Surreptitious Student of Life

Surreptitious Student of Life

          "A true poet does not bother to be poetical,
            Nor does a nursery gardener perfume his roses."
                                                      Jean Cocteau

You are a surreptitious 
C student of life
first thing hummer of Nietzsche
emotional alien
suicidal bug
Yellow Peril: neo-American
way over your head
in love and fiction
self-overrated
Mama's boy
sentimentalist
inveterately romantic
stranger in strange land
forever
lonely
yet always
trust the thrust of your heart's desires
and hanker
after
Peace

Adapted from Chang-Rae Lee, a Korean-American

Roberto Wissai/NKBa'
January 30, 2012

Ironies

The Saturday morning and afternoon were spent to make friends happy. In other words, I sacrificed my own time which could have been used to make money or rest my weary body. But then unexpectedly by 3 pm, some magical event took place. I was presented with a gift that was worth $1,000, but actually purchased for only $230. As I coolly gazed at the article placed at the table surrounded by my friends who oohed and aahed at the exquisite beauty of the article, my mind turned to all the ironies of my life and I was thankful for being blessed with luck. But then I wondered what luck really was. I used to have an obstreperous personality and that accounted for many unpleasant events in my life. Now I am wiser and more pleasant to deal with, except for certain assholes I cannot stand. And that has been bringing me more luck. What I am realizing that there are humans who persistently think they are nice folks, but they are just plainly delusional. I also think those individuals begin to have no effect on me, except a rather quaint wish that I would like to exterminate them if opportunities present themselves. If you think I am a miserable unhappy, unforgiving, revenge-obsessed son of a bitch, you are half-right. And I don't bother to explain why you are half-wrong. You would neither understand nor believe me, anyway. You would conveniently forget, as the Asshole does, that I have spent decades thinking of how to make sense of my life while knowing that in the big scheme of things, I am nothing and insignificant. Okay, I've done enough inveighing and railing against trivialities and nonsense. It's time for me to get serious with my remaining time on this planet.

Einstein once was reputed to remark that everybody is a genius of some kind, but if a fish judges its worth by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is hopelessly stupid. Think about this remark long enough and you may realize that happiness is not a state you get there by luck. It takes understanding and and knowledge of oneself and others. I'm not saying that I'm happy right now. I'm just finally realizing the world is mostly populated by liars and filthy animals which call themselves humans and I have to treat them as such.

The weather been absolutely gorgeous in the last few days. There is not a single fluff of clouds in the blue sky; temperature is hovering around low 60's with low humidity; the winds are brisk, blowing all the auto exhaust pollutants out of the valley; and I've been gloriously horny and randy and intoxicated with life. I haven't let the thoughts of any bitches and assholes disturb my psyche. Of course, if I could blow the heads off some or all of them, I would feel much better. But I know I can't have everything at once. One must enjoy life in small dosage, in whatever amount it is available. Greed is the creed of the stupid. And I am not stupid. Close, but not quite.

I've cautioned my readers more than once that they should not read my words too quickly lest they would think they really understand me. But they, especially the Asshole, wouldn't heed my advice. Armed with a meager and feeble and cursory and kindergarden level knowledge of the English language, they plunge headlong into the morass and maze of words weaved by me, and they get stuck and lost in the labyrinth of graphic symbols. And they bellow, hollow, scream, shout expressions of confusion and bewilderment while pontificating and mouthing off they understand me and my psyche.

This morning I leafed through a fancy magazine full of ads for luxury items and my mind was filled with thoughts of the nature of fashion, advertising, and simian-like traits of slavish imitation and the power of priming effect upon humans. That reminded me of the limitations of the mind of my High Priestess. Despite having a formidable intelligence and acute sensitivity, she only is at the threshold of enlightenment because of her lack of education and proper spiritual training. She has an unwarranted faith in her powers of understanding. Luckily for her, she always felt an unrelieved loneliness and that led her on a path to my door. Still, she does not quite understand me. The real world is much more complex than she has made it out to be. But that's all right. Compared to all the bitches I used to know, she is far more moralistic and spiritual. She helped me put things in perspective and deal better with my impending mortality. Every morning I sit down and tell myself that I need to be kind, understanding, and forgiving, and that I would not let memories of the bad deeds of assholes, bitches, and scumbags bother me to a point that I would pack up a gun and hunt them down because they are not worth the time and trouble for me to do so. My High Priestess keeps telling me that I am a blessed lucky son of a bitch and that I must always remember so and be happy with that, and I just must let the unpleasant memories go and be wiser next time. Life is not fun if there are no challenges, she said. She believes that all those assholes, monkeys, bitches, and scumbags are really my benefactors because they remind me that I'm made of finer stuff. She pointedly tells me that if I keep being angry at them, I am not that different from them.



(to be continued)

Ta quyet nang niu doi nghe si,

Ta quyet nang niu doi nghe si,
Sao em con ap u mong giau sang.
Ngan nam cai kiep da doan ay,
Chi song ban khoan voi mong vang.

Vo danh
 
Rough translation

I'm determined to pursue a life of artistic niches
While you're hankering after dreams of riches
And bogged down in the mire of your schemes
In the pursuit of your golden dreams.

Translator: RW/NKBa'
January 24, 2012

Lunar New Year's Day

So another Lunar New Year is knocking on the door.
The first day of the year is here once more
Without you being by my side
I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
The mere fact I'm writing these words of mine
Indicates I can't get you out of my mind.

The New Year Festivals are celebrated outside
With firecrackers blasting themselves into petals crimson,
And dragon dance going on in a frenzy with the drumbeats
And clanging cymbals
While inside my eyes welling up in tears,
With love songs blaring from the radio,
Reminding me of a love that flowed into oblivion.
You once told me that forever you would love me.
Now it is I who would miss you for eternity,
Who would love you till I die,
Who would do nothing during the New Year but cry.

Anger and Annoyance

Despite all my readings and meditations about the ultimate futility of anger and annoyance, I take to anger and annoyance like ducks to water, bees to flowers, and moths to flame. They are part of my nature, my default mode of consciousness, my dark angels of destruction who help me see the dark side of people's moons. I'm not claiming that I'm anybody extra-special. I'm just a seeker of truth and peace. Of course, truth and peace are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other, if by truth you mean the ultimate truth, not the kind that skims and glides on superficialities. I hate superficialities with a passion. Those who don't understand me are invariably tied to superficialities. The below cannot understand the above, a part cannot comprehend the whole, undeveloped minds are forever mired in ignorance and darkness, and fancy that they are the only realities in life. I'm reading about the origins and evolution of language. My fascination with language is a matter of course for a person who writes poetry and knows several languages. Reading and thinking about language makes me feel good about myself as I think I know something about the subject, not like the stupid and ignorant Asshole who loves to pontificate on subject matters of which he knows nothing. He is nothing but a jaunty, linguistically impotent pontificator, yet he is wont to foamy-mouthed, quivering pontification, and agog with sardonic, stupid triumph. For instance, the poorly educated bastard couldn't distinguish a "can" from a "cane", yet he pathetically said that he used a "can" to whack a barking dog when he was delivering mail as a postman. I was wondering what kind a postman would carry a "can" in his bag and used it as a defense against a territorial-minded dog unless it was a can of dog food that the postman was accustomed to consuming on his delivery round when hunger struck him.

Anyway, I used to pine and sigh longingly for a certain woman who in her youth attended Lycee Marie Curie, the woman with the downy outline of her pommettes in the sun, the amber-tinted darkness of quick eyes, lips shaped into a friendly smile. Nowadays, if my thoughts ever turn to her in passing, I shudder with horror at the stupidity of my youth, and the idealism of my innocence. And if my being registers any feelings of anger and annoyance, they are directed at myself and not at her because I understand she did what she had to do: she only responded to the dictates of her nature-- and to her perceptions of my nature-- and not necessarily to my true nature. As I often repeat, it's not easy to understand me. Many fools have tried and in the end they only see themselves in me. I'm like a shining mirror where men read strange matters, like the case of the Asshole who has opined that I am full of insecurity and fond of chiming in! He was counting on a possibility that his words were like the weighted tips of a flagrum across my soul. He was hoping his iniquitous, nefarious, meretricious, tawdry words would have an effect on me. And the bastard was right. I collogued with my inner self and it told me to wait and to act towards the harlequin in the mean time with a studied, persnickety shibumi while maintaining a winsome disposition.

The tragedy of my youthful misplaced affection has overshadowed and colored all the subsequent love affairs, even to this very day. I am a prisoner of my distant past. The painful memories have haunted me and shaped me into the person I am today. I've often coiled and curled and clung to my own intimate and bittersweet recollection of a love that could have been. And I often reach a painful understanding during which I understand why a piece of a broken glass sparkled so on the pavement, why the sunlight reflected on the ice cubes of a tall glass of ice tea on a picnic table at the road stop in mid afternoon, and why I loved so much the shimmering sea.

Sometime ago, a kind elderly man pulled me aside and whispered to me that as a writer, I must regard all living experiences of my own and others as gist for my creativity; thus, I shouldn't be so angry and annoyed by ignorance, taunts, and slights especially if they come from filthy dogs like the Asshole. He further advised that I must learn to manage my tapasya (Sanskirt for heat/essential energy. The gentleman was an Indian and well versed in yogic tradition) in such a way that I could achieve my evolution as a spiritual being. I asked him how he would know that I have potential to develop into a bona fide spiritual being. He replied that his master had taught him how to read people. He said, "I was observing how you were baited, drawn in, sucked into a vortex called "debate" initiated by the mangled, maimed mongrel of a creature who called himself fittingly Asshole. I listened to your arguments and the nonsense uttered by the Asshole. I watched your facial features and his simian and canine traits. While your face radiated with human beauty and intelligence, his muzzle showed the cunning of a dog. In addition, he had lousy teeth and he was short, pudgy, and ugly. He was obviously not as well-versed in reading, languages, and logic as you were. So I wondered why the fuck you were wasting your tapasya on an animal like that. He has no chance to evolve. His destiny is already set. He's well on his way straight to samsara while you still have a chance to reach nỉrvana." I explained to him that I was suffering from HDADD (High Definition Attentcion Deficit Disorder) and that I usually didn't pay attention to words spoken by dark-skinned men from India, but when I did, my attention was crystal clear and in his case, his words did hold my attention. He laughed uproariously and then stepped forward and embraced me---the pungent curry smell still clings to me to this day---and said the following parting words before jauntingly sashaying away: "Intensify your receptivity. Make yourself highly magnetic to core truths."

Well, core truths are what I am intimating today. Only those who are strong enough can withstand them or are attracted to them. The rest, like the Asshole, are scared of them and would resort to lies and cheap pontifications in order to avoid the head-on collisions with them. As Daniel Kahneman was fond of reminding us, we easily think associatively, metaphorically, and causally, but statistical thinking is the kind that gives us trouble. Statistical thinking exposes the limitations of the human mind: "our overconfidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events." (Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp 13-14)


(to be continued)

The Love that could have been

The Love that could have been

Love comes from shared and mutual understanding and respect, not from condemnations and rebukes arising from actual or perceived hurts and slights. 

Some people may go through their entire lives and to their dusty deaths without ever experiencing true love, rarely not because they are unlucky of never meeting their soul mates, but very likely because they are inherently unlovable: lying, selfish, arrogant, peevish, and self-righteous. Who in their right minds would love assholes like that? So while they may dream of the shared magic of raindrops, snowflakes, crackling fires, lightening flashes, and rolling thunderstorms, they in fact spend their time alone with TV or with a book, and with an aching awareness that there is an unending, nagging loneliness weighing down on them. 
 

On dit que tu te maries

On dit que tu te maries,
tu sais que j'en vais mourir."

Somebody sent me through snail mail an announcement of your wedding. To disambiguate my distaste for you as a harridan and to let on an impression that I thought of your matrimony was just a bagatelle, and my once affection for you was a vernal error, I dug up an old photo of mine when my "beauty" was in its prime and emailed it to you. Then I went out for a walk. 

The air was bristling with winds and chilly, with a faint tang of burning logs and raucous twang of seagulls. The sea was glaucous and gray with waves busily breaking into foam. I stood at the beach, looking out to the sea, and I felt in the hollow of my solitariness the unending syllables of the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers. And the flutters and effluvia of that gray day filled me with an unredeemed melancholy. I still remember the day you said you loved me like it was yesterday. We were standing on the second floor of the college building, near the railing and looking at the leaves falling off the trees in the yard below us and fluttering in the winds. The dry season was in full swing. It was late afternoon. Our classes were long over. We were shooting the breeze. You asked me what would become of us. I sighed and replied that somehow I felt in my bones you would make me sad and suffer for a long, long time. You retorted that I was talking rot and that you were very much affected by our daily talks. I queried, "For sure?" To that you answered, "Je t'aime. Je t'aimerai toujours."

I am not going to share this part of me with you. I am just confining it to this cyberspace. The photo I emailed was a reminder of me, of us, when we were young and green and not yet tainted by greed and anger. I am not really angry at your decision. After all, we have been drifted apart for such a long time. Anything that is left of us is this lingering strange desire of mine to dissect and analyze a love that could not possibly last.