As I briefly mentioned yesterday, we've been dealing with quite a bit of family stuff lately, fortunately most of it of the delightful kind. We're just off now to celebrate Fafa's wedding. 😀 Good grief! When did my little niece grow up without me really noticing?
Postscript: A jolly good time indeed was enjoyed by all at the wedding celebration. Some youthful exuberance as evidence below:
Trying to carve out time to get on with my reading of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, Volume 2 - and, to some small degree succeeding, despite the demands of examination marking for the IB and family stuff. I'd lost a bit of momentum after completing the brilliant Bosh and Flapdoodle sequence from 2005 partly because I was a touch doubtful that the final 150+ pages comprising appendices featuring uncollected & posthumously published poems would match up to my (high) expectations of Archie. It didn't help that I'd struggled with the Brink Road material near the beginning of this volume.
Anyway, it looks like I was wrong - very happily so. I'm 9 poems in and they've all been rewarding in their different ways (stretching from 1956 - 1964 in terms of dates, so distinctly different in style given the poet's development over those years.) Astonishing to think of just how much great stuff finds its way into the two volumes of the Complete.
One small example: Just read Sung Reassertions, a 1963 piece after a poem by William Carlos Williams that's not exactly in the usual Archie mode. In fact, it's got more than an element of Dr Williams about it, but I reckon is almost better than Williams at his considerable best. (It spins off from a late WCW poem about roosters crowing, exploring the idea of them marking out their territory through sound and features some killer lines along the way - the sun / his embassy of light, colors // the throne-room of his breast... I mean, blimey, how good is that?!!)
Now and again I'll jot down a line of dialogue that belongs to a non-existent play about nothing that I'll never write. Usually I have next to no idea as to what they mean. Today, without exactly meaning to, I jotted down the following since I heard it in my head: I got the impression he was trying to avoid me. Mind you, most days I think I'd be inclined to avoid myself as much as possible.
I'm not a big fan of my own work, but I quite like this one. The problem is, though, that I suspect the 'me' in question might well be me (in person as it were) which makes it all a bit ouch.
And just occasionally there are days that serve as reminders of the sheer undeserved unlikely good fortune of being able to exist. Especially if you've been around a long time.
Three great post-Ramadhan moments today, in no particular order of merit:
Munching a delectable cake (from my equally delectable form class (as they term it in these parts)) along with slurping some tea from my flask, around 9.45 am;
Enjoying my first cuppa in SAC along with listening to some David Bowie (played from my phone) later in the day;
Enjoying my second cuppa in SAC along with staring in a zen-like trance at the greenery through the big window. In truth, doing nothing, and doing it very well. This was, by the by, even later in the day.
A good day indeed, despite the busy bits - of which there were more than a few.
The last couple of days have seen me making a slow but entirely happy start on George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. I thought I needed to pick something broadly disgraceful for my post-Ramadhan reading and, of course, any of the brilliant Flashman series would be more than appropriate.
This is the tenth in the series, and the only one I own, having received it as a gift back in the 1990s. Loved it then, but read it very quickly, just to enjoy the characterisation of Fraser's great anti-hero and his exhilarating escapades. This time round I'm paying close attention to the historical details, which I sort of previously skipped by in wanting to just enjoy a gripping yarn of the highest order. I reckon I'm getting much more out of the fiction as a result.
So now I'm thinking I need to (one day) embark on a reread of the whole series. To be honest, I'm a bit hazy over which were the exact ones I read, but that sort of adds to my considerable enthusiasm.
09.20
Drove up to Melaka yesterday evening. Was worried as to whether the checkpoints and roads would be busy with Raya traffic, but the journey was a proverbial breeze. Door to door in 3 hours & 10 minutes.
Sadly, though, there was a brief hold-up on the highway after Machap for what looked like a bad accident involving a motor-bike, which appeared to have very recently taken place. No police or ambulance at the scene, but several cars stopped to re-direct traffic. I'm pretty sure there were fatalities involved. Couldn't help but think of someone, somewhere getting the worst of news on Hari Raya. And simply couldn't help as it would have been pointless.
We're off visiting soon. Hope we stay safe. There are no guarantees in this world.
23.55
Got there and back safely. The 'there' in question being three houses, replete with food & drink. Now officially exhausted as well as safe.
Went to the second session for Raya Prayers at the masjid at which the khutbah was in English (and translated into Bengali). First time I've really understood completely the message for the day (based on the part in English, I mean.)
Now replete with all sorts of goodies and thinking of our forthcoming journey northwards later in the day, and the journey we made to the centre of things last December. (See photo above.)
As ever, to all and everyone: Eid Mubarak!
29 Ramadhan, 1444
One of the benefits of doing the Dawn Prayer early, as is my wont in Ramadhan, is that it's invariably accompanied by our feathered friends tuning up at first light. A couple of days back, when we suffered the power outage, I prayed with all the windows open to ease the humidity that had built up through the long, still night, and got to hear even more detail than usual. Normally there's one very obvious repeated melody that dominates - and gets a bit monotonous if truth be told. But on that morning I became conscious of deeper textures - a whole net of sound. Entangled in blessings.
Have you not seen that God it is to whom everything in the heavens and on the earth gives praise and the birds on the wing. He knows the prayer of each, the praise of each.
28 Ramadhan, 1444
Just watched the ending of the Malay drama series Bidadari (the title being a reference to a well-known old Muslim cemetery in Singapore.) Wonderful stuff. Sort of Dickensian in its way. Melodramatic in the best sense of that much maligned adjective. Perfect viewing for the fasting month. Must say a bit more about it, but now is not the time as I'm about to crash out.
27 Ramadhan, 1444
Was awakened by Noi at some unholy hour in the late night or early morning (around 2.00 am, I think) with the news that we'd had a complete power outage in our Hall. Wandered around for 15 minutes or so, going to various electrical riser units, to try and fix the problem - meeting with a spectacular lack of success. Found it difficult to get back to sleep, especially with no air-conditioning, and had to contend with stumbling around in the semi-darkness at sahur time plus a cold shower before setting off to work.
Thought I was in for a very rough day, given my lack of sleep, but the day turned out only mildly rough, with several decent patches. In a small Shakespearean way I suppose I felt armed against a sea of trouble. Having said that, I now feel officially exhausted. So, over and out.
Our twinkling lights went up yesterday and increased my sense of cheer considerably.
Actually I have some nice pics of these from outside our apartment looking up, but for some reason I can't upload these to this Far Place. My failings on the tech front, or tech's failings on my front, have served to mildly irritate and massively bewilder me - but as a well-known king once said in the stage version of himself: I shall be the pattern of all patience.
(Makes me wonder how these social media influencer chappies put up with stuff going wrong for them when they post all that visually rich, multi-media material. Or maybe it just doesn't and they can do all the bells and whistle stuff without any hassle?)
We got ourselves down to Geylang in the late afternoon to pay our zakat at Darul Arqam & get a taste of the bazaar in the environs. Things were, as expected, different but the same.
I doubt we'll get the chance to avail ourselves of the funkiness of the bazaar there in the evening given Noi's commitments on the baking front, so that's a slight difference in our experience of the Holy Month from the usual routine. But just a taste was sufficient for this old chap.
24 Ramadhan, 1444
Got to the gym after breaking the fast, as I also managed to do on Wednesday. So far I've made it on seven occasions in Ramadhan, which I reckon is a pretty good count, and I've felt fine each time. I've even considered seeing what it might be like to work out just before buka, but I'm wary of the risk of possible dehydration.
On both of my trips this week I've felt very comfortable doing my fifty minutes on the elliptical trainer, to the extent that each time I've become lost in my thoughts for the final thirty minutes and 'escaped' focusing on the machine and keeping going. Tonight I was caught up in a rant about the need to teach texts with a genuine sense of engagement with the emotional heft of the material - fortunately my audience was purely imaginary, so no one had to suffer my outpouring.
Must say though, I'm a wee bit wary of bringing on some kind of electrical storm in the old grey matter. On my last visit to my neurologist at NUH the doc strongly recommended keeping up some kind of medication to protect against epileptic seizures (such seizures being what had had such a devastating impact on me in late August last year, resulting in the unpleasant interruption to my life experienced back then.) Despite my happy sense of general well-being and considerable confidence with regard to my mental faculties, I've been quite happy to pop the couple of pills a day he prescribed, but am maintaining a watchful self-awareness when it comes to monitoring my thinking. I've always been prone to periods of quite unintentionally intense cerebration, if that makes sense to you, and I remember being easily able to lose myself in my thoughts just ahead of the attack I suffered.
Also must say, it feels a bit odd to be labelled 'epileptic' ('labelled' being the word used by the doc) since, as far as I'm aware, I didn't suffer anything like the convulsive fits one usually associates with the term, but it's been fascinating to find out about the sheer range of behaviour covered by the word.
And also, also must say, it's been a gratifying relief to have recovered enough from last year's set-back to be able to handle the demands of the Holy Month. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I can't recall feeling quite this chipper in any previous fasting month. God willing, this keeps up, eh?
A time of emptiness, but fullness to follow. The sweet after the sour. (Well, not so much sour, but distinctly dry.)
The Missus has been about her highly productive work. Evidence above.
22 Ramadhan, 1444
Every year I try and lose myself in the timelessness offered by the fasting month, and every year I fail. Yes, there's one week, plus one day to go. Which means there's one more Thursday to fast (and one more Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.) Tomorrow is one of two Fridays left, which two sets of Friday Prayers whilst still fasting.
This is all very childish, but oddly satisfactory. Like counting down to Christmas Day when I was a kid.
Part of me has never grown up. And the part that has is mildly grateful for that, but still longs for just a bit more maturity. Maybe next year, eh?
21 Ramadhan, 1444
Is prayer a mode of escape from the miseries of our fallen world? Or a means of engagement with them? As usual, I'm not really sure of the answer. But I suspect it's: Both.
19 Ramadhan, 1444
I'm not quite sure why but the early days of the fasting month saw me (if that's the appropriate verb) listening with an unwonted intensity to all sorts of music. I think this was partly to do with the fact that there wasn't much actual time to listen, so I was determined to make best use of whatever time there was, and partly because a key feature of the month is that it enhances one's gratitude for not simply food & drink but just about every good thing and I was particularly struck by just what a good thing music is.
Now it's not that the inherent goodness of music came as a sudden revelation - of course, I've always known that and, more importantly, felt that since being a little kid. But I just seemed to feel it more deeply than usual somehow.
The feeling applied to just about everything I managed to listen to, but most of all to various pieces from the Finnish master Jean Sibelius, especially the symphonies, and, most especially, the fourth. My go-to version is the one conducted by the (then) young Simon Rattle - with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - which I've got on CD. But listening around I've come to the conclusion I prefer Esa Pekka Salonen doing his stuff with it, though it's a close run thing. (The version I link to, by the way, features an obviously very young Salonen. I saw him conducting when I was in Sheffield in the 80's and, my goodness me, the young ladies in attendance, of whom there were more than a few, went absolutely gaga. And I'm not sure it was over the music, to be honest.)
18 Ramadhan, 1444
I'm deeply into Kenneth Cragg's The Event of the Qur'an, so I can declare my Islamic-themed reading for the fasting month as quite a success, even with a couple of weeks left (which should be ample time to finish Cragg's book.) Happily I've also managed to find time to keep going on the second volume of Archie Ammons's Complete Poems, helped along considerably by the fact that I'm now reading the segment dedicated to the poems published in 2005's Bosh and Flapdoodle. I loved the book when it came out, so much so that I read it too fast. I'm finding myself doing something similar now, but because my time reading has to be more carefully rationed than usual I'm slowing up enough to feel an even greater engagement with the material - which is basically Archie as an old man railing, sort of, against the dying of the light, but in a gloriously wise, funny and crusty manner. Definitely the kind of work to appeal to a crusty old chap like myself.
The funny thing is that I keep thinking of a time I'll re-read this in the single volume paperback I got hold of when it was first published. And another sort of funny thing occurs to me: it's difficult to pick out single poems from Ammons's work as standalone pieces, just as it's difficult to quote from Archie. It's the cumulative nature of the poems that impacts the reader. I just kind of bookmarked a lovely poem entitled Thoughts, from Bosh and Flapdoodle, a sort of meditation on the work and death of A. E. Houseman which was very funny, deeply moving and a little bit scary, all at the same time, but I'm pretty sure my sense of it as an individual piece somehow apart from the rest of Bosh will fade. And rightly so.
Just decided: this (Bosh and Flapdoodle) is my favourite book from Ammons, for now, at least. TOP BARD, eh?
17 Ramadhan, 1444
Thought of Mum a few times today, on the anniversary of her death. Funnily enough the most vivid memory concerned her dancing. Her determination to cut the rug on any weekend at a workingman's club was a thing to behold, Something I didn't inherit, though I'm like her in any number of other ways. Not sure that Dad could ever really keep up, which, I suspect, resulted in a fair amount of criticism raining down on him.
Can't help but wonder why dancing doesn't feature on the curriculum. Bit of a non sequitur, I know, but it's running late and I declare myself beyond mere connections.
16 Ramadhan, 1444
Broke the fast this evening with quite a crowd at our place. Much laughter.
Thought of the Prophet (peace be upon him) alone in the watches of the night receiving the early surahs. The first chapter of Kenneth Craggs's The Event of the Qur'an evokes that perspective on Rasulullah quite brilliantly. It also features a quotation from Henry Vaughan's The Night that I'd quite forgotten:
Lovely stuff. Must put aside some time for HV soon. At his best the equal of Donne - and surpasses him in simple sincerity every time.
15 Ramadhan, 1444
It was around about this time in the fasting month last year that I found myself breaking the fast in company with some of my Muslim colleagues. I suppose something of a pattern has been set over the years: the early days of the month are spent routinely at home adjusting to a new (but old) way of doing things, and then I gradually open out to embracing others - growing (again) in awareness of the communal nature of this special (but general) experience.
Unlike last year, I arrived in good time to prepare to buka and it felt good to ease myself into the evening. And especially so since work had been particularly intense with little or no time to spit out (as Mum would have said.) Not that one is meant to spend time spitting in the Holy Month I hasten to add.
14 Ramadhan, 1444
It's not so much the lack of food & drink that wears one down. It's the need to strive to be a better version of oneself. Not easy. Trust me, I know.
But, I suspect, not impossible.
13 Ramadhan, 1444
Almost two weeks gone of the fasting month. And it's almost routine. Almost. But it never really is.
Case in point: I've been happily napping in the afternoon pretty much everyday - usually waking about an hour prior to breaking the fast. But today I was just too busy to even think of dozing for just five minutes. The odd thing was that it felt good to keep going and stay alert.
Even after years of observing the fast there's always something that surprises; sometimes something new; often something forgotten that comes alive again.
12 Ramadhan, 1444
Am managing reasonably regular trips to the gym. I time these for just after breaking the fast and that seems to work for me, though I don't try and do too much with the weights.
I was a bit worried about how I would cope with fasting and working at the same time back at the start of the year, but I was still in recovery at that time. Now I'm doing it I'm feeling very good indeed, and intensely thankful for that. When colleagues inquire as to how I'm doing, and it's surprising just how often I'm asked this as a genuine, kind question, my reply is usually along the lines of never having felt better. I don't think people quite believe me, but the odd thing is that it happens to be true.
11 Ramadhan, 1444
13.40
A bit of jolt for me just now. I was in the NTUC supermarket at Clementi Mall, helping Noi at the checkout and browsing various favourite websites as I did so, when I came across a reference at Progressive Ears to the news of the death of the musician Ray Schulman, whom I'd referred to in this Far Place just yesterday evening (in glowing terms, I'm very happy to say.)
I generally try to avoid RIP-themed posts. There would be so many of them given that I'm of an age when the heroes of my youth, generally musicians, are finding their ways to their long homes. But it's good to reflect occasionally on how much of communal value an individual can give to the world when developing his or her talents to the full, as Mr Schulman undoubtedly, wonderfully, did.
22.40
And more bad news regarding the death of a co-worker, entirely unexpected, later in the day. Sad.
Spent the last three hours or so, just popping away to break the fast, at a carnival run by the students. And rightly jolly it was. Enough raw energy around to supply a large city for a day or two. Good to be among the living.
10 Ramadhan, 1444
Decided to give a spin to Gentle Giant's live Playing the Fool this morning and was glad I did. Doing so is turning into a bit of a tradition in this household as a way of celebrating this Great Day of Fools, but I'm a bit puzzled as to why I don't give it a listen more often. I was totally blown away by the stunning rendition of On Reflection, to the extent that I went searching for other versions posted to YouTube later in the day - hence the one in the link for the stunned enjoyment of all with ears. It's pure folly I don't open my ears to the genius of GG throughout the year.
Another foolish thing I must acknowledge today. We're exactly one-third of the way through the fasting month and I'm overly aware of that fact. Each year I do my best to lose myself in the experience of fasting, and each year I find myself counting down the days. Mind you, I suppose it doesn't help that each year I publish the dates for the month in this very Far Place. Doh!
(On a further note - having just watched and listened to the live rendition from the BBC's Sight & Sound In Concert I'm forced to ask whether Ray Schulman (bass, violin & vocals) in particular isn't just sickeningly over-blessed with talent? The answer is: no. His brilliance, and that of his erstwhile band-mates, is a source of absolute JOY.)
