Skip to main content

Tales from the Down Under: # 9- Running Up That Hill

On the eve before coming to Auckland last year, a question was seriously pondered about in my head. For a brand new chapter of my life, shall I be more of a submissive person or a self-assertive one? I’m never one who relents to neutrality so I must choose to be either, and while “reticence” had been tagging along like a dogged will-o’-the-wisp, a decision was made within seconds that I would stride in New Zealand burst with indestructible boldness.

And one year later I’m still thinking about the same question. Apparently the ceaseless alacrity exuded from the Kiwi’s baffles me, and has left me tongue-tied whenever I was good-humouredly confronted. Most of the posts I’ve written since studying in Auckland are more or less dealing with the record of my amateurish linguistic study of Kiwi’s accent. Those posts are no less than sheer nuisances, but what I’ve always wanted to expound on is how accents can cause a stirring among people. And even typify people. Not intending to sound scathing but it is the first time I see “stereotype” wielding its sword and thrusting its way through without hindrance. There are also multiple moulds made for people, and they just jump in, the most submissive gingerbread men I’ve ever seen.

There’s a slope outside the place I live, and every day I have to toil up that slope to go to school. The thing with climbing slopes is that, with full impetus, you have to rush up without any tinge of hesitation. The notion is analogous to the boldness I first visualized before coming to Auckland, of a little girl running up that hill.

There are still a lot of things I dislike but am obliged to do. To be honest I do not really fancy writing. Every time I set out on the outset of my essay I am always too eager to an end to it. I do love reading and I marvel at the flourish language some writers master upon, and it is sheer imitation that goads me on writing. I’ve long had a fatuous illusion that one day I would be able to feign some master’s style of writing. I shirk from daily responsibilities, and the feeling of having duties hoarding and heaping one upon another makes me swoon with surreal ecstasy. Those blatant enumeration of my innate inertia cannot obliterate the fact that at times I do sound like a heifer.

Charles Baudelaire said that a truth can never be concise. If you were inclined to terseness then you were more or less a liar. So to assert yourself you must tell the truth, and to tell the truth words must flow out of your mouth regardless of how they might have the potential of winding up in a tedious rambling. Every day, yet, I’m still learning.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are