I’m officially privileged!

Went to Kinokuniya a few days back to buy two books for my sis, and when I was there, I was persuaded to sign up for their privilege members’ card. So now, I have privilege members’ cards for all the major bookshops: Borders, Popular and Kino! And I noticed something random, which is that all three cards are yellow. Here:

But it was what my mum said when she knew I went to Kinokuniya that really got me bursting out in laughter. She said, “Aiyoh! Everytime you go to a bookshop, I get worried!” The reason being that I would always buy a book or two when I enter a bookshop, as the piles of books on my study table, bedside table, floor, reading chair all testify. And yes, true to form, in addition to the two books that I bought for my sis that day, I also bought a book for myself! =) But don’t tell my mum that as I skilfully mingle the new book with the rest of the books that are lying on the floor surrounding my bed.

Stay Calm and Move On

The antidote to death is life

I read this article and decided I had to post it on my blog. It is written by a staff nurse in a hospital, and while I have cut the article to make it shorter, do read it all the way…especially to the very last paragraph.

At my job, people die.

That’s hardly our intention, but they die nonetheless.

Usually it’s at the end of a long struggle — we have done everything modern medicine can do and then some, but we can’t save them. Some part of their body, usually their lungs or their heart or their liver, has become too frail to function. These are the “good deaths,” the ones where the family is present and knows what to expect. Like all deaths, these deaths are difficult, but they are controlled, unsurprising, anticipated.

And then there are the other deaths: quick and rare, where life leaves a body in minutes. In my hospital these deaths are “Condition A’s.” The “A” stands for arrest, as in cardiac arrest, as in this patient’s heart has all of a sudden stopped beating and we need to try to restart it.

I am a new nurse, and recently I had my first Condition A. My patient, a particularly nice older woman with lung cancer, had been, as we say, “fine,” with no complaints but a low-grade fever she’d had off and on for a couple of days. She had come in because she was coughing up blood, a problem we had resolved, and she was set for discharge that afternoon.

(She then describes the very sudden way in which the patient died in the hospital despite all attempts to save her.)

And my patient was dead. She had been dead when she fell back on the bed and she stayed dead through all the effort to save her, while blood and tissue bubbled out of her and the suction clogged with particles spilling from her lungs. Everyone did what she knew how to do to save her. She could not be saved.

…

I am 43. I came to nursing circuitously, following a brief career as an English professor. Often at work in the hospital I hear John Donne in my head:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.

But after my Condition A I find his words empty. My patient died looking like one of the flesh-eating zombies from “28 Weeks Later,” and indeed in real life, even in the world of the hospital, a death like this is unsettling.

What can one do? Go home, love your children, try not to bicker, eat well, walk in the rain, feel the sun on your face and laugh loud and often, as much as possible, and especially at yourself. Because the only antidote to death is not poetry, or drama, or miracle drugs, or a roomful of technical expertise and good intentions. The antidote to death is life.

唯独你是不可取替

If you ask me what my favourite song is, this is it.

曾听说有许多恋爱　没有结果
却剩伤心者感慨　令我都刻意避开
是我不敢相信真爱
但你不惜真心真意对待
竟令我再感到意外
让我献出全部热爱　全面喝采
如果今天将失去　眼前的一切
剩低清风两袖也不计
唯独你一个是不可给取替
是我生命里的一切　Wooh
如早知今生跟你　有幸可相爱
在当初应更努力为未来
其实我知道　是可一不可再
下半生准我留住你　一直相爱
谁似你这般欣赏我
谁也说不上你一般清楚我
问我可需要甚么　愿你终身交托给我
让我一生好好把你照料
请让我体恤你需要
为你献出全部热爱　从来没缺少
如果今天将失去　眼前的一切
剩低清风两袖也不计
唯独你一个是不可给取替
是我生命里的一切　Wooh
如早知今生跟你　有幸可相爱
在当初应更努力为未来
其实我知道　是可一不可再
下半生准我留住你　一直相爱
其实我知道　是可一不可再
下半生准我留住你　一直相爱

To All I have Loved Before

When you are in love with someone, there’s always a movie or song or book that defines that relationship and every time you chance upon that item again, the memories come floating back all over again. Here then are all the chains of flowers, the trails of tears, the whispers of breaths. Here then are the remembrance of things past…

Double Vision

Ever since Carol introduced me to the painting by Brughel of Icarus falling and the same-styled poem by Williams, I have been fascinated with the idea of how paintings can evoke people to pen poems about them. I did some research and found that there is a term for it, called ‘ekphrasis’, which means the imitation in verbal art of a work of visual art. It is as if we are given another opportunity to make sense of the painting, by going into the mind of the poet, who himself or herself sought to express the emotions and thoughts that the painting had evoked within him or her. We are given double vision to appreciate the painting and the poem; to understand the painter and the poet. So while I am transfixed by Matisse’s Red Studio and Snodgrass’ haunting words that “there is no one here”, I am similarly spellbound by Picassos’ The Blind Man’s Meal, and deeply moved by Engle’s description of colours and their links to emotions in his poem. Ekphrasis then is the beauty of how pictures, images, lines, words, rhythm all combine to touch our senses and invite us into the worlds of the artists. It’s quite interesting, like a mass MSN session among the painter, the poet and the audience!

“All the others translate: the painter sketches

A visible world to love or reject;

Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches

The images out that hurt and connect,

From Life to Art by painstaking adaption,

Relying on us to cover the rift…”

W. H. Auden, “The Composer”

Ekphrasis: Nighthawks (by Hopper)

Nighthawks (by Samuel Yellen)

The place is the corner of Empty and Bleak,

The time is night’s most desolate hour,

The scene is Al’s Coffee Cup or the Hamburger Tower,

The persons in this drama do not speak.

 

We who peer though that curve of plate glass

Count three nighthawks seated there—patrons of life:

The counterman will be with you in a jiff,

The thick white mugs were never meant for demitasse.

 

The single man whose hunched back we see

Once put a gun to his head in Russian roulette,

Whirled the chamber, pulled the trigger, won the bet,

And now lives out his x years’ guarantee.

 

And facing us, the two central characters

Have finished their coffee, and have lit

A contemplative cigarette:

His hand lies close, but not touching hers.

 

Not long ago together in a darkened room,

Mouth burned mouth, flesh beat and ground

On ravaged flesh, and yet they found

No local habitation and no name.

 

Oh, are we not lucky to be none of these!

We can look on with complacent eye:

Our satisfactions satisfy, Our pleasure, our pleasures please.

Ekphrasis: The Blind Man’s Meal (by Picasso)

Blind Man by Paul Engle

His green left hand clutches the yellow bread

With the cruved, breathing motion of a sigh.

He waits, while under the unblinking head

His shoulders turn and peer like a great eye.

He does not know his jacket is dark blue.

And yet the jug his right hand has set down

(Still touching it, reluctant to let go)

Gleams with such warmth, with such a vivid hue,

He feels the color up his thin arm flow;

He hears his looking fingers whisper, Brown.

Ekphrasis: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (by Brueghel)

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted the wing’s wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden  

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Ekphrasis: The Swing (by Fragonard)

Portrait of a Lady by William Carlos Williams

YOUR thighs are appletrees

whose blossoms touch the sky.

Which sky? The sky

where Watteau hung a lady’s

slipper. Your knees

are a southern breeze–or

a gust of snow. Agh! what

sort of man was Fragonard?

–as if that answered

anything. Ah, yes–below

the knees, since the tune

drops that way, it is

one of those white summer days,

the tall grass of your ankles

flickers upon the shore–

Which shore?–

the sand clings to my lips–

Which shore?

Agh, petals maybe. How

should I know?

Which shore? Which shore?

I said petals from an appletree.