Little Ocean

I meet this speculation with a share of fear and a share of fascination. Rarely has the spirit of territorial conquest in the colonial age returned to the modern man. Rarely do you need the Canadian foreign minister to remind everyone that this is not the fifteenth century anymore and you can't just conquer the Lomonosov Ridge with a tricolour.

Then as they mourn the passing of the ice-white beasts that left only their name on the little ocean, the first freighters arrive at Nanortalik, filled with imports from the south and bound for Archangel. Hitherto distant and uninteresting cities begin to flourish all along the Arctic coast and further inland. A torrid clime develops at the equator and nations of both hemispheres are once again enshrouded from each other, in a fog of mystery and exaggerated accounts of travellers.

A Toast to Terms
Coming to terms with myself is pretty hard nowadays, in extreme times where people either let fly down canyons or up to the heavens, where people either mug with a giant grudge or read the textbook with all the reverence deserved for a storybook.

Coming to terms is hard because it is not always easy to accept. It could be that August is the month when Amanda Heng makes the least sense, when Boccioni, Kruger or other art wranglers are at their most vitriolic, and Tianyu comes to his element and sprinkles terrible bathos around the art room. These personalities find their adversaries hard to reconcile with; nothing for naturalistic portrayals but history, nothing for society but death and destruction through wars, nothing for Men but to get unmentionable things done to their unmentionables... Yet don't we also refuse to come to terms with them?

Enough of our senseless polemic: society rallying themselves against the ill-refined society around them in an eternal struggle has to be one of the greatest joke of modern times.

Here's to the muse of question and understanding; Here's to shame the devil that is our caustic hatred.

For old time's sake, give me a sheet of paper, and I'll give you a portrait beautiful enough for to hunt birds with.
In the year before I joined the choir I remembered this line from a song we sang during mass: Too many little games I've played.

These games they do spell my fall so often. Do they spell the sadness of others as well, as my rabid imagination beckons me to believe? Does my muse suffer in my stead, when I put these concerns away? Does she think as I do, look away when I feign haughtiness, turn remote as I feign nonchalance, put our friendship in disregard when I thought of the same?

I spelled out some of my confessions to a close friend who could understand them. (It was not too bad, I had confessed worse sins to Father Frans, and earned forgiveness through my first Rite of Confession.) Among the confessions is the one about fear, the fear I feel of an encounter more than longing or anything. So unfashionable this notion is in the minds of people, I thought I was the only one lame enough to have it, or the only one stupid enough to counter the fear by the most straightforward method of fleeing the scene.

But I can recall conquering that fear once, putting onto paper the image of the most beautiful girl I knew of, working on the painstakingly minute detail, going ecstatic or depressed over slight disparities of proportion, or a spark from an eye missing. I had to commit myself to a close reading of a piece of art beautiful to the point of being lethal, but when the portrait was finished, so had my fear.

So before everything else starts again, I'll do a summary homage to Interesting Times; so that all wrongs may be forgiven, all fears allayed, all souls touched, and all eyes set to the bright and the real.