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Posted by blog/moonriver at 1:37 PM WST
Updated: Sunday, 14 December 2003 2:06 PM WST
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A Most Exciting Letter
Dear Friend,

Sorry that my letter to you had to be made public. These are thoughts that I want to share with you as well as other people who might have stumbled upon this for one reason or another.
Life is not one long bitching session, or is it? I hate to be asked why I have nothing to contribute to this endless inane chatter. You know me best; sometimes I will suddenly be in a mood to tell you a lot of things, most of the time, I don!?t respond to your questions. Do I seem too absorbed in my own world? It is very difficult to resist the temptation to think that what goes on inside the brain is far more interesting to hear than what other people have to say. In a way, we are just uttering random sentences to each other, via an encoded program. People have lost the power to say powerful things; they have the ability to say before they think. If I can police all those sentences that make no useful contribution to the world, it will be a much quieter place.
Would you thus accept the explanation that I am silent because I am silent unless I have something to say? I have to think about Life because I am not too sure when I will be asked to stop the ride. As Gaarder puts it, !?Life is one huge lottery where only the winning tickets are visible.!? If you think about it at all, the infinite coincidences that culminate in our existence do not give us an easy equation to figure out at all. We are the winners of the biggest lottery ever. Now that we are here, it is of paramount importance that we should seriously consider how to wisely spend our winnings.
Isn!?t life fascinating enough in itself? A witty line I!?ve once read about Life goes: !?I was so surprised by my own birth that I was speechless for one and a half years.!? How apt, for it is only babies who retain the greatest faculty of wonder. If babies could somehow made their thoughts known to us, what interesting revelations would they give us? It is sadly ironic that all of us have to be !?socialized!? in the process of what we call !?growing up!?. All it does is to make us lose our innate capability for many great things, like thinking and asking. We don!?t think, we assume. We are not sure. We do not know why something is there but we know it is always there. We are comfortable with not what we know, but what we are familiar with. Isn!?t it ironic, that as we grow up, we actually become more ignorant? Wisest is she who knows she doesn!?t know.
I really missed the days of being out of this city. Waking up to a foreign land is the nearest to waking up with a bang. You seem to drop dead and come alive again each day. You wake up in surprise, not knowing who you are and where you are. Isn!?t that feeling exciting? The familiar has a firm grip on us. Humdrum as our lives may be, we are addicted and unwilling to let go of it. Moderation I guess, my friend. Have enough familiarity to comfort you in times of doubt and loneliness; yet do not be sucked into the routine. Add something new everyday. Muster up courage bit by bit. There are times when you really need it and it just feels so inadequate!-
Take care my friend. Though I have said this so many times, I do not know what it means to take care. We think we know ourselves, but we don!?t. We can never understand ourselves. We only inflate ourselves, deflate ourselves, are over expectant or not tolerant enough of ourselves. How many of us have treated ourselves in the right way? It!?s a conundrum to ask people to take care of themselves really, because I am sure nobody can do it. We need to take care of each other.

Yours unruly,
The Jumping Spider.

PS: A Freudian slip! Of course I meant !?Yours Truly,!?

"He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials--people who were ignorant of the past and proud of it.
Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occured earlier could be safely ignored. The modern world was compelling and new, and the past had no bearing on it. Studying history was as pointless as learning Morse code, or how to drive a horse-drawn wagon. And the medieval period--all those knights in clanking armor and ladies in gowns and pointy hats--was so obviously irrelevant as to be beneath consideration.
Yet the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love, had first been established in the medieval times. These stockborkers owed the very notion of a market economy to the Middle Ages. And if they didn't know that, then they didn't know the basic facts of who they were.Why they did what they did. Where they had come from.
Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree."
-Michael Crichton
Timeline

"My brain is seething. I'm bubbling with hundreds of new ideas.They just keep welling up.
Perhaps it's possible to control thoughts to a certain extent, but to stop thinking is asking too much. My head is teeming with hundreds of beguiling notions, I'm not able to fix them before they're ousted by new thoughts. I can't keep them apart.
I'm rarely able to remember my thoughts. Before I manage to dwell on one of my inspirations, it generally melts into an even better idea, but this, too, is so fickle of character that I struggle to save it from the constant volcanic stream of new ideas...
Once more my head is full of voices. I feel haunted by an excitable swarm of souls who use my brain cells to talk to one another. I haven't the equanimity to harbour them all, some must be racked off. I have a considerable intellectual surplus and I constantly need to unburden it. At regular intervals, I have to sit down with pencil and paper and relieve myself of ideas...
When I awoke a few hours ago, I was certain I'd formulated the world's most competant adage. Now I'm not so sure, but at least I've given the virgin aphorism a due place in my notebook. I am convinced it could be traded for a better dinner. If I sold it to someone who already has a name, it might make it into the next edition of Familiar Quotations. At last, I've decided what I want to be. I shall continue doing what I've always done, but from now on, I'll make a living out of it. I don't feel the need to be famous, that's an important consideration, but I could still become extremely rich."

-Jostein Gaarder
The Ringmaster's Daughter

The Joker and Life's Mysteries
That day, at the lookout point of the Hindhede Quarry in Bukit Timah Hill, there was this young man who was sitting together in the pavillion with a group of people whom i thought were probably volunteers . what was so distinct about this young man was, he kept making a simple vocalization repeatedly while the other 'normal' pple kept up their chatter. this interesting young man no doubt caught the attention of every single person who came up to the pavilion other than those who brought him here. no doubt, everyone's first reaction would be, this boy must be one of those we call an intellectually disabled person. but have we ever thought of how we differentiate them from ourselves? simply by recognising that they cannot or don't want to do things that we are used to doing and they kind of don't experience the world in the same way as we do. in a way, i felt that this young man cld really have been born to experience the world differently from many of us. and because he is among so many "normal" pple (for me being normal has no more meaning than acting like the majority at any point in time). perhaps, the young man is the lone Joker in a pack of cards who have lost their senses. perhaps he saw peculiar things that everyone else was blind to.

Maybe it is not unlike the words in the Joker Game:

"The images jump out of the creative space into the created space. The figures are shaken out of the magician's sleeve and appear out of thin air bursting with life. The fantasies are beautiful in appearance but all except have one lost their minds. Only a lonesome Joker sees through the delusion."

"The solitaire is a family curse. There is always a Joker to see through the delusion. Generation succeeds generation, but there is a fool walking the earth who is never ravaged by time. The one who sees through destiny must also live through it."

Continue the story
He had met her for the first time outside Saint Margaret's Church. It was the wedding of two of his best varsity friends Min and Yu. He was a guest, she a mere passerby. Her hair was plastered on her forehead and beads of sweat formed on her brow, presumably she had walked a long way under the hot sun. She paused to look at the little congregation of newly-weds and well wishers in the church, oblivious to the man who was eyeing her curiously...

One of her favourite ways to spend time was to take a long walk through a place that she'd never been before. People liked to think that there were no places that they had never been to, but they were usually wrong. deciding to avoid the usual path would most probably bring something new, but most were unwilling. they were used to the security that familiarity had given them. she hated that. she loved to walk a different path everytime.
Like today. she had taken a long walk round an old estate, simply out of boredom and a little curiosity about a place that she had never been to, but where some people had lived all their lives. she had intruded into their territory and noticed more interesting things in this neighborhood in one hour than the residents would in ten years. she had seen a white cat;she remembered reading that white cats of a certain eye color were deaf. she was tempted to test it out; she sneaked behind the unsuspecting creature and brought her hands together in a loud clap. the terrified cat promptly bolted out of sight.
walking further, she notice a tree with a knobby little crevice halfway up its trunk which somehow resembled an eye. it looked like the tree was looking at her and all that passed with an unerring gaze. feeling a bit disconcerted, she walked off quickly.
the road was long and winding, and by now the clouds had parted. The weather was hot! just then a little red cab slowed down beside her, the driver gesturing for her to take his cab, but she shook her head vehemently and he went on.


how would you continue the story?

This reminds me of a little game i played with my frens during my childhood. everyone would sit in a little circle each with a piece of paper and a pen. one person would be responsible for asking the questions, but they were always almost the same questions, in the same order. after writing down the answer to the first question, e.g. what's his name? everyone will fold their sheets down just to conceal what they'd just written and switch papers in one direction. then the second question would be sth along the lines of: where is he?, followed by what was he doing there? etc etc etc. then at the end , everyone will open their paper by now folded into a strip and read the hilarious contents. this funny little exercise produced totally out of the world narratives. tho it seems silly now and the questions corny, it nevertheless provided hours of fun for me as a child.

Long Walk
white cat. empty swings. tree with an eye. crow trap. red taxi. vanilla soft serve ice-cream. talking parrot. church wedding.

The cosmic fossil
"When radio telescopes can pick up light from distant galaxies billions of lightyears away,they will be charting the universe as it looked in primeval times after the Big Bang. Everything we see in the sky is a cosmic fossil from thousands and millions of years ago. The only thing an astrologer can do is predict the past."
-Albert Knag
Sophie's World

Freud
last night, fell asleep reading the chapter on freud and his analysis on dreams. true enough, i began to have a dream exactly the way he said we would have it. firstly, it was inspired by the happenings the day b4 (not that i din know this). what's more, i finally understand what he means by we are much more unrepressed in our dreams, despite the fact that there are still censors. in my dream, i said something which i wldn't have said to another person in real life, cos it was an extremely mean and ungracious thing to say. i guess what teaches me what was mean and ungracious is the superego. and in a dream, superegos are very much absent and ids are taking control. no wonder we always wake up feeling that our dream are ludicrous. :P

The stranges of the strange has happened.why did a yellow rose sprout from my white rose plant?