Something in me has to break

Screencap: Jeongnyeon 정년이 (2024)

Lent is taking an interesting turn. Some weeks ago, I had run into a sense of despondency while on the dance floor, and was unable to put my finger on why. And then it occurred to me that I had set my sights on dancing as free as a bird, but my insecurities and doubts about my technique made me hold back. I could not follow movements and cues from the jazz. I got thrown off when my partner appeared bored. The conclusion became that something in me has to break for me to keep dancing— what's the hold-up? How do I get rid of them?

I had done well to die to self, giving up sweet stuff in coffee and othersuch indulgences which will all return joyously to my life come Easter, but maybe the real, permanent thing to give up is the hold-up? When I learned boxing, I went through a kind of ego death; it stopped me from taking things personal when I lost a sparring match, and helped me keep my wits about me while being manhandled. The ego death that one experiences for a breakthrough in dance, how do I get to it? What does it look like? Is it the same as before? A little different?

Two weeks ago, my friends and I talked about Lent being not just a season of "give up", but also the season of "get some". I am very glad about this new approach to Lent. My life has up to this point been governed by what I call the Harsh Inner Voice. The Voice had been with me through many periods of difficulty, and then it started to cause its own difficulties. Lent has always been when this Voice has been at its strongest, which is the reason why it is also the most stressful season. This year can be the first one where I fast from the Voice. In some ways, I am giving up Lent for Lent— giving up the caricatural lenten self-denial that make monsters out of so many devout people.

How Greeting Every Uncle and Auntie in the Village Leads You to Sainthood

Ngarai Sianok, Bukittinggi, February 2025

I met Rahmat of Bukittinggi by chance near his house, which is by a small suspension bridge across the canyon and close to the hotel I was staying in. He brought me on a small walking trip to Kotogadang village and the next day he was biking me up and down West Sumatra. The first thing I noticed about him and his family (his brother and mother were there) was how casually and directly they asked you to part with your money. The second thing was that he seemed to know every living soul in Kotogadang. “Do you know everyone in this village?” I asked him. He replied: “I don’t. I just greet everyone I see.” For Saturday and Sunday I tried doing the same as him. When we saw an elder, we nodded and said “pak” or “bu”. If they were about our age, we said “abang”, “kak”, and so on.

On Sunday we came across some spots where, according to Rahmat, gotong royong was happening. This was where, for example, a tree has fallen across the street, and the whole village would be there to help clear up the mess and direct traffic. Naturally, there would be a kid holding up a cardboard box to me, and Rahmat would encourage me to stuff cash into it. You could hear about gotong royong in Singapore as something that happened in the remote past; the generations above mine would remember what it is – the idea of a community coming and working together, but those of my generation and later have hardly heard it. Perhaps, this was something that got left behind when the villages of Singapore were demolished and the people were moved to public housing, and, as affluence grew, we forgot even to greet our neighbours.

In Singapore, we are very used to seeing the world in terms of status markers. Good manners is no different. When we see people being graceful, we say they have “refinement” and are of “high class”. This way of understanding fell apart in Kotogadang, where people act so gracefully to one another yet the kid over there gets bowled over when you hand her 50k rupiah (4 SGD). What could be missing here?

The fundamental point of having good manners is LOVE. We do this also because God is Love. Has Dumbledore whipped the dead horse to death yet? Yes? Even so, I’m going to have my turn at it now.

Humanity is set up so that the other is always a part of our lives. Could it have been any different? Coral polyps can live an entire life of leisurely existence sessile, eating whatever the ocean currents shove right in front of their mouths, and release gametes on their own when mating season comes. Some animals live their whole lives alone – for reproduction, the male octopus can leave a spermatophore under the rock somewhere and the female octopus can come along later to pick it up, and they never have to meet. Humans are afforded no such luxury. We have the other and if the other is absent from our lives, we go batshit. And living with the other means we are constantly acting out of each other’s best interests. And so much of it is made up with the small things we do to make the lives of others more pleasant.

The best part of this idea is that many other good habits in life can be rephrased to serve this end: If I dress up well before leaving the house, it is not to puff myself up and let people know how rich I am, but to make it more pleasant for people who I will meet. If I work hard, it is not just for my renumeration, but for the hope that the fruits of my work will benefit the public. If I land hits on my sparring partner at the dojo, it is not so that I can hurt them, but to say to them that they deserve my best.

A lot of why I joined the Work is its insistence that our daily lives are paths to sainthood, that one is not obliged to line up the weekends with endless devotions, retreats, or constant basking in deep religious feelings. The spirit of the Work taught me that small things are bigger than big things, like how the small instances of good manners add up to Charity, the greatest of the virtues.

Arthdal Chronicles should be renamed to Erika Karata Chronicles

 

I'm ready to fight anyone who disagrees

Villain Arc

Screenshot: Mr. Queen 철인왕후 (2020)

It is Lent again. A strange season in the liturgical calendar where one deepens their relationship with God. For me, however, it has always been a time of the year where strange and out-of-pocket things happen in my spiritual life, most of them also distressing. Presently I am knackered out of my mind but unable to fall asleep, the second or third night in a row. Insh'Allah, I will find out what the problem is by the time these paragraphs are done.

I came out of the engagement six months ago. I had experienced it not as some sort of calamity, as my friends believed, but like a disaster narrowly averted. It became clear in retrospect that I was not happy in the relationship, and that I had let my grievances fester. I did not sound them out because (1) I did not know how to put those feelings in words, and (2) that suffering in life is penance, that penance leads us to sanctifying grace, and one should just put up with them rather than complain. The implications of this realisation is momentous; to move any further, I have to shed these assumptions in the praxis of my own life. Very inconveniently, these have been formed in me by my peers and advisors in the church, who have been good to me and whom I look to as role models.

I want to become better, but not in the direction my ex would have preferred that I take, nor the priests, not even my friends in the Work— nor the sycophantic aunties who orbit the priests' cassock hems in the parish, nor the genteel parents of twelve children, brought up to become poster children of devoutness, nor the trolls of online Catholicism who compete with each other on the extremeness and disagreableness of their views— No, I will become a villain in all of their eyes, following the will of only Allah.

I WILL WAKE UP, I WILL FALL ASLEEP, ON HIS COMMAND ONLY

I have wasted all that time trying to be good in others' eyes. I broke my back for my daily commutes to work and to church together. My colleagues made huge strides in work; as for my extra hours, I wasted them on the road. I took my command from people who lived next to a tabernacle, when my own house is hours away. I wasted my time trying to fulfil my pious duties. I neglected even the birthday of my own mother. I cultivated values which clashed with my upbringing, and aggrieved my parents. I robbed myself of rest, I became cranky and cantankerous. I had become a monster in my family's eyes without knowing. 

I wasted two years wooing the ex-fiancée. I drew close with her who only put up with me without loving me. I wasted two years liking what she liked and being where she lived, and she would not do the same for me. All the meals I ate together with her now tastes to me as like hogswill. I reject the merest thought and memory of them; I'd throw them up if I could, as if I have just eaten a bucket of slugs.

In the wake of this rejection, what comes in its place? My sense of self, my authentic and private pleasures; my family, who have been so loyal to me. The Will of Allah made himself known to me last September. First my sister, who showed up randomly on the street when I was the most distressed, then an old friend and his troupe of dancers, who showed up and dragged me in for a dance.

I DANCE TO HIS WILL

A consolation— People have said to me, a guy ought to learn to dance, or that this dance floor is where you find your mate. I've not said this to anyone but family before now, but the Will of Allah was what got me dancing, and everything else is secondary motivations. 

The ex-fiancée hated frivolity. She hated adventure. She hated expressiveness. She hated that I talked to diverse people different from myself and from her. She hated that I loved all these things. But now, I think, that I have been restraining myself too much, and did not love them nearly enough. I realise to my horror that, by this learned reticence, I risked hacking off my own limbs to be buried in her coffin. 

From this Lent and onwards, instead of posing haughty and smart in the corner of the room, I shall make a fool of myself on the dance floor. Instead of following the lyrics of someone else's jam, I shall belch Turkish Flamenco to an unprepared audience. I will ditch my suit for bell bottoms. I will do difficult things, I will learn skills on a steep curve, I will kill it at work. Time is precious, I am close to Death, and I have already let too much of it pass fruitlessly.

The Babiest Babe

"A good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child— not in a conceited child, but in a good child— as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. [...] Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures— nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator." — C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1949)

[Source: Күннэй — Таатта (MV)]

I walk in expecting to see the giants among men, those of fabled virtue and holiness whose statures have multiplied down the ages every time their stories are retold and embellished— and find only children. Shrieking children, tumbling over one another, milling around a vast space, wall-to-wall, if ever we can find any walls in such a boundless place; then, in the middle of them all, lies the most childlike of children, the babiest babe, nursed by his mother. His presence had such gravity that it warped the space around him, and all are drawn to him.

When people enter here they wake up in a sunny, breezy meadow, after their passing in the previous life. Those who die young wake up here young, and those who die elderly wake up here elderly, their consciousness passing between the worlds seamlessly. Immediately following this rebirth, children from all around accost them, tease them, climb all over them, and egg them on to move. Here a scraggly greybeard wakes up from his long slumber, and two young girls in bright yellow dresses dunk a bucket of water over his head. When he comes to, his back has stopped hurting, his spine is again straight, and he has regained movement in his joints. With this renewed strength he puts himself to work, for this is the place where seniority serves youth.

Often people entered after living the full life: a life time of joy, sadness, disappointments and betrayals, tragedies and injustices. They come wizened and cynical, their countenances ghastly, their utterances hateful; they wear grey cloaks which are like the hide of a porcupine, shooting quills upon each perceived slight or offense. The more they are at this extreme of the spectrum, the less kindly they take to the dousing. They scream curses at every child who splashed water onto them, because it feels to them scalding hot, and shake their fists at the kids as they bolt off in retreat, laughing and giggling ridiculously.

As the dousing continues, the morale among the new residents seem to improve, as the suffering of each subsequent douse becomes less and less. The age of the residents now approach the teenage years. Same as earthly adolescence, the soul squeezes through a liminal middle-space in a process as much terrifying and confusing and awkward as it is magical. Those who are at this stage enter a state of rebellion and defiance, not against the cloying love of their parents, as in our universe, but at the imprints the world has left upon them, the scars and the wounds that has accumulated over their lives, insecurity and defensiveness, feelings of vindictiveness and unkindness, self-superiority and inadequacy... The uniform, genteel, starched grey cloaks that cover them tear into shreds, revealing their bearers' true selves: clothes made of fabric of every imaginable colour, one in the earthly colours of autumn, another in pastel pink and blue and purple, another iridescent like the wings of a butterfly... all of them present themselves in varying degrees of frivolity and uproariousness, and no two persons are found wearing the same colours. The last rags of gravitas and respectability are blown away in a stiff breeze, and our friends emerge as fresh and liberated as a crab who has freed itself of its molt.

As spontaneously as happens on a dance floor, the colourful ones join their hands, and start dancing in a circle around the centre of the room, where lies the Babiest Babe in his mother's embrace. The more they dance, the younger they appear, the smaller the circle becomes, and the faster they spin. From where I watch them, the closest ones to the centre dance so hard and so briskly that they seem just a blur, blending into a continuum of light, and I like to imagine that they would keep at it until they are catapulted, in this ecstasy, into a memory of a dining hall, warmly lit in the glow of the late afternoon sun, all of their loved ones alive and somewhere in the house, the dinner being prepared, in a moment which one would wish to last forever.

22 November 2024, Bukit Tiram, Johor