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Finding meaning, making meaning

Dedicated to all my former students this Teachers’ Day.

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I am not an evolutionary biologist, nor am I a scientist of any kind; all I am is a poet, a writer, a thinker, and my own domain is the arts rather than the sciences. But today I will be using Darwin’s concept of naturalistic evolution to discuss the creative impulse, the force which drives us to make, to create, to impose meaning on this world in which we live.

We are makers, we are thinkers, and as far as life on our planet is concerned we are an intelligent species. We are in fact probably the most intelligent beings this world has ever produced, and our own name for ourselves — homo sapiens, wise man — highlights this distinctive characteristic. As far as Darwinian theory is concerned, this trait of ours evolved and lasted because it made us better-equipped to survive: it developed as a response to core biological imperatives — the need to find food, to reproduce, to survive in a hostile environment. Our intelligence as a species is the result of competition and the process of natural selection, and — combined with our abilities to work together and to use and manipulate objects — it is what has allowed us to become the dominant species on this planet. For most humans, the greatest threats to our continued survival no longer come from the natural world around us. They come, instead, from other humans and from the works of their minds and hands, and fortunately where the rule of law prevails such threats are relatively remote. But this has only been a fairly recent development in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history.

For a very long time we turned our natural intelligence (more…)

Some notes on spirituality

I think of myself fundamentally as a poet of landscapes: wilderness, cities, and the surreal shifting landscapes of the mind are taken up and treated in my work. Other writers might choose to focus on social issues, on vignettes of moments, or on portraits of people; my own concerns, however, have to do with context and interaction — an ecology encompassing different cultures and religions, past and present, texts and intertexts, gods and animals, men and women. That focus in turn arises out of my own spirituality, which takes up and understands all of these as potentially sacramental; all things are able to mediate the sacred, and all things are beautiful in their own way. Today I will try to elaborate a little more on this.

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The new watchmakers

The toilet broke down while I was visiting my parents for new year celebrations: the metal hook connecting the handle and flapper had corroded and worn through. A simple problem, which should have had a simple solution. Unfortunately when I looked inside I found that most of the ballcock mechanism was sealed within a one-piece plastic skin, which meant none of the components were within reach. So the entire mechanism had to be replaced. Overkill, but unfortunately necessary.

Many of you know that I’m a bit of a tinkerer: (more…)

On dance, beginner’s mind, and being a teacher

all those long hours — compressed into a single explosion of movement

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On Saturday night I took part in my first-ever performance as part of a salsa team. I’ve been on stage many times before, acting, singing, playing music — but almost never dancing, and certainly never at this level. (No video yet, but I’m sure one’ll be on YouTube sooner or later…) So this counts as one of my life’s landmark moments. I’m glad we put in all those hours of practice and rehearsal, and I’m glad our performance went down well.

Dance keeps me humble. (more…)

Why I don’t get jetlag

It is 1:38am and Starbucks is buzzing. Light jazz, trumpets and bass, keeping things afloat like a party at sea. Across from me a shavenheaded pagesetter with tattoos down his arms, jaw firm, pure concentration in the lines of his face. His fingers move nimbly over the keyboard. He never looks up. Voices of late-night groups, jostling in the air. There’s a fashionable kid ordering a drink at the counter, smooth-faced, beardless, with a lovely girl who may or may not be his girlfriend. And then there’s me, working, writing, settled in like a traveller on a Greyhound. Here’s to the night. Straight on till morning. (more…)

As long as I am here I will sing my own country

rain blankets the world outside — a sweet moist whisper of earth, salt, iron

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Today I cleaned house and guided a visitor from Indonesia around the neighbourhood, talking about architecture, conservation, landuse, and change. Borders had a sale on — 20% off for two books, 30% off for three — so I went there after and picked up a couple of volumes: Yehuda Amichai and Pablo Neruda, two of the great poets of the twentieth century. And I thought of how, while my fellow writers in this country often seem heavily influenced by contemporary English-language writing, my own literary influences tend to span languages and centuries: Hebrew, Chinese, Latin, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, English. Perhaps it’s fitting. After all I’m a translator, a student of languages, and a bit of a classicist.

Amichai and Neruda wrote a huge amount, and were very popular among their own people. Poetry, so much of it, vital and alive. And I wonder what happened to poetry in my own language of English, wonder when its throat was slit and its blood drained, making it beautiful and pure and dead. Poetry in English does seem to have retreated to the universities, become another pretty artifact for academics to examine. It is hard to imagine anyone now quoting a contemporary English-language poet in conversation (as people did with both Neruda and Amichai), or reciting their poems at weddings, or carrying their work into battle. And it is hard to imagine, in English, people still treating verse as an art to be practiced, as the Japanese still do. Poetry is fading in many languages worldwide, yes. But it was not always thus.

More and more it seems (more…)

In defence of vice

Over and over again our society (like most societies in most eras) is accused of having become too “permissive”. Those who bandy this term about would apparently very much prefer that society become more restrictive or repressive, as long as the restrictions are in line with their own personal or ideological preferences. But now, more clearly than ever, the battle lines have been drawn. The chief target this time is homosexuality; its fronts are civil society, religion, marriage, the law courts, the halls of government, and the American military. But this is merely the latest iteration of a much wider battle which has been fought down the centuries: a battle of prudery and puritanism on one side, versus vitality and vice on the other.

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Where Pepsi is Eight-Four and Coke is Five-Six

It is sometimes the custom, in the coffee shops of my country, for the wait staff to call your order across to the drinks counter so as to decrease waiting time. This pre-dates the Starbucks practice of cashier staff calling your order across to the bar, and is sometimes equally complicated: “kopi-si-siu-dai”, for instance, means coffee made with sugar and evaporated milk (ideally the Carnation brand), but with less sugar and milk than usual.

In any case, sometimes I order a Coke with my dinner, whereupon the attendant calls out “wu-liu!”, meaning “five-six” in Mandarin. This has always puzzled me, so today I asked why.

It seems the custom goes back to the days when coffee shops needed a way to easily distinguish Pepsi from Coke. And so the term “Pepsi-Cola” was transliterated into “puay-si-gor-lak” in Hokkien (literally meaning “eight-four-five-six”), and attendants took to calling Pepsi “puay-si” (“eight-four”) and Coke “gor-lak” (“five-six”).

The Hokkien terms are now slowly being Mandarinized, due to the state’s “speak Mandarin” policy and the influx of new immigrants from China. So “gor-lak” has become “wu-liu”, and I suppose “puay-si” has become “ba-si”.

I have yet to actually hear anyone calling Pepsi “ba-si”, though, because in the Nanyang accent the term is homophonous with “ba-shi”, meaning “bus”. That would be amusing. Let me know if you have, though.

The street where I live

This is an old neighbourhood, here in the east: Katong, with nearly two hundred years of history behind it, settlement beginning only a few years after the British came. These days it’s become the closest thing we have in Singapore to New York City’s SoHo district. It’s been one of my favourite parts of the country for years, and still is.

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How poets can stay relevant

Some years ago, at a formal dinner immediately following my graduation, the President of the Republic of Singapore congratulated me and asked me what I’d majored in.

English Literature, I told him. Poetry.

He was not especially overjoyed. “No money in poetry,” he said.

When even the President of your country talks smack about your course of study, you know your discipline’s got a serious P.R. problem.

Poets, like English departments, often have to make excuses for their very existence. Irrelevant, we’re called. Books of poetry don’t sell. The stereotype of the poet tends to veer between the extremes of morally dubious, sexually promiscuous hard-drinking rule-breaking devil-may-care rogue on the one hand and pale squeamish burbling uptight coddled nervous trainwreck on the other. Either way, nobody really seems to listen to us any more.

And yet when one more poem by Ted Hughes about Sylvia Plath was discovered last week, it seemed important enough for the media to pick it up and get Jonathan Pryce to read it for the camera.

And when Kwa Geok Choo — better known as Mrs Lee Kuan Yew — was bedridden in her final years, her husband, among other things, read her favourite poems to her.

Poems are a part of life, and somebody somewhere is always paying attention. Not everybody is, perhaps. But this is the twenty-first century. We’ve shifted from the era of the mass to the era of the niche.

So what should poets do, in this new age? How do we stay relevant? How can we make our work matter?

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