Skip to main content

Tales From the Down Under: #24- First Post After a Long While is Usually Not Very Impressive

One night I was waken by the noise of a couple bawling to each other outside on the corridor. Being galvanized up at such untimely moment, I resolved in switching the channels desultorily while the bawl heated on. Motions and images flipped through the screen like batches of vignettes. The ebb and flow of the noise outside kept with the fleet of the channel, thus a comical consequence was induced. It is funny how people are implicitly inclined to match their lives onto the screen, and into the screen however they result in. Some concierge, I presumed, settle the argument briskly and everything restored to its order like every yesterday.

People can be categorized into three: one with those who are always brimming with confidence and wielding their dominance wherever they go- they are the victors. Most people in general should be in the second one, who surface and sink just like every other but refusing to sail close to the wind, they secure themselves a perfect spot where they can witness every event flipping through their eyes just like channel switching. The terminology is irrefutably drab, too, I’ll call them the commoners. The rest should be lumped together in the victims, who are constantly creating follies in their lives and constantly being jeered at by the victors or the commoners.

What an unjust classification I sketched out! The purpose of the aforesaid is chiefly to demonstrate how those three groups of people all like to dramatize their lives, victors, commoners or victims notwithstanding. It is usually at the dinner table with your relatives when those three categories surface, and as the conversation drags on, every story that reels gradually blows out of its proportion. Silence is a poise to hold but painful as well when it excludes you from any of those categories.

“Why studying Literature.” Those three words screamed on the page and it was only prophetic they could appear on my coursebook. I slinked from providing a convincing answer when being badgered by such question. But now I know that the main reason lies in nothing but self-indulgence. I love reading, that is for certain, and stories as well. Stories, like stones, can be plucked from everywhere on every road. They are, however in reality, too painful for even words to document, hence my retreat to read stories that are fictional. The ugliest tend to be endearing when you know you share no ties with that story you read.

Not long after the noise ceased I fell asleep and dreamed. I dreamed I actually wrote me in Twin Peaks. Not an impressive character rather, which fits me perfectly because long ago I dreamed of becoming a better person but in vain. Not until that moment did I realize that mystery should be the period of every story.

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...