a rose is a rose

While helping my student with her reflectios on the nightingale story by Oscar Wilde, we produced the following paragraph to explain the last scene of the story -- a rose falling into the gutter:

By falling into the gutter, the rose ends up being with the more indignant and repulsive things in the world. The rose loses its shine and originality. The cartwheel, on the other hand, is an inanimate heavy object that is moving forward. It squeezes the life out of the rose without knowing what it has done, and it continues on its path, heading for a certain destination with no regard for the living details along the way.

revisiting mavis gallant and the garden of forking paths

As I was reading through Mavis Gallant’s most recent short story collection, Going Ashore, I was thoroughly impressed by the story “Wing’s Chips” (1954).

A girl tells the story of living in interwar Quebec with her English father, a painter who chooses to live on the French side of the region rather than the English. Ostracized by both the English and the French, he attains his moment of triumph with a Chinese family who asks him to paint a sign for their restaurant. Gallant’s depiction of the Chinese family is cute, controlled, though somewhat stereotypical, but only because of the truth it contains.

The Wing children were solemn little Chinese, close in age and so tangled in lineage that it was impossible to sort them out as sisters, brothers, and cousins.

Her descriptive dexterity is displayed in the way she depicts their hierarchy:

Their [the young ones’] English was excellent and their French Canadian idiom without flaw. Those nearest my age were Florence, Marjorie, Ronald, and Hugh. The older set of brothers and cousins – those of my father’s generation – had abrupt, utilitarian names: Tommy, Jimmy, George. The still older people – most of whom seldom came out of the rooms behind the shop – used their Chinese names. There was even a great-grandmother, who sat, shrunken and silent, by the great iron range where the chips swam in a bath of boiling fat.

Gallant paints a very human picture in a very Canadian story, rich in character, as revealed by their actions.

In contrast, yesterday, I took an hour off in the afternoon to revisit “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), a classic by Jorge Luis Borges. It occurred to me, only a page or two into the story, that I had read this before in university. I decided to pick up Borges yesterday because his birthday was highlighted on Google’s main page. In any case, due to a lack of technical knowledge on my part, I had printed this story in very small font, and that strained my eyes, not to mention having to pause every here and there to wrap my mind around the philosophical and metaphysical concepts that Borges throws at me. The garden is a time-warp. He (through the character Stephen Albert) explains the garden as follows:

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Tsui Pen conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.

Borges differs from Gallant (and most fiction writers) by his focus on concepts and philosophy as opposed to emotions and human relations. The cross-cultural aspect – as seen also in the earlier excerpt of Gallant’s story – is also a trademark of Borges’s writing . The narrator, a Chinese man serving as a German spy, is running from an English captain. When being told about the Garden by the Anglo professor, the narrator reflects:

I listened with proper veneration to these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in themselves than the fact that they had been created by my blood and were being restored to me by a man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a Western isle.

At times, in my life, I also find myself in situations where I am riding on the thrill of having streams of different cultures flowing through me and even bigger is the thrill, more satisfactory, at least, when I am able to navigate through these cultures effortlessly, as a result of the skills and understandings I have acquired over the years, living as – I’d like to think-- a worldly man. Times like this I remind myself to be thankful, and in doing so, I avoid letting my undeserved fortunes get the best of me. I must not let them get to me if I intend to live and learn seriously.

things that count and things that don't

On his deathbed, Albert Einstein’s last words were not understood by the only nurse on duty that evening because he had said them in German. It was an unfinished utterance.

Einstein spent most of his Nobel Prize money on making sure that his first wife and the two sons he had with her were well looked- after. But in his will, his allocated more money to his two step-daughters from his second marriage than to his two sons.

I was trying to recall some of his quotes…

“A man really only starts to live when he learns how to live outside of himself.”

“Things that are counted do not always count, but things that count usually cannot be counted.”

“I have never considered myself talented; I am just inquisitive.”

happy shades

To illustrate the awesome ways in which the English language, with its various verb tenses, allows us to convey different moods and feelings, I have, until now, often quoted a rather thin line -- “I’ll be loving you forever, and I’ve been loving you so long” -- from the chorus of a love song.

This late afternoon, in reading Alice Munro’s story “Walker Brothers Cowboy” -- the first story in her first published collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), I found the following passage that strikes me as a grand example of how the perfect tense allows us to slide back and forth on this continuum of time.

Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive – old, old – when it ends. I do not like to think of it.

When I want a simple, genuinely human story, free of gimmicks and language that draws attention onto itself, I go back to Alice Munro, who I could easily say is my favourite short story writer. She wasn’t published until she was around 40. She seems to have only lived in small town Ontario through most of her life. Not a world traveler, yet her observations of the human condition are beyond this world.



I was reading, in the late afternoon, on a bench in Tsim Sha Tsui East, and when I finished reading, it was already dark and the lights on the Regal Hotel came on. I lay on the bench for a while, closed my eyes, felt the sounds from the fountain from a distance and I felt very much at home, very much at home.

a view, from my room, of other rooms

A room with walls painted poppy red; curtains partly drawn. In the flat above that, four pairs of underwear seem to be hanging by the window from the inside; the shape of that one pair of brief in the centre is most recognizable as bronze-tinted lights from the ceiling filters its fabric. As for the flat to its right, a worm of brownish light seeps through the gap where the curtains should overlap, and just now, someone closed the curtains completely. I saw his shadow just now, his arm reaching up to adjust the air-conditioner. It looked like a man. That abrupt moving of the curtains seemed to me to be an act of a man peeking down at me from behind the cloth, criticizing me for making prose so late at night, or envying, perhaps, of my romantic tendency to write in this late hour with a desk lamp over my toothpaste-white keyboard and a whiskey glass filled with green tea over ice cubes. Enough about me. Across from my window at my eye-level, in the unit with the tainted translucent windows shut, the fluorescent ceiling lamp outlines of a pair of jeans hanging off the window frame from the inside. The flat to its right has its lights out, curtains left open on purpose, perhaps, as thought of by a tenant so fond of streetlights reflected onto the walls of the home; a compact disc, dangling off a string tied to the air-conditioner, sways slightly like a pendulum, slicing glimpses of the metallic spectrum that catch the eyes, even now, ten minutes before midnight.

slow motion

I was walking toward and still a few feet away from the information desk, deciding which of the panel of librarians to address, when my mouth jumpstarted the question, “Is there a way for me to research in the old newspapers?”

Her wide eyes made me look to them as I completed my question. They were like a quarter of a hardboiled egg. They gave a look of wanting to help even though they were really quite expressionless.

“The computers are all fully booked at this moment,” she said, looking at the list and keeping an upright posture on her swivel chair. “But you can tell me what you want to search. I can look it up for you.”

A nervousness trickled from her high supple cheeks down to her chin. Her complexion was arid and pasty from over-wash but cosmetically glossy. She kept her wide eyes from making contact with mine. They shone like a fluorescent desk lamp.

Trying a bit too hard to hide my hesitation, I enunciated the words, “Cosmetic surgery failures in Hong Kong that have led to depression and mental breakdowns.” I put emphasis on the keywords and improvised the latter part of the sentence to keep from saying ‘suicide’.

“How far back do you want me to trace?” She asked, eyes on the monitor, hands on the keyboard.

“Just recent ones.”

“The last month? The last two months? The last year?”

“How about the last two years?”

“From Aug 14 2009 to Aug 14 of 2011,” she said flatly, and with the pride of a librarian who insisted on structure. Her posture was upright and her eyes wore a blank focus. She had the ability to make typing sounds while keeping her body still. Then she lifted the monitor, turned it toward me, and rested it on the counter that came up to my shoulders. The monitor half-stood in a twisted position restricted by its too-short power cord. “You can hold it,” she said and left me to scan the results while she tended to another patron. I kept one hand on the mammoth screen to keep it from falling.

words

Chandler doesn’t waste his words. Here, making verbs out of nouns, he describes the hallway:

I… went along a wide hall carpeted in green and paneled in ivory.

The writer tackles spatial descriptions without muddling the waters. Note how he makes his prepositions work for him:

French windows in the end wall opened on a stone porch and looked across the dusk at the foothills. Near the windows a closed door in the west wall and near the entrance door another door in the same wall. This last had a plush curtain drawn across on a thin brass rod below the lintel.

Chandler shows how, when depicting an often-seen gesture, the writer can cut the abstract picture into three concrete and distinct movements, and then place them in sequence. Active verbs are ever so useful in a task like this.

…he put his hand out palm up and cupped the fingers and rolled the thumb gently against the index and middle fingers.

That piece of verbal animation right there is many times more exciting than computer animation. A true craftsman sees clearly, cuts like a knife, and gets full mileage out of every word.

after class, before dinner

I continue to be taken aback by Raymond Chandler’s descriptive prowess.

On describing Geiger’s house:

The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamp, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colours, the flagon of ether and laudanum – all this in the daytime had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.

In that paragraph, three words require a dictionary for me to know what they refer to. I also wonder if a fag party is what I think it is.

In describing Carmen’s reaction to the narrator:

Her eyes became narrow and almost black and as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray.

In describing Eddie Mars the moment he enters:

…two scarlet diamonds in his grey satin tie that looked like the diamonds on roulette layouts. …beautifully cut flannel… his hair underneath it [the hat] was grey and as fine as if it had been sifted by gauze… thoughtful grey eyes.

I was talking to a student as we were in the same elevator going down. Earlier in class, she had mentioned that, having just finished high school, she was looking for a part-time job as an accounting clerk. I asked her what her dream job was, and she said she still didn’t know. I said that’s a question she had to answer at some point. After class, we found ourselves in the same elevator going down.

I told her to go abroad for a year or so. She said she couldn’t. “I get homesick,” she said. “I was in Malaysia for a month and I cried the whole time because I missed home so much.” She was an only child. At home, there were mom, dad, and two cats. We got down to the narrow pavements of Kwun Tong and weaved our way around pedestrians. I had in my hand a detective novel and a Japanese magazine picked up at the laundromat. I asked her if she was taking the subway, and she said, “Yes, I live in Lam Tin.” “Then you can walk home,” I said. She smiled and shook her head simultaneously, and before she could explain, I said, “I have to cross here,” and stopped at the corner. Her momentum took her to the direction of the station, but she turned to me, in no rush, and with a smile made by lifting her cheek to the corner of her squinting eye, she escorted the stillness of the moment to wave goodbye, before resuming her walk to the station. Cars and the rush-hour hoard found my senses again as I crossed the road, headed for the building where I was about to have dinner by myself.

the naming of parts

There was an overtone of strain in her smile. It wasn’t a smile at all. It was a grimace. She just thought it was a smile. – Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

I am beginning to sense, in my own prose, a layer of existentialist overtone. I thought I was creating a kind of surrealist detachment, but I wasn’t. I had merely made muddy water.

One demand I am making of myself is to see and articulate clearly.

A smile is different from a grimace. Just like a chair is different from a stool which is different from a bench; just like a table is different from a desk.

Strive to be clear. And today we have the naming of parts.

depressing airport scene

Once in a while, I would stop reading a story with a few more pages still to go before the end so that I can prolong the experience while waiting for the perfect time to enjoy the ending. This was my experience reading Charles Baxter’s “The Cures of Love” from his collection Believers. The following passage is brilliant.

A businessman carrying a laptop computer and whose face had a WASPy nondescript pudgy blankness fueled by liquor and avarice was raising his voice at the gate agent, an African-American woman. Men like that raise their voices and make demands as a way of life; it was as automatic and as thoughtless as cement turning and slopping around inside a cement mixer.

Baxter succeeds in capturing exactly what I see in a lot of men. The cement metaphor is dead-on. The grayness resembles the depressing corridors of many airports in the US. He continues this lashing-out while keeping as objective a distance as possible.

His wingtip shoes were scuffed, and his suit was tailored one size too small for him so that it bulged at the waist. He had combed strands of hair across his sizable bald spot. His forehead was damp with sweat, and his nose sported broken capillaries. He was not so first class.

I say I love this city but too often I want to thump the people here. Their thoughtless actions make me tired. I love this city, but I hate it too. This strange mixture of love and hate is, altogether, a kind of love. You wouldn’t hate it if you don’t care about it. The scariest thing that can happen in a society is if we condition our children to be indifferent.

a night in central

I was with two colleagues tonight, and after a late-night snack, we were about to leave Central, heading for the subway. “You know what I love about Central?” asked one of my colleagues, so ready to give us the answer. “You see so many birds,” he said. “Good birds. Not just local birds.”

By ‘birds’ he meant women who go out on a Saturday night dawning strategic outfits that reveal their shapely body parts. I thought of the cut-out models from mainstream fashion magazines and entertainment tabloids.

I also caught his meaning of how local women are rather unattractive, which, I would disagree, for I have come across the occasional lady who wears her local earthly energy with such grace and charm.

I thought of the troubled narrator, Podznyshev, in Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata”. In it, the narrator (perhaps Tolstoy himself), makes the following observation:

It’s an astonishing thing how complete the illusion can be that beauty is the good. A beautiful woman says stupid things, you listen and don’t see the stupidity, you see intelligence. She says and does vile things, and you see something sweet. And when she doesn’t say stupid or vile things, but is beautiful, you think she’s a marvel of intelligence and morality.

I have always kept the position that it is difficult to see the true essence of a person if one only looks at the appearance. I have experienced the irritation of having to converse with a woman whose appearance and physical exposition challenges my control over where I look, and more irritating if this woman is aware of her power and is using it knowingly. This is when a voice inside of me reminds me to neither be taken aback nor be moved by the tricks. It is a power struggle. And too often, men submit. I’d like to think I have too much pride. Yes, I just have too much pride. I would rather forgo the opportunity to glance over a body that society deems beautiful than to allow the owner of the body to arrive at some kind of success (as she may see it as such) for having ‘enchanted’ me.

Podznychev also says the following:

A woman is happy and achieves everything she can desire when she enchants a man.

For me, if I know this is what she is trying to do, I’d say, I see your tricks, and your tricks are nothing new. Rather, the woman who doesn’t try, the woman whose appearance is different from the beauty defined in the mainstream catalogue, who yet carries a lightness that seems like she has attained a certain grace without effort, who sits in the corner of a restaurant sipping lemon tea – that, I may find very captivating.

But you see, the difference is, in the latter case, it is I who detect her, whereas in the former example, she is the one who puts on a front to enchant me. I prefer to be the active participant. But does it suggest that I prefer my women to be passive, and that really, even with my criticism of contemporary views on beauty, I am still, really, a traditionalist?

The best part of going to Central is seeing the birds --- I compare my colleague’s comment to Podznyshev’s fear.

…I always felt awkward, eerie, when I saw a woman decked out in a ball gown, but now I’m downright scared, I see something downright dangerous for people and against the law¸I want to call the police, to ask for protection against the danger, to demand that the dangerous object be taken away, removed.

The narrator also asks society the following question.

Why is gambling forbidden, while women in prostitutionous, sensuality-arousing costumes are not? They’re a thousand times more dangerous!

I see how a strategically revealing outfit can be dangerous, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that we need to have them removed. I think women can choose to wear whatever they want as long as they are being themselves and not what society wants them to be. As I say this, the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant is being televised. The women contestants are numbered 1 to 10 (I think there are ten of them), and each woman, when it is her turn, does a much-practiced catwalk across the stage while holding a smile and moving her arms as if she was a blooming flower. If, as a man watching this, I feel offended, as a woman, would I not be outraged?

on seeing life in the deadest things

I took note of the following passages, both of which capture the irony of being able to see life in a dead body. The following is from Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”.

He had changed very much, had grown still thinner, since Pyotr Ivanovich last saw him, but, as with all dead people, his face was more handsome, and above all more significant, the it had been in the living man.

This one below is from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep where he describes Geiger’s dead body that is lying on the carpet.

His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots I heard had missed. He was very dead.

There is life even in the deadest things, and death in what appears to be lively. He who observes irony and is able to articulate it adds not just in his own ability to dissect the world but also gives pleasure and enlightenment to those who reads his prose.

on living a long and slow death

When we talk about Tolstoy we think of his two great novels. A great writer is a great writer, so I really shouldn’t be surprised that Tolstoy’s short stories are just as enticing and thought-provoking as his novels, with characters that breathe and cry and play vint and suffer vividly. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” captures the life of the one Ivan Ilyich. The story emphasizes the ‘death’ because Ivan Ilyich has lived ‘correctly’ according to social expectations, but he has not nearly experienced life in its grandest form. Such is his tragedy. Such is a life time’s long and slow death.

Time and again, Tolstoy echoes thoughts that have crossed my mind many a times. Here, he describes how Ivan Ilyich goes about decorating the new home.

Essentially, though, it was the same with all people who are not exactly rich, but who want to resemble the rich, and for that reason, only resemble each other: damasks, ebony, flowers, carpets, and bronzes, dark and gleaming – all that all people of a certain kind acquire in order to resemble all people of a certain kind.

Just like how the more we try to create a style, thinking that we are stylish and hip, we are, really, just like everyone else, resembling ‘all people of a certain kind’. Are we content with resembling people of this certain kind? Are we content with resembling the same people who carry insecurities about their appearance, their career path, their preferences of things to do in their free time?

Tolstoy’s observation is delicate, but even more stunning is the ease by which he articulates these observations, laying it out for the reader like a perfectly peeled and sliced orange.

But Ivan Ilyich’s real pleasure was in little dinners, to which he invited ladies and gentlemen of important social position and passed the time with them similarly to the way such people usually pass the time, just as his drawing room was similar to all other drawing rooms.

Do we dine like everyone else? Do we dress ourselves like everyone else? Do we pass the time by going to the shopping malls and the commercial movies like everyone else? What is the drama that takes place for a person who senses an alert in his awareness that his choices are beginning to resemble the ‘everybody’?