Late for church this morning because I was being sick and throwing up my breakfast at the coffee-house next door. By the time I got there there were no available seats left for myself, alongside a couple of other vacant-looking folks, whom I presumed did not have the kind of excuse I’d had for my tardiness.
January 14, 2012
Who am I kidding?
At the land of epiphanies, a.k.a gym yesterday (in what I perceive as a short-term solution to all that grease America has given me over the “festive” period) I am struck by how incredibly restless I have become without work to do, eating away the confident surge of exuberance in which I have initially approached the city by. I have baked, painted, read, allowed my life to be dictated around 17-calorie egg whites, and now I can’t wait for January 17th so all this wastefulness in an idle life can be sieved through by the manipulative geniuses of my professors.
In my head I know it’s too simple to wish for war, for open battle, but one cannot help but wish for those situations that make us heroic. Like school, or work, or family arguments. I love Columbia; I love the humbleness of being in such a sterile, thoughtfully-dynamic, and humorous environment with all these organically-talented people, such concoctions amiss elsewhere in memory. Also a huge bonus I get to cross-register with the Business School, in modules with titles I can barely string a sentence to talk about. The only downside, however, is that I remain remarkably awkward around one of my housemates, whom I perceive to be underwhelming, and only ever coming to engagement when gossip and topics remotely relevant to her boyfriend abound.
June 13, 2011
Last Letter
What happened that night? Your final night.
Double, treble exposure
Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday,
My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine
How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office
And added to your load. I moved fast,
Through the snow-blue, February, London twilight.
Wept with relief when you opened the door.
A huddle of riddles in solution. Precocious tears
That failed to interpret to me, failed to divulge
Their real import. But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—-off the ashtray
Against which you would lean for me to read
The Doctor’s phone-number.
My escape
Had become such a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,
Only wanting to be recaptured, only
Wanting to drop, out of its vacuum.
Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.
Two days in no calendar, but stolen
From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their bloody tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.That night
My dellarobbia Susan. I moved
With the circumspection
Of a flame in a fuse. My whole fury
Was an abandoned effort to blow up
The old globe where shadows bent over
My telltale track of ashes. I raced
From and from, face backwards, a film reversed,
Towards what? We went to Rugby St
Where you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all places
Why did we go there? Perversity
In the artistry of our fate
Adjusted its refinements for you, for me
And for Susan. Solitaire
Played by the Minotaur of that maze
Even included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.
You had noted her—-a girl for a story.
You never met her. Few ever met her,
Except across the ears and raving mask
Of her Alsatian. You had not even glimpsed her.
You had only recoiled
When her demented animal crashed its weight
Against her door, as we slipped through the hallway;
And heard it choking on infinite German hatred.That Sunday night she eased her door open
Its few permitted inches.
Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappy
Overweight, lovely face, that peeped out
Across the little chain. The door closed.
We heard her consoling her jailor
Inside her cell, its kennel, where, days later,
She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day.
I did not take her back to my own bed.
It had occurred to me, your weekend over,
You might appear—-a surprise visitation.
Did you appear, to tap at my dark window?
So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,
In our own wedding bed—-the same from which
Within three years she would be taken to die
In that same hospital where, within twelve hours,
I would find you dead.
Monday morning
I drove her to work, in the City,
Then parked my van North of Euston Road
And returned to where my telephone waited.What happened that night, inside your hours,
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen,
As if it was not happening. How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver—-
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’
-Ted Hughes
April 16, 2011
So… the time has come for me to realise that nobody cares about my rants and little narratives here, or, more importantly, that I must depart this stage of intense, sporadic soliloquy and delve into things that do matter (grand themes like poverty, or the evolution of the Keynesian school of thought, for instance) – perhaps selfishly, for my own career and academic development (which has insofar been zilch), by opening my own thoughts up to scrutiny instead of hiding here in a blogsopheric cave whining about being morbidly obese or complaining about Arsenal not losing every week.
Thus I have created for myself a space where I can achieve the very purposes of the above, and hold, to account, my own thoughts about the field I have so come to love. Nearly 5 years of personal blogging has been fun and at times, helpful. But the world needs my ideas, not my emotions.
March 27, 2011
But of course I’m generalising. Of course if I had gone to an ultra hip school (somewhere along Bras Brasah) where students don’t get put under some self-professed great idea of a liberal arts experiment the foundation on which this entry rests on would not have stood. And of course if I had not endowed my education with such Great Expectations I may not have been dealt with something closer to a Bleak House.
Here, you do not read widely. You’re not even compelled, nor motivated to read widely. And this is not because the school runs off with your tuition fees and decides to patronise your attendance with scant notes so that you pass your final exams and leave with a certificate from the 21st-ranked university in the world. It is, lo and behold, precisely because the school bombards you with readings that you find little else time for anything to further this metal tinsel of a mind they so gleefully oil. The outcome? You read loads of articles prescribed by the school, so that all 60 of you in the same class are armed with the same information, same quotable quotes by which each of you attempt to regurgitate in a 3-hour exam at the end of your course. No, I do not even have the time to look up on what Karl Marx talks about in his Communist Manifesto about “commercial crises” even if it relates (somewhat) to what the syllabus attempts to cover. No, I do not have time to compare the trade ideas of Krugman or Ricardo, nor do I have the time to assess China’s role in nuclear energy, if these -God forbid- not be found in our “readings for the week”. Here, you are a machine. A machine that depreciates and rots and rusts. You read, highlight and regurgitate. Here, you kiss goodbye to hours spent intellectually sparring over thoughts on global imbalances. (And your classmate, to your quiet exasperation, will say, “Why are you reading that? That’s not tested!”) Here, reading T.S. Eliot during lunchtime is construed as arrogance because that implicitly means that you have done all your school readings, and that textbooks are beyond you. Oh yes, if it be architecturally possible the school would, I suspect, build its building on stacks of textbooks and books alone.
What have I learnt? I have learnt what Bernanke (2006) says; I have learnt what Gros & Thygesen (2009) says, I have memorised Howorth (2005) – and clearly the system works in such a way that Loo (2011) is merely a plagiarised form of all of the above.
I cannot wait for August. When ideas will finally not be dictated by a page number, nor will thinking aloud be an act of crime and cowardice in class.
March 25, 2011
Typical of God’s great balancing act that today was a tale of extremes. Met a friend from the UK for coffee in the morning (Chai latte – B+); Tony Blair visited the school and spoke about post-ideological governance, which disappointed but nonetheless inspired this European-attuned mind.
Then, bumped into Joshua and we mused over the non sequitur while I waited out the time till my interview – which was basically British-accented, fluffy, and rather horrible.
March 23, 2011
Quote from my dean Kis.hore Ma.hbu.bani yesterday:
Foreign aid is one of the biggest frauds committed in the whole of human history.
March 16, 2011
730am and I’ve been up for two hours trailing the end of a football match (God bless GMT +8) while keeping half a mind on this profusely-watered down essay on how to save the euro (God bless Jean-Claude Trichet), and I am acutely reminded that it was Gordon Brown who saved the global financial system. It was Gordon Brown who averted the same kind of global financial meltdown our great grandparents saw. It was Gordon Brown, invited to the Eurogroup crisis meeting in that autumn day in 2008, who thrusted solidarity into the picture. The same solidarity that must now lend itself in Japan, in Libya, in Ireland, in New Zealand.
Call me an ideologically-tainted economist, and I suspect I’m more left than I supposed I am, more Keynesian that most liberals, and more socialist than my background would suggest, but to any decision that has so far come out of Westminster or Brussels I affix the one framing question, “What would Gordon have done? What would he have thought of that policy?”
Ah, yes… Britain is poorer in compassion without a world leader on its helm. What insight this becomes for my essay.
March 8, 2011
I
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing againBecause I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoiceAnd pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon usBecause these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.II
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, sayingLady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthybut speak the word only.
IV
Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springsMade cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,
Sovegna vosHere are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearingWhite light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no wordBut the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspokenTill the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile
V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and
deny the voiceWill the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and opposeO my people, what have I done unto thee.
Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.O my people.
VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turnWavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wingsAnd the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earthThis is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separatedAnd let my cry come unto Thee.
- T. S. Eliot
March 5, 2011
