A Civil Contract

     Georgette Heyer is one of my favourite historical romance writers (if not the favourite), because she writes with such warmth, humour and understanding of what it is to be human. She is often known and recommended as Jane Austen with romance/ a poorer Jane Austen - and that was actually how I got to discover Georgette Heyer and how I introduced her to friends. But, the more I have read her novels, the more I find this a misnomer... because Georgette Heyer is I daresay, an original in her own right, she never repeats herself in any of her novels, and her gift for re-invention and the playing of tropes gives me real pleasure. I always feel, just before I open her novel, that I am going to have the most fun reading it, that I will never be dissatisfied (even when I have my favourites). That, as a reader, is often all I can ask from a writer.

   I was particularly moved by A Civil Contract and when it ended, I felt slightly out of breath, and smiled to myself, that was really beautiful. Roughly, the main character, Adam, returns from the war to inherit the title of Viscount Lynton from his just deceased father and finds his family "on the brink of ruin and the broad acres of his ancestral home mortgaged to the hilt". Thus, he cannot marry his first love, a beautiful blond romantic creation called Julia. Adam becomes engaged and subsequently married to "plain ol Jenny", the daughter of one of the richest man in the City, who wants to make a great social match for his daughter.

   A Civil Contract is simultaneously absorbing and frustrating - because you know this story in your heart, titled handsome man marries the plainer but more practical and wiser girl (who has always loved him and can take care of all his needs) while having already given his heart to a beautiful princess of a blonde (who loves herself more than him, never really loved him but only the person she imagined him to be, and could scarcely survive with her golden spoon in her mouth). You want it to turn out the way you envisioned satisfyingly - and it does pan out satisfyingly but never in the way you want it. And somehow, that feels the most true to life, gaining that happiness in the end, but not exactly how you envisioned it.

    Now, don't read the quote below if you don't want to know the ending:

    A little pang smote her; she wanted to ask him: 'Do you love me as much as you loved her?' She was too inarticulate to be able to utter the words; and in a minute, knew that it would be foolish to do so. Searching his eyes, she saw warmth in them, and tenderness, but not the ardent flame that had once kindled them when he had looked at Julia. She hid her face in his shoulder, thinking that she too had an impractical dream. But she had always known that she was too commonplace and matter-of-fact to inspire him with the passionate adoration that he had felt for Julia. Probably Adam would always carry Julia in some corner of his heart. She had been tiresome today, putting him out of love with her; but Jenny did not think that this revulsion would last. Julia stood for his youth, and the high hopes he had cherished; and although he might no longer yearn to possess her she would remain nostalgically dear to him while life endured.  

   Yet, after all, Jenny thought that she had been granted more than she had hoped for when she had married him. He did love her: differently, but perhaps more enduringly; and he had grown to depend on her. She thought that they would have many years of quiet content: never reaching the heights, but living together in comfort and deepening friendship. Well, you can't have it both ways, she thought, and I couldn't live in alt all the time, so I daresay I'm better off as things are.  

     ... She thought, and was comforted, that though she was not the wife of his dreams, it was her, not with Julia, that he shared life's little, foolish jokes. 

     Dear Husband, I am grateful to be both your Julia and Jenny. Which do you see in me at any one time? We are always changing, aren't we? But let's learn to always share in life's little jokes. After all, it would be nice as well, to be yours forever. 

SEA Aquarium (Part 3)

   Because of Murakami, no visit to the aquarium is complete without seeing the Jellyfish. 

        We spent that first afternoon together in the aquarium of the Ueno Zoo. The weather was so nice that day, I thought it might be more fun to stroll around the zoo itself, and I hinted as much to Kumiko on the train to Ueno, but it was obvious she had made up her mind to go to the aquarium. If that was what she wanted, it was all right with me. At the aquarium there was a special display of jellyfish, and we went through them from beginning to end, viewing the rare specimens gathered from all parts of the world. They floated, trembling in their tanks, everything from a tiny cotton puff the size of a fingertip to monsters more than three feet in diameter. For a Sunday, the aquarium was relatively uncrowded. In fact, it was on the empty side. On such a lovely day, anybody would have preferred the elephants and giraffes to jellyfish. 

       Although I said nothing to Kumiko, I actually hated jellyfish. I had often been stung by jellyfish while swimming in the ocean as a boy. Once, when swimming far out by myself, I wandered into a school of them. By the time I realised what I had done, I was surrounded. I never forgot the slimy, cold feeling of them touching me. In the centre of their whirlpool of jellyfish, an immense terror overtook me, as if I had been dragged into a bottomless darkness. I wasn't stung, for some reason, but in my panic I gulped a lot of sea water. Which is why I would have liked to skip the jellyfish display if possible and go to see some ordinary fish, like tuna or flounder. 

       Kumiko, though, was fascinated. She stopped at every single tank, leaned over the railing, and remained transfixed as if she had lost all sense of time. "Look at this," she'd say to me. "I never knew there were such vivid pink jellyfish. And look at the beautiful way it swims. They just keep wobbling along like this until they've been to every ocean in the world. Aren't they wonderful?" 

       "Yeah, sure." But the more I forced myself to keep examining jellyfish with her, the more I felt a tightening growing in my chest. Before I knew it, I had stopped replying to her and was counting the change in my pocket over and over, or wiping the corners of my mouth with my handkerchief. I kept wishing we would come to the last of the jellyfish tanks, but there was no end to them. The variety of jellyfish swimming in the oceans of the world was enormous. I was able to bear it for half an hour, but the tension was turning my head into mush. When, finally, it became too painful for me to stand leaning against the railing, I left Kumiko's side and slumped on a nearby bench. She came over to me and, clearly very concerned, asked if I was feeling ill. I answered honestly that looking at the jellyfish was making me dizzy. 

        She stared into my eyes with a grave expression on her face. "It's true," she said. "I can see it in your eyes. They've gone out of focus. It's incredible - just from looking at jellyfish!" Kumiko took me by the arm and led me out of the gloomy, dank aquarium into the sunlight. 

       Sitting in the nearby park for ten minutes, taking long, slow breaths, I managed to return to a normal psychological state. The strong autumn sun cast its pleasant radiance everywhere, and the bone-dry leaves of the gingko trees rustled softly whenever the breeze picked up. "Are you all right?" Kumiko asked after several minutes had gone by. "You certainly are a strange one. If you hate jellyfish so much, you should have said so right away, instead of waiting until they made you sick." 

        The sky was high and cloudless, the wind felt good, the people spending their Sunday in the park all wore happy expressions. A slim, pretty girl was walking a large, long-haired dog. An old fellow wearing a felt hat was watching his granddaughter on the swing. Several couples sat on benches, as we were doing. Off in the distance, someone was practising scales on a saxophone. 

        "Why do you like jellyfish so much?" I asked. 

      "I don't know. I guess I think they're sweet," she said. "But one thing did occur to me when I was focusing on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don't you agree?"

- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

"You have been in every line I have ever read"

      Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. 

                                                              - Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 

illogic

     
       Illogic (Cake Theatre Productions)
       Playing from 13 to 15 June 2013
     

Someone said the universe must not be narrowed down to the limit of our understanding.

Illogic is a theatre performance in two acts.

Two actors move across a desert-like terrain. Encounters between them gradually bring forth a dramatic landscape capturing at once, a dream like state and the reality of their humanity.

Illogic asks questions it can’t answer and sets a path it won’t follow. 

Two actors. One moving terrain. Giving way to Illogic.

       

      I was intrigued by the synopsis given of the production. It had echoes of Waiting for Godot even if it was borderline pretentious.

      After watching the play, the truest thing that could be written about it are those very lines above. Illogic is a theatre performance in two acts... 

     I though the first half was a failure and the second half a success. But a production is a whole, isn't it? Were they mirror images of each other - the second one building and consolidating images, sounds and senses given in the first half of chaotic frenzied segments?

     And so it starts, I am writing a play... It does not follow the usual rise and fall, exposition, etc... It follows a theme... themes on love. What is love? The rise and fall of the first half - raising the question and offering no answers, except intermissions of songs, shortcuts to already filled depositories of emotions and memories. They rise and fall on the stage resembling a sketch by Escher - a resemblance they will never achieve, because the very essence of Escher is to be impossible. But these two chameleonic figures, both mind and flesh, both young and adult, both female and male, everything and nothing at the same time, were the audience's vicarious pathways to infinity.

    I want to be possessed by God. A woman will undress and become naked on stage. I'm going away - Stay. I'm going away - Stay. It needs two. To the breathtaking crescendo when the actor becomes director (as directed) and controls the stage light (god's thunder onstage), to the stripping of the actress with the stripping of the stage embalmed in light. The actress breaks the fourth wall in the last monologue, you will be ok. We will meet again. 

         "August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day, don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade. This intensity, this heat, sun like a disc-saw through your body. Is it because you come from Australia? 

          You didn't answer, just held my hot hand in your cool fingers and strode on easy in linen and silk. I felt ridiculous. I was wearing a pair of shorts with RECYCLE tattooed across one leg. I remembered vaguely that I had once had a girlfriend who thought it rude to wear shorts in front of public monuments. When we met I tethered my bike at Charing Cross and changed in the toilets before meeting her by Nelson's Column. 

'Why bother?' I said. 'He only had one eye.'  

   'I've got two,' she said and kissed me. Wrong to seal illogic with a kiss but I do it myself all the time."

   - Written on The Body, Jeanette Winterson  

Consolidation

                                                                 Etsy: Illustrative Quotations


        It's been about seven months since I've started writing in this place and it's nice to see how much I've grown to love it. As the entries grow, I've decided to categorise some of the entries for ease of reference later:

a) Book
b) Europe
c) Food
d) Hoarder
e) Home & Decor
f) Quotations
g) Taiwan
h) Theatre
i) writings
j) Z & C
k) 我和她

    I'm not really sure how to make the tags appear on the blog (it-idiot) so I'll probably do consolidated entries every now and then. Finally, thank you for actually reading this space of mine. From the number of page views and geography of readers, it's more than likely we have never met in real life. But that's what I love the most about the written word - you write it and let it go. 

the heart of books

       I just realised that Facebook had this really cute function of searching for your favourite books and liking them. In a way, it's all very silly, but I enjoyed looking at the various book covers and thinking about which books still spoke to me. I've read many many many excellent books, but I don't think excellence is the criteria when we think about books that have impacted our lives, whose words capture the very moments we live and become part of our lives.

      Presently, the ten (english) books that mean the most to me would be (in no order of merit):

      1) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
      2)  I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
      3)  Master Harold and The Boys (play) by Athol Fugard
      4)  His Dark Materials (trilogy) by Philip Pullman
      5) The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
      6) The Devotion of Suspect X by Keiko Higashi
      7) The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
      8) Long Day's Journey into Night (play) by Eugene O'Neil
      9) South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
     10) Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

   I had to leave three other heart books out: (i) The Plague by Albert Camus, (ii) Eating Fire by Margaret Atwood and (iii) The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein.

   No. 1 is the book I'll read for life and the one I'll carry if I can only have one book on a deserted island. No. 2 is the book I read when I was seventeen, which is the perfect age to read it, on the cusp of adulthood and brimming with the potential loss of innocence. No. 3 is the play that gives me this beautiful image to hold onto in my darkest moments. No. 4 is the book that taught me about heartbreak when I was a child. No. 5 is my idea of the perfect novel. No. 6 is how I want to write. No. 7 is how I used to want to write and the one book where my closest friends have told me that I was like the main character (who I think is crazy, romantic, creative, narcissistic and dreamy). No. 8 is my idea of the perfect play. No. 9 is the first book I read from Murakami and sometimes, how I see the world. No. 10 is still my greatest reading pleasure.

    [(i) is the book that captured me in the moment where I missed ZM the most, (ii) is my poetic aspirations and (iii) is the book that made me believed that magic lies in the goodness of people].

    Oh, the lives lived in books! The happy endings, the sad endings, so much of life is in the lives we will never live.

eating fire

     In the first week of February, I suffered from gastric flu and haven't quite recovered. I suspect it all boils down to stress really and a need to learn to let go. In the small breaks I have, I try to read; but then come up against my frustrating library system (non-existent). I have a glass cabinet full of books and two large wooden compartments under my bed filled with stacks and stacks of books. I can never find the books I want to read. 

   I decided to read "Eating Fire" by Margaret Atwood again; a book I've returned to again and again over the years. I bought it in Utrecht, in the first week of September 2008. I still remember that it was the first bookstore we came across, full of used books, I was exhilarated. The book was on the highest shelf and ZM had taken it down for me. That was the first day we met. 

   Eating Fire is one of the most accessible poetry collections I've ever come across, and the beauty of it is that it has stood the test of time (or approximately four plus years).  I don't profess to liking everything I read in this book, but every time I re-visit it - there will be the familiar landmarks showing no sign of wear and tear and new signposts asking you to linger longer. Those small turn of phrases that kill you - "your kiss no longer literature/ but fine print, a set of instructions". Re-reading an old favourite is always a good snapshot of your inner self - certain things may no longer have the same hold on you, but you never leave unaffected. 

  Here are some lovely bits from a poem I didn't use to like, "Their Attitudes Differ":

...

iii

You held out your hand

I took your fingerprints

You asked for love 

I gave you only descriptions 

Please die I said 

so I can write about it 

After all you are quite 

ordinary: 2 arms 2 legs

a head, a reasonable 

body, toes & fingers, a few 

eccentricities, a few honesties

but not too many, too many 

postponements & regrets but 

you'll adjust to it, meeting 

deadlines and other 

people, pretending to love

the wrong woman some of the

time, listening to your brain

shrink, your diaries

expanding as you grow older, 

growing older, of course you'll 

die but not yet, you'll outlive 

even my distortions of you 

... 

i

We are hard on each other 

and call it honesty,

choosing our jagged truths 

with care and aiming them across 

the neutral table. 

The things we say are

true; it is our crooked

aims, our choices

turn them criminal. 

ii

Of course your lies

are more amusing: 

you make them new each time. 

Your truths, painful and boring 

repeat themselves over & over 

perhaps because you own

so few of them.

iii

A truth should exist,

it should not be be used

like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon? 

but not somewhere in between

I bought the book despite the cover.

     Even two months after I've read Audition, I cannot decide if I like or dislike it. It's so cleverly written, but it feels so hollow. I finished it in a night - and in the darkness, I kept thinking, "so what?" In truth, I bought the book because I came across a breath-taking quote from it. I still love the quote, but it is an unfinished promise. A disappointing titillation. It is that striking person that walks into the room for an audition - who seems perfect, really, if he didn't look at you with the eyes of someone who couldn't even understand himself.

  "So, what do you think?" he asked, but not in the spirit of actually soliciting her opinion. It was more of an attempt to confirm what he already knew: She's really something, isn't she? You just don't find young women like her any more. You see that, don't you?

  "Strange girl," Kai said, exhaling smoke.

  "Strange?"

  "I've never met a girl quite like that before."

  "Well, it's a whole new generation, Kai." 

  "That's true, but some things never change. What's most important to a person, that's the question. Always has been and always will be. When I meet someone, I can usually tell within a minute or two what it is they value most. The young people nowadays - men and women, amateurs and pros - generally fall into one of two categories: either they don't know what it is that's most important to them, or they know but don't have the power to go after it. But this girl's different. She knows what's most important to her and she knows how to get it, but she doesn't let on what it is. I'm pretty sure it's not money or success, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weird religion, but that's about all I can tell you. She's like smoke: you think you're seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for her there's nothing there. That's a sort of strength, I suppose. But it makes her hard to figure out." 

  "She's nice though, right?" Aoyama said. 

  Kai seemed taken aback by this. She shook her head and stubbed out her cigarette. 

  "Is that really what you think?" she said. 

  A simple question, but it rocked him. He knew perfectly well that Yamasaki Asami wasn't simply a nice girl, and yet that was how he'd chosen to think of her. Kai had put her finger on this bald self-deception, and he had the odd sensation of wanting to be surprised but not being able to. 

   "Anyway," he said, "I'm sure she's not a bad person. I'm pretty serious about her." 

   Kai frowned and shook her head again. 

  "Nice person, bad person - that's not the level this girl is at. I can see you're crazy about her and probably won't be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you'd be better of staying away from someone like her. I can't read her exactly, but I can tell you she's either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between."