Author Archives: GracefulRock

“Bring Something Incomprehensible into the World!”

Joy! New discovery of a great mind and also rediscovery of the empowering morning jog.

Gilles Deleuze — postwar continental heavyweight whose philosophy is fiercely fresh and completely disconcerting — is a man who believes in secrecy and spent most of his life by staying where he was. “If I stick where I am, if I don’t travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. … Arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.”

But still, this was a life lived to the fullest — despite the fact he’s been suffering from debilitating disease for a quarter of a century and described himself “like a dog chained to an oxygen machine”. The inner journey he took, those internal sojourns…were a true testimony to what Proust once famously said: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

For Deleuze,  to live well is to fully express one’s power, to go to the limits of one’s potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society suppresses difference and alienates persons from their true potentials. To become what we can become, we must at least try to subvert conventionalities, overturn established identities and take a fresh look at sedimentated concepts. For him, philosophy is the construction of concepts, and those concepts are not merely propositions but metaphysical constructions that can render intelligible reality — which is a flux of change of difference.

I like his epistemology — there’s no neutral point of view that one can arrive at after rigorous thinking; and philosophy is no disinterested pursuit that results in a fixed set of truth. Deleuze thinks genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Reason is always a footnote to irrationality.

I like how he differentiates among philosophy, arts and science. Philosophy deals with concepts, arts with sensation and feeling, and science raw data from natural world. They’re different ways of organizing metaphysical influx. I especially like what he said about cinema — he doesn’t treat cinema as representing external reality, but takes it as an ontological practice of creating different ways of organizing movement and time.

So for him, the pinnacle of human practice, is creativity.

“Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.”

Berry Daiquiri

Maybe I’ve been hanging out too much with disturbed and deranged people, am now slightly at a loss over a simple man with a good heart.

But how I love it! So I feel that urge again … to read a poem.

Stretched out,

Stone made of noon,

half-open eyes whose whiteness turns to blue,

half-ready smile.

Your body rouses, you shake your lion’s mane.

Again lying down,

a fine striation of lava in the rock,

a sleeping ray of light.

And while you sleep I stroke you, I polish you,

slim axe,

arrow with whom i set the night (or the morning) on fire.

The sea fighting far off with its swords and feathers.

(Octavio Paz)

Blue Valentine

Watched “Blue Valentine” today. Was not as good as I expected to be, probably because it’s  the same genre movie as Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road and François Ozon’s masterpiece 5×2; in the inevitable comparison, it only pales beside the latter two. But still, am a big sucker for flicks that handle how relationship disintegrates. Besides, Gosling’s cunnilingus performance was very real!

The Wait

It is life in slow motion,
it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:
too much and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenly
stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,
and, leaning out the carriage

door, we vainly contemplate
a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop.

              -- Rilke

Let it Simmer

Nothing has really happened just yet. But that might be for a reason. The only consolation I could use: am no fan of immediate gratification.

Only the third week into the new year, but I already saw the light out of the tunnel!

(And so Sally can wait…)

Beau-ti-ful

Two things happen if I feel that tickle at my heart. I read/write poetry and I dress myself more nicely than usual.

Sex makes many demands, and somehow it seems wisest to respond to them without necessarily taking them at face value. What we repress return to us.

Bacchanalia (J.B.Bernstein)

I lie
Before you soaked
in white orchid, its redolence
assails like devil’s fire. And when
you sheathe my body
with your flame, I get drunk
from the blood of you  the flesh of you.
Then, when the new moon mounts
black sky, I inhale your breath
and pray to you: Swallow me
alive.

New Moon

The first week of the new year, is slipping through my fingers.

A couple of fine stories, a stepped-up pace after a long vacation, a new found love for hardcore journalism, some potential ripples in life — that tickle at my heart…glad I’m still able to feel it.

I want to place my lips on a tender spot tonight.

Bye Bye Blackbird!

This is a very interesting experiment — what exactly happens to the patients parts of whose orbitofrontal cortex (which plays a central role in regulating emotional feelings whether to approach or withdraw) are damaged so that they lost most of their emotional lives. Their reasoning and logical abilities are intact and they can perform normally on tests of intelligence. When these people go out into the world, you would assume these people are free of emotional distractions and able to see through the haze of feelings that blind the rest of us and achieve perfect rationality.

Just the opposite. They found themselves unable to make simplest decisions or set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out at the world and think, “What should I do now?” They see loads of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like and dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every option with reasoning, but in the absence of feeling, they see little reason to pick one over another.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. Along a similar line, it’s hard for the controlled system to beat the automatic system by will power alone. That’s why all self-control would fail eventually if it’s up against one’s true desire.

Last day of 2010 — I read an article on Boredom (Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Under-stimulation) and bought a book on Exuberance.

And I cooked a beautiful pot of mung bean soup for myself.

May next year be filled with genuine exuberance for life.

The Confessions of A Snob

Last day in Nam and already looking forward to returning to Kong. I can never fully relax when traveling. My life has been highly structured. I long for returning to those daily routines like long walk up the hills, morning reading, afternoon drinks, and late night jazz.

Like Schopenhauer once said and I catastrophically came across at an impressionable age, life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom; my longing — or human longing — is constantly moving between adventure and security.

Yesterday, after a quite good trip to Ha Long Bay, I still came to conclusion that I tend to like travelling in more developed places (gasp!). As much as I love the beauty of Mother Nature, I am equally appalled by its philistine nature.

  • Floating Market, HLB
  • Weird Drink List
  • War Museum
  • Saigon Post Office
  • Elephant Ear Fish
  • Gigantic Buddha

Saigon, Saigon

Was sitting at this lovely cafe “Green Leaf” sipping Pina Colada and surprisingly, they’ve got free WiFi! Facebook is also blocked in Nam, I discovered.

Ho Chi Minh City looks like a second-tier Chinese city at the level of Ningbo or Nanning. Thousands of maddening cyclos were roaming along every street, which looks dusty and rundown even in its most hustle and bustle district. The sense of anarchic madness kicked in when I was applying for the visa-on-arrival at the HCM airport — everyone was queuing the wrong queue and didn’t know what to expect. Finally it was my turn, this small, dark, emotionless Vietnamese guy was as terse as possible, to the point I was completely clueless whether I was in the right queue or not. I waited for about 20 minutes before he used his eyes to direct me to the sideways. And then came this Vietnamese cab driver who didn’t speak a word of English and somehow thought I was going to check into InterContinental, even though I repeatedly said my hotel is Hotel Continental Saigon (Which was the setting of Graham Green’s The Quiet American).

Got a lovely letter from Down Under. That, along with a glass of Pinot Grigio at the pavement table watching maddening traffic around me, made my day.

Wandering around a bit in the hotel area — it was totally mad with all sorts of piercing sounds clashing into each other. For many Vietnamese people, the favorite pastime seems to be sitting around on the stairs in front of an inhumanely gigantic shopping mall; and for many young people here, hugging (literally) brand name logos for a photo is THE thing to do.

It’s late now, but thanks for massive noises outside my window, I could only half-sleep.

The Social Network

Was reading the newspaper this morning at Pacific Coffee and had to say the editorial quality dropped to a new low. C’s story, “Change tack on Korea, experts urge Beijing”, was a hodgepodge of weak judgment, excessive repetition and even a spelling mistake that was forced to the front page.

Look at the intro: “China yesterday urged close ally North Korea to follow though on its offer to allow UN nuclear inspectors to return …” — that’s equivalent to Mum urges her boy to do homework after school and what’s anything significant about that? Then the second paragraph, which should have been the intro — which would not have salvaged the article but could have at least made it not as a spectacular failure as the existing one — started to cite experts as saying Beijing’s N-Korean policy had fallen off the rails. And then came, very jarringly, our dear spokesperson friend from the FM.

Aaron Sorkin was on BBC “Arts and Ideas” program and made a compelling statement on the Facebook phenomenon. While Zuckerberg may have the best of intentions when creating the website,  what it has done was exactly the opposite, Sorkin argued.

“What socializing on the net is to socializing is what reality TV to reality.”

FB users are constantly re-inventing themselves to what the world would love them to be — and there’s an insincerity to it, and it is, to essence, a performance when you put on a status update saying “oops, got up too late coz I went to a fabulous party last night”. We don’t show our flaws on FB, or we only show those cute ones.

“It’s an insincere form of communication.”

It’s A Wonderful Life (Xmas)

Those fine things in life —

1. Bus ride to Stanley on a sunny day with Kermode around the ears

2. One drink or two at sunset writing my blog

3. Deep night Jazz saturating the room, with moonlight shining in

4. Saturday morning AMC movies

5. 1am phone call from you

6. Reading at the crack of the dawn

7. Morning yoga

8. Morning jogging on Bowen Road

9. Cracking a joke, and pottering around

10. A sentence perfectly crafted