exist as mocking reminders of my nobler intensions, on my bookshelf.
 
The shared community of the borrowed book.  Thousands of eyes skim through its words.  All of us borrowing from its moments and curves of language, disengaging in a thousand private moments to lift that mug to your lips or to stare at the next passer-by.  Epiphanies discharged, scattered on a page.  Perhaps.

viii

If Alan Resnais made highly structured and architectonic masterpieces, the other crest of the "new wave" of French film in the 1950s is represented by an almost diametrically opposed spirit. Play, freedom, joy, the apparent lack of continuity and direction, are elements that combine to make films such as Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless such wonderful experiments in film.

Both are about society's marginalised - a troubled adolescent and an aimless drifter/conman - and both find pleasure in filming the little mundane situations that characterise ordinary existence. Taking out the garbage, running through traffic, struggling to light a cigarette, lazing around in bed. All these moments come together in a patchwork of experience. The camera sometimes lingers on a scene for an extremely long time, capturing conversations and encounters in a single take. We see the awkwardness of characters negotiating cramped spaces, without the cinematic convensions of continuity editing cut or the neatness of framing characters economically within the space. Characters move off the screen but the camera lingers on the empty bed, the deserted stairs, the abandoned window, hoping that our protagonists will return, so that it can resume its voyeuristic appraisal of what it means to be human, at the fringes of societal convention.

And what chracterisation and acting. The irrepressible character Antoine Daniol, who Truffaut felt was such a wonderful creation that he consistenly returned him throughout his film making career. The strange combination of a suave, reckless but increasingly alientated and desperate French con-man with a hesitant American student speaking stilted French, Godard's early recognition of a post-war clash of cultures. The conversations seem trivial but the unexpected erruption of emotional response to the most mundane comments are a priceless insight into the way we value what others have to say to us - even if we're on the run wanted by the authorities.

And what tragedy. Where the draw of new experience or the beguiling presence of someone so enchanting means you will risk getting caught to both escape and return to danger, in order to love.

vii

"Excuse me, didn’t we meet at that party last year?"
The worst of pickup lines perhaps, but the premise of Last Year At Marienbad, another Alan Resnais film. Nothing happens in it. A man tries to convince a lady that they met the previous year at a lavish mansion resort. She cannot remember. Throughout the 2 hours, he gnaws at her, feeding her, repeatedly bits of memory, describing what she was wearing, how her hands were palced, the statues that they stood under. All this shot in gorgeously arranged black and white, where the actors are props and the props – the interiors, wooden furniture, ornate paneling, baroque ceilings, unending corridors, lush carpets, polished surfaces, miles of mirrors, unopened doors and a impossibly symmetric garden - are explored incessantly. The tension arises from whether or not we remember correctly or accurately scenes that are shown over and over, not repeated ad naseum but layered textures of images that seem so similar that we ask, "Haven't we been here before?"
The actors are props. Many scenes have the cast frozen, standing statue-like but never statuesque as the protagonist find the moment, enact their little tete a tetes. A glass drops, shatters. Nobody moves but the waiter, and the camera stays on him for the excruciating length of time that it takes for him to pick up every piece. The shots vary – up close then a jump cut from high in the rafters – the mundane becomes pregnant with tension as the rest of the world stops.
The third character. The lady’s lover or husband? "Let me show you a game that I never lose." "If you never lose it is not a game." "I can lose – but I never will." The running action motif, that simple game where sticks, cards, tokens are placed in a rows then eliminated, the loser being the one forced to pick the last one. Played over and over with a variety of opponents, in different spaces – always a climax – will he lose? "I never will" he fires a gun – at her? In the bedroom. But she is left, standing and unsure at the end of that impossible garden that casts no shadows, wondering if her memory, which has come to believe she did once love, serves her well.

v

v - 2/6/2004






my feet hurt. i've got corns. i can think of several reasons why.

1.  didn't wear proper shoes during the dec hols and lounged around in flip flops too much. now that i need to wear proper shoes everyday - my feet used to them and are thus rebelling. 

2.  I'm fat.

3.  I'm thirty this year.

of course the last two reasons are just standard replied for everything that isn't quite pleasant for this year.  And yes I just realised that the kids I'm teaching this year are born in the year of the tiger as well - making them a whole zodiac cycle younger.  Wow - what was I doing when they were born? 

Avoiding having to do assessment books for the PSLE.  Raising money for the ACS building fund.  Riding on the 154 trying to convince one of my best friends not to betray us all and go to RI.  Playing tennis a lot.  you know - i really can't remember that much.  Maybe I'll fair better if I just stick to today.

ah - yes did my part for the PAP.  sent out 100 leaflets to the kids for them to sign up with the feedback unit.  I even had a nicely placed quote at the end of my instructions to the CT Reps about playing an active part in building the kind of society we want.  I don't suppose anyone will bother with the leaflets.  Of course with my legendary administrative incompetence, I parcelled all the leaflets out and stapled them into groups for distribution, only to find that I had about 40 left over.  I'll probably have to dump them because if they sit on my desk too long someone will think that I've been sitting on work ... 

I realised also that I'm an amazing procrastinator.  I looked at a kid in class and knew that I had to ask him for work that he owed me.  But I didn't.  Saw him later again - and remembered again - and didn't.  What's going on?  Some sort of strange assurance that consciousness is all?  Or do I predict, on some level, that he's going to say that he's not done the work and I'll have to ask him why and enact that whole ritual ....

I got a great idea for pple who don't bring their reading stuff for reading.  Came to mind during one of those periods today.  It's what the Head of Lit used to do to his students who didn't prepare for Lit tutorial at good ol NUS ... I'm looking forward to springing it ...

 

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*smiles* Sounds Diabolical, can't wait to see what punishment you bring down on the unsuspecting...wait...AHHHHH I forgot my homework...lol Good luck with your students and your corns for that matter. [Buggyone]

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I wish MY teacher wrote an online diary. Sometimes we forget our teachers have lives i guess. I forget that all the time till I read your stuff. [Contusion.]

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Could I borrow the Full Metal Jacket show? :)

Hope your feet get better soon.



- The Callous, Cynical Bastard

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hmm. Open book pop-quiz? :-) [Tempest Blue]

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have you been showing FMJ to 'dem kids again?? *tsk tsk* i wish you proscrastinated more when you taught us, that way i wouldn't have had to decline politely each time ;)



wotcher gonna do? make them write a story?



-fey

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oh yes, roar roar... haha...

oh dear, what evil ideas have E.Lit teachers at NUS been putting into mr lim's head? must be rather nasty... =S

^_^ [moi~]

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had a corn last year. dug it out with a penknife. very painful - not recommended.,

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