Mumu's Milk Memo

2009-01-23T03:28:00.001-08:00

Is it possible to grasp on to an ideal, and banish the rest of the world?

Even as I script the rest of MMTG screenplay - sometimes I think this particular theme is rather unbelievable; then in a way I know this is that which each and everyone of us secrete in our heart of hearts - in that place no one goes: sometimes not even ourselves; sometimes we forget.

I think of 'you', the abstraction of an unutterable longing in my mind, I freeze-frame, suspend time, dim the lights, turn down the voices of the crowds; I curl up before your 'feet' and am happy that life could be so easy; that I could be so easily contended, sans the intricacies of living and life.

I am then reminded how powerful abstractions are for mankind - in the absence of an overarching law which binds us, one rule which all things obey beyond mortality and mutability - some of us hew a kind of perfect image out of this wilderness which basically, even as we reject it as truth, governs our lives here. For some - it is a godhead, for others money, to some an endless pursuit of forgetfulness through sybaritic pleasure, alcohol, intoxications of all kinds; and for me: 'you' -

Suspended in a void; to recall the immortal words - that should the world come to an end, but you alone remained, I would feel at peace; and the world remained but you alone departed, the world would become a mighty stranger.

And there 'you' stand, against the onslaught of the madness of the mendacious world; holding back the tides.

An abstraction with a face; I hope, one day, I will meet.

Thinking of 'you' - I feel 'sad' - but devoid of melancholy.

2008-10-24T22:58:00.001-07:00

Collusion of Chance and Probability - Ode to Everybody

Now that you mentioned god; sometimes it is hard not to feel tempted to believe in the existence of a higher being, some inscrutable intent in this grand mystery called life which guides us all. It is not because I fear non-existence, that I fear becoming nothing – that is an irrefragable eventuality I have learned to embrace with tired resignation; what is the use of fighting, might as well treasure the present to live and love. But I am oft tempted to believe in this greater intent, this invisible hand that guides us all, because I have seen so many instances of dispensed good will, not from camaraderie of human comradeship, but from some sheer ‘coincidence’ or intent.

If you do it mathematically, I am not good at this but you probably know the odds clearer than me, for us to go through our respective lives, to chance upon it entwining, and arriving at where we are today. If you calculate how many more infinite possibilities there could have, how a single sneeze could have changed it so inexplicably, or how even going through the same events, how we could have passed on like ships in the night – ever the twain – it brings into perspective how rare every instance in this life remains, and how doubly rare and vital every shared instance we might have is. And triply blessed it makes all things in life.

Words fail me. Failing to capture the sense of grandeur and humility I feel everyday - knowing from whence I came, and where I am, and that you are here with me.

2008-10-15T06:45:00.000-07:00

Written in 1994 (LAUGH), after anguishing at night over some fundamental questions of existence.

How easy does the realization come - that you will never become anyone, never be remembered? No one in posterity will know you existed, let alone your name. No one will want to hear what you once uttered; the words wander off into forgetfulness. The scribbling you so painstakingly penned, no one will want to peruse; consign them to the dustbin, they belong there, rather, do not even bother writing, save a tree for our children. The feelings that so charged your breast, no one will want to know; the annals of history have no place for you or yours. The memories that you so cherished and carefully nursed and relived in secret, over and over again, no one will fathom.

Where do the memories go?

You are part of the vast ocean of humanity, destined to remain nameless, anonymous, to enter the world with a cry, to depart and be heard no more. Back to the ocean.

From there where do we go?

Afterlife? Heaven? Do you believe? Or would you rather come back as a cockroach, something you so despised and hated and wanted to squash when you were alive and bigger and stronger and higher on the evolutionary food chain?

Can you believe, when you see that lifeless figure before you, that once spoke, moved and laughed, shall find another day – a resurrection, in some place of eternal happiness or damnation? Tell that to the corpse. When you meet again, would you recognize? When they lower the coffin into the earth, or return what is said to be made of earth to fire, dare you envision a continuity? A resurrection? Do you believe that when they do the same to you, you will awake to something, something – anything? It doesn’t really what we awake to in the end, does it? Happiness, pain, salvation or damnation, the existence cannot believe in its own non-being and hence cries: Just let me be! And even if there is nothing beyond, if all these assurances are just fantasies, lies – funny how we will never ever realize.

Where do memories go?

And so the priest asserts: for those who believe, there will be salvation! From what? From the fear that clutches the heart which suspects the inexistence of its future? Fear of what? Be still, do not mention, try not to remember. But do not blame me for doubting – in all true faith there is doubt, without which the faith would not be tried, refined and pure. Adam ate the apple and hence we must die. Those who do not believe must burn. Animals have no souls, they kind of disappear, I think, but God knows when a sparrow falls from the sky. And God is Love. Merciful. Compassionate.

The Catholics say you can pray your loved ones out of purgatory. What if you leave behind no one who knows that it is possible? Does that mean I burn for their ignorance? What if they refuse to, if they do not believe? Does that mean I burn for their not believing, screaming in the delicious flames? Who then will pray for me out of the delicious flames of Hell into the cascading glory of an angelic choir singing songs over and over and over for all eternity? Some of my relatives cannot speak English; does God understand Mandarin?

We hate politicians when they consider us as nothing but numbers. Funny how in the end, we are still numbers. Each one of us is numbered, the chosen are numbered. The rest go to hell. I wonder if God bothered to count and number those.

The realization comes. You know. But you don’t want to remember. And so you die before you die. Because you refuse to remember.

And so when the realization comes, how easy is it to accept it? When someone gives you something as absurd, and painful, as a cactus, do you embrace it? How do you continue to live life as it is? You forget. You die first. Then you continue living as if nothing happened. Might as well tie your heart to your soles and walk the thorny path.

How can we not remember?

When the realization comes, when we accept it, holding the barbed cactus to our bosoms with a fervour of a demented lover – what next – what then? We get up in the middle of the night, when thoughts of eternity take an ominous turn. We get up and kneel on our knees and we pray, the way we did when we were children. Oh Father, thank you for your grace. Thank you for existing, that we may continue to exist. Better an eternity in hell, than, than, than that indescribable emptiness. Though Hell has twenty four levels of torture and pain, better! Better! Better by far than oblivion. Better by far than forgetfulness.

Where can the memories go?

The serpent tempted Eve into eating the fruit, hence all snakes must suffer to be legless; Adam ate the apple, hence we must all die; humanity was thus created and chased out of the Garden.

Is this where memories go – out of the Garden?

How many cursed Eve! How many less have cursed Adam. It is just a damned and damn fruit, what’s so hard in resisting? But remember how we use to look at sweets unguarded? Remember how the adults would say: ‘Thou shall not!’ and how that would usually galvanise one into doing what was exactly warned against? Indeed, if only metaphorically, we are the descendants of Adam and Eve; some of us, of the Serpent – legless, on our bellies we crawl.

What a tragedy! Precisely so, and hence it is not. Without Tragedy, what would humans be? To be without Tragedy is to be tragic. The Tragedy enabled us to write a story, to raise ourselves above the mendacity of existence. Hence, we live.

When Eve walked out of the Garden, did she not feel the crispness of the grass beneath? Did she not hear the deep murmur of the river beside, which flowed out of the Garden? Did she not, finally standing before the sea, feel comforted? That in a world and existence so determined, so ordered, foretold and unflinching from its destiny – from her Fall, to the salvation of humanity from her seed, to the final days – there is something so changeful, so changing.

Whenever I stand before the sea, I am Eve. I am Eve drowning in a surf of memories. Memories of the sin. Each time I return to the sea, it is like returning to the arms of the Beloved; I am Eve drowning. I am Eve drowning. Drowning, in full fathom five, of memories. And sea-change.

Some people write to live. Some live to write. Others write for a living. Me – I write because I die.

Caught between the irreversibility of the past, the unaccountability of the future; in the pregnancy of this moment, the hand is put to task – Write.

2008-09-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

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VOID

My grandma used to say - existence, on a blue planet with white swirls spinning across an endless cold emptiness, is a void, which you must fill. Most fill it with the clatter of everyday noise, to deny the void, to forget its existence within all of us, and the irrefragable return to it we all must, one day.

Musicians fill the void with notes.

Artists - with swirls of color, bold strokes.

Writers - with words.

And attempt to transfigure the emptiness into something else; and that is the true measure of Art.

She believed Musicians are foremost in their success - they fill the void with notes, serenading the void into forgetfulness and substance; banishing the gloom. Like strange flashes of light of micro-organisms on the heaving brine, you see, when you are far out at sea, at night, in the holy darkness - they glow.

Artists are second - with intimations of imagination,splashes of color and substance, paint over the void. Like a thirsty man in the desert - who gazes upon the mirage of an oasis, and finds comfort and salvation.

But writers are different. They attempt to word the void, and in doing so, lends it substance. Embracing the void, themselves become one with it; banishes it.

2008-09-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

I still remember - when I first stepped on your shores; the odd feeling of wet sand between my toes, the relentless sun mellow as it bowed towards the horizon. 6 hours on a plane, another 12 hours by boat; I arrived at the island of Kudafari - your home. How everyone scattered as I walked up - the first stranger from an outside world which was read, talked about, dreamt of, but never really experienced or seen.

And now, some 8 years later when I think, the somewhat odd picture of me standing there - defined many other things which make up my existence - since then, even when we are more than 3500 kilometres apart, I have always felt that now a parallel existence now runs alongside mine, and the song of my life has now a double set to it: richer and more harmonious in its duet.

Looking back, me standing there at the beach with the sun behind me, and you, some 10 feet in front me, welcoming, afraid, shy, curious - cast forever in stark relief my realisation of our relationship, which is much like that between domestic animal and wild animal. Chickens, pigs, sheeps are respectable animals, in the sense that they repay in kind the care and food we offer them, in return recompense us for our love; domestic animals derive their existence in relation to the society and community, and such is the civilised man and he is respectable. But the wild animal is different: the giraffe upon the Serengeti, the swallow flitting in the sky carelessly - they derive their existence from no one but themselves, and are held in direct relation to the Creative force, and are one step closer to the Creator; such is your state my dear friends. One cannot help when seeing a flock of wild geese sweep in undulating flight across the darkening sky, but feel the trace of the Creator's finger across the sky.

As I sit here, at 115am, wondering what you would be doing now - sitting in your darkening coral houses, the light bulbs dimmed by the hum of the overworked and unreliable generator - I hope you keep faith, with that strange freedom in your hearts, on an island in the middle of an unrelenting emerald turning deep purple with the advent night. And even now, I feel a strange closeness to you, as if a wild line is drawn across our intervening distance - burned into my memory that I might, like generations of elephants, find my way back home to you: along the trace of the Immortal finger.

Thinking of you - I lose a bit of my respectability. And take a step closer.

I sleep now. And give myself to the wildness which I hope - will take my dreams.

2008-09-02T19:38:00.000-07:00

Living is suicide; it is not as oxymoron as it sounds - it is the fire that consumes the wick.

My grandmother told me this - when I was 5 or 6, sitting by her on the bed, as the room darkened with the evening she cracked a match-head to hatch a dubious flame and fed it to the candle; through the thin plank walls I could hear the neighbours returning from work and cluttering around the kitchen preparing food, and someone cursing the lack of electricity.

It is amazing how we humans, young and old, continue living like there will always be a tomorrow; until confronted with some irrefragable proof of our advent mortality.

Then what? - you might ask - live life like you will die tomorrow?

There is a deep abandoned joy which is both bitter and sweet that comes with the acceptance of mortality - that makes every second more keen, more real.

Walking out of the room that day, I looked up at the sky - a leaky roof through which the pinhole lights shine.

And felt at peace; even though I didn’t understand.

2008-08-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

As we spin across a milieu of stars and dust, crying in vain for someone who isn’t there, on a limping spaceship called Earth - who will save our non-existent souls?

When I wake up tomorrow I will make myself a cup of tea, sit outside my house. Sip, smell the wafting sweetness of the aroma and watch the world go by. A man will walk by and look at me in surprise - don’t you have something better to do than sit outside your house in your pajamas? I will invite him for a cup; slow down - and watch the sun cross the road to the other side.