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15 August 2003 Alright. Time to get a grip and stop whinging. 13 August 2003, addendum I say I want to live with passion. I say I look for something to do that's just difficult enough. I say it doesn't matter if it's difficult. Which is all very well. But it would be nice, wouldn't it - if things were just slightly less messy? If peace came more easily? 13 August 2003 Lee, I’m sorry. This is not something I can do. When you write to tell me of your happiness – no, not quite happiness; fulfilment – the peace you’ve made with yourself – the sudden illumination of your desires – When you say, tell me what you’re doing now, tell me what you do for life and passion – We had a pact. This – what I’m writing now – all that I have been writing in these pages – is a violation of it. If I am honest – and did we not promise honesty? – I will destroy at least one of us. If I am not – will there be a point to writing at all? To trying to build a friendship? You say, write to me soon. I can write something unforgiveable. (Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane: I would like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they’re on, but words like that have a way of being unforgiveable as well as unforgettable.) Or I can offer you silence. As the kindest thing I can do without lying. If I love you – if I could not help you find your peace back in New York - I should not – shatter it now – should I? 6 August 2003 See - you say to write without fear - to say what I want/have to say - but I'm not sure - how much you can bear. What line I can't cross. I don't trust - this is a terrible admission - your capacity - for endurance. Or mine. 6 August 2003 Throw away the lights, the definitions And say of what you see in the dark. I'm not sure - given the current range of job choices - quite how to do that. (It's been a week of interviews and open houses and more to come.) So. What price Wallace Stevens? 5 August 2003 I don't think you quite understand - to be fair I don't think many, if any, people do - the extent to which I beat my life out in words. Like Flaubert's cracked kettle. I don't mean poems or stories or books, though those are important - I mean words. I don't think you quite understand the extent to which your letters sustain me. Not simply because you are writing them, but because you are writing them. The words between us as a lifeline. I don't write - and I don't read - to escape from life; this is my life. Not more important than the rest of it - but often more real. More fundamental. What stays, what remains behind. Does that - make any sense? 5 August 2003 What responsibility do we have in writing a letter? To write what I want to say, or what you need to hear? 3 August 2003, addendum Who said that happiness writes white? (Alright; I heard from it from XZ; but surely someone else said it first. :) It sounds like I do nothing all day but mope around the house. Which is fairly close to the truth. But today - in addition to moping - we went swimming at the Civil Service Club and then had dinner by the poolside - haven't had a packed dinner with my family at the beach for many, many years now - looking out at the long fringe of beach and then from behind the trees there came a ship the colour of the sea and the sky - a washed-out grey that still remembered being blue, once - looking exactly like a ghost ship would, except solider. And then we went to the arcade to be trounced by my brother at one of those fighting game things - not Street Fighter but rather like it. My brother still looks a little like he used to - same gestures - same hairstyle (always and forever, probably) - and still lets me come over and ruffle his hair - and still, sometimes, slips his hand into mine - but he's taller now, taller than me, and his voice and just broken, and it's sometimes like he's almost, but not quite, a different person. And yesterday I went back to RJ for the Punch concert and it was odd being back in LT1 and later wandering around the school trying to remember where it was we used to sit before assembly and later reminiscing over coffee/tea and marvelling privately over how easy it was to talk of nothing at all with friends I hadn't seen and hadn't written to for a year now. 3 August 2003 Your last letter said to have faith. Faith in what? And to what end? Faith in what end? You didn't mean us; I think you meant faith in our ability to go on living full happy fulfilled lives without each other. I don't think I ever doubted that would happen. But I wouldn't have credited it to faith. It's not that I want you to hurt. It's just that - you can't have forgotten - this quickly - can you? You can't want to forget - can you? 1 August 2003 (backdated) Oh! My books are here! I haven't unpacked them all - my papers are here too, but I don't particularly want to look at them again - but I've extracted the Thurber and Beauty of the Husband and Wallace Stevens to read for now. And - I found the poem you left for me - and was amazed - knowing when it was written, guessing what you must have been going through - at its generosity. And its exuberance. And - I thought - I used to write like that - a little like that (you're much better at it) - a long time ago. Somewhere, somehow, I seem to have left the words and the energy behind. Though I suppose what I really ought to be doing is finding out what's been happening in this region, in an attempt to bluff various HR people into thinking me halfway competent? Urgh. Working is such a depressing prospect. 1 August 2003 How do you know whether a friendship has run its course, has burnt itself out, and all the other cliches we use to avoid thinking too hard about the matter - or whether you're just not trying hard enough? 30 July 2003, evening Thought I'd do my useful thing for the day. So I plugged in the kettle and short-circuited the house. 30 July 2003, and too hot in the afternoon It disturbs me when I read that there’s a Multimedia University in the MSC in KL, or that Creative Technologies has linked up with a Malaysian university to provide space and teachers for classes. I know universities are places where people learn the skills they need to get jobs after university and get on with their lives. But shouldn’t universities be – first and last – places where they go to learn? Space to read and write and think. Not just things that can be used in a job, but things that alter your world in some irrevocable way. Throw away the lights, the definitions / And say of what you see in the dark. Things that help you see in the dark, or at least help you see that it is dark. But I’m privileged and biased – privileged because I still cling to the assumption, possibly vain, that I’m going to have a job and soon, and don’t have heavy college loans to pay off, and biased because I never quite understood how engineering could teach you about anything other than electrical circuits or bridges. Will probably change my mind when I'm homeless and selling all my Anne Carsons at Tampines MRT. 29 July 2003, slightly later Your letter came today. After a day of food and friends and jasmine tea and far too much chocolate at the Esplanade; after a day spent happily not thinking about you; after too many days of haunting the mailbox. You said you were happy at camp: you had found the focus, the responsibility, the discipline, the control you needed and craved. The focus you desired; that's your word. You had been thinking about gravity and forces of attraction: how could we control them? You said you were more focused and fulfilled than you had been in a long time. I have been waiting longer than I'm willing to admit to hear from you. What am I so pissed off about, exactly? 29 July 2003 In some of the clumsiest coding in history - a place to tread clear water? |
And yet, having held you in my company so long, I find I do have something to give you. Not the mysterious, intimate and consoling data you would have wished, but something to go on with, and in all likelihood the best I can do. It is simply the fact, as you go down the stairs and walk in dark streets, as you see forms, as you marry or speak sharply or wait for a train, as you begin imagination, as you look at every mark, simply the fact of my eyes in your back. |