Beyond the Cul De Sac

Says Milan Kundera

maxluth — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:21:34 +0000

Anyone whose goal is something ‘higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It it the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which , terrified, we defend ourselves.

Who am I? Who are you?

maxluth — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:44:25 +0000

How does it matter what we are in our own eyes and in those of people around us, when we are hardly able to catch a glimpse of our true selves, not even if we stand still in front of the mirror and keep our gaze fixed on our own reflection. We think we know enough about the space we live in, about what we are made of, about why things turn out the way they did, and why we are in this place we have put ourselves in, but do we? We think we know why we do certain things, we give explanations, and yet explanations sometimes fall short of convincing our own ego. How do we know when our behaviour and the things we say are not just based upon confabulation, an ability that must have been so crucial to the preservation of our existence, so much so that nature has to assign a portion of our brain to the function.

I do not know why I am here or why I am supposed to be this way and not that. I do not know why I can claim to have been attached to a person so dearly and yet let time and the trivialities of life sweep my mind and heart away. I do not understand why I acted the way I did only to realise that I was not the least bit proud of who I seemingly was. Everything is changing. Everything about me down to the cellular level is changing. I am not who I was yesterday.

So who am I? And who are you?

Might we just be everyone, and everything?

You’re right, who’s not?

maxluth — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:36:35 +0000

You’re always right and I’m always wrong.
How wrong I am indeed to make myself your social object,
only to have you take it for granted time and again.
You’re right to have insisted you were right when you were wrong;
that’s what made me realise the real problem has all along been that,
you have been right too many times,
while I have too often been denied the benefit of doubt,
that you’re wrong to not notice I may require every now and then.

Rooms

maxluth — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:24:58 +0000

Life is a series of rooms and who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are.

A Universal Reminder

maxluth — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:32:03 +0000

In the face of ambiguity, one is subjected to the cruelty of having to make out for themselves what is the right and what is not, to choose what to or not to let go. The brutality lies in what one stands to lose when making the necessary decision.

It is almost like choosing between an intensive course of treatment that might not guarantee complete recovery for a terminally ill patient and the resignation to the fact that death is imminent and inevitable and to adopt the palliative approach. The former will probably help buy more time for the patient but living on borrowed time always comes with it a high possibility of a decreased quality of life due to the myriad negative bodily responses to the treatment. And what is supposed to be right in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath – to preserve the purity of life – may actually turn out rather skewed. Going forth with the palliative approach may however allow for a better quality of life but this is at the expense of the duration one gets to live before death overcomes. Alas, it all boils down to choosing which is worth keeping and which is not.

Decision making is brutal, my friend, but it is necessary. Having to constantly be in the gray takes away a part of you that is bright and shiny and worth more than anything in the world to keep. And you know you deserve better than what you’re going through.

おかえり

maxluth — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 07:01:56 +0000

能为一个人真心付出，一起走过种种艰辛挫折，

就算无奈到了离别的时候，累积的回忆也会让幸福延续。

真爱，不会因为离别而淡化或消失。

真爱，跨越时空的障碍，是一切奇迹的开始。

Life’s like cutting calories, and keeping away from chocolates.

maxluth — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 06:43:13 +0000

We’re all just trying to find a better way to die.
Some of us do.
Most, sadly, don’t.

On Minimalism

maxluth — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:11:50 +0000

About a week ago, I picked up a book off one of the shelves in the library at the Esplanade. It was a weird move and I really couldn’t explain why I did that because the book titled Minimalists was clearly a biographical account of the more prominent perpetrators of minimalism in the realm of modern music and I for one have always had something against biographies, not to mention those written on pioneers of a musical movement I never thought I would have taken an interest in. Now I’m halfway through the book and it got me pretty curious as to what minimalistic music actually sounds like. And just as I was looking through youtube today I came across this video of a choreography to a composition of one of the minimalists mentioned in the book, Steve Reich.

There is actually a second part to the video but I’m not going to show it here since I’m pretty sure some of you out there must have already found it hard to follow through with the entire length of the first video.

The music in the video is titled Piano Phase and as you may have picked up right from the start of the video, a single phrase of music was repetitively played until almost imperceptibly, the same phrase of music is played slightly out of phase with the ongoing one. Along with this changing overlapping time layers of fundamentally similar stanzas, even more seemingly insignificant changes in the way the repeated stanzas sounded were introduced. The result is a schizophrenic and time-suspending work. It gives the audience almost no sense of progress the entire time.

What left me in awe is however more the choreography than the music, although I must emphasize that the choreography will be meaningless without the music being the centre piece of the work. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Michele Anne De Mey has masterfully made use of shadows to bring to focus the schizophrenic element of the music. I was especially intrigued by the superimposition of the shadows cast on the wall by the two dancers in the middle of the both of them and how as the music progressed, the superimposed shadows grew increasingly out of sync with each other. The entire setup feels as though three dancers were performing at any one time, the third dancer – the result of the superimposition – being the protagonist of the performance. While both of the dancers in white were mechanically moving about in similar fashion, being seemingly comfortable with what they were set out to perform, the protagonist seemed conflicted and confused.

The picture painted almost reminded me of the way life is like for me in the city I live in. Things are progressing so quickly there is hardly time to catch up with the changes that is happening all around. There is no room for letting anyone take a breather because if you do, you’re just going to be left behind too soon while the others continue unaffected with their lives.

Also with the video I am forced to look at how the typical harried and brusque urban dweller has to cope with the rapidly evolving systems of moral perception and religious beliefs. There is this perpetual state of duality one has to deal with – pretty much like the conflicted protagonist in the performance – when it comes to doing away with the old and embracing the new, defining what is socially and morally acceptable and what is not.

Minimalism in the visual arts serves to communicate ideas and emotions in the single most direct means of expression and in the same way, minimalism in music stirs the heart of its listeners. Simple really does it best.

Recruitment Drive

maxluth — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 06:16:08 +0000

It amazes me how some bloggers seem to be able to find a whole gamut of stuff, noteworthy or not, to write about everyday. As my friends would have observed, the existence of my online journal has its place only in my subconscious and if i were to ever write about anything at all that is of substantial length – typically a paragraph of at least 10 sentences – the subject matter must then have concerned itself with the neocortex region of my brain enough to spark the otherwise mostly dormant intellectual process the neocortex facilitates.

Having said that, I don’t actually think I go about life not having any opinions on issues at all. To me, the need to write about stuff arises only when a particular occurrence possesses the potential to reveal a more important notion about this space that we live in. Otherwise writing is mentally exhausting and there is really no point in keeping up with the effort if all one has to offer to his readers is a narrative of what went on that particular day of his life.

Maybe I’m just plain lazy. Maybe I haven’t found the joy in writing.. because I’m lazy. Whatever the case is, I’m glad that WordPress is doing so well at providing such an interactive platform for my dilettante efforts in journalism. Something tells me this online journal is going to last longer than any of my previous botched blogging attempts.