Daughter / Nicole Blackman

One day I'll give birth to a tiny baby girl
and when she's born she'll scream and I'll make sure
she never stops.

I will kiss her before I lay her down
and will tell her a story so she knows
how it is and how it must be for her to survive.

I'll tell her about the power of water
the seduction of paper
the promise of gasoline
and the hope of blood.

I'll teach her to shave her eyebrows and
mark her skin.

I'll teach her that her body is
her greatest work of art.

I'll tell her to light things on fire
and keep them burning.

I'll teach her that the fire will not consume her,
that she must take it and use it.

I'll tell her to be tri-sexual, to try anything
to sleep with, fight with, pray with anyone,
just as long as she feels something.

I'll help her do her best work when it rains.
I'll tell her to reinvent herself every 28 days.
I'll teach her to develop all her selves,
the courageous ones,
the smart ones,
the dreaming ones
the fast ones.

I'll teach her that she has an army inside her
that can save her life.

I'll tell her to say Fuck like other people say
and when people are shocked
to ask them why they so fear a small quartet
of letters.

I'll make sure she always carries a pen
so she can take down the evidence.
If she has no paper, I'll teach her to
write everything down on her tongue
write it on her thighs.

I'll help her to see that she will not find God
or salvation in a dark brick building
built by dead men.

I'll explain to her that it's better to regret the things
she has done than the things she hasn't.

I'll teach her to write her manifestos
on cocktail napkins.
I'll say she should make men lick her enterprise.

I'll teach her to talk hard.
I'll tell her that her skin is the
most beautiful dress she will ever wear.

I'll tell her that people must earn the right
to use her nickname,
that forced intimacy is an ugly thing.

I'll make her understand that she is worth more
with her clothes on.

I'll tell her that when the words finally flow too fast
and she has no use for a pen
that she must quit her job
run out of the house in her bathrobe,
leaving the door open.
I'll teach her to follow the words.

I'll tell her to stand up
and head for the door
after she makes love.
When he asks her to
stay she'll say
she's got to
go.

I'll tell her that when she first bleeds
when she is a woman,
to go up to the roof at midnight,
reach her hands up to the sky and scream.

I'll teach her to be whole, to be holy,
to be so much that she doesn't even
need me anymore.
I'll tell her to go quickly and never come back.
I will make her stronger than me.

I'll say to her never forget what they did to you
and never let them know you remember.

Never forget what they did to you
and never let them know you remember.

things i failed to understand this week

1. How I'm supposed to write a philosophy paper for the exams: this is vaguely worrying because my philosophy paper is in about two and a half weeks, and my teacher is just about as helpful as a bicycle (this makes sense because I cannot cycle). Unsure if my essays are actually starting to make sense or I've just convinced myself that they have. Unsure how to determine which is actually the case. Unsure how philosophy in university became so different from what I expected it to be. Just really hoping it's just this year that's disappointing, and the next one will be better. Perpetually keeping my fingers crossed for good things to happen.
2. Why G. E. Moore thought 'there is a hand' would be a good proof for the existence of the external world: look Moore, here is my hand, and I am going to hit you with it. Other than the fact it is exceedingly daft and doesn't say much beyond asserting the existence of things with four fingers and a thumb, he also wrote it in the most frustrating language possible, as if he predicted there would be legions of philosophy students being forced to read it some years down the road and strived to make our life as difficult as possible.
3. How people can say 'I love you' a month into their relationships: a phenomenon that increasingly crops up on Facebook — albums of couples holding up 'I love you' signs while smiling into the Photobooth camera (á la Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me music video), lovey-dovey comments of 'together forever' and a real-life lovefest going on in my room (now that one of my very best friends is attached)... how can you say just a month into your relationship? It absolutely baffles me. Then maybe they might be playing some language game (attempt to make degree relevant to life #32: Wittgenstein, On Certainty) that I am not privy to. But okay, 'call it what you want, eh eh eh, call it what you want want want' (Foster The People, 2011)
4. How I really lucked out: what would a typical post in this space be if there wasn't something vague and cryptic? I guess what I'm trying to say is that second chances do come around and I'm going to hold on to it as tightly as possible.

"make good art"

Taking time off Hume and Plato—okay not really, more like taking time off watching Community whilst seated in a pile of paper on my bed and eating Percy Pigs—to add to the collective Internet sentiment on how great Neil Gaiman's commencement speech to the University of the Arts is. Neil Gaiman is sort of an important person to me, even though he doesn't know that I exist. The only time I've had any actual contact with him was during a book signing in Singapore—I remember it rather clearly: it was at The Arts House and I held out my copy of Dream Country for him to sign when it was my turn. It was the thin paperback volume because I couldn't afford the beautiful leather-bound Absolute versions, even my copy of American Gods was an old somewhat tattered one I found in a second-hand bookstore. He scrawled 'sweet dreams' on it and my name, then looked up and said 'Dreadful weather, isn't it?' It was pouring, typical Singaporean monsoon weather. I was too awestruck to say anything. If I could, I would have told him how powerful American Gods was for me, or how much I was moved by the themes in Sandman and the realms of imagination that opened up for a girl of fifteen. I saw the world differently after those books, and it's not something you can say of everything you read.

Discovering Neil Gaiman was a fortunate coincidence with a time where I started to truly become aware of myself. It was also a period of idealism, the age where you think the world is yours to own and your future is wholly in your control. If you asked me then what I would be doing at age twenty, it certainly would not have been 'studying politics and philosophy at a social science institution'. I would have scoffed and said it was pretentious to have 'academic interests' and went back to writing overly emotional and highly self-indulgent poetry while dreaming of attending drama school. Some of that idealism is gone. Family, money, survival, responsibilities. But you win some, you lose some—I could not imagine not knowing about philosophy, or feeling that strange sensation I personally call 'epiphany' (which may be a hyperbole) when I think I've broken down some intellectual wall in my head. Today I think I want a doctorate, or to do law eventually, or be an analyst (whatever that means). But I am acutely aware that these things can change, and this speech is a timely reminder.

If you haven't watched it, he talks about walking towards that mountain that is your goal and making decisions based on what gets you closer at that point in time. Well, I've moved from one mountain to another—I'm a bit of a wanderer, largely because I want to do so many things. It gets hard to navigate when you don't have a fixed point in the map or a destination. I'm not even sure if I have a north-star—I'm not one to actually confide wholeheartedly about what I want to do or how I'm feeling (trust issues, feel free to psychoanalyze) so I'm really going at this on my own. But even though I'm wandering, his words remind me of something important—'above all, to thine ownself be true' (look! I managed to quote Hamlet in a relevant fashion).

Most of us only find our voices when we've sounded a lot like other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story. Your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment you feel that just possibly you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that's when you may be starting to get it right.

Ultimately, whatever I do or create or become has to be something that I am. That may sound self-evidently true, or logically trivial (trying my best to apply what I'm learning my degree to life...) but it's a reminder not to pursue things as a means to an end, but as an end in themselves. These words have made me feel brave enough to be free-spirited again, and that's a feeling I miss. I'm sort of frightened of showing too much of myself to the world but that's really how you know something is genuinely in your voice, isn't it? And how you know that's really who you are?

I guess that's really the whole point I was driving at with this long incoherent rambling—to be less unafraid to put more of myself in the world. It's almost coincidental, really—had a conversation today with someone quite important to me involving trust. I think I could. I want to.

[This nonsensical spiel has been brought you to by Procrastination]

i made a mix

punching in a dream from silenceandsyntax on 8tracks.

Shapechangers in Winter / Margaret Atwood

I.
Through the slit of our open window, the wind
comes in and flows around us, nothingness
in motion, like time. The power of what is not there.
the snow empties itself down, a shadow turning
to indigo, obliterating
everything out there, roofs, cars, garbage cans,
dead flowerstalks, dog turds, it doesn’t matter.
you could read this as indifference
on the part of the universe, or else a relentless
forgiveness: all of our
scratches and blots and mortal
wounds and patched-up jobs
wiped clean in the snow’s huge erasure.

I feel it as a pressure,
an added layer:
above the white waterfall of snow
thundering down; then attic, moth-balled
sweaters, nomadic tents,
the dried words of old letters;
then stairs, then children, cats and radiators, peeling paint,
us in our bed, the afterglow
of a smoky fire, our one candle flickering;
below us, the kitchen in the dark, the wink
of pots on shelves; then books and tools, then cellar
and furnace, graying dolls, a bicycle,
the whole precarious geology of house
crisscrossed with hidden mousetrails,
and under that a buried river
that seeps up through the cement
floor every spring,
and the tree roots snouting their slow way
into the drains;
under that, the bones
of our ancestors, or if not theirs, someone’s,
mixed with a biomass of nematodes;
under that, bedrock, then molten
stone and the earth’s fiery core;
and sideways, out into the city, street
and corner store and mall
and underpass, then barns and ruined woodlands, continent
and island, oceans, mists
of story drifting
on the tide like seaweed, animal
species crushed and blinking out,
and births and illnesses, hatred and love infra-
red, compassion fleshtone, prayer ultra-
violet; then rumours, alternate waves
of sad peace and sad war,
and then the air, and then the scintillating ions,
and then the stars. That’s where
we are.

II.
Some centuries ago, when we lived at the edge
of the forest, on nights like this
you would have put on your pelt of a bear
and shambled off to prowl and hulk
among the trees, and be a silhouette of human
fears against the snowbank.
I would have chosen fox;
I liked the jokes,
the doubling back on my tracks,
and, let’s face it, the theft.
Back then, I had many forms:
the sliding in and out
of my own slippery eelskin,
and yours as well; we were each other’s
iridescent glove, the deft body
all sleight-of-hand and illusion.
Once we were lithe as pythons, quick
and silvery as herring, and we still are, momentarily,
except our knees hurt.
Right now we’re content to huddle
under the shed feathers of duck and goose
as the wind pours like a river
we swim in by keeping still,
like trout in a current.
                              Every cell
in our bodies has renewed itself
so many times since then, there’s
not much left, my love,
of the originals. We’re footprints
becoming limestone, or think of it
as coal becoming diamond. Less
flexible, but more condensed;
and no more scales or aliases,
at least on the outside. Though we’ve accumulated,
despite ourselves, other disguises:
you as a rumpled elephant—
hide suitcase with white fur,
me as a bramble bush. Well, the hair
was always difficult. Then there’s
the eye problems: too close, too far, you’re a blur.
I used to say I’d know you anywhere,
but it’s getting harder.

III.
This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar.

Taking hands like children
lost in a six-dimensional
forest, we step across.
The walls of the house fold themselves down,
and the house turns
itself inside out, as a tulip does
in its last full-blown moment, and our candle
flares up and goes out, and the only common
sense that remains to us is touch,

as it will be, later, some other
century, when we will seem to each other
even less what we were.
But that trick is just to hold on
through all appearances; and so we do,
and yes, I know it’s you;
and that is what we will come to, sooner
or later, when it’s even darker
than It is now, when the snow is colder,
when it’s darkest and coldest
and candles are no longer any use to us
and the visibility is zero: Yes.
It’s still you. It’s still you.

blast from the past

Rediscovering all the music of my youth—I still know the lyrics to Fluorescent Adolescent by heart and Blur's Parklife was crucial in forming my first impressions of British people.

Different voices, one sentence / Marge Piercy

I love you in one voice is an arrival
in another a curse. It can be a wall
imprisoning. Or a door opening
to who knows what pain or joy.

When it's spoken sometimes
the listener flinches, wants to
force it back into the mouth
that dropped it like a net.

Sometimes it has been waited
for so long it has lost its juice
wizened now, a winter potato
in the bottom of the sack.

Sometimes we fall into it
willing to take what we can get.