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I made a short evening trip to Punggol Park last weekend, to get in a little black-and-white practice. Here are some of the better photos.

Here’s the first photo of the evening, shot in sepia:

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These steel Japanese pens all date from the 1970s. (more…)

I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the 1930s lately. This is probably less indicative of originality than it is of some kind of broad societal interest in the period, though I can’t imagine why the thirties might be popular again. Still, I’ve spent some time thinking about the era from an aesthetic perspective, trying to uncover the trends which together made up the overall style of the period; and I think I’ve managed to do so with some modest success. (more…)

Diana and I visited a few stores of the junk-and-antique persuasion in Jakarta, and came away with these: a thoroughly elegant brass-and-steel microscope from Beck-Kassel CBS, and a little replica sextant marked “Kelvin & Hughes, London, 1917″ (yeah, right). Diana kept the microscope. I took the sextant.

Neither piece is functional, but they’re both quite pretty sitting on a desk. Here’s the little sextant on my table at home, paired with a Leatherman Micra pocketknife.

I like the way the brass glows in the evening sun.

Been ages since last I updated this blog. Work and busyness got in the way, but those aren’t the only reasons. Slowly over the past few months — over the past few years, in fact — I’ve become increasingly tuned to the material world, become more inclined to experience the world firsthand than to write about it. I suppose it’s as Toni Morrison once said: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t have to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” I dance, sculpt, climb, walk, make tea, enjoy art and music and architecture; life for me is to be experienced, to be lived. I’ve never been one of those people who carry cameras everywhere they go; never been the sort to “record the moment”, in all its concreteness and ephemerality. This may be a literary sort of blog, but I’m not a very literary sort of man. At the end of the day I suppose I’m less an artist than an artisan.

But still I enjoy writing every now and again, and I’m also a lover of beautiful things. So it’s time to take this blog in a new direction, one more in line with prevailing trends in my life. I’ve spent much time writing about events and situations: now I’ll begin writing about things, about all the lovely little objects I’ve accumulated through the years. And I’ll give it all a new category: favourite things, dedicated to all things counter, original, spare, strange.

This might just be fun.

a melody doubled — hanging in the evening air, the waitress’s voice

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This also is happiness: to be sitting, the only customer, in a tiny cafe, listening to the sweet, tuneful voice of the Filipina waitress as she sings along to the radio. It isn’t freezing, as cafes often are in this country; and I’m sitting quiet with a book and a journal and time which is my own. I feel like a tourist in a foreign city; more precisely, I feel as I did in a sandwich place in Galway, in a bagel shop in Victoria. Anonymous little diners, serving the same food, playing the same songs — a blessing to travellers away from home, with all their comfortable, nondescript familiarity. I’ve only just gotten home from Jakarta, where Diana’s been hosting me for a few days; sometimes it seems that it’s only in the quiet of the solitary traveller that I’m most myself. For all the pleasure I take in the company of friends, I’m still essentially a solitary man.

Last quarter of the year approaching now, with all its lights and festivity. The seventh month’s just ended, and soon it’ll be Mid-Autumn and the Double Ninth. A reminder to myself to make the most of what time I have remaining, to do what I can to make the rest of the year worthwhile.

this golden evening, new silence greets the smells of tea and incense

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I’m sitting at home drinking last year’s kabuse, my favourite among the Japanese green teas; a little old perhaps, but still pleasant. I’ve set out a blend of Chinese and Japanese utensils, and there’s a light smell of incense in the air. Haydn’s Cello Concerto #2 is playing, with Jacqueline du Pré as the soloist; beyond the window light is fading to an ever deeper blue. And I think to myself that this is what spirituality means: a deeper awareness of the world in all its form and beauty, a kind of meditative clarity. Not the stillness of an absolute silence, but the stillness of movement, of falling leaves stirred by the wind. The sound of a bell echoing in a meditation chamber. I sit and listen, cross-legged.

leaves carpet the ground — through the quiet evening air, bells are ringing

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A certain combination of circumstances — at least partially related to the current global economic climate — have been impressing themselves upon me for some time now; and now that I’ve had time to think, more and more I’ve been feeling that it’s time for a lifestyle change, for a retreat of some kind. Not the sort of retreat one goes on for a specific number of days, or to any specific place. More a retreat from the world, a movement to an inner landscape, a more monastic sort of life. I’m winding down various affairs, curbing consumer spending, fasting from certain extravagances. I’ll trade them for a life more greatly devoted to art and spirituality, books and nature and exercise; exploring my world more deeply, slowly, clearly. A time to think, to learn, to breathe.

I first encountered this way of life in America, where I spent some months in the little town of Chapel Hill in North Carolina — a town which is essentially a university and one main street. Those were some of the happiest days of my life. And the last time I truly did this — early in 2004, five years ago — led to a time of deep silence, of emptiness, an encounter with the abyss. Right after that came my single most productive writing period ever. So I’ll do this again now, ride out the storms, and hope something wonderful comes of it in the end.

I’m not leaving for good. I’ll be back in the heart of things soon enough, returning to the world and to society. But for now I feel a need to explore the wilderness within: wilderness as a state of mind, an exploration of landscapes uncharted, an encounter with the gods, a deeper seeing into the quiet heart of things. And hopefully there I’ll find something worthwhile.

Here in this moment when we watch the years
take their final steps on the tightrope of transition,
the past and the present, shrouded by nightfall,
touch fingers also in silent greeting.
Then and now overlap in this place.
I’ve known these walls twenty years,
coming here again and again as a child
to be enraptured by stories; those years are gone now.
But just for a moment the knife-edge of time
pares away the layers of now —
the Australian beer which shivers and warms
on the aluminium table before me,
the Vietnamese waitress, smiling and eager,
the plasma screens rattling with football —
and ghostly beneath, like a wrinkled slide’s image
projected on wavering air,
I see the dim phantoms of shelves full of books,
smell the damp paper, hear songs in two tongues.
The bar’s fairy lights fade out for a moment,
overlaid by the dimness of memory;
and then the vision is past, the new year is upon us,
and only a memory remains.

as the dusk settles — flitting there between the trees, shapes of unfamiliar wings

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I’ve been feeling increasingly feral lately. Less civilised, tired of politics and people; worn out with pleasantries. Too much of the city, of the office. I need to get out, perhaps, for a while; see mountains again, mist in the distance, listen to animals passing through the undergrowth. Look out on vistas, smell sap in the morning. A wilder life, that other life which pulses beneath my bones.

But I can’t go, not yet. Too much to do here still. And so today I headed out to Kent Ridge Park, after work, driving down the bends and twists of South Buona Vista Road. Walked there in the evening, for a bit. Cool air; birds of all kinds, not all of which I recognised at once. Just in time to hear the evening chorus. I stood under the tembusus, watched their flowers falling, breathing in their scent mixed with tobacco in the air. (Are people still allowed to smoke in public parks?) Couples sitting in the evening; a car with engine running, windows steamed up, movement inside. Ships in the distance, out over the water, lights slowly coming on. Now and again the sound of a horn. Stayed till the darkness came and the birds fell silent and cicadas and crickets took over. Green sticky humidity deepening in the night. But out of all that still a little peace.