Rivers And Roads

http://sphaeras.bandcamp.com/releases

     You who stand so proud at the stern, beneath

The biting sea spray; you who have been here before,

Clad in your thousand faces, bright of eye and swift of arm -

Tell me, how far will faith take you through the fire?

                   Feel your feet pitch and plummet below you.

Here is the heart of it. The rolling of the thunder, the lightning

That licks the sky in wailing cracks.

     Feel this!

Here is where triremes do not cut easy, where

The waves turn to thick sludge and break in heaving currents;

This heavy water will breed nothing in your wake.

                  Unkind wind cuts ocean froth into storms. There is the burn

Of salt deep in your airways. Your breath, in ragged puffs,

Condenses on the empty eyes of ruined statues that

Gasp for air in the tide. Now that you have seen how kings die,

Come shore these fragments against your ruins, where

The Styx clothes their broken images in bile.

                 Buffet. Pitch. Roll with the tempest. Fear

Is denied to no man, and this is the arrow

That the bow of exile shoots first. You will leave everything

You know and love, and understand loss

As the comet does when it falls from the firmament.

                 This is your prayer in the wilderness: to turn

At the looming gates of oblivion. But of all your aspects, this

Is the only visage you have ever worn - in chasing to return,

You know only how to leave.

*

Last month, I was given the opportunity to write an accompanying piece of literature for Sphaeras, one of Singapore’s most talented upcoming bands and arguably the best instrumental/math rock band in Asia. This was more by luck rather than by talent - I caught Sphaeras at Baybeats 2014, and as it turned out, their guitarist is my friend Jessica’s coursemate at Yale-NUS. Out of my repeated attempts to ask for autographs also came the news that they were looking for artists to come up with art to match the tracks on their new album, so I duly leapt at the chance.

Asked to pick a track to write for, I chose Monomyth. I’d heard this one at Baybeats and it stuck with me all the way home and then some (The link to the song, by the way, is above the poetry - do give it a listen, it's essential and you won't regret it.).Plus, a little bit of research revealed that the subject matter was right up my alley. So after a few weeks of writer’s block and general procrastination, I began. 

I focused this piece on the eponymous theory – Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth, which posits that narratives all over the world follow certain patterns in their plots. Every tale of a hero’s journey, no matter the time it was told or the region it came from, is structured around identical stages and themes, according to Campbell and his supporters. He summarized this theory in a book entitled The Hero With A Thousand Faces, but it’s quite a lot to condense, so I shan’t spend too much time talking about its details.

The construction of the prose began with listening to the Sphaeras track in isolation, and letting it quite literally wash over me. That’s how the conceptualization began – I didn’t want the piece to be an awkward companion to the music, like a jagged installation jammed into place side by side, related only by forceful proximity. I wanted to strive towards a kind of synchrony, as if elements of the music could be extrapolated and reflected mirror-like in verse.  

With that in mind I considered what I wanted the piece to exist as. I rejected the idea of a coherent plotline because I felt it didn’t suit the mood of the song, which struck me as unbound – like a tempest translated into quavering (excuse the pun) beats and howling riffs. At first I thought of cramming as many references to obscure myths and legends as I could into it, but I decided against it. For one, I wouldn’t be able to do it justice given the time I had to write (mostly due to my own procrastination); for two, it would be ripping off T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. And for three, perhaps most importantly – it would have told the reader of the many narratives following the monomyth theory, but it would not have shown them.

Sensuousness was the key concept I tried to stick by. Listening to the track, I felt boiling tides in the throes of an ocean storm, and I wanted the piece to evoke that too, not just describe it. In Monomyth the track, there are angry, soaring crests of waves, punctuated by the slow melancholy of a guitar line petering out. It was an almost tactile approach, attempting to capture the rolling texture and atmosphere of the grungy, growling music. I did sneak in a few lines from The Waste Land and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy into the piece, partly as easter eggs and partly also because I felt their lyricism fitted certain moments of the music.

Slightly paradoxically, I tried to refrain from drawing on the rich canon of the Epic in capturing the universality of the monomyth. I wanted to make it as general and applicable as possible to any where, any time – putting in only just enough reference to evoke something that recalls the tradition of The Odysseyor Beowulf. The creation process was more of capturing the theme of the Hero’s Journey within individual snapshots of moments, focusing on details as if they were macro photographs that tell, piecemeal, the story of a whole. The ending line itself takes cues from Campbell’s theory about the structure of the Hero’s journey – there is always a departure, and always a return.

That universality also fits in line with one of the major influences for Campbell, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ulysses packs Homer’s Odyssey into the boring, everyday life of Irishman Leopold Bloom, conflating the mundane with the epic. The mythic connection is a way of lending significance and order to the futile and small, an attempt to turn the everyman into a hero in his own right – in some ways, also like themes in Graham Swift’s Waterland.

I began by writing the piece as normal prose, but later decided to cast it in a kind of structure. I wanted to artificially mimic the structural style of heroic prose, as per The Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid. Clearly, there is no real reason for the way that the prose takes on verse form – the line breaks are arbitrary and the spaces contrived. I tried to make it tight enough to serve as a mnemonic evocation of Epics, yet loose enough to recall the modern style of prose it was originally written in.

The verses aren’t actually split into dactylic hexameter, as in the Greek tradition’s typical syllabic form. This obvious artifice now revealed, this lazy construction easily seen through, it becomes enough to suggest the piece as a formless vessel for the idea of the Hero, who could live in the age of a Norse skjald’s oral compositions, of Roman epics, or Shakespeare’s iambic verse.

I've been out of the writing routine quite a bit now, partly due to my own creative drought, and also partly due to other life-y things that are convenient excuses to not write. 

Anyway, when I finally got down to doing it, this one took a bit of work to finish. It's been in the workshop for quite many months, because I felt I didn't quite have what it takes to write about the subject, or the subject matter.

In general, this poem is about a first generation Singaporean who emigrated from her homeland as a child, and whose children have since abandoned her. Her plight is sadly common in this country, and I didn't want it to focus on any one person in particular - I wanted to draw out a vague, very hinted-at sense of collective tragedy or shared despair.

The titles for each stanza/part are meant to reference various sundries that you'd find in any elderly person's home. Because she explains it far better than I can, I quote Mary Karr in her introduction to my copy of T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' (which served as a great inspiration for me when I was writing this poem): '[An] object’s aesthetic virtues are wholly private, its evocative value zilch except to whoever bought it.'

We invest the things we own with personal nostalgia. They take on individuality in their ubiquitousness; significance in their littleness. They are wrapped in the memories that make our lives, in some strange and sometimes sad way. 

Again, whilst I've completed the poem, I'll never feel like I've done it - or rather, who it's about - proper justice. I don't know if I ever can or will. But we're always learning, always growing, so here's my best shot.

*

出埃及記 (Exodus)

“    What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow, Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.” -T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’

  i. The Urn She buries her sons in it This swollen porcelain, pregnant with ash, swirls with dead patterns of flowers

  ii. Tiger Balm Trace the grooves of this old woman’s skin Why do you draw back? There is no need to be afraid, It is only caverns and crags, only crevasses, Do you mock the wind and rain that carve them out?

Wind and rain brought her here.

  iii. Kodak 135 (ISO 1007), Black & White In the autumn, the bright autumn, The sunlight she wove into her hair, ringing Her face, covered in soft falling leaves, as young and beautiful as yours.

“Wu kua tio wa eh da boh kia boh?” * Which silence is heavier? Fire makes no sound as it feeds, kisses, folds over a photograph Neither does a son when he leaves.

  iv. Incense Mother of dust and ash, decaying daughter of the Middle Kingdom.

Wind and rain have taken everything from her but home

Wind and rain keep her here.

  Fin

Unlike other things I’ve written, almost everything in this poem is true. It’s based off things I’ve seen and people I’ve been around on a short sojourn over the long weekend to the UK, to catch my sister’s graduation from uni.

 My sister really did get stopped along the street once by an old lady who told her that she looked kind, and proceeded to show her the ‘secret’ of that particular avenue. As we walked down that street after dinner, she mentioned that incident and pointed the secret out to me – and indeed there were a pair of squirrels carved out of the tree trunk.

 Also true was the homeless man. We saw him sitting outside the antiques market near Piccadilly, and while I don’t have the courage to take photographs of people, HONY-style, I’ve done my best to paint him in verse here.

 The poem as a whole strings together a messy potpourri of personal and religious views. Christianity sometimes comes across as a sunshine faith – i.e. there’s nothing wrong with how I'm feeling, I’m perfectly happy because of what I believe in, etc. etc. And while it certainly does grant peace and happiness, there is as much pain and agony and doubt in it. Jesus, after all, was a beggar king sent to suffer alongside a suffering species.

 As a Christian myself I feel I would be lying, and cheating the faith of its wholeness, if I pretended that these lonely moments of loss didn’t exist. I do have trouble seeing God in the heartbreak and anguish of mankind, so learning to look deeper and search more is part of my personal journey in the faith (and also kind of central to the poem anyway). But I ramble too much and my introduction runs the risk of being longer than the actual poem, so I’ll let the stanzas do the talking from here on.  

The Hidden World

*

Drought

Do not speak to me of droughts I remember every summer promise - “You’ll never be lonely, You’ll never be lonely ever again,” I remember, I remember; The way the desert remembers the rain

I do drawings and I do poetry, so I thought why not do both together for once? I'm not entirely happy with either the sketch (the paint and the pen never mix together as seamlessly as I would like them to) or the poem (blunt, somewhat inelegant), but at least I know what to work on in future.

"How long will you wait for the right girl to walk into your life?" a friend asked me once over lunch. “As long as it takes,” I shrugged, without hesitating.

So this is a poem about that wait.

*

Chassé

Love is that dance you lost In the dry and graceless shuffle, the one that unravelled you like the ocean does a river; there’s trace amounts of it in your blood- Leaking through with the sun-rays in your veins. You would bleed to see her in that light,

so you do:

The rising curves of Babylon by the morning; The milk and honey of your promised land; Byzantine silk, Arabian silver; She’s Greek fire on a windless night. A will ‘o’ the wisp upon the marsh country- She is much like this, and more,

This is a story about fear.

i. you set a canvas alight with the burning end of a cig. tonight, you learn – there are ways in which nicotine can whisper, like the tips of angels’ wings

ii. He can only make out her lines in the evening light. They could be geography like rolling velvet hills or a cartographer’s map of silk-web roads, but he departs from clichés. That sort of romance can’t wet a parched throat. She is drenched in gold and she is sand in an arid desert.

iii. (It was in the desert that he first heard it from the Bedouin man, who told him what the opposite of love was. Was it not also in the desert that Jesus wandered, forty days and forty nights, with every jigsaw temptation of the devil brushing like wild honey against his skin?)

iv. Storm-chaser.

He has ever sought out the storm. He wants a tempest. He wants to be battered on an open ocean. He wants to drown in black waves thicker than language, left to gasp for air, crash like foaming surf. He wants to claim the madness of a boiling sea. Love, he thinks, is the froth of the tumult.

Her hips move against his, but she’s no storm. She grinds against him like plate tectonics. Faultlines beneath the sheets. The sort of movement that makes continents drift.

She gasps a supernova. To other men she could be a dawn star at the height of the morning, but all the light he sees is already dead. No star you see is still alive, forms the pulseline of a bedtime thought. The cosmos is a quivering tragedy.

So she’s falling stardust. He thinks that if he touches her she’ll cascade into motes of it, the same way she was made.

There’s no tanline on his ring finger. The ring sits on the wardrobe table. When he does wear it, he wonders how something so hollow can feel so heavy.

She gasps again and he sighs in answer. This is not pleasure. This is the sound of a man who’s made a mistake.

I wrote this way back in July, but it's never been posted up here. I dug it up and decided to put it up anyway.

Today the parents and I took a road trip out to Punggol, on an expedition to parts of the country that we don’t normally frequent. These are great for adventures and for nostalgia. This island is so small that in 18 years there haven’t really been any regions I’ve never been to; the places that I’ve been to only once or twice as a boy get steeped in the wonder of myth and memory.

We first ventured out to one of the new waterparks that’ve been springing up in the area around the HDB developments. It’s really quite fascinating; the iPhone camera is disappointingly unable to capture the scale or the depth of the view, but I’ve never seen hills quite so rolling or space quite so vast in a Singapore park before. A refreshing glimpse of things hopefully to come for the future. We hung around for a while and strode some meters down the length of the river, before we decided it was getting too damp beneath the drizzle of fat raindrops. The rest of the park was mainly deserted, save for a motley bunch of brave skateboarders across the water, and a young couple making for the sheltered benches beneath the overpass.

We aren’t northmen. Ours is not the slow and patient agency of the fisherman or the coxswain, although you could say that hints of the adventurous maritime spirit have insinuated themselves into our veins. We’re drawn to the sea in ways both subtle and overt. Dad wanted to find the new park connector that straddles the fringes of the ocean, and in the process we stumbled upon Marina Country Club. We used to eat here when I was a boy at Ponggol Seafood. The Mee Goreng was legendary and the ambience magic – I remember tottering down a long wooden boardwalk, flanked on either side by deep water and sea turtles. Loads of sea turtles.

All that is gone now. The boardwalk and the turtles have vanished, and the restaurant has aged. Oddly enough I remember nothing of the dimensions of the place, beyond its distance from home (and, of course, the turtles). Today, I relied on my parents’ testimony to note that the place is largely in disrepair.

The building that houses the boats was…odd. I can find no archetypes to describe it. It didn’t fit wholly into any architectural age that I could identify. The first thing that it made me think of was an airplane factory from a Japanese steampunk anime, or a whimsical Studio Ghibli production. There was something in the corrugated iron, though, something in the tacky colours that reminded of something else – long lost in the winding thought-trails of younger Leonard. I could taste hints of nostalgia between the open gaps in the metal.   

I think I understand, at least a little, why I’ve forgotten so much of this place. We remember things in part by scale – how sprawling or cramped a place is in comparison to us. I’ve grown since then, and the vast, echo-y ceilings that this part of Punggol made me think of have shrunk considerably. Even the forest road that took us there has been divested of some of its majestic height, but the sloping road was still as straight and narrow as I remembered it to be. 

We took a slow drive through the rest of the estate. There were a small number of wonderfully rustic bungalows (both old and new) and churches in the little avenue; they sat in a peaceful contented way amidst the smattering of forest and clearing. When we did find the boardwalk in the end, it was at the edge of a beach where a new chalet-esque thing has sprung up. It’s got individual rooms in little wagon-themed capsules, a quaint touch. A ragged string of people in sportswear, washed out by the annoyingly incessant drizzle, queued in line for ice cream sandwiches that an old woman was selling. She had the kind of simple, contented expression on her face that reminded me of what I really love about neighbourhoods.

The only form of public transport here, beyond the single bus service, is the LRT line that cuts through vast swathes of undeveloped grassland. There isn’t a single space in this country that you can consider ‘untamed’, not even here – even in the cricket-chirping fields you can glimpse scattered bits of white plating, the kind they use to board off developments, or rusty metal spurs. But it does come pretty close, admittedly. You can see nature creeping back in the little, quiet ways it does so well. In places, green fencing’s collapsed under the weight of overgrown vines. Awkward gates stand uselessly; they bestride the wreckage of the fallen fence.

This’d be such a beautiful place to explore on foot.

When finally we left Punggol, the inroads bore the trappings of one of the last few rustic hideaways in Singapore. An elderly man cycled resolutely through the rain, paying no mind to the cars thundering past him. He had all the unhurriedness that thickens the air of the north. Stringing the mossy lampposts were lengths of countryside lighting – wires of cheap little bulbs, like the kind you see on Christmas lights. Dusk would fall in a couple of hours and the lights, presumably, would wink into life. Sleepy boats would drift back in from the straits and anchor at the old, barnacled quay.

Somewhere, sea turtles would amble about lazily in the water.

I write most of my stuff in prose, so my friends always say that my poetry reads more like prose forced into the poetic form. That’s true and unavoidable, so I keep writing poetry in the hopes of changing that – or, at least, developing a style that’s sort of in-between the two.

*

Beyond your fields of fear and pride, is where you find love in the ocean: Pale light on still waves, this is the edifice of hopes unspoken

But your heartbeat is the lock of closed doors Your veins the watchman’s pierced gaze Your dreams are morning mist fuming from gutters, the pigeon-flutter of dauntless wings, a rust-streak down the spires of the house of God.

Old stuff. Poetry has never been my forte, but it's good to step out of the comfort zone every once in a while. I should try writing more soon.

Fast faces, distant glances, all saying - “This is the city. There is no time for anything else but urgency, nothing else to be but busy.”

You’ve seen the industry of this place: an old man folding bombers out of paper, a cook serving daintily-salted cod on a gleaming silver plate. He crowns it with reeds of burnt lemongrass - impales it through a broken mouth.

You’ve been slowly intimated with the music of lost hearts: a mess of Ziploc bags in a luggage bearing the blunt edges of long journeys. You want to seek out the songs you’ve never known But there’s no space to find them in – no more than there’s room for ghost towns in between the cities, or stars out amidst the clouds.

In between the steel and glass, there are quiet suggestions of peace; here, your finger whispers down her wrist with a delicacy not unlike the one with which you wander the backways of home.

There are stories written about road trips all the time, but there are very few written about the end of them. This is a story about the end of a road trip. It is also about men who, despite their best efforts, just won't seem to die.

*

The Lightning Strike

They drove west, always west, stopping little except for food and drink. They rarely needed sleep, and when they did, they preferred to sleep in the car, because although it smelled faintly of vomit it was likely cleaner than any of the roadside motels that sprouted weed-like along the spiderweb roads of the United States.

The jagged teeth of the Appalachians faded eastward as they drove far out from DC and came upon the Great Plains. Then came the Boston mountains, then the headwaters of the Arkansas valley, and then the names got too tiring and it became dirt and plateaus and firs and old, water-stained towns.    

Sleep never came easy at the back of the car, even though his long legs and thin arms fit as comfortably as a grown man could across the seats. When he could not fall asleep, which was very often, he would look out the window and imagine he was swimming in the sea of stars – out there, miles and years away from the tops of the pines that whispered against the sallow moon. Then he closed his eyes. Perhaps he slept.

Ten days later, the car pulled over. He could hear dirty waters slopping against a breakwater. Some distance behind them, the neon lights of the City of Angels heaved and began to wake.  Live Forever by Oasis was playing on the radio. Hector swore and turned it off.

“Fucking hate that song,” Hector grunted.

He smiled.

They got out of the car and got into a diner to buy a hot meal. Then they walked towards the coast. Night had already spread across the sky, a large, dark bruise, and their cigarettes streamed like ghosts into the darkness. With arms on the cold steel bannisters, they hunched over the railings and looked out to sea.

“West Coast,” said Hector, and there was a look in his eyes that could have turned five years into five minutes. “End of the line.”

Road trips weren’t a matter of distance for them. They’d wrecked the mileage counter a long time ago and never bothered to replace it. It was time that was ground beneath the SUV’s wheels instead; hours and minutes burned underneath rubber and dirt. That was all you could do when you had more time than you knew what to do with – give it a direction. Flatten your days out in a cross-continental straight-line journey from coast to coast, maybe shave off a couple of months…anything to keep the seconds from piling up, folding over each other, and drowning you in a shapeless sea.

But they’d run the road trip countless times, and each time they counted how much time they had left, and always, always, the answer was simple: more.

He stubbed the burnt cig on the railing. Across the sea there was a quiet rumbling of thunder, and it sounded like faraway shields beating against one another, and for a fleeting moment it reminded him of something.

“Hector,” he said, “do you remember Troy?”

Hector looked at him strangely and it looked as if he might not answer at all. Then he did.

“Yeah,” he began. “Yeah, I remember Troy.”

Hector took a drag of his cig and let the smoke flow out of his mouth like waterfall vapour. “Right mess, that was. No one can forget Troy. Why the question?”

“Nah,” he said. “Just remembering.”

Hector laughed. “I remember dragging your ass away from King Menelaus before he stuck you with his iron toothpick, little brother.”

He snorted. “And I remember dragging your dead body from beneath the heel of goddamn Achilles, Hec. He put you on your back so many times, there was so much sand in your armour that the Trojans had to scrub it for a fortnight before it would dare to glimmer again.”

“Yeah, and then you shot that heel with an arrow from afar and killed him. At least when I fought Achilles I didn’t pull a fucking dick move.”

He shrugged. “It worked.”

“Yeah, yeah, it sure did,” Hector said. “What did they call you after that? Paris Far-Striker, favoured son of Apollo. Gods, I couldn’t stop laughing for days.”

He bristled. “Fuck that. No one calls me that anymore.”

“Now they just call you Alexander,” Hector nodded. “Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, eh?”

Fingertips of lightning were cobwebbing across the sky in the distance. They underlit clouds and whispered hotly down the horizon line.

“Troy wasn’t the worst,” sighed Hector. “It was better than Verdun. Verdun was absolute shit. 1916 was absolute shit. I saw men drown in shell craters that were filled with the ooze from rotting bodies and rain water. Once on trench patrol we walked past this section that had been hit by ground burst. Buried alive, all of them inside, only bayonets on their rifles sticking out of the damn soil. They think Afghanistan was bad, they should have been there at Verdun.”

“Afghanistan was a cakewalk,” agreed Paris, or Alexander, or whatever they called him nowadays. But he wasn’t thinking of Afghanistan. He wasn’t remembering how well the rifles handled compared to his bow, even Apollo’s bow that had struck the heel of Achilles and left him to bleed out on the hills and dust of Troy. He was remembering something else.

There was a huge fork of light across the sky. The lightning strike shot across the bay, hot branches peeling away from the central discharge like a massive silver tree. It feathered, crackled, shook the trees and shivered the water and, for a moment, lit up the horizon like a newborn sun. And Paris saw everything in the blinding wake – the ships along the sealine in bristling forests of titanium and exhaust and the tangled piles of wood that had once been the forests in Verdun and the soft-spoken Afghan sunrise marred by artillery smoke and bitter winter wind. The years, and the decades, and the centuries, and beyond all of them, a cold halo of brilliant golden hair. A face as clear and cutting as any lightning strike. Paris remembered.

“Helen,” he said quietly.

“What was that?” asked Hector.

“It was always Helen. I never loved anyone else like I did Helen.”

“Jesus,” Hector grunted and pushed himself away from the railing. “Not this again. Don’t forget it was that business with Helen that started all that Trojan War shit.”  

And I would have done it all over again, Paris thought but did not say out loud. Before the war they had sat in the meadows in silence and she’d let him bury his face in her harvest moon hair, the colour of honey and oats at the height of the spring. He was never sure if she smelt of the summer, or if the summer smelt of her.

“I’d have died a thousand deaths just to keep a lock of her hair,” he sighed.

“You already have,” Hector laughed, but then his smile disappeared and the mood turned serious. “Best you forget her. Forget all of that.”

“Because it started a war?” Paris rounded on him. “Because of all those kings and heroes who dashed themselves like wheat against the walls? You and I are going to live forever, Hec. After Achilles killed you the first time, you sat upright in the funeral halls five hours later and began to walk that same night. A German bullet took off your head at Verdun and then you were back on the firing step within a week. If they’ll start a war for Helen then Hell take them all, because it can’t take me,” he growled, at the oncoming storm.

“Precisely because we live forever,” Hector snapped. “Because we live forever, and Helen never did.” A pause, then a heavy sigh. “Forget love, brother. There are things simply denied at birth to some men.”

They stood in silence, watching lightning flicker in the distance, until their cigs burnt out to ember stumps and sent sparks sailing into the night.

“I used to see things in her eyes,” Paris said at last. “Stars, mostly. A whole sea of stars, one great twinkling well of starlight in an iris. But there was one night I stared into her eyes and I saw heaven, and it wasn’t where Zeus or Apollo or Aphrodite stayed, and I didn’t know where it was, but I knew that it was heaven and I knew that that was the closest I’d ever get to it. If there was any chance, any chance in the world at all, that I could see that in a woman’s eyes ever again – I would take it.”

“Take it and do what? Hoard it? Lock those stars away in a box in your chest and run away with it and never come back? Is that what you did with the Jewish girl in Dordogne?”

Paris turned suddenly to face Hector. “Don’t mention her,” he warned.

“You gave her a son, Paris. Then you fled and didn’t even have the decency to watch him grow and die.”

Thin and weak raindrops sleeted down from the clouds. They made a noise like falling leaves on silk.

“I said not to mention her.” Paris started to make his way back to the SUV.  Julia had been a good girl. He had fond memories of her. She was simple but not in an unintelligent way, was sweet as mountain water, possessed of a great inner strength, and he could not love her at all. Julia had been a good girl and a bad choice. Julia was a good girl but she was no Helen.  

But Hector couldn’t know that – couldn’t know that he’d run away to let her find someone who could love her. That wasn’t what Hector would do. Brave, noble Hector, first son of the King of Troy! If Hector were in his place he’d have stayed with Julia and let them all live a miserable, loveless life. All the books loved Hector and his honour to bits. Paris had read them all and he didn’t care. Let Homer go write his fucking epics. He would run away and keep running until he’d found Helen or someone like Helen and then none of it would matter at all.

The rain was getting heavier now. He was about to open the door to the SUV when he realised that his brother was still standing there, still as a mountain, drenched in the downpour. His eyes were open in the cutting, whipping rain.

“Everything you love dies, Alex,” he called out to Paris. “Everyone we love dies.”

That made him look into Hector’s gray pupils, the colour of rolling thunder, and for once he understood his brother for more than the chain smoker who did lines of coke in an Alabama basement every night. Hector had a wife once too, fair Andromache, and a son, Astyanax, who before the walls of Troy caught the last light of the morning in his eyes reflected from his father’s gleaming helm. He had cried so loudly that dawn.

They all outlived the Trojan War and then Hector outlived them all. Forever wasn’t just a cage, it was a mirror. It was the mirror through which you saw your wife grow old and wither and your sons turn to ashes that ran through your ageless hands. Beyond a mirror it was a hell that eclipsed even Verdun.

“I buried Astyanax,” shouted Hector. His voice was hoarse and it wasn’t the wind. “Homer lied. The Greeks never threw him off the wall after they sacked Troy, that would have been a mercy. He grew up then he grew old and I was there to watch it all and then in the end, at the very end, I cradled his withered body in my own arms and buried him beside the Styx. Could you do that, Paris? Could you?”

Rain. Rain, and thunder, and lightning over the bay.

Hector walked to the car. “We always knew why we fought in all those wars,” he said, and flicked his cigarette to the ground. Aeons of violence and conflict scattered to the floor and got washed out with the ash in the rain. “Because the shock that goes up your arm as you plunge a sword into another man’s chest is just a single moment. All this pain, all this suffering – so temporary. It becomes a product of an instant. The seasons will come and go and all those bayonets sticking out of the mud turn into memorials. Grass will grow and the trenches get covered over in farmland.”

What he didn’t say, but what Paris knew fully, was why they could appreciate that so keenly. Some kinds of lives could make a year in the trenches no more than a blink of the eye. It did not feel comfortable to think too much about what kind of life that was, especially if you were living it.

“I fucking hate this,” said Hector, and it was the chain smoker who spoke again. He stamped out the cigarette bud beneath his feet and did not reach for a new one. “Let’s get back in the car. Time to head back.”

"When did we allow evil to become stronger than us?"

I've been doing this miniature-painting gig for some time, so I thought it'd be nice to paint one for my sis's Christmas/birthday gift. So I popped down to the store and bought one and clipped out/cleaned up the little plastic bits before gluing them together. 

They're not called miniatures for no reason.

The next step was to undercoat it with black paint and start blocking out colours. Then I began working on the face.

It's a pretty good sculpt in everything but the face, really. Tauriel's got quite sharp cheekbones and eyebrows...none of which were painted on. The face was almost flat. So I had to work with what I had, and highlight cheekbones + bring out the shadowed bits manually. Also eyebrows.

After much swearing and cursing and a very small brush.

With the face somewhat done, I also painted the hair. That was a fun bit.

Then I worked on the green ranger garb that Tauriel wears. I tried to paint that in varying shades of yellowish green, something that could presumably be well-camouflaged in a forest. Red and green are contrasting colours, so I ran a red wash into the recesses to give some depth. All the while I kept going back to the face because it never felt done - either it needed another highlight, or shade, or many other things.

With the greens finished, I did up the weapons and base...and that was that. Also got Tauriel's face up to a stage where it seemed like it was heading in the direction that I wanted it to.

I am never painting eyebrows onto something this size EVER again.

I didn't like the Tauriel-Kili 'romance' thing that went on in the movie, thought it was a little cheap. I much preferred the militant orc-beheader Tauriel...so I chopped up an old orc mini that I had lying around and stuck his head on the base. 

"I did free him. I freed his miserable head from his shoulders."

Just so that there's no doubt about who killed that orc. 

I am naturally lazy, so I like to write little short stories and pass them off as flash fiction. Here's one.

*

“There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.” -Juan Gabriel Vasquez, The Sound of Things Falling

You fell in love for the first time when you were sixteen. She was a dreamer and she broke your heart. You never had the courage to tell her a proper yes, so she could never give you a proper no, and because of this she drew out your pain like a slow sinking knife and she never even knew it.

You spent a long time after that roaming in the dark. You began to hunt. You searched. There was the dancer in Moscow, whose delicate toes tapped out a rhythm you couldn’t catch on to. There was the girl you used to smile at in the coffee joint off West 142nd. You told yourself you’d say hello to her one day. You did not. New York City is built on grids and there is little space to breathe in between them; even littler for a heart to beat. You thought from time to time, also, of the wild woman from Andalusia, because you brushed fingers with her in the meadows high above the Spanish Sierra. You could’ve told her then that you fancied her. You never did.

They were all good and sweet and sometimes complicated girls and you could not love any of them.

Any of them. It could have been any of them. You reasoned that you could have been in a relationship with any one of them, and it would have been nice for a while, but only for a while, and one night you would find your bed filled and your soul empty.

In the dark it is hard to listen. All you could hear was your heart whispering no. You are not, after all, in the business of short journeys. They take a lot out of you.

The drive from London to Somerset, for one, certainly did. Fields of black rolling into the night, the white smoke of moonlit clouds, pinpricks of countryside light…you felt like you had driven years and not just miles in the dark. Sirius Dog-Star flanked the starboard side.

So no. No more short journeys. You are in things for the long haul. And for every long haul, you must expect an equally long wait.

Jolts of turbulence on the plane. It is looping in the sky aimlessly as air traffic below clears. This is okay. It gives you time to think. You finish flipping through a year’s worth of photos and contemplate your years in reflection. You consider how much you have changed, from jawline to hair to body and mind. Not many pay enough attention to realise. This is okay too.

Sunlight, pale and golden, streams through the port window. It hits your face. Motes of dust swirl. You remember the drive back. The rising moon by port, the setting sun by starboard. Sleeping green hills, and painterly horsehair streaks of fire in the sky. In London, bright London, you heard the bells of the house of God ring over the rooftops.

TRANSITIONS AND THRESHOLDS The Importance of the Messenger in Death and the King’s Horseman

Death and the King’s Horseman is a play built upon transitions: the various scenes in the play shift from civilization to civilization, from microcosms of one culture to another, and the survival of the Yoruba community itself is built upon transitions between the material world and the spirit world. The role of the messenger in the play is therefore of supreme importance –to ensure smooth transitions by carrying messages of import from one point to the next, and to straddle the thresholds between worlds.  

The stability of a community hinges upon understanding-based interaction with other communities around it (in the case of the Yoruba, this entails its interaction with the spirit world as well as the colonial presence in Africa). If a messenger is unsuccessful in his interpretative and translative duties, conveying incorrect messages or simply failing to carry out his ascribed duty, then that yields potentially disastrous results for the community – and that’s exactly what happens in the play.

We’ll focus on a number of key characters who play the role of the messenger in the play. First among these is of course Elesin, whose ascribed social function since birth has been to act as the messenger between the Yoruba and the realm of the ancestors. But no discussion is complete without looking at the other messengers – Amusa is another prime example, and to some degree, Olunde. I’ll also be referencing some brilliant points made by Marty Brooks in ‘The “Failed Messenger”’, which is featured somewhere in the DKH reader.

Elesin’s constant misinterpretations foreshadow his impending failure as the messenger between this world and the next, threatening by extension the very existence of the Yoruba community itself. Brooks writes of how “The Praise-Singer warns Elesin of the threatening presence of the white man, but must end his speech: ‘Elesin Oba, do you hear me?’ [to which Elesin replies] ‘I hear your voice, Olohun-iyo.’ Hearing someone’s voice, however, is not the same as hearing someone’s words and is even farther removed from an acknowledgement of understanding.” That Elesin can hear a voice in general, but not the nuance, meaning and importance of the words which that voice is used for, casts doubt on his interpretative abilities.

But Elesin’s hubris also fundamentally impedes his role as a messenger. He has the strongest obligation, out of all others in his community, to be careful and precise with the language that he uses. After all, language is the medium by which he will speak to both his king and the ancestors, guiding the former through to the afterlife and ensuring continued harmony between the physical world and the immaterial realm. However, Elesin’s language bleeds superfluity where it should be concise; manipulation where it should be truthful. He uses it to forward his own personal desires rather than the good of the community. When Elesin sees a beautiful woman in the marketplace, Brooks shows how the Horseman “[contends] that he yearns not for the pleasure but for an act of meaning”, using “the metaphor of the young shoot rising from the withering stalk of the plaintain to suggest that his desire for the young woman is actually the desire to create life from death”:

  Elesin …You have seen the young shoot swelling Even as the parent stalk begins to wither. Women, let my going be likened to The twilight hour of the plantain.

Elesin, appointed spiritual messenger of the Yoruba people, is flippant with the treatment of his craft’s medium, and also proves careless with his interpretation of it. That casts a long, foreboding shadow onto whether or not his role will be fulfilled, and establishes the potential for the descent of the Yoruba community into calamitous instability.

Other characters who fall into the messenger archetype also see a similar failure to carry out their appointed role, engendering chaos as a result. Let’s have a look now at Sergeant Amusa.

Amusa is the only link between the world of the British and the world of Yoruba. He delivers messages from one party to another, but because he speaks in broken, Pidgin English, it leads to misunderstandings and instability between the two worlds.  The Pilkingses “misinterpret the contents [of the note that Amusa writes]. They assume that Amusa’s phrase ‘Elesin Oba is to commit death’ refers to ritual murder. Their servant Joseph corrects their misinterpretation, but Joseph is a feeble interpreter for the Pilkingses to rely upon…Pilkings, unable to confirm the truth of Amusa’s note, sends a message to Amusa directing him to arrest Elesin.” And we all know how the story goes from here – eventually the white man’s forces breaks into Elesin’s chamber while his naughty time makes him hesitate, and the Yoruba world is thrown into imbalance.

There are many other scenes where Amusa fails to convey the proper message, causing the colonials to get the wrong idea. For example, despite Pilkings’ later insistence that Amusa is “prone to exaggerations”, the Resident still interprets Amusa’s note as describing riots in the marketplace. As a whole, however, it’s clear that Amusa is another example of a failed messenger.

But why is his language so fragmented? During the scenes with the British, we can assume it’s because he might speak Yoruba whereas the Brits speak English, and therefore Amusa’s Pidgin English reflects his poor grasp of colonial talk. But Amusa is just as incompetent at conversing with the Yoruba as well.

When we were in England for the lit trip, we had a session with a Nigerian playwright who told us that it’s because Amusa isn’t actually Yoruba. Soyinka never specifies, but the playwright speculated that Amusa is most likely Hausa – a completely different nomadic African tribe/culture with its own language, who were often hired by the colonial British. 

So Amusa, caricatured through his laughable language, is an incompetent messenger because he simply doesn’t belong. His inability to convey messages properly to either world arises from the fact that this shouldn’t be his job – he’s neither British nor Yoruba. That ill placement creates a fundamental inadequacy, and in turn results in the failure of his assigned job. He is a symbol for the critical, inevitable failure of an out-of-place messenger.

We can draw interesting – and rather foreboding – parallels to Olunde. On the one hand, Olunde should eventually become the next Horseman after the death of his father, because the position of Horseman is dynastic and inherited. So Olunde has that association with the role of messenger, just as how Amusa also has a basic association with being a messenger because he’s been employed by the British. 

Most likely not Olunde, but you get the idea

At the same time, however, Olunde attempts to save his community in the wake of his father’s acute failure, committing ritual suicide in place of Elesin – before his father has died, and before the mantle of Horseman has been passed on to him. Olunde is acting way out of his role here because he is not actually the Horseman, much in the same way that Amusa acts out of his role because he is not Yoruba.

Amusa totally fails to interpret and convey messages from one world to another because he is an inadequate messenger. He has no place as a link to two cultures because he simply isn’t part of either, and thus fails precisely because of that. And if Amusa fails on account of that - what more Olunde? What more a black man returning to his community after years abroad in the dressing of the white man, half an outsider…what more a man who has not yet been ordained and ordered to die for his people?

Olunde’s success in keeping harmony between the Yoruba world and the spirit world are drowned in massive doubt. We have no idea if he’ll make it, and most signs point towards the fact that he won’t. Death and the King’s Horseman is a play built upon transitions, and characterized by the failure to transition smoothly because of the inadequacies of its messengers. The abject failure of their important roles suggests a serious de-synchronization of total worlds, be it the material and the immaterial, or the Yoruba and the British.