No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.

—E. Hemingway, on The Old Man And The Sea

I am embarking on a collection of Zbigniew Herbert’s translated works! This excites me, because I don’t know if a book of poetry can be read like a novel. I just imagine it will be very trying, given the density of ideas. Also I long to travel through the crystalline thought of one mind. The book itself is very charming—thick, black and pages wavy from having absorbed something since evaporated. Usually I shudder at the thought of what substances remain from that, but it really adds character. I can’t be the only one who likes dog ears and cracked hinges too. Most of all I love that they did not print title or authorship on the front cover. There’s something ugly about seeing words there that are only needed on the spine.

I know I’ve posted this somewhere before, but this is what got me started reading him.

Elegy Of Fortinbras

    for C.M.

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing  exquisite
those will be my manoeuvers before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part of an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

—Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Czesław Miłosz

What saddens me is that I may never be able to read him in the original Polish. And Rumi in Persian. And Tagore in Bengali. I think it takes years of real-life usage to grasp the nuances of a language, even after grammar and vocabulary are down pat.

你好，小葡萄！I went away for a while.

And on New Year’s Eve came back from Taipei, where I took photographs properly for the first time in exactly a year.

Breakfast, sometimes.

What virile-looking boxers.

We got really lucky at the 总统府, arriving five minutes before the flag lowering assembly even though we didn’t know it was going to happen. They hold it every evening, I think, at 5.10pm, and stop the traffic along three major arteries for the entirety of the procession. There was a stage being constructed in front of the main building then, so they went out onto the road, unlike other days, according to the mother of one of the soldiers. I’m pretty sure there was also a girlfriend there, taking pictures.

I love a good signboard. The ones I like most are in India, which are painted onto the concrete itself. That makes it feel like a shop belongs there, and nowhere else. Anyway, 肥前屋 is a famous place that sells unagi don (鳗鱼饭), but for some reason my tongue ordered 鳄鱼饭 the first time we ate there. Like when you say Pope Alexander instead of Alexander Pope. Thankfully they understood my intent.

That was a local artists’ market, like MAAD in Singapore. We didn’t go to any of the night markets, so I don’t have shots of those and I didn’t eat 蚵仔煎—blasphemy, I know. My parents didn’t like the thought of going to one, but they did at least cooperate with getting to some places that were out of the way to eat some really good food. So that’s all we did. Eat and shop and walk!

I crave 臭豆腐 maddeningly, and have a compulsion to address everyone and everything as “sweetheart”.

This is probably just the fangirl in me speaking, but one of the most melancholic things I know of is a song that I love being played without any of the vocals. Like those “(Less Vocal)” versions of recordings on Japanese singles. I know the point is to have an impromptu karaoke session, but to me they’ve just become shells of songs, ghost towns.

The air here is pretty bad, but the coolness and the expanse of it makes up somewhat. The bits of Taipei I like most are the historical, (which pervade) the residential, and the botanical. I’m enamoured of the paths behind gates and through dim gardens that lead to the squat apartment blocks. They’re very short but essential, like welcome mats that draw people in even as they delineate the borders of home and city.

Some of the trees have been given identities, and creepers have taken over a few buildings.

Today I saw the littlest kitten—white with brown patches—meandering around a pillar and among the motorcycles parked along the road. It started to cross, and cleared three-quarters of one side of the road when a taxi flashed past. There was a big man at the bikes who clapped and yelled to warn the kitten. It jumped back just in time, and after that, when I gasped, there was an instant when the man and I exchanged a look of shared… concern is the usual word here, but it was so much more urgent then. Anyway, that was a strange smidgen of a second. I hope it’s enjoying some leftovers now. My dad said it was “only a matter of time”.

Last night I learnt how to make screen captures myself! Wahahahaha now I’m going to go trigger happy on every film I see. Except for last week’s 忠臣蔵 花の巻 雪の巻/47 Ronin, which was so lengthy, weighty and entirely pretty that I couldn’t hold it to take slices from.

Anyway, this is 世界の中心で、愛をさけぶ/Crying Out Love, In The Centre Of The World, which is a rarity just by being an East Asian love story that attends to terminal illness with delicacy, instead of using it as a Cruel Twist Of Fate that hits in the feature film equivalent of 20 minutes before the end. Instead, I think, it takes the only route to let someone die without losing, by having disease and death segue into the background of what is more perpetual. I just wish I could explain why the original English title is Socrates In Love.

I can’t stop listening to Korean indie music! Though I don’t even know what the titles mean, let alone the lyrics.

☁ 반딧불소년 by Donawhale

Apparently the title translates to something like “a glow boy”. I just like the way the guitar rings and rings away in the background.

In the past few months I have rediscovered being East Asian. Everyday since then I’ve just felt like eating donburi, watching Kurosawa films, sipping Korean tisane on a verandah lined with bamboo wind chimes and visiting monasteries in the misty mountains where I come to understand 道. I wish we had a real East Asian winter here too. Everytime it starts to drizzle or a breeze blows I get excited about it reaching the point where I can actually wear knits and rain boots and stomp around outside. All I’ve had so far is the great Bukit Timah flood and the plastic snowmen along Orchard Road, though.

Meanwhile, with all this time on my hands and the J-pop and K-pop worlds at my door, I am turning into one of these.

I need to see リリイ・シュシュのすべて/All About Lily Chou-Chou again. In the meantime, while going through Hamlet readings today I chanced upon something that articulated what it felt like to watch this film. Whee, vicarious expression always feels like serendipity.

The combination of truthfulness and formal perfection with which the spectacle of suffering and evil is presented in great tragedy is one reason why we derive both pleasure and satisfaction from what should in theory depress us.

—T. McAlindon, What is a Shakespearean tragedy?

From a scene that stayed with me, because it was understated.

_{screen capture from here}

重庆森林/Chungking Express arrived in the mail last week. (Together with G-Dragon’s Heartbreaker. ㅋㅋㅋㅋ) I cannot articulate anything intelligent about films, so I’ll just leave a couple of memorable, non-spoilery images.

_{screen captures from here}