Shakespeare and Peanuts

Sally Brown: I couldn't decide if I wanted marble fudge, chocolate, rocky road, vanilla or butter pecan...I finally decided to try marble fudge...then I had to choose between a plain cone or a sugar cone...I decided on the sugar cone...so what happened? I went out the door, and dropped the whole thing on the sidewalk! Don't tell me my life isn't a Shakespearean tragedy!

Charlie Brown: I won't.


At BookClub last weekend, we talked about choices in life, God's guidance in those, and troubles notwithstanding. Scintillating discussion as usual, especially on something that would have been close to heart to everyone at some point or the other. Should I choose this job or the other? To live in this country or that? Why does God seem to open up many choices sometimes and remain silent at other times? Why then, when it seemed so clear that He opened the road one way, when the rainbow covenant had already been written across the sky, that one still gets the uncomfortable sensation that perhaps this is "not the centre of God's Will" after all, as one had been so sure about at first?

It is a precious thing to have Peace as spoken of in the Bible. But that itself seems to have several shades of meaning. Is the Peace of God the same as having Peace in God or Peace with God. Is the something we should seek for or is it something granted to us, somewhat like Faith?

More questions than answers i think. But I think we could all do with a little Peanutty humour and tell ourselves that life's problems are not nearly as often tragic as we think they are. There's almost always a surprising blessing in the circumstance, Honey in the Rock. And as God has so often shown, He is far far more interested in our characters than in our circumstances.

Letter to Wu Xi

Dear Wu Xi

As we do know that that the 互联网 is open to scrutiny by the authorities where you are, I am not sure I can write all that I want to write to you via email. I am thinking maybe if you ever did a google or a 百度 on your own name, you might see this. Of course, there are other things here in my blog which would probably not get through the firewalls anyway. Perhaps you might read this while travelling abroad, or perhaps one day the firewalls would be removed (amen!), and we can have open conversations about the Faith on the internet. It's a little funny isn't it? We had pretty open conversations in the spanking new cafes at the Border Town, while many a 公安 passed us by. We were only having English lessons of course :)

I did receive some updates from sister Fay about you and the rest of the class. I am very glad to hear that most of you are well and growing in the Lord. I am especially excited to hear from her that you have taken up various positions of service and leadership in the家庭教会 . It was clear to us from the start that you do have a gift for teaching, even while you interpreted for Jacob when he conducted the OT studies, I was always impressed with your clear and lucid explanations in your native tongue to the class. With your enthusiasm and admirable discipline for learning the scriptures, I am sure you will be, and are being used by God to do the much much needed work of teaching the Word of Life to the very many 兄弟姐妹 being added to the Kingdom everyday in your country, where bible scholarship and teaching resources are scarce indeed.

I remember how we used to chat after class, and you would ask me many questions about how a "regular" church is run in places with religious freedom, and the things Christians do in such congregations. It never failed to remind me just how lucky I have been to have always lived in places (Singapore, Hong Kong, Singapore) where freedom of religion is entrenched as part of the宪法 . Some of us do, of course, face persecution in other forms, for instance from our families, or just social pressures from friends or colleagues that we let constrain us in our practice and proclamation of the Faith. But yes, I have come to realize the need to learn never to take for granted to ability to freely worship, and to take lightly the ability to draw on any of the Christian literature and resources worldwide. And yes, you always reminded me how blessed I am to be able to openly identify with other Christians, worshipping and praying with them in public, a comfort and joy that I easily forget.

So, Wu Xi, I hope you are well. I hope things have been sorted out with your wife, and that your little daughter is not too much affected by the separation. It must not be easy sometimes, but you must remember that all things are new with the Lord, and that you can take courage to face life ahead with the strength of the Lord, and hope in Him alone.

Your sister in Christ,

Wei

p.s. Found a gouache at the Joomi Ching art gallery website called Baidu Passages. Thought it was quite nice. Hope your new graphic design firm is getting off on a good start too.

The Harp in the Willow 杨 琴

A few days ago, our very own Professor Dr E.G. emailed to the class some photos she took of the spring flora at Oxford, which were very pretty indeed. I especially liked the photos of the willow trees, taken at different times in the spring season. This thumbnail shows one willow by the river which was just stirring to life after the British winter.

I have always been quite partial to willow trees. They are beautiful to draw and photograph, and every picture of a willow tree seems to tell a story. It was also the first tree that I learned about (yes, even before the angsana and frangipani in primary science textbooks) - in fact, at the same time that I learnt to write my name. At age 4, as mom held my hand to put my Chinese name on the front cover of my kindergarten exercise books, she said that the Willow 杨 (yang), was one of the four great trees of China. (Later on I learnt that the others are the Bamboo 竹 , the Pine 松 and the Lotus 莲, which together with the Willow, symbolized different virtues extolled by the Chinese).

Later in life, I discovered that God chose to to include in it some of the most poignant verses in biblical literature:

'By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willow-trees we hung up our harps.' - Psalm 137

Yes, the willow is often seen as a symbol of grief. There are some who therefore find it too sorrowful to be a tree of life. But in its hanging branches, strength grows. In its bitter bark, the miracle of healing is found. It will always be found near rivers of water, and though its blossoms are imperceptible to the eye, it endures when other plants fade.

And then recently, I found another new and remarkable thing about the willow. The harps which the defeated Israealites hung on the willow tree, were in fact made from the solid willow wood! Joy came literally from Sorrow!

Take down your harp from the willow tree
Bottle the tears at the end of the yews
Let the living waters beside run free
Over the stones which sing their tune.

They who hung up their harps lost Zion
We whose strings are mended Hope see
So let the songs of joy not be silent
Take down your harp from the willow tree.

This Bridge

This book tells but half my world
The other half no one can read:
On tall white peaks, in deep pine groves
Sleep brings dancing elves on a moonlit beach .
I wish you could come in for while and share
The colourful swirling worlds I've known.
But this book will only take you halfway there
The last few steps in Dreamland we take alone.

It's been a little hard putting thoughts into prose these few days. Have only been posting verse. Could be the work frenzy, or the lack of a nice long stretch of hours, or maybe it's just the sense that things are hard to reduce into paragraphs some times. Once again, I am glad for poetry and pictures.

Chaff and Grain

Oh, the comfort --
The inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
Having neither to weigh thoughts,
Nor measure words -- but pouring them
All right out -- just as they are --
Chaff and grain together --
Certain that a faithful hand will
Take and sift them --
Keep what is worth keeping -
and with the breath of kindness
Blow the rest away.

A quote attributed to George Eliot, who is, for the uninitiated, a female writer.

Smart Investing

If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.

If you had bought $1,000.00 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, my current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

- From LegalHumour.com

Watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room on DVD on Thursday. Thinking about why God puts us in certain jobs.

Changed label

The previous posts under this label have been moved to "Diary".

Click here to go to The Goats-Really Main HomePage.

Till Human Voices Wake Us

If you read the last post here without hyperlinking to the full text of "The Love Song", you would have been posed perfectly at that time in history before the Modernist Psyche came to the consciousness of society. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has often been called the first modernist poem in English literature.

I first read The Love Song in an elective class taken during the second semester of the second year of Law School, round about the same time when the thought of picking up a novel or reading a poem was finally no longer so painful as it had been since the dashing of a young dream many months before.

T. S. Eliot's Prufrock has become so much a part of the English language that people who have never read the poem are familiar with phrases like "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" and "I grow old... I grow old.../ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" and "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangleo." (Like we see from B's comment in the last post, these phrases stay with you for life! :) )

The title of the poem, "The Love Song", the grand prologue quoted from Dante, and the romantic opening lines, "Let us go then, you and I,..." are possibly the best example of ironic deflation in the English language. T.S. Eliot starts the poem with great promise of grandeur and romance, but when you read beyond the first lines, the rest of the poem becomes impossibly fragmented, obscure, and difficult to understand. It also has a strangely depressive effect for a poem comprised largely of the most ordinary images of modern life, with a protaganist that was so emacipated ("look how his arms are thin") and pathetic ("Do I dare.. do i dare") as to be comical.

There are very many articles written on this important poem (which if I may note, was not so readily available to us in the class of 1994, since the Internet was only starting to be populated), and any of them would give a reader a good aid to understanding its background. As a full-time frustrated English major, I spent many an hour in the NUS Arts Library (away from the law journals) researching the classical and non-classical allusions in the poem, collecting hints from the professors in tutorials, and while finally getting a Distinction in Lit 203 (largely by focusing on Hamlet in the exam paper), I had to admit that I did not understand the poem.

Since then, over the years, I would come across the poem once every so often, and on several occasions, I would look at individual stanzas and suddenly get the startling sensation of suddenly "seeing the image and understanding it". Recently, I came across it again, and sat down to read the whole poem again in one sitting. It dawned on me then that to understand the poem, one must have grown to become the Modern Person, something that took place only in the last 12 years of my life.

The "you and I" in the opening lines are in fact the same person - Prufrock, in a soliloquoy. How many of us have had these internal monologues, as a result of emotional alienation, not just from those around us, but even with ourselves?

Are there not days when you are just "measuring life out by coffee spoons", or projects, or job appraisals, or movies, or kids?

"Do I dare...disturb the universe?" - Do I dare live a different life, tell someone I love them, or even call up an old friend?

With all the ostensible choices that we have in work and life, none of which does not involve some sacrifice of something else, is there not "time for a hundred visions and revisions"?

Have you felt like an insect "pinned and wriggling on the wall", scrutinized by them all? If I read or write, or introspect, will my friends call me melancholic, can they understand that keeping a smiling face is not all?

"I hear the mermaids singing, each to each

I do not think they will sing to me."

- Will someone notice us in the crowds?

Do we dream to fly, or dance, or sing? - well yes, maybe..

"Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

(Note on the photo: tried to look for a picture of mermaid's tail on Google Images, but decided that i just don't like scaly-looking things. The picture I chose is the end of a guppy's tail- mauve, blue, silvery, - I think that's how I imagine a mermaid's tail to be)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo
Questa fiamma staria sensa piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero
Sensa tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky...

Opening lines, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

Frequency

Frequency is a funny thing. You know it when you see it, it goes "click". You can usually tell similar frequencies by (a) the economy of words (b) common bases of thinking about the world; and (c) shared humour. Interestingly (a) then leads to the proliferation of conversation, (b) provides the safe ground on which to spar and challenge each other's ideas, and (c) ... well (c) just makes you laugh a lot together, which gets people through the not-so-similarly-frequent parts.

Baby Shower

The very fabulous Class 91A15 got together to have the Third Baby Shower on Sunday. Carrying on the tradition that started with She-Bear, we did another craft project (my first, since I was away in the previous years) for the Mommy-to-Be, Joyful Cow.

It's an Animal Safari Laundry Bag!

These were the pieces of colourful colourful felt left over from the last project (Wei's Baby Shower) and we had a very pleasant afternoon making the bag, which I was told is a culmination of the improved craft making skills of the class over these years.















The bag will be a good educational tool when Baby Sebastian arrives. Although Mommy and Daddy will have a hard time explaining the lemon/apple/banana all-in-one tree!















Max and Josh were such good models and just sat there like angels while I snipped and cut out their likeness. :)