In Denial

2 Ramadhan 1431

Something I wrote early in Ramadhan some nine years ago in 1422: Not easy to establish a rhythm of denial. Some things don't change. I rather sensibly added, but good to face the challenge. And that too remains the case.

Sometimes, often, at this time of year I feel a strong sense of inadequacy at my lack of fibre. Even kids make the business of fasting look easier than I do. But then the sense of inadequacy is the whole point. It's not just being moved out of one's comfort zone; it's being left in the open with no such zone in sight.

Except it's not that bad, and there are many, too many, who face far, far worse. And it's a powerful experience being forced to appreciate that.

Starting Yet Again

1 Ramadhan 1431

One's body always seems to react with a kind of mild but distinct shock to the first day of fasting. It's being placed somewhere familiar yet strange, a place in which the usual rules are replaced by new codes of behaviour. Suddenly it's the body's weakness that is fore-grounded. All perspectives shift.

And this is just the beginning.

Conclusions

I'm feeling quite pleased with myself for finishing all the books I intended to finish before fasting month. (Starts tomorrow!) Indeed, I got a little extra in by way of reading Leon Garfield's The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris, still being on a bit of a roll from his Apprentices. Adelaide was the first of his novels I read and, possibly for that reason, remains my favourite. I remember being utterly flummoxed by how good the first pages were - how beautifully written and how funny - and thinking that what was classified as fiction for children might just have quite a bit to offer. This time round I see no reason to moderate my judgement in any respect.

I also emerged from another re-read, of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, with a sense of added appreciation, although I think he begins to run a little bit out of steam in the last hundred pages. Or perhaps it's just the ambition of the venture and the size of the numbers involved that sort of overwhelms. But the last chapter pulls everything together. Bryson's amusing yet melancholy sense of mankind's instinct for simple destruction therein makes for salutary reading.

And I found echoes of that in The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin is a wonderful companion and extraordinarily enlightened for his time concerning judgements on matters of race, religion and nationality, but his casual attitude towards killing the creatures he observes (and observes with a degree of attention that suggests a deep sense of love) is bracing to say the least. At one point he biffs a fox over the head with a geological hammer in order to take it back to some museum to have it put on display having marvelled at the fact the beast was observing the human activity below it so closely it was unaware of the great naturalist's approach. Somewhat disturbing.

The icing on the cake of all this was reading the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin in sequence and getting a sense how individual favourites (so many!) fitted into the overall development of the poet. It's striking how each of the major books seems to improve on its predecessor, culminating in High Windows. I see a move from the abstract to the concrete as being the crucial factor in this development, though that oversimplifies a deceptively straightforward writer. Oddly though I can't say I share critics' almost uniformly high regard for the uncollected Aubade. Yes, on its own it's a fine piece, but coming to it at the end of the volume I couldn't heretically wonder if the fear of death bit hadn't become a bit overdone. I preferred the verse written for Charles Causley's birthday (which set me to thinking that a sequenced reading of Causley's own Collected might not be a bad idea post-Ramadhan.)

On And Off The Phone

I've spent a fair amount of my life without direct access to a telephone. I don't think we got a phone until we moved into the shop at Guide Lane, so that's the first eight years of my life taken care of. Access to a phone was extremely limited at university, though I'm not too sure if we (myself and the four other students I lived with) had one when we were in digs in my second and third years. I certainly didn't have one in the little room I occupied when I started teaching. And I can't picture the phone I assume I had at Ellerton Road when I was finally in a house of my own. I don't think phones loomed very large in my life.

When I came to Singapore I was taken aback at just how much of a necessity access to a phone was regarded as by all and sundry. Which is by way of a prelude to recording the fact that, once again, our phone line at Maison KL decided not to function, and I found that enormously irritating. We're now actively considering ways to bypass the system in terms of getting on the Internet and simply function using the array of handphones possessed by the missus.

Mind you, there's also something curiously comforting in being quite cut-off from the world. Sort of anti-social-networking, I suppose. I realised just how much of a hermit I can be when a chap in a workshop I one attended sagely pointed out that everyone feels the need to answer a ringing phone when I knew with a deep, dark certainty that my every instinct is to ignore the darn thing.

A Small Success

I’m just going to do the prayer, I said to the missus just now. And, not for the first time, found myself reflecting upon the extent to which I find myself using expressions that mirror her own simply because they seem so entirely appropriate. The central form of Islamic prayer, the solat, the one performed five times a day at set times, is exactly that: a performance (in physical terms) , as opposed to something that one might simply say. And just what an energetic performance it is has been brought home to me over the last two weeks by my inability to do it properly.

This is the result of a decidedly iffy left knee. I don’t think this is in any way related to the sciatica I have to put up sometimes. Normally that runs down my right leg. In fact, the discomfort in my knee reminds me of the kind of injury I found myself carrying in the last couple of seasons in which I was still playing the beautiful game. I’ve got a lurking suspicion this has something to do with a shifting cartilage, if cartilage can be said to shift.

The sort of good news is, though, that I’ve just done the maghrib prayer at full throttle, as it were. (I’ve simply been sitting down through the prayers recently whilst my knee has been refusing to cooperate. This is, of course, allowed, but it has left me feeling irritatingly incomplete – which is foolish since it is, obviously, the quality of devotion that counts. But I can’t help being a fool.)

The bad news is that, even as I listen to the Call to Prayer sweeping across the taman for the final prayer of the day, I’m not sure I can repeat my little success.

Home

Hardly pausing to take a breath we find ourselves loading up for the journey north, taking advantage of the long weekend for National Day - officially on Monday.

Which, in our case, begs the question, where is home? Wherever we take ourselves, I suppose. Everywhere and nowhere. Which suits me a treat.

Ourselves As Others See

It's December 1834 and here's Charles Darwin being tremendously politically incorrect: These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one self believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians! And Darwin was one of the most enlightened men of his time.

Which makes me wonder what those a century or so hence (assuming our species survives that long) will make of us and our blind spots - possibly our complete blindness.

It would be interesting to re-write the above encounter - Darwin and his companions heading to the shore of Wollaston Island, pulling alongside a canoe filled with six Fuegians - from the perspective of those from the Land of Fires.

Suspect

I'd completely forgotten that Professor Ramadan (author of the first book on my list for fasting month) found himself denied entry to the United States for a good (or bad) six years, on the grounds that he had made donations to charities with links to Hamas. (This from a nation some of whose citizens went a long way to funding the IRA in the 1970's!) The fact that he made the donations in the period before the US government itself was aware of the links between the charities and Hamas and was wholly unaware of such links was, somehow or other, not seen to be a reasonable point.

Fortunately the government of this little island clearly thinks it's a good idea to accept visitors who consistently support tolerance and understanding between religious faiths, which is why he was in these parts doing just that only recently.

But now I've recalled his checkered history let me reassure all from the land of the free that I'll take great care when reading the professor not to be unduly influenced by any radically extreme ideas about being a good Muslim that I come across. Just as I'm extra cautious when listening to Yusuf Islam (another doubtful donor) in case he slips something insidious in those suspiciously innocent lyrics about Peace Trains and the like.

Far From Listless

I've been thinking about what to read in the holy month of Ramadhan and have decided to repeat the experiment I carried out last fasting month of focusing on what one might term loosely Islamic-themed reading. With that in mind I set out last Saturday to acquire the necessary tomes from the rather funky Wardah Books at Kampong Glam. The result: a tasty pile of four attractive paperbacks that I'm keen to start on right away but from which I am manfully holding myself back. This is not, I hasten to add, out of some obsession about only reading such material in Ramadhan. No, it's simply that I still need to finish The Voyage of the Beagle, A Short History of Nearly Everything and Larkin's Collected Poems, which comprise my highly enjoyable current reading. I've been making slow progress with them, partly the result of being extremely busy at work, and partly because I'm savouring all three. (I read Bryson's Short History some four years back and found myself chortling away almost throughout. This time I'm trying to understand the science a bit more. And I'm very familiar with pretty much every Larkin poem from The Less Deceived onwards, but reading them in sequence feels oddly rewarding.) But now I feel it's time to push on, and the long weekend ahead (for National Day) should afford an opportunity to do just that.

The reading that's intended to follow that will encompass (insh' allah): The Messenger - The Meanings of the Life of Muhammad by Tariq Ramadan; The Garden of Truth by Seyyed Hossein Nasr; Remembering God - Reflections of Islam by Gai Eaton; and Ibn Al-Arabi's On The Mysteries of Fasting, translated by Aisha Bewley. Oh, and I'm intending a swiftish, non-stop reading of Arberry's translation of The Holy Qur'an, the one in Oxford World's Classics.

I've never quite understood why I get a kick out of listing things - but I do, so there you are.

Wired Up

Life keeps getting just that little bit more complicated. Our main phone line decided not to function after Saturday morning which meant we lost access to the Internet. That's now been restored, but we no longer have a telephone in the front room, where we really need it, and we've acquired more wires than we really care for and a Mio box which gives us television programmes we don't want to see having got quite enough channels already via the Starhub box, which is, thankfully, behaving itself at the moment. The Mio box, which now sits below the Starhub box, is a free gift for something I don't understand to do with a telephone and, it seems, we can't turn it down. We know this because that's what we tried to do and failed miserably.

Fortunately the deep simplicity of fasting month is just around the corner. In the course of it I'm hoping to get wired up to what really counts.