Skip to main content

Tales From the Down Under: #3 Every Breath I've Fought For May Be Fragmented At Any Moment

I've been bewildering at the idea of things going from bad to worse, or things reaching to such a pinnacle that they are destined to fail. It is not karma I'm trying to elucidate but rather some wicked old witch's clairvoyance which I can never decipher.

Studying is made overwhelming if other trivial yet muddling fuss slides across. It is almost impossible to root out all the hindrances since university life entails one's preparation to a more independent adult world. Therefore, being independent of the words I ramble about and dependent on the actions I shall take is what appears to be the most challenging. Thankfully, like every start of a new year, I scrawled all over my schedule book of how I'm going to squander my weekends. The diligence can only be paid off if every single letter is spelt out correctly and accurately in its place.

It is like staring at the sun with persistent eyes only to prove that you can never win over it. When you are bulged with inexplicit anger and you can find no way to vent it, injustice is how you define the word. To struggle to be a typical student, I did dream of the ordinaries. Or I do still dream sometimes, having a life without muddle; being level-headed, pracitcal-minded.

Gratefully I was able to veer back to the track and be a realistic person, and deem all my stupid follies of 2010 as those who can only live in my diary but not in my nightmarish memory. As I stared persistently to the setting sun in the vain hope of prevailing it, optimistic thoughts suddenly came like thunderstorm, that I'm studying music, art history and English literature therefore I should be contented and happy.

Therefore the sun stared back but never managed to blind me.

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...

Felix Vallotton

"He was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him."- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw One sees immediately from Felix Vallotton’s paintings that he must had been a gifted raconteur. The painter was possessed of the natural aptitude of unfolding and withholding the narrative flow at the most propitious timing. Mysteriousness emerges. The viewers are bound to be tantalised. Whilst most of Vallotton’s paintings are about the quotidian, the domestic, beneath them their pent-up energy seethes and trembles, threatening to explode at any moment. It isn’t just the quotidian that he depicted, but the interior dramas. Any reader of Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s plays will know that interior drama can be the most frenetic. A woman leans towards a man, her hand entwines his body in show of sensuousness. She whispers into his ears something that the viewers are forbidden the right to privy to. But one has the eye to deduce, from the slightly wrinkled of the man’s nose and t...

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...