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Moving north

Moving back to stay with my parents for a while, before the next big change in my lifestyle comes. I’ve been away for some time, and I’ll miss the east with its endless supply of good food, the closeness of the beach, the wind, the richness and heritage and vibrancy of the landscape. It’s the only part of the country where I’ve ever really felt at home; and, for a while, it was home, and was cherished. Suburbia pales in comparison. But nothing lasts forever, however tightly we hold on; everything changes and is gone in the end. Yet over the years I have learnt not to set too much store by anything that can be taken away, whether it be mode of living or circumstances of life; instead I lay up treasure for myself in a place I know to be secure — the past, where can be found every dance, every kiss, every song, each glass of wine, each pint of beer, every road I have ever travelled. All my eyes have seen, all my hands have wrought, is there, not to be bought and sold, not to be plundered or stolen. In experience, then, I am rich: in the rise and fall of each life I have built, moving with the cycles of the years. Change now will come again; and I will go with it, tacking once more into the wind of destiny.

Back round again

How it is that things go always in circles! Tonight once again I walk where once I walked, in the empty evening city, after the workers have gone home and the offices emptied out. The city is busy yet and the traffic unstilled, but even so around me little music, few people, little speech. I am returning, it seems, to who I was: my mode of life frugal, walking the city in old clothes, inconspicuous. I’ve made a long journey, taken a long detour over the years to come back, almost empty-handed, to where I used to be. I am older now, and sometimes I wonder what I have done with my time. I have lived differently from other men, in that I never sought to amass wealth and goods for myself; instead I chose the path of experience, though not perhaps that of wisdom. And so I have written, and read, and taught, and loved, and danced, and translated, and travelled, and run, and lived a simple life by the sea. All of it vanishing down the years like words traced in the restless foam.

Breakwater, 5 a.m.

The city looms, glowing and ominous, in the west: three amber towers with the cold aquatic green of the financial centre beyond them. It’s five in the morning and I’m here at the beach, looking out over great fields of dark water. The sea is alive, waves swift and sinuous, hinting at the bodies of great beasts. On the shore the sound of the surf, hissing and rustling, gulping and slapping on rock. Clouds to the southwest, blowing in. Lightning arcs between them; a different light from that of the city, flickering and ribboned where the city is still. Again and again the night is illumined. Man and nature on par.

Spread out before me a flotilla of ships, some huge, others tiny, a field of lights and metal. Almost another city out on the water, stretched wide from west to east. The islands beyond are invisible in the darkness. Hanging in the sky above them, stars; gigantic, clearest of all, the unmistakeable hook of the Scorpion’s tail, rising. Scorpio, a water sign. Orion’s nemesis: one rises as the other sets. Almost directly to the east, the morning star, also rising; I mistook it for a plane at first because of its height and brightness, but it rose higher as the planes flew slowly, lights flashing, northeast and low to Changi.

The clouds and lightning spread, reflecting the earthshine, blotting out the stars. There are people here too: people in tents, men sleeping on benches, very early joggers. Old men walking beneath the footpath’s lamps. A couple stands in the darkness by the water, kissing, kissing; for half an hour they remain there, lost in each other. On the breakwater with me, three or four large rats, roaming about, uncharacteristically relaxed. This is their territory. They have no fear of people, coming close, inquisitive, hurrying back to the water only when I tap a foot on the stones. Down by the surf they play, scampering over the rocks and nooks, tails faint in the dark. A little after five-thirty the koels call, first birds of morning, voices clear on the land breeze. I look back up at the stars; and suddenly one of them detaches itself from the others, swings in a wobbly arc across the sky, and is gone.

Bethel

High in the air above me is the place where you live, the apartment which holds you smiling faintly like a cool towel laid across the forehead of an invalid. But I will not call up to you nor climb the stairways up to you, close as you are, far away as you are. For between your place in the sky and my feet here on the ground are escalators filled with angels going up, going down, but the ones standing on the right will not move for those behind them and so the entire system gets clogged up. You don’t take the escalators; you are too wise. I sit, I walk, I have my own business, even as you gaze out over the city like an angel — so high that you can only see the city, but not me. How high are forty stories? In any case I don’t have forty stories to tell, I only have one, and that too far away from you to matter.

Workingmen’s morning

There is a man salting fish across from me. Salt on the outside spread over the head, rubbed over the skin, two long smooth strokes. Salt on the inside, the edge of a hand pressed along the clean flesh of the long ventral cut. Then the fish laid silvery down in a basket, separated from its fellows by a corrugated strip of banana leaf. The voices of coffeeshop attendants cut through the air, calling out drink orders; I recognize one of the security guards on a coffee break, and we exchange nods. Across the road, sparks fly: workmen are grinding welds down, careful, efficient, rebuilding a shophouse from within. Everyone is working. Further down the road, beyond painted iron shutters, two men, one with a laptop, one making adjustments to a printing press; and further on another two men, squatting low over a motorcycle engine. They are talking, they have tools. The bike itself stands next to them, looking forlorn. In the museum on the corner a woman from China says hello to me. It’s her first day at work and she’s eager, enthusiastic. Paint tins and newspapers sit below a large canvas, half-finished; eight Vietnamese artists are collaborating, and the large painting will showcase their work. But the artists have not yet arrived. I leave and pay a visit to the Chinese tea merchant; the shop is surprisingly busy. The shopkeeper recommends me a pack of Tie Guanyin — the fragrant Tiger variety, not the stronger Pearl one — and wraps it up for me. And then I walk past the sparrows playing tag between treebranch and windowledge and kerbside, and enter my own office. And it’s my turn to work.

Canticle

Rain at night, tiny, sketching over the surface of the pool circles concentric, interlocking. A dusting of dew on the sidewalks; wind from the north, a cool breeze making its way down the empty roads on its procession to the sea. The land breathing. Over the sleeping town the rain still falling, like a dream, like a memory of the sea which once rolled deep and grave in place of the ground on which I stand. I remember New York and walking after midnight in the heavy snow which covered the cars with quilts of white, thick-packed, cold. Out over the air the voice of Alicia Keys, no one, no one/ can get in the way of what I’m feelin’, faint on a distant radio with no one in sight to hear. November. November, just after the Feast of All Saints, and the winds are changing, the season shifting, and the rain continues to build.

I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey

Daybreak and I sit cross-legged, back straight, facing the window in silence. Colours of daybreak whisper around me, words scatter through me, the goddess is here. I sit in contemplation, knowing as I do the changes of light and time, year after year, as the calendar moves. The waking of the birds, the hiss of the traffic, the breath of the world blowing.

And I do not say, as once I did, Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel; I do not sing the canticle of Zechariah. Instead the words which pass my lips are those of another man, also a Jew, some two thousand years removed:

Lovely is the world rising early to evil,
lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity,
in the forbidden mingling of ourselves, you and I,
lovely is the world.

And I remember when my lover once said those same words to me, and now that she is not here I say the words still, and I remember other times, other places, an unlocked room, a Muslim girl brushing her hair in the dark; and I remember when my heart broke for the first time, and I knew it would not be the last.

I have always been fond of early morning activity: all the rushing about that men do, travelling, hurrying, singing, cooking, moving through the morning into the day, with the clatter of pots and pans, the whisk of brooms, the ripple of music over the air. It has been a long time since I was a child, but I remember the way we would sit in school early, and more and more friends would arrive and gather until all of us were there, and the bell would tip us forward into the onrushing day. I have been on both sides now, and I still think that was the better lot.

Inside and out

Dancing still goes on here, red on black on black, as all around us outside the searing white of the racetrack cauterizes the streets, slices electric chunks out of the old city. It’s a world of machines and men and massive concrete panels, pounding their way through, preparing. But for us, this final night before the roads get sealed off, we dance, in the closeness of the dark and the music, bodies moving and swaying, flesh, scent, skin. Yukako’s made tiny mooncakes, pale and delicious, melting on the tongue; just as above our heads, far higher than the massive automaton of the Flyer, the moon, almost full, and in the western sky Jupiter, brighter than the earthshine, unconquered.

January 4th

Another night is passing by now, slowly, so slowly I can almost feel the stars as they slide by in their great celestial sphere. The night moves slowly, taking its time, like a man in the evening walking his dog along a railroad track. I go to bed earlier now, lie in bed letting each thought settle, as each impression of the day finds its own shelf, its own drawer, and slides in. A new year. Another new beginning. Cool January breezes fill the streets outside. As one by one, in the buildings next to mine, the lights go out.

Looking through the glass

I’m sitting in the quiet evening looking out over Grange Road, the echo of a trumpet fading in the background. Streetlamps glow — yellow circles — through the fading sky; mynahs sit silhouetted black in the light. Beneath pen and paper, the worn chessboard squares of a table, comforting and dented, offer support. Upon the pavement tiles outside the damp trace of rain, slick and dark like wet hair, calls to mind a memory stepping into the prayerless hush: a memory cold like strawberries and snow, a woman’s name.