Stingrays

At 5:00 a.m. the Pacific Ocean was onyx black, illuminated only by the small globe lights along the pier.

Stacey led the way into the water, advising, “Make sure to slide your feet along teh bottom. There are lots of stingrays here. They look like small bat rays, but they have a long tail with a stinger at the very tip, and they’ll zap you if you step on the It’s just a defensive mechanism – they don’t attack – but if you get stung, your foot will become as large as a football. If you slide your feet, you’ll stir up the bottom sand and scare them away.”

– Swimming to Antartica, Lynne Cox

image source

I remember now going to Mandurah one still, hot afternoon when all the fish were hiding from the white hot heat, and all that we hooked up were blowies and seaweed. You can’t relax completely when fishing – at least not this kind of fishing, on the rocks, by the river. You have to be alert at all times to the possibility. I am an impatient person by nature but something about fishing does calm me, allows me to focus my intensity down to a tiny nib, on the tip of that rod, angling for the tiniest change of the strain on the line. So I wait intently, my mind never off that fine point. But no bite, except for the infuriatingly strong tug of the blowies chasing my line near the surface. No bite.

Then this large diamond of dark water floats by , nearer, nearer, along the path of the great Swan River, but but it was too purposeful, too concrete a dream to be just a dark patch of rock. Besides, it was moving, much faster than shadow could, faster than the current. “It’s the ray,” someone said, and it was – a majestic glide of dark water, patrolling up and down the river in deep water. Moving so swiftly it was like a testellating shape dancing before the eyes, like a dazzling pattern that throws a different diamond into relief each split second, only real. You’re almost sure it’s an illusion – are more willing to believe the illusion, than the thing itself.

“Has anyone tried to catch it?” I ask, and almost immediately regretted my question. Everyone laughed at the evident newbie on the river.

“What would you do with it – eat it?”

I realized the profound bravado I’d just let show, the disrespect I’d expressed for the great ray. How could I, new to fishing, new to Mandurah, expect to catch, much less cook and eat the monarch of the river?

And besides, wasn’t it just cruelty, a callous greed, to imagine taking up that flat slab of a head for the sake of being able to say I did it – just for the sake of a good story I could tell friends, on the other side of the world?I felt a little like Job, being told to consider the Leviathan, the sea boiling like a pot.

The afternoon lazed on, and we tanned on the fruitless docks of the Swan. Fishless, we trooped back to the cars, sweaty and a little burnt, some of us, gulping from the big bottles of water we had hauled over and had been too absorbed to drink from, laughing at our empty handedness. But some of us were determined to get at least some action, to have something to show for the whole day spent in pursuit of invisible fish.

We packed up and drove ourselves to Freemantle, where the mighty Indian Ocean lapped at the great skull rocks, unobstructed for miles and miles, to try our luck there.

And I realize if you live in a place for long enough with an eye for beauty always staring wide open, you realize that the thing inside your heart for it has an ancient, ancient name – the thing growing inside you without your bidding – and that that name is love.

Remember Me, Remember Me, Remember Me

Adieu, Adieu! Hamlet, Remember me!

- Ghost of Denmark

The psychiatrist Barry Reisberg first observed twenty years ago (that) the decline of an Alzheimer’s patient mirrors in reverse the neurological development of a child. The earliest capacities a child develops – raising the head (at one to three months), smiling (two to four months), sitting up unassisted (six to ten months) – are the last capacities an Alzheimer’s patient loses. Brain development in a growing child is consolidated through a process called myelinization, wherein the axonal connections among neurons are gradually strengthened by sheathings of the fatty substance myelin. Apparently, since the last regions of the child’s brain to mature remain the least myelinated, they’re the regions most vulnerable to the insult of Alzheimer’s. The hippocampus, which processes short-term memories into long-term, is very slow to myelinize. This is why we’re unable to form permanent episodic memories before the age of three or four, and why the hippocampus is where the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s first appear. Hence the ghostly apparition of the middle-stage patient who continues to be able to walk and feed herself even as she remembers nothing from hour to hour. The inner child isn’t inner anymore. Neurologically speaking, we’re looking at a one-year-old.

- from How to be Alone, Essays by Jonathan Franzen.

I’ve never been particularly good with my memory of external events. I think this shows in my dreams – I am not so attached to the external form of things as attached to my internal emotional state when large events happen to me. Of course, like everyone else, my memory is a weird pastiche of things which I remember first hand, embellished by stories narrated by my mother, (less but sometimes) my father, my aunt, my friends. And I am always stunned when an account of an event from another source clashes completely with my own – this has happened a few times, and I’ve always felt a kind of serious cognitive dissonance whenever it happens. I am so certain that my version must be right, and theirs wrong – fortunately for me, I have been addicted to writing ever since I discovered how, and so at least I have a logbook, as such, of events to “prove” that events really happened to me the way that they did, at least from inside my head. I am so thankful for the technology of writing – so, so thankful – because I can easily converse with my 10 year-old-self, my 14-year-old-self, even my 7-year-old self. And as I write this now, I write for my 30-year-old self, my 40-year-old-self, even my 80-year-old-self – I am in continuous conversation with myself. There are certain selves I really dislike, my 14-year-old self being one of them. I’ve been trying to learn compassion for those people, seeing as they were actually me. But it always startles me to realize that all this – all this, which seems to appear so solid, like a cinematic reel that I assume I could hold in my hands – is really a sort of cognitive phantom, a genie we unbottle to toy with for a while, which we cannot be certain we will ever be able to retrieve.

Franzen reminded me of the stuff I learned in my introductory psychology class – that memories are merely temporary constellations (the graphic in my textbook actually showed little red stars being united by red lines across the hemispheres of the brain), reinforced each time we conjure them, but subtly altered each time also by our brain chemistry at that moment on that day. Nothing is pure, nothing is original. Everything, like film itself – is burned away even as we watch it. There is no such thing as perfect archiving, perfect recall. All that is an illusion in the first place.

I understand the inherent hysteria that the inner historian in us feels when told something like this. But on the other hand, I wonder why we fear forgetting so much. Sometimes I fear remembering too much. It is blessed to forget – it makes it easier to forgive. The repressed memories of evil (which Freud inadvisedly, at times, dredged up) can surely be as harmful as the forgotten good ones. We see this phenomenon in history – we refuse to look at the dark periods of our own people, preferring to narrate a story of triumph and entitlement. In Australia there is an odd phenomenon of “black armband history” in which most of the history is narrated negatively, and the revisionists, instead of springing the occasional expose on the crimes of ancestors, try valiantly to paint a better picture of the nation (the ones who were not convicts, racists, jailers, etc.), only to be stomped upon by the liberals who yell that the wrongs are not yet redressed, so it’s premature to celebrate.

image from Wikipedia

I don’t know if this is right or wrong. But I do know that Britain has a curious preference to narrate itself as an underdog, even though it was a vast empire. And that Israel has the most hangdog national history of any people I can think of. America is very much triumphalist – hubristic, even, in its desire to be a nation before God, blameless and upright. France narrates itself as Reasonable, when in fact it swung from one kind of tyranny to another all the way until Napoleon imploded the empire. I think in any case it is best to, if one really wants to “know thyself”, as the apocryphal Greek sage(s) say, it is wise to go back and stare at the things you remember but wish you did not – the dark (or the light) side which was neglected when you started to narrate yourself wholly – to disillusion yourself to the things which you wish you had not done, to stare that beast in the eye and to understand it, and unite it with the godlike being who also dwells in the same breast. And then perhaps we can call ourselves Homo Sapiens – Man – “Knowing Man”, Wise Woman, Wise Man.

Urban Blight & Orwell’s Pyramid

You can tell a lot about a city from its county newspaper. Of course, I am unnaturally interested in regional newspapers because there weren’t any in Singapore where I grew up. I was stunned by the provincialism of the Western Australian, amused by the graphic focus of USA Today, temporarily seduced by the cosmopolitanism and urbane tone of the New York Times, and now I’m in St Louis I flapped open the NorthSider, a free mag (and apparently in its first issue) that was lying on my friend Darell’s breakfast table.

Here are some of July’s Headlines -

REBUILDING BLOCK BY BLOCK

A NEW TOOL FOR REPORTING ISSUES

“OPERATION UNITY” CALLS FOR END TO THE VIOLENCE

NEWSTEAD DEVELOPMENT NEARING COMPLETION

TRANSFORMING O’FALLON PARK

ST. LOUIS LANDS $21M FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING

MISSOURI UNEMPLOYMENT NUMBERS SLIGHTLY BETTER

STATE OUTLAWS FAKE POT

Here are a selection of the ads:

MINORITY CONTRACTORS!

HELP KEEP YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD SAFE AND BRIGHT: LEAVE YOUR PORCH LIGHT ON!

LEADERS NEEDED! HELP RAISE THE STANDARDS – IF YOU DON’T LIKE WHAT’S HAPPENING ON YOUR BLOCK, HELP CHANGE IT!

So, I guess Darell did warn me before I came to St Louis that it is a “blighted city” – she’s working in an urban planning office to revitalize the city, after all, and it’s one of the most segregated (racially and economically) cities in America. Fortunately Southeast Asians are a bit of a rarity and so we encounter curiosity rather than hostility on either side. I had felt some of the tension in Chicago, but man, St Louis is something else.

“The Chinatown closed down,” Darell said, while we whooshed through the almost-empty metro onward to her apartment. “Have you ever heard of a Chinatown closing down??” Later in the evening I was cooking some Singaporean fish porridge for her. “Do you have any ginger?” She looked at me sheepishly. “You call yourself Malaysian???” “Judith, there isn’t an Asian grocery store around here!” Fair enough. We did, thankfully, have soy sauce and some pseudo-Asian fried onion flakes though. But no ginger.

“So what’s the socio-economic breakdown of St Louis, from what you’ve seen?”

“Hm, so, there are these really really rich people who live in mansions and have been here since the 1800s or something,” she said. “Then there are the young rich professionals who also live around that area. And then, well, there’s everyone else…”

“The proletariat?”

“Yup, the proles.”

“What would you say, 85%?”

“Yeah…. maybe 75%…. or yeah maybe 80.”

And you wonder why there’s crime and resentment and segregation.

I mean, here’s a little graphic depicting the social structure of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984:

image from Wikipedia

Sounds about right?

I was talking to someone from China who was with the CCP from the start – he was a soldier in the PLA, a young, idealistic boy who joined up and wanted to help alleviate the suffering of the masses. He was curious about America, never having been there before.

“So, what do you find is different about America?” He asked, after relating his stories about the Chinese Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution. I was kind of embarrassed – not just because my Chinese vocabulary leaves much to be desired, but I wasn’t very sure what to say. Different from what? Different from Singapore? From America? From Australia? From everywhere else?

He gestured towards his balcony, which had a pretty green grill over it – it was a new condominium, and he’d just moved there in the last two years. “Do people have grates over their doors there?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean, fences and gates for security?”

“Yes,” he said. “Do you need to keep thieves out?”

This was all a revelation to me. I had never lived in a place where you wouldn‘t want to at least install some grills over your windows. I mean, in Perth there weren’t fences around the houses, but already break-ins were more and more frequent and people were starting to put them up due to a surge of poor refugees into the city.

“Yes, yes, people have security grills.”

He laughed. “During the 1970s, everyone was equally poor,” he said. “There wasn’t anything worth stealing. We didn’t have grills over our windows then. I mean, we were all starving, but I guess we were all equal.”

I guess I just had never thought about it that way.

.

When I was back at college, I had to take a couple of psych tests in order to fulfill my requirement for Steven Pinker’s class, the Human Mind. At the beginning of the psych study we were asked what sorts of shapes we liked better – shapes like this:

image source

or this:

Generally, a preference for pyramidal structures indicates a tendency toward political and economic conservatism, while a preference for circular structures indicates a tendency toward political and economic liberalism.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the actual pyramids of Egypt were built for a single man’s remains, possibly to preserve him as an immortal, on the backs of hundreds of thousands of slaves; it should also come as no surprise that the complete abject equality of the Cultural Revolution led to a destructive, collective purge of thousands of years of culture and civilization – in which the young and powerful beat the old and helpless, not for goods or because they were poor, but for fun, for acceptance amongst their peers, and out of a fierce, misguided ideological conviction.

In the end, all kinds of tyranny led to the same place: the War of All against All.

Abe

Abe
by Judith Huang

After a year, Abe got sick of the place.
I don’t know about you, he’d say,
But the people around here talk funny.
And sure it’s unclaimed land, but
I can see why it’s unclaimed – it’s
Deserted desert, that’s what it is.
It’s a caravan park, a shanty-town…
I’m more of city person, as you know.
Buildings, proper sewage systems.
I guess it’s a country thing.
And it’s so inconvenient, everything.
Water is a long walk away,
And people get testy when
Water is a long walk away.
The weather decides to suck,
And boom, there goes your harvest.
It’s ridiculous. Sure, you get some
Great views, but when you’re staring
At mountains, and more mountains
There’s, you know, diminishing returns.

They say things will get better
Sort of get used to the pace of life
Sort things out with the neighbours, you know,
This bit is my land and that bit
To the left is yours, draw boundaries,
Mend fences, that sort of thing.
It just takes a while to adjust, right?

There he is again, using my well.
God, why did I move here?
What the hell?

-

photo by Scott Thistle Thwait Photography

A family moved out of the city to Perth, Australia, and their pastor said to them as he blessed them at the airport, saying: You are like Abraham, called out to the promised land, and we send you out with our blessing.

For those of you who remember, the promised land at the time was a bloody desert, and Abraham was impotent or Sarah was barren, or both, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t even like living in a cultural desert, not to mention an actual desert desert.

But they went. And Oh, it was hard! But we must never turn to Egypt, mistaking it again for Eden. We must never pimp out our wives, must never worship their idols, must never despair, must never idolize our son, must never give up on our daughters, must never look back at the cities now going up in flame, lest we melt into a flood of tears or turn into a pillar of salt.

Oh God you blessed Abraham – bless also this family.

-

The Promised Land no longer exists, not in the Singapore Dream, not in the American Dream. We have wrecked it, wrecked it all. There is no Garden of Eden on Earth, at least not right now. But I have slowly come to love tiny facets of the Australian desert – and I wrote this once to a friend

You know, there is nothing quite as moving as the different faces of our world. Can we help communing with places? I am so glad to think that the earth will not simply crumple up like a burnt crisp when God puts the world right, but rather that we will then witness the marriage of heaven and earth. Because this much beauty – the pointing, pointed beauty of your glaciers and my peculiar Western Australian light – this beauty could not bear being destroyed by its Creator. I love the world, G -  . It is a magnificent place to live. I love my body, especially when running and I can feel it humming along at what It ought to do. I love my mind, the way it reaches into my thoughtcloud and links two things together, the whirring beauty of it when stimulated to its peak, the wild surmise when it encounters God in the beautiful idea. Can you believe, G – , that on top of these wonderful things we have been equipped, blessed with, that there is more? That we are, apparently, weirdly enough, perfectible? I shudder to think what a perfect world will look like. Perhaps only then will great art not mean heartbreak.

Illegal Bunny Problem

I have a confession to make: I had an illegal bunny for my last semester at college. For the longest time this was a source of great delight and a certain perverse pleasure in doing something that is expressly forbidden (sound familiar?) which I thought perfectly harmless. But this journey so far has made me change my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Moonbun, who is one of the best bunnies in the world, in my totally unbiased opinion. But unfortunately, deception is a sin – not just lying, but any kind of lying by omission, even if it is for as innocent a purpose as housing a cute bunny for a semester who would not otherwise have anywhere to go. You would think that, as someone who is affiliated with Australia, I would have learned the lesson of Australia: namely, do not bring bunnies where they do not belong. However, I did not heed the lesson of Australia, and my bunny caused me quite a bit of trouble by biting through the wire of my computer charger.

Now my computer is from a large conglomerate that charges a lot of money for replacement chargers, and I am a poor recent grad who is spending her life savings on circumnavigating the globe. So I reasoned that if I didn’t tell them that a bunny chewed through the wire I would be doing no great wrong, when I asked for a free replacement charger. Not true. $80 is not worth exchanging for deception, as it turns out.

So when I went on this journey I kind of subconsciously forgot my charger (I know, BAD PLANNING!). And for the first two weeks I had to sheepishly explain my bunny story to various people who had compatible chargers. Then finally when I reached Iowa I realized that this was just not going to happen because non of my cousins had compatible chargers, and I had to buy one – and I paid the tax and the commission on Best Buy, and also sort of had to go around with tail between legs because I had a) lied to my dorm about not having a bunny b) lied to the computer company that a bunny did not chew through my charger wire. Sigh.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time!

Moonbun, who was named after the Bunny in the Moon.

Moonbun, disguised by my mother as William Shakespeare for the final move out of the dorm.

“Too Green to Fail” and the Sunk-Cost Fallacy

image from The Economist

Whenever someone says something like Too _________ to Fail (see Economist article), that’s kind of like asking for a lightning strike. Or an iceberg. But well.

Interesting. “This may just be a variant of the sunk-cost fallacy to which everyone from gamblers to stock managers falls prey: instead of looking ahead, to the prospects for future returns, they try to make up for past losses. ” My have I done that before! Good to know people call it a fallacy.

You are the Weakest Link. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Oh Kevin! You were so cute, and Bill Gatesy, and I liked your apology to the Native Australians. Also John Howard was not all that likable for all his fiscal responsibility. But you spent all our surplus and put us in deficit, and were doling out all our resources boom to various random causes (including, and I don’t even know how this was ever a good idea – giving the largest car manufacturer in the world a subsidy to invent a car that had already been invented!)!

Watch this amazing video!

Also, Australia has a female PM. And Kevin Rudd is Out.

Her name is Julia Gillard, and from what I’ve seen on TV, she’s pretty impressive. Watch out, world.

America, you’ve really got some catching up  to do now.

from Wikipedia:

Julia Eileen Gillard (born 29 September 1961) is the 27th Prime Minister of Australia.

Gillard became the Leader of the Australian Labor Party at the 2010 Australian Labor Party leadership election on 24 June 2010 and was sworn in as prime minister later that day. She had previously served as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia under Kevin Rudd. On 11 December 2007, she became the first woman in Australia’s history to assume the prime ministerial role when she was the acting prime minister while Rudd attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali.^[2]

Of Australian prime ministers, Gillard is the first woman, the first foreign-born since Billy Hughes,^[3] and the first who has never married.^[4]

Gillard has been a Labor Party member of the House of Representatives since the 1998 federal election. She represents the Division of Lalor, west of Melbourne.

Here is an article about her

Photo from Wikipedia. Photograph by Adam Carr; Cropped by Orangemonkey.