Looking Out

Got lost poorly in my thoughts earlier this evening. Found myself considering, in no great depth, the nature of evil, human evil, that is. The subject deserves more than the kind of shallowness I could manage. But it did occur to me that there's something essentially dull about it, a kind of nasty predictability. Not much in the way of imagination.

I suppose that's why horror movies eventually fail to horrify. Halloweens always end in disappointment. 

On the other hand, goodness grows in fascination, I suppose, in part, because of its sheer unlikeliness. Something genuinely worth looking out for.

Looking In

Was glancing through my journal of this date fifteen years ago and came across this very odd bit of self-communing:

Reflected today on some of the motivating factors behind my feelings about work-related issues. Did not like what I saw but realised that was why it was important to look. I thought I had achieved some distance on this. But I haven't. These issues seem related in some sense to the money issues above. I don't know quite how but they both seem related to unsurfaced anxieties. I think I'm open to exploring these pressures, if that's the right word, in an open-ended way - but there's another part of me that says be stoical. Take the pressure and allow it to release grace of a kind. Rise above this. This is nothing compared to the real anxieties that beset some folk. And that's so obviously true. I can forget these hardly existent problems quite easily, naturally. But is there some underlying trouble that I'm closing my eyes to, which it would be fruitful, profitable to live with, walk among, become conversant with?

I suppose I'd better say why I found this so odd. Two reasons. The first is that I have no idea at all what 'work-related issues' were on my mind all those years ago. These days such 'issues' simply don't exist, at least not in the oddly intense way they appear to have been affecting my (somewhat) younger self. (Though the concerns about the green stuff being hinted at have not exactly disappeared, I must say.) The second is that I seem to have abandoned the peculiarly introverted style of the passage above a long time ago to the extent that I hardly recognise it as something I was once capable of.

I'm all for reflection, but sometimes you can gaze too deeply inwards.

Sensible Decision-making

Still feeling considerably under the weather, I had a big decision to make this afternoon. Would it be an act of complete stupidity to get to the gym and do my bit in the pursuit of a minimum of physical fitness, or would be it a sign of some kind of recovery? In the event I went along and endured forty minutes on the elliptical whotsit. Then later we hosted a birthday bash for Fifi (twenty-one years old - good grief!) at the very pleasant Spize at the Temasek Club. Still not entirely sure of the degree of heroic stupidity involved in my actions of the afternoon. Got a feeling I'll know tomorrow, though.

A Human Face

Our little household found itself short of the Internet service promised by its well-paid providers, one Singtel, last week. The problem manifested itself on Wednesday and plagued us for some forty-eight hours. Eventually I resorted to phoning said providers and found myself chastising some unfortunate young lady at the other end of the line who was attempting the impossible: to sound reasonable in defending the service providers from an indefensible position and genuinely trying to provide us some help. I don't want to go into the gory details of how a major flagship company associated with all that's good about this Far Place gets into indefensible territory, but let's just say it can't really be wise to offer people a contract for a service and then tell them that the infrastructure that supports the service isn't up to par, such that those needing the service have to accept they made a bad choice and need to make fundamental changes regarding the service at higher cost.

For some reason I can't quite grasp it seems it's unthinkable to suggest that one might receive a refund to compensate for the periods for which one wasn't provided the service paid for. An excellent way to do business, I'm sure.

But strangely enough I didn't intend to write this little post to rant about the inadequacies of Singtel. Rather I just wanted to say how genuinely impressed I was with the young lady who handled my call on Thursday and even more so regarding the guy who came round and tried to restore our service on Friday. It took him a good three hours to deal with the problem and he was unrelenting in his attempts to figure out what parts of the cabling involved were giving a problem as well as being pleasantly chatty throughout. I'm guessing that neither of these minor figures are regarded as indispensable to the company they work for - the lady in some call centre not even located on the island, and the gentleman painfully clear in his explanation of just how dispensable he and other technicians are seen as being to their employers - but from our perspective they somehow managed to put a reasonable face on, and give a human voice to, a company that really doesn't seem to possess either.

Business As Usual

Strange how a thing can grow in one's consciousness over time. A few years back I encountered for the first time the notion of someone having become addicted to prescription pain-killers. This wasn't something that was ever heard of in my childhood or teenage years. I suppose it happened then, but it didn't make the news. I'm guessing I first came across the idea in relation to the problems of some celebrity or other. I know I found it puzzling at first but then saw a kind of grim logic being involved.

Then about a year ago I came across the term opioid, in relation to the notion of opioid addiction. I was vaguely aware that the problem was connected somehow to prescribed pain-killers but didn't quite grasp the nature of the connection. Now I know, following recent revelations concerning the number of deaths per day in the US as a result of overdoses of various opioids. And as a result of a particularly well-researched article in the on-line edition of the New Yorker I'm also now disturbingly aware of just how the whole problem/crisis/epidemic began.

The idea that we can blame a particular drugs company for all this somehow manages to be astonishing and all too predictable at one and the same time. Is there no end to human greed and folly?

(The answer is no, in case you're wondering.)

Not Soon Enough

Feeling tired and ill, ill and tired. One state blends into another. Two faces of the same coin, an ugly one of little to no value. Suppose I'll feel better eventually, and hoping eventually comes soon.

Playtime

Planning for potential drama performances for 2018 gathered pace today. Felt just as excited as I did when I started doing this sort of thing some time in the last century. Sort of childish in the best of ways. In fact, I've been reading quite a few plays lately since discovering the Connections series published by Bloomsbury in collaboration with the National Theatre. Some wonderfully edgy stuff in the volume for 2014, but maybe a bit too edgy for this Far Place. Still it's always fun to imagine just how far we might be able to push the envelope.

The Year In View

Finally got hold of a desk diary for 2018.  I am entirely reliant on the kind that gives you a week on a single view to organise that part of my life that requires organisation. The next task is to fill in the broad outlines of the year to get some sense of how to make the impossible work. This is daunting, but routine. Worryingly it only seems like last week that I was doing the same thing for my 2017 diary. Who knows where the time goes? sang Sandy Denny, beautifully and wisely - sadly not staying for an answer.

It's Life!

Noi showed me a short video earlier of a snake loose in Bukit Batok. It was a big fellow - looked like a python. Some rather skilful, and brave, guys were apprehending the snake, finally getting it into a sack. Bit sad, I suppose, but I'm hopeful the creature was released afterward into the wild to resume its snakey existence. (Don't really want to think of other possible 'endings' for this little tale.) As we were chatting about the local wild life Noi was telling me that one of her friends spotted a wild boar the other week.

All this made me feel unaccountably cheerful. Isn't it splendid to be forced to realise the world revolves around more than just our daft species? (Though, again, it's perhaps best to avoid darker thoughts of the miserable manner in which we exercise our custodianship of the planet and the life thereon.)

It put me in mind of something John mentioned when we were chatting on the phone the other evening. He was telling me about his next door neighbour who's not so well now but who used to spend his evening smoking outside the house (one of the reasons for his not-so-well state, I'm afraid) waiting for the foxes around the area to put in an appearance as they came scavenging around the houses. A great way to spend the time, I reckon - the observing of the rascally foxes, that is, not the self-harm.

It occurs to me that I've never seen a fox close up. The loss is mine.

When I was a little lad, living up Haughton Green, around six years old, the neighbours had a shed in their little back garden in which they kept rabbits. Sadly they were in cages, but it didn't seem sad to me at the time, they were such lovely creatures to hold and stroke. There were also a couple of ferrets in the shed, kept in a kind of box. They stunk. I suppose the neighbour used to go ferreting with them (a 'sport' I won't explain, involving as it does Nature red in tooth and claw.) Deeply inhumane, but maybe the ferrets didn't mind it too much? Better than a world in which kids never get to see them at all, except on film.

Accomplished, Sort Of

Finished Omeros today. Tremendous power in the elegiac closing sections, partly as a result of having learnt so much, with such depth, about St Lucia and its residents; the poem accumulates somehow. I'll never look at fishermen in the same way; not that I used to look at them in any real way - which is, in some tiny sense, what the poem is about.
 
And since I finished The Master and his Emissary last weekend, I'm finally able to think about what I'll be reading as we approach the end of the year. I suspect it'll be something from my shelves. I suspect it'll involve segments of The Master and his Emissary and something from my Collected Poems 1948 - 1984 of Walcott. When one's reading experience has been this rich it's difficult to put it to one side. These days I find myself needing to try and live up to the writers I admire by giving them the attention they deserve - but somehow always feeling myself failing in this regard. It's a sort of happy failure though.