The Woman at the Top of the Mountain

Dedicated to a junior in Art class. You know who you are, O thou before whom men swoon and faint, thinking they have died and come to Paradise.

"I am here to see the woman at the top of the mountain."
"She is not to be seen;
_____we, the townspeople, learn to let her be."
"Her fame travels across all the land."
"Her beauty benights the minds of our folk."
"Give me a way through:
_____I am a poor draughtsman who has seen my earth
_____scythed clean of spirits."
"She will not welcome you.
_____her looks are her curse, cast by jealous women."

And he came to the amber broadleaves.
"She is not to be seen;" they said.
_____we of the forest leave her alone.
"Her fame travels across all the land."
"Her beauty has scattered our wolves and brought down our geese."
"Give me a way through:
_____I am a poor draughtsman who wants to see true beauty revive."

And he came to the bluish pines.
"She is not to be seen;" they said.
_____"so far up she is in snow-covered wastes."
"Her fame carries up to high heavens."
"With it her prayers to be back where she was."
"Let me pass:
_____I shall save her from her treasures unwanted."

And he came to the cave in the snow-covered wastes.
And the woman sat there at the top of the mountain.
She wrapped about herself rough hides and old cloth,
_____obscured the world from her visage with a veil.
_____as a spell bound her in a shrine of youth.
"How have you found me," she said
_____"so far away from the town of my birth,
_____so high above the multicoloured wilds,
_____so far up in the snow-covered wastes?"

"My fame travels across all the land;
My fame carries up to the highest heavens."
"My face has crippled the minds of men.
_____My gaze has slain beasts
__________and hunted birds.
_______________It has sunk boats in the lake
_______________and torn ships in the sea.
____________________It has drawn lightning
____________________and incurred the downfall of
____________________great kings!"

"Silly man, do you really dare to see my face,
or be the vehicle of my burden to the impoverished world?"
"But come in and sit down; I have prepared you a meal
_____to reward you for your journey."
"I shall not face you and you will be home
_____when the sun slants west."

"Then will you let me break the spell;" said the traveller,
_____"return beauty to the world
__________where people live and are happy."
"Many a brave aesthete have come with a noble goal
_____and left with a broken heart."

"What good can I do for our people, when all good things
_____congregate in my own image
__________smeared upon my skin in thick slabs.
_______________How deep can skin be?
_______________I am made breathless by this burden."
"Are you sure that you are the one?"
_____"Men flock towards beautiful things;
__________There has been no shortage of mountaineers
__________who deign to die in my arms
__________enchanted by the treasure trove I wear.
__________Beauty in their eyes is all they go after,
_______________not the alleviation of my ills.
"But the true aesthete would come
_____and end my restless existence among rocks."

The draughtsman insisted
So she turned around to face him
And she removed her veil
And she brushed aside the hair that covered her cheeks
And she shed her cover of hay.
And the draughtsman watched her
_____and waited for the awe and wonder.
"Hear my words!" she said.
And the substance gushed out of her in a million streams
_____burst out of her in a million rays
__________flew out of her in a million birds.
It spilled of the summit rocks like ice off a glacier
_____into rivers to fill valleys.
_____Her hair was gold as the maize fields
_____Brown as the hides of deer
_____Black as the soil of volcanic coasts
_____Face of sculpted marble
__________and brows of polished jasper
_______________brilliant as mothers-of-pearl
"Let the curse of poverty be lifted from all men and women!"
_____"Let all who see me freed be true of heart
__________be free of unworthy goals
_______________in their quest.
_____"Let no woman sacrifice themselves
__________in worship of beauty;
__________let no woman be demeaned!
_____"Let no man be fooled by false decoration!"

And her eyes glared wide and severe
_____her irises dark as the blackest jet
__________and round as the universe closed in upon itself
_____her irises bright as brilliant-cut diamonds
__________and lively as the first light of creation.

_____her irises dark as a huge emptiness
__________billions of miles of philosophical desert
_______________wherein lives a sparse handful of dust
____________________each particle inaccessible to the other in
_________________________this monstrous scale
______________________________Each one self-contained, liberated,
___________________________________trapped, confused;
___________________________________and bursting in nihilistic fury!

There he fled past the snow-covered peak
There he fled past the hardy conifers
There he fled past the earthy broadleaves

Her beauty travelled across all the land
_____went into every living creature
__________and every plot of ground.
And it went into the townspeople
And it went into the jealous women
And it went into the battered wildlife

There he fled back to the foothills
_____where the deluge held tongues still.

"What has become of the woman at the top of the mountain?
_____Only a scattered tent greets my climb.
_____Where has she gone?"
I am the opening of your heart
and the light through your eyes...
Turn back to see the place where you came from.

J'aurai le Vin

Folks out there please holler if you would know what this song says:

Par un beau Matin, je me suis levé(BIS)
Dans mon joli jardin J'(ai)été

REFRAIN:
J'aurai le vin, le verre et la bouteille
J'aurai le vin le verra à la main

Dans mon joli jardin J'(ai)été (BIS)
C'était pour cueillir du raisin
REFRAIN

C'était pour cueillir du raisin (BIS)
J'en avais pas cueilli trois grains
REFRAIN

J'en avais pas cueilli trois grains (BIS)
Qu'un gros corbeau à moi s'en vient
REFRAIN

Qu'un gros corbeau à moi s'en vient (BIS)
Dit en Français, dit en Latin
REFRAIN

Dit en Français, dit en Latin (BIS)
Qu'un vin claret m'ferait du bien
REFRAIN

Qu'un vin claret m'ferait du bien (BIS)
Moi qui ne sais pas le Latin
REFRAIN

Moi qui ne sais pas le Latin (BIS)
Ces quelques mots j'les compris bien

All Walks of Life

All maps made with Google Earth and Adobe Photoshop
Just a summary, though, of what's passed under my feet for the last few years.


click to enlarge! it's 3d!
The Trübsee-Engelberg Route (on MapMyRun)
Obwalden and Nidwalden sub-cantons, Switzerland
22 June 2005 / 7.7km


click to enlarge!
The Budavár-City Park Route
Budapest City Central, Hungary
27 June 2005 / 5.4km

Then the routes here in Singapore. Hmm. Not very nicely pieced together but it looks good still.
(right click and select "copy shortcut as" to get the URL)


(Old school Route approximately 8.5km
Reservoir Circuit approximately 7km
Saint Joseph Route is slightly over 11km
The trip to Sungei Buloh was mainly by bus (in dotted lines), so don't bother)

Kazantzakis and the Wrestler

Fr. Ronald Rolheiser writes:

IN HIS MEMOIR, "Report to Greco", Nikos Kazantzakis shares this story: As a young man, he spent a summer in a monastery during which he had a series of conversations with an old monk: "Father, do you still battle with the devil?" The old monk replied: "No, I used to, when I was younger, but now I have grown old and tired and the devil has grown old and tired with me. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone." "So your life is easy then?" remarked Kazantzakis. "Oh no," replied the monk, "it's much worse, now I wrestle with God!"

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.