Is to age to become so utterly, disgustingly trite? I am bored, bored, and BORED to near death by my boring preoccupations and thoughts. I do not want to think about: housing, children, and health.
I want to think about the immaterial, the fantastical, and the madness that is in every infinitesimal gap of every material thing.
I no longer want to be enraptured by these gormless pixels that so easily tell me what to do, think, buy, and say.
I am SICK of it. I want to be ridiculous.
As its title suggests, the novel is one of seeming paradoxes that come into focus as perfect parallels. Milan Kundera’s works are at once Brechtian yet decidedly romantic. The Unbearable Lightness is a concise testament to his literary style. The exposing of fictive and literary techniques; the non-chronological narrative placing the climax and ending ahead of its traditional time in a plot; the constant exposition of political ideas, beliefs about relationships, humans, love, life, death, and loss.
While the characters are moulded to be vehicles of Kundera’s exploration of themes / ideals, they are no less nuanced and complex – in fact, much more so – than a character in any other fictional work. Just as with Immortality, it is challenging to not identify and feel strongly for the fictive persons of Kundera’s imagination (borne of an image, a gesture, a sound, a feeling within himself) despite and because of their faults and very human-ness.
I am in love especially with an excerpt in the last page of this novel. You can say I’m pleasantly surprised at how melancholic yet romantic Kundera made the ending. It verges on kitsch, which most of the book expounded on (mostly against). Which makes it suspect as a deliberate and self-reflexive literary choice on the author’s part. After all, as Kundera himself believes, no one can escape kitsch.
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
It is, already, a month into 2023.
How has yours been?
I crossed into the year atop a hill, in 5°C, with only the rolling fields and hills in the horizon. There was no light but the moonlight; there was no one else but my two companions.
We watched the fireworks go off in Czech towns across the border – pinpricks of starlight bursting with a gentle pop-pop.
The rest of January is as it always is: full of family, friends, celebrations, drama… you know how it is.
This time, distinctively, full of art. Two museums in Wrocław, four in Munich, then an art gallery fair in Singapore. Getting to see Cy Twombly’s work up close; squeezing in a painting of my own; relishing the splendid memoir of Marina Abramović gifted by K’s mom; receiving a book on Basquiat from K himself.
For the rest of 2023, I want to keep this creative energy about me, and it may mean more travel, visits to galleries, downtime to harness art from free space.
I never understand when people said “This is my year.”
What does that mean? Every year is my year, just as it is not at all. I may own much of how it shapes up, but it is so easily and completely at the mercy of everything else too. 2020 is a perfect global reminder.
So 2023 is simply another year, a year in which I will grow; stagnate; take some steps back and some leaps forward. In which I will give and receive love; create art, dread some days, anticipate others. It is simply another year I keep on being. That is exciting, and enough.
Somewhere in the cusp of adulthood, I found my body.
Let me put it in finer terms. It was to realise that I could myself operate the material body I have been driven around in.
By then, I was acutely aware of my mind — how it worked; why, what I can do with it, and when I was powerless to it. It was in those moments of powerlessness that I discovered the body could be a machinery of escape. The first time it happened, I ran – literally – away from my mind and emotions. I took to running twice a week, then more, every other day, maybe more days a week than not.
As I ran, the rhythm carrying me forward and away, everything else peeled away. To think became a conscious effort, and I often ascribed a theme to each run: thinking about the future, a fantasy, a dream. There was no space for my mind to wander into the dark: all it took was to peddle my feet against the resistance of wind and soreness to bring myself back to the physical present.
I ran so much, and ran away from so much then. I was and am grateful for my body for providing that means of escape.
Years later, as I grew into myself, the engine of my mind spun voraciously. There was so much energy, always wanting more, seeking more, and it would not quiet. Then, I found HIIT. It was the perfect concentrated, potent dose of adrenaline I needed. To utterly exhaust myself through my body. With every burpee and squat jump, I pushed myself to go higher, faster — more than running I had no space for thoughts. My mind in the 45 minutes flattens its multiple threads to a single, focussed voice: go, more, higher, push.
I love HIIT, love the agility, the powerful bursts of energy my body is capable of giving, bigger and stronger each day.
Then COVID hit, and my lungs could no longer fill up like a balloon — my breath felt reedy, my body sluggish. I turned to yoga, which I had previously sworn to hate because it was ‘too slow’, ‘boring’. I couldn’t understand why my body, strong as it was, could not achieve a simple yoga pose, and why the way I did handstands out of brute strength was incorrect.
This time, though, yoga connected me (my mind) to not only my body, but the material space around me. I found myself moving, manoeuvring, and holding my body in ways I have never before. I stretched ancient muscles and learnt to be still. I observed that my balance is excellent, and my back flexibility extremely not. I noticed that I loathed stretching not because it was a bore, but because it was so painful for me (still is).
Outside of yoga classes, I now find acute control over my body, the same way I found agility and power in HIIT. More than that, it is not only in the momentary space of working out that I can distract myself from my ceaselessly unspooling thoughts. It is the practice of just. pausing, breathing, and letting it be, that has translated to my daily life outside of yoga.
Yoga grounds me.
You know what I will never succumb to though?
Spin. Not in a million years of rhabdo-infused pee will I fall into that cult, no thank you.
Dear C,
I have dreamt of you a hundred times since you left. A hundred different ways of you back home again, with us. In every one of these dreams, I’m ringing with joy — pure and uncomplicated.
I dreamt of you again, more realistic than ever. I wanted to ask why you left the convent, but was afraid asking might make you go back again. A hundred mornings of waking up to you silent and unreachable.
Are you happy? I don’t know if I want to know.
Once, our lives ran in perfect parallels. You lived two streets down from me. For six years through primary school, we were in the same class. We ended up in the same CCA, without machinations. We traded stories and sketches, what brought us together. Do you remember the endless well of games we thought up and played between everything?
We went to the same secondary school, took the same car together every morning, that 10 minutes wait standing with you by the road every weekday, without fail. We entered Drama together, took Japanese third language together.
We performed together, whenever we could. From Fungly-Mungly to Godot to CAP. I never found another person who can replicate the chemistry we had onstage.
C, you were the person I spent the most time with, from 7 to 16.
Even when we entered Uni, our lives taking different routes, relationships, and friends, we always found our way back to each other. The same Uni, your dorm a block away from mine. Taking Japanese Studies together. Remember the night we scaled the rooftop with G and D? Remember how G fell straight through a hole? “I hoard these moments in words online for us.”
For years, all the years that matter, you were by my side.
Now you are somewhere, doing something I have no way of knowing, maybe speaking another language. You have dedicated yourself to God, perhaps more and more so every year. And I have over the years gone from believing in the same God you do, to believing in a god not of our conception, to believing that maybe there are higher forces beyond our comprehension; to that there is nothing but the physical plane, evolution, and energy. That there is not only no god, but nothing after death. We are organic beings that cease consciousness and return to the earth. Once you stop fearing death, or what comes after, you stop needing a god.
Somewhere out there you are praying for my sins, praying that I too can join you in the paradise of your beliefs.
This is where we diverge: you sacrificed some of our time together on earth to have eternity together. I want nothing after death, and a bit more time with you on my transient, insignificant, and beautiful whisper of a life on earth.
Love,
your best friend Q
I fell deeply in love with this novel.
Kundera crafted a delectable seven-course literary masterpiece. The amount of control he has over the narrative – every dialogue, character, gesture, structure – is astounding. And with this control comes the most self-aware, perfectly orchestrated novel I’ve read in a long time. Like a Brechtian play, the ropes and pulleys are laid out: our heroine is not only fictional, but borne of a gesture the author glanced from another. Weaved into the story are the author’s muses, the story but a vehicle and device.
Yet, you cannot help being drawn in.
I especially related to Agnes, our protagonist. Her easy irritation at noise, bodies, negativity, modern chaos. Her need to disappear, to be alone, to not be inconvenienced outside of her own control.
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
For posterity: some sections and quotes from the book I held my breath through.
On Imagology.
Are you objecting that advertising and propaganda cannot be compared, because one serves commerce and the other ideology? […] Some one hundred years ago in Russia, persecuted Marxists began to secretly gather in small circles in order to study Marx’s manifesto; they simplified the contents of this simple ideology in order to disseminate it to other circles, whose members, simplifying it further and further, this simplification of the simple kept passing it on and on, so that Marxism became known and powerful on the whole planet all that was left of it was a collection of six or seven slogans, so poorly linked that it can hardly be called an ideology. And precisely because the remnants of Marx no longer form any logical systems of ideas, but only a series of suggestive images and slogans (of smiling worker with a hammer, black, white and yellow men and so on), we can rightfully talk of gradual, general, planetary transformation of ideology into imagology.
Ideology was like a set of enormous wheels at the back of the stage, turning and setting in motion wars revolutions, reforms. The wheels of imagology turn without having any effect upon history. Ideologies fought with one another and each of them was capable of filling a whole epoch with its thinking. Imagology organizes peaceful alternation of its systems in lively seasonal rhythms. […] Ideology belonged to history, while the reign of imagology begins where history ends.
On human rights.
Human rights once again found their place in the vocabulary of our times; I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day ‘the fight for human rights’ or ‘violation of human rights’. But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become the men’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street in the middle of the night.
On Rationality.
In all languages derived from Latin, the word “reason” (ratio, raison, ragione) has a double meaning: first, it designates the ability to think, and only second, the cause. Therefore reason in the sense of a cause is always understood as something rational. A reason the rationality of which is not transparent would seem to be incapable of causing an effect. But in German, a reason in the sense of a cause is called Grund, a word having nothing to do with the Latin ratio and originally meaning “soil” and later “basis”. […] Such a Grund is inscribed deep in all of us, it is the ever-present cause of our actions, it is the soil from which our fate grows.
On Novels.
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, they have to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted [or] retold.
On Being.
A special, unforgettable moment: She was forgetting her self, losing her self, she was without a self; and that was happiness.
What is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self.
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
Can you believe that I have been writing in this space – semi-actively – since March 2006?
By some foresight I have privatised everything pre-2009. You don’t want words from your fourteen year old self out in the internet. Yet, I’m so glad I have kept these relics. Thoughts, feelings, fears, dreams, opinions, joys, goals, stupid and embarrassing though they may be.
Au contraire, trawling through the years of writing, I’m in awe of my younger self’s heady and naïve courage. For half a decade, I wrote so confidently on divisive issues: homosexuality, religion, politics… it seemed almost as if I wanted to incite an argument. I don’t know where I got that bawdy confidence from. How did I respond to the barrage of comments – for and against – methodologically, undaunted by being wrong or strangers hating me for my core beliefs?
I no longer have that foolhardiness.
With age, I know only one thing for certain: I know absolutely nothing with certainty. Even with my stronger convictions, I no longer have the urge to convince others in that conviction. Not that I think young Q was wrong – I loved that she tried, loved that she wrote in hope to be convinced otherwise, to better parse, analyse, and understand / refute her own beliefs.
Similarly, I’m in awe of the bold choices I’ve made without thinking them bold. How I was so at ease with putting myself out there with #foodporn, performing with abandon with everyone who mattered watching. How I broke all the rules of an honors thesis in psychology, and made #fp – a self-staged production – the subject of my graduation thesis (?? How did I do this ??). And how was I so cavalier with my chances at an internship, choosing instead to work at a kindergarten, stage #fp, and help out a friend for a startup (which turned out to be the pivotal moment for my career path).
In all these unconventional choices I have derived only the best memories and experiences. They have opened the doors to all the opportunities I have that led me to today. I have not a feather of regret for all these choices young Q has made. If my prefrontal cortex was pre-developed, then I wish everyone could have a safe sandbox to go crazy and play during their years of pre-development.
This book was picked up on the whim: I wanted something to read by the pool, on a holiday in Chiang Mai. Chosen purely because it was the one book sitting snug and new in a wrapper, in the bookstore I chanced by.
An orphan of a novel, Orwell himself disowned it and was displeased by its continued publication. My theory: he had set out to write something satirical — an absurd situation and life — only to find it an embarrassingly accurate depiction (of a woman’s life). Put off by the unintended veracity (curses! i am a satirical political writer, not a feminist! thought he.) he disavowed and swore against the title thereafter.
But boy am I glad it was written.
There was something deeply immersive about the inner world and adventures – or misadventures – of Dorothy. The phases in the novel are crisp and concise: her former life, hops picking, as a school teacher, etc. Each section compelling; necessary; brilliantly paced and placed.
What was intended to be a light poolside read had me hooked – on a vacation! I read for hours in the balcony, the pool, the airport, on the plane and savoured each page till the last.
This book doesn’t get lost in itself – it is controlled, coming back to a full circle. Despite all Dorothy has experienced and overcome, she is back at ground zero. This despairing ending by her will and choice, not by her stupidity nor forces of plot. Yet, it was wholly relatable. The entire story has been built so you understand Dorothy’s upbringing, environment, inner beliefs, thoughts, and progression, and how it could have hit that brick wall when the ultimate decision was to be made.
I would go as far as to say this was one of the most raw and truthful depiction of a small town woman’s life in 1930s England I have read.
Now as for the surrounding characters: as much as they were caricatures, Orwell’s satire did a remarkable job at fleshing each one out. True, they were vehicles carrying highly specific socio-political messages. But really, everyone has an entirely disagreeable Rector Hare, a free-spirited and selfish Mr Waburton, and a shit-stirring gossip-monger Mrs Semprill, in their lives. Chances are they play to their caricatures all too well.
My verdict: Every woman should give A Clergyman’s Daughter a read, and find yourself both despairing and relieved. That there are aspects of Dorothy’s helplessness we can relate to; that we have the illusion of choice at times, but in fact not at all. But also that we have come really, really far from where Dorothy was. We have agency and choices that, even when difficult, is freedom in themselves.
Lisbon, of cobalt and clementine. Of faded regality and a startle of sunlight. Of graffiti inherited from old times, scribbles on walls. Sleepy tunes that make you weep at midnight; endless codfish and white wine.
Paris. My heart lies here, in the Pantheon, by the seine. Of your coffee-laced mornings and espresso nights. Of your snappy slowness and symmetry. Of the lilt in your tongue and the certainty of petit déjeuner; your authenticity maligned as aloofness.
Fontaine-bleu, your compact beauty, your winding, bouldered forests and lakes and castles.
Porto, sweet as your namesake. Narrow alleys and the sharp silhouette of masts yearning for skies.
Guimarães, of clean, quiet grace. Of sitting above the rest. Of fur-soft tones and walking in circles, going somewhere to end up where you have always been.
Cascais. Of liqueur in chocolate cups that mellows you inside out. Of stupid loopy grins. Of cold beaches and too-young people, stomping in the sand.
Sintra. A fairytale, a watercolor daydream. Of untold love stories between many, many told ones. Of secrets puffed into the wind like dandelion, bitter and beautiful. Of clouds pillowing your fantasy in vermillion and gold. Of bronzed dogs that live forever.
In the minute I was born, three other events took place, of which two were significant and one altered the subsequent course of my life.
These were what happened:
1. An author penned the first word of her first novel, without realising the fact
2. A chain of GATCs lined up in a sequence unique in the history of our Universe
3. A tomato rolled off the wagon, squashed to a green pulp under the farmer’s boot
The day was simultaneously hot and cold depending on where you were. At the place of my birth, heat seared into skin like knives dragged over bare skin. Elsewhere, winter chill did the same.
I favor the derivative, ‘Space’. ‘Outer Space’ suggests that there is an ‘Inner Space’ – Earth. But there is no space here. Only gaps. Gaps between this land and the other; gaps between humans on the subway (if you are so lucky). Gaps between teeth, thighs, and logic. The infinitesimal gap between atoms of futilely clasped hands.
When I say “I need space,” no one knows the picture in my head:
I am floating in subzero, waiting for a speck of space dust to shatter my brittle body into the vacuum.
Leaves have their wisdom too.
Their shape, size and color; their thirst and lust for closeness to the sun, are singularly governed by the task of respiration. Untethered they are by Living, or Meaning. They brown and shed when needed and suffer no existentialism.
Q 