Small Mercies

2 Ramadhan 1434

19.10
The time for breaking the fast is approaching and I feel a whole lot better than I did yesterday.

Another paradox of this month: it shows you how strong you can be whilst showing you how weak you really are.

Sort Of Routine

1 Ramadhan 1434

17.00
Around 12.30 I realised just how tough fasting is. It's not that I'd forgotten exactly, but in looking forward to the holy month I suppose I'd been remembering the final days of fasting in past years when generally things have fallen into place, adaptations having been made. It isn't like that at the beginning and the way I felt just after noon was a fierce reminder: I had an aching head such that it felt my brains had been scooped out and something very bruised forced back into the space they'd occupied. I didn't feel hungry; I didn't feel thirsty. I felt too listless to accommodate either state.

And now there's still more than a couple of hours left before I get to drink again, but, somehow or other, my body is telling me that this is not so bad and we can cope, so stop being a wimp. And that's what I'm going to do.

Intoxication

If you don't understand why Plato wanted poets banned from The Republic then you don't understand poetry.

Straining

Listening to Levon Helm's Dirt Farmer this evening I was aware for the first time of just how strained his voice sounds - not surprising in a man then dealing with cancer of the throat - now, sadly, so longer with us. He sings so well, with such commitment, that the sheer difficulty of what he's doing is not immediately apparent. It's the imperfection of the voice that makes it so powerful.

There's a sort of definition of art in there somewhere.

In Raptures

It says something for the lackadaisical pace of my reading that I'm only now coming to the final volumes of some books of poetry I bought almost a full year ago. Well, not exactly 'bought'. Said volumes were purchased with some of the book vouchers I got for my talk for the annual Literature Seminar done by the Gifted Education people at MOE. I gave away about half the vouchers to Fafa and Fifi on the grounds that we have no room on the shelves for a whole raft of new books but it seemed appropriate to purchase a few thin volumes of the stuff I'd been talking about.

Anyway, two of the collections were by Carol Ann Duffy. I'd always enjoyed the odd poem here and there I'd seen by her, I was aware of her acquiring a stellar reputation, I like the idea of poets who consciously write for children as well as adults, and when she was appointed Poet Laureate I'd felt embarrassed I didn't know her work in any kind of detail since I am supposed to know something about poetry - being invited to give talks and all. So buying at least a little something seemed a bit of an imperative.

The first of the two I read, last year, Mean Time was a bit of a disappointment. I think I was expecting a bit too much, or had an impression of a kind of writer that Duffy isn't but which I wanted her to be - a sort of English version of Billy Collins. This is not to say I didn't get anything out of the book. But now I don't remember anything vividly from it, the test of an immediate impact. Having said that, I'm quite happy at the idea I'll revisit it soon. That's the way it is with poetry, of course. It so often needs time to grow. Goodness, it took me forty years to start to genuinely respond to Lycidas.

But I've just finished the second of the collections I bought last year, Rapture, and in this case the impact was powerful and immediate. If you want to read an electric, exhilarating account of the madness of falling in love, this is it. The problem is, though, that this is a book you need to read when you're capable of that kind of craziness. I'm thankful that I'm not anymore, but it's oddly stirring and disturbing to be reminded of some of those feelings. There's something adolescent about the poems in the best possible sense - the sense in which we need to retain that aspect of ourselves, that extraordinary generosity of feeling, as Keats did.

At Reasonable Volume

Noi has bravely driven north for the weekend to oversee the on-going renovation of Maison KL whilst I get on with some marking. This has given me the opportunity to play one or two pieces at a somewhat higher volume than is usual - something approaching what I think might even be reasonable in the concert hall. It turns out that Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin is a good deal more stirring than you might think when you can really hear the percussion towards the end. I hope the neighbours enjoyed it. (Just joking!)

Postscript: Just thought I'd let you know that the music of choice for late on Saturday night was a Sam Cooke compilation. Truly sweet soul music, sadly out of fashion, worthy of any reasonable volume.

Keeping Up Appearances

I remember the first time I ever saw a kid of my own age wearing flared trousers, I'd have been around thirteen, I think. I thought they were the coolest thing I'd ever seen on one of my peers, though I'm not entirely sure the word 'cool' was a natural part of my vocabulary back then. There was a real physical excitement involved in the idea of looking so different to the older generation. So there was a time when I must have been to some degree interested in fashion in the sense of wanting to look trendy, that being a term definitely in use. Strange, isn't it? The interest in any kind of intense sense didn't last too long - it'd largely gone by my early twenties and not too long after that reached zero.

But I realised today that I rather enjoy the fashions young people adopt. The thought was partly prompted by seeing the students at my school dressed in 'home clothes' for something termed Youth Day held annually in this Far Place. (There's a day for pretty much everybody here as far as I can tell.) Most dressed pretty conservatively but there were a few nods towards looking somewhat more funky and a few brave souls opted for outright silliness, which was highly refreshing.

And then this afternoon, for reasons which completely escape me, I settled to watch about an hour of music videos on the telly. Almost everything was completely unfamiliar but I found myself appreciating the fun, colour and imagination of it all. Even at a distance of years I could get a sense of why this kind of thing might be important to its natural audience. And I'll tell you one thing for sure: the dancing has improved several hundred-fold from what you might have seen back in my days.

I'm thankful not to feel any concern about appearance at all - other than ensuring nothing important comes unzipped - but it's part of the pleasurable texture of life that others do feel such concern and put on quite a show.

More Waste?

Got hold of a copy of the programme for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra's 2013/2014 Season today, and a very handsome volume indeed it is, running to no fewer than 80 glossy pages. Aesthetically highly pleasing and completely free. But hang on a minute. Isn't somebody, somewhere, somehow paying for all this? And is it really necessary to market the SSO in such a fulsome manner? Probably the answer to that last question is yes, and it's just that I don't understand the economics of all this - in the same way that I can't figure out why it somehow makes money to knock down perfectly reasonable buildings less than thirty years old and build new bigger, uglier ones. After all, it's well known that the planet has limitless resources.

The actual programme for the season looked very conservative to me at first glance, but then it occurred to me that if you've never heard the old war-horses live you'd probably be highly excited at the opportunity to do so, as I was, once upon a time. Anyway, given my extremely poor attendance of the concert hall in recent years it hardly behoves me to make moan, and I really must find a way to attend the Shostakovich 5 and Strauss's Four Last Songs. They're also doing the St John Passion next year, which I've never heard live, but I'm not sure I'm up to Bach played by a twenty-first century symphony orchestra having listened to the Passions almost exclusively on original instruments.

The problem is though that I waste too many opportunities to hear wonderful music performed wonderfully, so I really should take every chance I get.

Citizens Of The World

I was chatting with my friend and colleague Ola the other day and happened to ask him if he went back home often. It turns out that he sees less of his native land than I do of mine. It was particularly striking that his two daughters, around ten to thirteen years old, I think, have hardly been in Nigeria at all. The younger one doesn't remember anything about it at all, though they do, as a family, talk about life there.

What must it be like to be the citizen of a land you have never really lived in, and may never do so in the future? It suddenly struck me that Ola's girls were probably not all that unusual in their experience, and may represent a considerable portion of a generation growing up 'globalised' in quite a new sense. Someone who sees patriotism as one of the great virtues might find this notion disturbing. But I'm not that someone, and I see it as exciting.

Going To Waste

An article in today's Straits Times noted a substantial increase in the amount of food wasted in this Far Place over the last ten years or so. Those familiar with the astonishing fact that something like a whopping half of all food in the world never makes it into anyone's stomach would not have been surprised, so I wasn't. It comes with development, it seems. Waste is systemic. Putting all those enticing delicacies on the shelves to inflame our appetites involves creating surplus delicacies to ensure that profits are maximised. We already have too much and the answer is to create more.

Do you ever get the feeling that our species is an experiment of nature that has gone sadly wrong?