冰猫侦探社

Love's Work by Gillian Rose My rating: 4 of 5 stars I have mixed feelings about Rose’s Love’s Work , upon which I cogitated in a knot of frown but could not unlock my brow—a hard, seedless nut; a water-scented perfume; a come-hither from the mirror—such unavailing tantilisation that when I finally cracked the charade, the answser is charade . This semi-biography semi-treatise is overwritten, like a warning sign turned to a litany. The language can be overbearing and pretentiously abstruse—she tried too hard to hide a plain truth, amping up the expectation and toning down the fun of it. The book is a loosely-structured, thinly-sheafed dichotomy of personal life and philosophical musings. I use the word dichotomy advisedly yet under a dramatic light, as her reflection on life and death and love (which I find too broad and ancient a theme for this puny memoir to master) is indeed periodically spliced by framments of past life; however, the link bet...

This year I want your love and not my love back. Bounties taste sweeter when given without view of return; grants are loudlier lauded when received upon no merit. It is time to be touched, affected, and not discomfited by it. I know at any rate, be it that I hate myself beyond desert or that everything I touch tumbles beyond credit, this trial must be tried, this weight must be borne, this tax must be wiped, and this life must pass itself by, glorious or bland.

Only the number of distractions caps that of my whims. I’ve sadly come to realise that I lose heart easily and will never stick at nothing. Aborted projects, partial writings, emerging sketches lie somewhere, plaintively, in some forlorn hopes of coming into use some day, until they pulp and smear, atomise and disappear into thin air. I command standards mightily higher than I command mastery, not least being that I enter upon matters I refuse to enter into—the gore and whiteness, the miniatures and traps of a body when anatomised, is what repels me from a direct observation. I live vicariously, in fancy and feelings, batering youth for flings, splurging over bread just for the warm smell. There's meaning in largess, and so much more of it in not seeking it.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl My rating: 1 of 5 stars I have time now to grudge this hell of a book some of my vehement reflections. First, why all these reiterations of the same ideas, why frame them with the exact words over and over again? I would’ve made allowances if it is one giant tome —it is not, however, with its 180-odd pages lengthwise (but in terms of the stop-and-start reading experience, it is surely a big time-consumer and bootless distraction for me). I’d have frowned less if these ideas are of value, worthy of empatic repetitions—they are not, however, original or ground-breaking (and I, a non-Christian, have come to detect most of the doctrines to be from Jesus himself); in point of fact, it is the parading and touting them as new and salutary that tick me off. Frankle was clear and adamant in his conviction that life should be a quest for meaning, and he brushed off pleasure and power as a worthy object to be pu...

NO arrival of good news. I never swipe my phone open without forebodings. All my friends and I talk about seems not frustration enough to suit the occasion—a bed of mares, a mirror of tears, a house of pregnant pauses, and a life being every bit as it always ought to be.

I am the freest man in the world—no jobs, no aspirations; no items to tick off, no pencil to twiddle; no hair to curl, no heel to cool; no need for feigned shame or overblown rage, no exposure to the human species or their putative moral obligations set upon me.  I must be content, for I have all the slates to wipe, and streets to cross; I have every iota with me that makes who I am, every lucid thought within me to mirror the world I intrude myself upon. However, I, a wanderer who wonders at the vagrant, a conjurer who conquers the mystery of truth, always find my fate a straightway maze, the vast of which assures as well as contradicts every one of my senses. Thinking , I take them all out—my puny, wearish thoughts, and iron them down, fold them up into collages of geometries, and stow them away in the draw; and then unthinking I upset the draw, and go over the ritual, thinking , and not realising .

I  spend too much time sleeping, time that would not have elsewhere to be placed than in devising meaningless, pregnant thoughts, deep like alluvion, heavy like manacles. Eyes shut, the mind is at peace, hopefully, a peace that is hard-fought, treasured up, too precious to be stirred at, too friable for an excited dream to break. To achieve a state of somnolence when the mind is active and phosphorescent takes more pains than fighting droopy eyelids. The latter is merely a physical tussle; the former a travail on the mind. Now I am sitting behind the glum, fake wood table, boring into the short pass way to the flimsy door that jolts and moans whenever someone passes by from the other side; though every switch is flipped up, the lighting in the room is meager and I can barely see one scintilla boucing from any reflective surface. I am thinking, shallow, happy thoughts—in the present day, there seem less and less of them—those pert, ebullient scums on the surface of a still, composed...

The dark, starless sky is going out like a travelling wave; the bed, bare as mine, on which lie raspy, white hot planets and other bodies, takes away all the fanciful astrological notions proper to a medieval academic. I slink down along the headboard on my spine and then feeling no sleep right myself back up. How wakefulness keeps me up and useless in my convolutions is a mystery ancient as time. Every cell, troubled by overthinking and irregularity, rages against me; I know for sure I won’t be living long, but what a long jump would that be if death were not ground enough. (crack of dawn) Waiting in line to do the routine swab test, I found a familiar cart selling sugar-glazed hawberries (neatly threaded on wooden skewers) and it made me happy. Handmade food gives me not only comfort but hope that is not crushed by mass brutalisation, and a sturdiness that gains by the weight it bears, and a loveliness all the more prettier against dark back cloth. (late evening)

Out a verse is yawned, Now a calmer eye might shut.  Of nothing is life;  Thus about something  It must be! 

Idea, stronger than a seed- Nothing to do about it- Discarded, chafes back By the sleight of a dandelion;  Buried, shades its grave Perverting thousand eyes  To the cool play.  Mind, perverser than a wobbly tray- Nothing to do with it- A tug makes it tumble; And a lift sends it flying! 

When in love Do as lovers do. Liver, or heart  Spare no part!  Touch the sheets. Touch the skin. All enclosed  In a sense of kith.  Where selves cede  Bonds throng. Where cores bare, Shimmering feels keen. 

Come thither, Follow the hand. Can it see,  Your harried face? To the chamber Now you inch. Stone or gas? Make a guess! Noose that cannot be  But for the funny-faced. Short tongues shan’t be Bothered with the final itch. Every drudge has now its place.  Quick make a wish! If the next must be near, Would it’d never be this! 

Finally, the last line went up in the air; distraction to puffs,   palling. Read runes of Stained fingers, Cat’s sideeye, Rippling geography on the marble; Nothing betrayed. In the cold demitass, Geometries Laid out The driving from the Divine. Sped   May it be. Sped, sped, sped!

A wrinkle from when I don’t smile Reveals more now that I pout! Youth is best before use. Every whiff of air leaves a mark.

My couplets are crude. My eyes  bleared, with strain and sigh. Long night ground colors. Darker than cased blood, Light as fish eggs. I wonder where can be found some driftwood  waving a dying hand. Maybe at my bedside? Clean cut over slogging saw, Death better than doubt. A grand ending gives everything A punch can.

First day in a new year,  clean as linen; assured as a scissor cut. Cups crumbs in the curve, unfolds till drum-tight; Trims odds and  ends till nothing left.  For desire doomed to despair the room is made.  A wish in curlicue is your wage. For a substanti al soul, no cure is but spared. In all its solidity, a drag will devour you one-piece one-bite.

I’m sick of not knowing.   A life bereft of surprises, In that I revel with tremor. The calendar  shudders at any touch. November is all but over. For his own life he fears. Confident the day stauches a rivulet of possibilities, I want to shove the knife And carve out of me a fountain of roses. To see the landscape, whatever is running under this hide. I want sobering cuts.   They give me a tease. I want peeled truth.   They dismiss with a tickle. Never will I thrill at anything   in a baby-proofed cell. A baby’s life is locked in itself. A baby’s pain gives motive for wonder As if pain is a novelty. The unwrapping grows wearisome. Doubts begin to envelop me   That the wrap is the gift. If I wreathe a garland about my neck, That, at last, might stir a ripple in me.

My father gulped vine From a bowl, Scrabbled four grapes  only From a glass In his lonely carousing Near dawn. I counted As one tumlbed After another, Another and The other .  At what I didn’t understand I giggled. At the wall, The drunk man pelted his rage, Gathering wool under the stain When the day broke.  Lilac kisses in the chalk, bedded  violently ;  Where my future to be found: A sour-scented splatter.  My wailing took march; My mother's howling strung to a melisma. Once where had bloomed innocence Cannoned  a great war.

1.  I always wear my hair short. I wonder how it feels to let it sprawl. And I become sickened with dread for not knowing - would I like a nice mane for myself? Now I understand why people paint on their skin, puncture layers of tissues and run rings through the nose. They just want to know. 2.  Now it’s months since I got my hair cut. When my fingertip skims over the end of it, I, startled, seem to have met another self. 

I want to be loved so let me. But not by many. I want to be heard so let me.  But not once for all.  I want to be rude so let me. Even once too often. In the gleaming teeth I see the world beaming  And myself wailing.  Still I want to be loved  Just by you. Maybe. Just about enough.  Maybe. Maybe.