the2ndrule Issue 44
the2ndrule
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November 2003 email edition
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web edition: http://the2ndrule.com
Contents
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0. Editorial
1. Instant Cafe Radio Episode 21: pathos n angst [b3]
2. mimi's in a tizzy [Constance Campbell]
3. Mouse [Terry Jaensch]
4. Loss [Anju Paul]
5. Way Out [Cyril Wong]
6. Impressions of the last day of the 7th Lunar Month [James Lee]
7. The Lord of Ruin [Rebecca Edwards]
8. Close [Yong Shu Hoong]
9. Images 2000-2002 [Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook]
-. In August [Chris Ong]
Editorial
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Years ago, an ex-boyfriend told me that it is healthy to dwell upon death once everyday.
Something died between us upon the realisation that I would never understand his faith.
I only believe something dies within you when religion takes over your capacity to be uncertain.
I think of dying when I realise loneliness can only be held up by more than one person.
Empathy is dead when there is so much about you you do not understand.
Even if you are dying politely, you are still dying.
First there was SARS, but now a blaster worm says my computer will crash in oh sixty seconds.
I am running out of time.
I am not being negative. Positive.
I am terrified of every kind of death except the one that switches off every light in your head.
I sent an email to many poets containing a whispered word I hoped would sail pass their brains to arrive at someplace so far down we would find each other.
To my ex-boyfriend, this is for you. Fuck you.
We're always looking for new work to publish. If you've got any writing, graphics, music, animation or video you'd like to get featured in the2ndrule, do get in touch with us. Please send your comments, suggestions and contributions to: editor@the2ndrule.com
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2ndrule team : Koh Beng Liang, Shannon Low, Benety Goh, Russell Chan, Alfian Bin Sa'at, Jason Tong
Contributors : Cyril Wong, b3, Constance Campbell Terry Jaensch, Anju Paul, James Lee Rebecca Edwards, Yong Shu Hoong, Chris Ong Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
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Instant Cafe Radio Episode 21: pathos n angst
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This month we have a special mix by b[cubasis]3
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue44/instantcafe.html
Quicktime users: try the high quality version at
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue44/instantcafeepisode21.mov
Playlist:
mix session part one
001: hans zimmer - gladiator suite
002: apollo 440 - altamont super highway revisited
003: fatboy slim - everyone loves a filter
004: the haunted - demon eyes
mix session part two
001: overseer - supermoves [b3 angst mix]
002: rob dougan - furious angel
003: trickshot - ceasefire
004: the prodigy - serial thrilla [b3 fusion jazz mix]
mix session part three
001: b3 - dark awakening [agnus dei extended mix]
002: jesse cook - beloved
003: creed - one last breath [b3 pathos mix]
004: b3 - remember yesterday's hate [outro mix]
visit b3's website: www.attitude.per.sg
- Selection and mix by b3
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awake
in this present time, as will be for the moment, everything is a grey, a sea and a sky at 3 in the morning, or sleeping lucid, you think everything like grey vividly dreamt. it helps to think in a colour, it makes things right
(your eyes open as you look outside)
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mimi's in a tizzy
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this love is animate/pulls mimi's strings/
dancing her to death one night/not
bothering to call the next/why can't mimi rest
when love is not at play/instead she paces-
pouts-and-pleads/poor mimi . . enjoys being pulled/
asunder loves the pain/poor mimi . . sore
mimi . . /her limbs crack from the strain/this
love exceeds her grasp/this
puppeteer's experienced/and mimi . .
poor mimi . ./cannot last/
- Constance Campbell
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the outside comes into view, hungry for sight. the outside demands this, is patient, is paint, refuses this game of grey and stares. as eyes catch up, grey loses reality, landscapes are stroked from broad to fine, blinks abstracting thoughts, flickering forms, speckling shapes, to an art within you. life will have its day. life, cannot be less then this sum of colour
(from the outside you step in)
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Mouse
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He took you inside before burying you.
One last trip round the house. In the open
casket of his palm you are neither holy
nor iconic. No mass gathers around
your small death. Your legs, four dying
sprigs of parsley atop the grey plate
of your under-parts; a warning
not insubstantial to others like you,
but what will he make of it. Your teeth
still in the tomatoes, he circumnavigates
each indiscretion with love's blunted knife,
blank as the white loaf naively forgiving
that first penetration. The walls silent
for the first time tonight, a kind
of reverence or fear. Without you
as reference point, he must decide which.
Your shit in every corner, behind
his furnishings the real story mounting
its opposition. The traps, so long a part
of his aesthetic, invisible, necessary,
snapping back over his hand in his attempt
at breaking the habit.. Who needed whom?
His heart atrophied in its addiction, that stale
cheese drawing nothing in or out. Still,
his eyes fix, impossibly on each entry point
as love stays mortally, irretractably put.
- Terry Jaensch
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from the door, coming in quiet, you never approach quiet, so there must be news. keeping close to the walls, standing against the grey, looking all pale, your wants, to fade into chiaroscuro and concrete. this room becomes the glass theatre, where every thought, word, deed is reflected, refracted, magnified, these actions are the glass menageries becoming your body, where and when light from the outside hits as you look to the sky outside, memories and desires die, lit like small vessels of flame, meaning to burn, meant to be burnt. but you never want to be this naked.
(you look outside)
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Loss
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He died and I wasn't there.
Ninety seven years old - my grandfather.
In the bed he bought.
In the house he built.
Surrounded by all his children and their children
(Except me).
He just closed his eyes and slipped away, they tell me.
Those eyes half-blind with cataracts,
So he confused his children with their children
And had to be told who he was looking at,
His fingers reading our cheeks... shoulders... like Braille,
Gripping our hands to keep us close,
Scared he would lose every sense of us.
I didn't see him before he died.
Wasn't planning on going home for another six months.
Only then. To see this man who had outlived a wife and two sons
And was supposed to keep on living, at least, six months longer.
To hold his hands, kiss his cheeks, hug him tightly,
And not let go.
I wasn't there; didn't see it.
So he can't be dead.
At least, not till six months from now.
When I go home and can't find him.
- Anju Paul
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in a motion to sit, in stunned hesitancy, in halted anxiety, you pose like the truth catches you, fumbling with the edges of table, collars and newspapers, eyes busy around the room to an uneasy chasing movement, speaking loud and soft fragments, sentences clinking in this place and that other, face to face, still distant chimes, never sounding together
(i look outside)
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Way Out
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Such is the violence required
to stop the body in its tracks.
Some say the spirit - if it exists - hovers
permanently within a hundred metre radius
of its busted, flesh-and-bone cage.
I hurried over to the huge, once encumbered
bulk of her; eyes shut behind spectacles
that cling to her face, oddly
unbroken. Her leg, jumped free from its socket,
was held in place
by what must be size-40 Levis.
Blood through a rip in the jeans
flood a long, squint-eyed cut across her thigh:
the inside of her large body
peeking out. I imagine her spirit easing
its way out of that wound
to stand there, gazing skywards at how
far she had come in the gasp of two seconds,
debating if this was a mistake,
and if she had only known
that death was false, that consciousness
would draw her back to itself
even after the end, inescapable,
like gravity.
But I prefer to believe that she
is gone, just as Leslie Cheung
is gone; that death
is not a rapid corridor
between one prison and the next;
that the sound she made when the pavement
rose generously to meet her
was not the opposite of a bomb
going off.
- Cyril Wong
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you, at the clock, the hour hand points your way, the second hand ticks you conscious, in this moment, the minutes falling into a mutter of names, an account, a situation, a relation of an incident, and you exit lighter, then when you came. everything then feels like a film
(i look outside)
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Impressions of the last day of the 7th Lunar Month
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All along the street,
a bride's veil of smoke
flushing through like
a white ink-pot very slowly
slowly dissolving
in a lake
It is the afternoon sun
ghosts have not begun
their annual home-coming
and parting
Already people are burning up ashes
eager to get
business out of the way.
Wind gathered ruffled and stuck
its fleet fingers through
stock-piles of half-burnt cash
in hell-bank notes
of impossible amounts
like a joke.
We called it 'mock money'
like mock pork, mock duck,
mock anything else
that monks and vegetarians eat
seriously.
Watch the ashes thrown up the air
like pranksters and mischief-makers
up to no good
when everyone has turned back
shut their doors
and slept
Watch how they fly
tossed black shadows
in circles circling
to the heights where
not even you nor I
can see
I think of vultures or crows
or something cold
and cruel
deciding whom to pick next
like fish caught by the fishermen
stretched out on a net
to dry.
- James Lee
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the outside films me switching on the radio, there is the music, some words, a dedication, and static and voice and static. there are announcements, reports, headlines, punchlines, places, accidents, deaths... names.
(i look outside)
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The Lord of Ruin
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I'm throwing them away now, the sticks, the feathers, the smooth stones. I've carried them around for years, packed them and unpacked them, wrapped them in tissue, or newspaper, or cloth. I thought one day I'd use them, one day I'd make something beautiful with them, or draw them. But there are too many now, and I have to move on, and there is nowhere to put them. So I tuck them back in the earth, or carry them down to the river, where mangroves siphon diesel from the highway.
I'm tearing them up now, the poems that stuttered, that stuck in the womb, that broke their necks or strangled on the cord. I stuff them in the bin with the yellow lid, their soft spines will be pounded and pulped, they will be fractured into silence. I pull open the filing cabinets, and drag out rusty-lipped files, with titles like Health and Tax and Insurance. I acknowledge that I will not be learning Mandarin in this lifetime, or ever again mangling airline Japanese, or buying a book called Speaking of Sadness, or touring the Medusa heads of Greece. I tear up those promises now, along with warranties and receipts.
Next are boxes of images and words filched from waiting-room magazines, the faces of beauties and flawless food, cosmetics, eyes and limbs; slogans full of portent: Bisexual. Guilt-free treats.
It's getting easier. I turn to the drawings themselves now, life-studies and bone-studies, sketches for bigger works. Limping flaccid images, smudged and incomplete. I crumple them, shove them into plastic bags, along with pieces of dolls, heads and legs and torsos, and bits of rusted wire, chipped glass beads, a blind ring shaped like an eye. I empty out drawers straight into the bin, snatch books from shelves and stack them for libraries, the brand-new, the second-hand, the unread. I'll never know what they wanted to say to me, I'm not listening, the phone clenches like a fist.
I'm giving them away, the paints and the pencils, the resins and oils, the frames. I'm stacking them up, the mugs and glasses, the plates, the shelves. I'm selling them for small change. I'm paying someone to carry them away. I don't need this. Or this. I cart bags at nightfall to the supermarket skip, I fling them in.
All the feathers, in boxes and envelopes and jars - I must've thought I was going to make myself a pair of wings - I don't need them, I have wings sprouting from my back, they are pure flame. I am burning, purifying, releasing all this. I refuse to make connections, I am not seeing anything except what lies ahead. I start to spin. Everywhere I look there is something to get rid of: a vase, a swan, a bear named Pinky, a tin, hauled across years and islands, getting smaller in my hands. There's nothing, finally, I can't let go of.
And I am spinning faster, so that cupboards are sucked open and papers and bills and jumblesale elephants and masks and albums and a clumsy chest I made in year nine and all the faces who ever loved me and all my bones and furnishings are lifting, are whirling into orbit. The ceiling dilates, the walls dismantle their ribs, the floor breaks up like a raft and I am spinning, spinning at the centre I am going to come apart, the pressure is unbearable my hands tear open colours dart out of them on strings I can't see the end of all this but I have a feeling when I settle down I will be elemental I will be almost indestructible I will be so light
- Rebecca Edwards
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should have some play in me, could go out and breathe, could go see the sky outside. the outside frames me
(as i look inside)
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Close
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There is a serenity that follows the cruising
of an airplane buoyant over the painted desert,
where even the Ayers Rock is no bigger
than an accidental smudge of a truffle
sprawled half-melted on the marbled floor.
And before I claim to be above everything else,
I train my ears against the engine's drone
until there is no use for words or meanings -
only silence in the way a book completes
its sentence and retires to the niche of its leaning.
- Yong Shu Hoong
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in this perfect moment, at this time, when the outside loses reality, when we have played out roles, played out lives, I'll call you to tell you to let you know, that I've heard, that I've listened.
A wake.
In August.
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Images 2000-2002
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"A continuous passing away of relatives, one after the other... when one realises these people are not around anymore, the yearning for them expresses itself beyond the consideration of time; beyond comprehension of impermanence and uncertainty. Even other basic human comprehensions concerning life and death escape the mind. When the yearning for those people accumulates itself and appears at the surface, then the attempt to embrace the bonds of the past succeed."
Araya reads to bodies of women afloat in glass tanks of water. The bodies are dressed in frangipani and flies. She changes their clothes too.
2nd of a Thai Medley :: http://www.the2ndrule.com/issues/issue44/1.jpg
I'm living :: http://www.the2ndrule.com/issues/issue44/2.jpg
Installation view, Edsvik Museum :: http://www.the2ndrule.com/issues/issue44/3.jpg
Sudsiri & Araya :: http://www.the2ndrule.com/issues/issue44/4.jpg
Wind Princess Black Cats :: http://www.the2ndrule.com/issues/issue44/5.jpg
About the artist:
Born in 1957, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook has given numerous solo and group exhibitions of her work in Thailand at the National Gallery in Bangkok as well as in various galleries and spaces in Fukouka, Ljubjana, Nurnberg, Seoul, Tokyo and Johannesburg. In 1993-94 she was awarded the position of Kondrad Adenauer Siftung Scholar, Germany. Previously Araya's work has been exhibited in Australia within the First Asia-Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and the Biennial of Sydney, 1996. She has received residencies at ARTSPACE in San Antonio, Texas, and various institutions in Germany and is currently lecturing at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Chiangmai Universiry, Thailand.
- Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
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* 2ndrule t-shirts *
Non-uniform of the guerilla army. Now available at S$20 each.
Sizes: Girls (28,30), Boys (40,42)
http://the2ndrule.com/issues/issue24/2rtshirt.html
Please send your orders to editor@the2ndrule.com
pathos n angst (c) 2003 b3
In August (c) 2003 Chris Ong
mimi's in a tizzy (c) 2003 Constance Campbell
Mouse (c) 2003 Terry Jaensch
Loss (c) 2003 Anju Paul
Way Out (c) 2003 Cyril Wong
Impressions of the last day of the 7th Lunar Month (c) 2003 James Lee
The Lord of Ruin (c) 2003 Rebecca Edwards
Close (c) 2003 Yong Shu Hoong
Images 2000-2002 (c) 2003 Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
