A dreaming

Have you ever having suddenly been roused from sleep, wholly disoriented, you look at the white walls change colour from light yellow to orange. Reflected in your room, you witnessed the exact moment the sun sets? It happened over the span of a second. It was that brief. You had just woken up and you saw this. You do not remember what you dreamt about but as suddenly as you jolted out of your sleep, a violent pang of sadness grabbed you by the throat and you lay paralysed at its mercy. This sudden momentous sadness simply bored down upon you as swiftly as a lioness  pounced onto the neck of a gazelle. A graceful savage act that rendered you helpless.

I've never felt so disarmed. I wondered what it was I dreamt about that had me wakened into such deep sadness. I don't think it mattered. I think it was the changing of the orange rays that flooded my room. My soul must have grasped in that briefness of the reflected sunset that time is passing. And I saw it passed by me, alone. It was as if Time manifested before me in an apparition and greeted me warmly. But I was alone.

What beautiful sadness it was. I acutely remember its suddenness, which made it unlike any other laborious melancholy. A moment of feeling that surged pure, from within my soul, without the confines of any worldly thought. I simply felt without coming to a feeling. It came to me.

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The Sea of Fertility: Book 2

"His old age shone with cheerful detachment, like the winter sun shining through white paper stretched over a latticework of fine, aged wood, not in the least warped, beyond which patches of snow lay here and there on the ground."
                                                                       

                                                                                            ~ Runaway Horses, Yukio Mishima

Now, this is how a real author writes. Only a true artist could see this beauty. The words come easy when one can see beauty. When one do not see it, there is no helping it.

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Night-time is no stranger to me. We've seen enough of each other.

I am sad still but next time (if ever), I'll just grit my teeth and resist any urge to write anything about anything and just wait til it passes.

Good Morning

I think I need to start writing in a journal again. I've abstained for so long I think I'm ready.

Woke up to the Sun streaming into my room, reflecting white rays onto the ceiling that radiate into the shape of a fan due to the way the curtains are tied. The world outside my window framed in a sloping triangle of azure blue sky void of clouds, metallic silhouette of distant skyscrapers and a band of blinding white roofs. 

High-pitched laughter of frolicking children in the nearby nursery and the whistling, chirping birds lent an air of sweet innocence befitting the starting of a day.

I reached for my glasses perching precariously atop a stack of books and put them on. I am never truly awake until I put my glasses on. The blurriness of vision, I associate with a dreaming state.

S. had just finished performing solat dhuha. Her slender white hands hidden within the folds of her white telekung, cupped in the offering of a prayer. Head bowed, dark eyes down cast, she wore a doleful expression that subdued her vivacious beauty into an image of purity and piousness.

I sat up, pulled my quilt closer around me and turned on the heater, expectant of the resulting warmth and whirring noise that reminds me of crickets. S. briskly got up and set about folding the prayer mat and telekung. She trotted out of the room and came bursting back in moments later. 

I observed her quietly. S. carefully handled the green vase full of wilted pink lilies on her desk, placing it onto the grey carpeted floors of our bedroom. With languid gentleness she started unwrapping a bouquet of white lilies she received on Monday. Sitting cross-legged, singing a love song as she arranged the yet to bloom stalks. After adjusting the pink ribbon at the neck of the vase she addressed me, her white forehead bearing a single crease, mouth slightly upturned. "But they're wilted aren't they?"

I appraised the bowed light green heads of the lilies, only some have glimpses of the white petals hidden within.

"Maybe they'll look better once they bloomed."

"But then they'll be heavier." She retorted. Mimicking the sound of a sob, she leaned against the foot of my bed, despondent. "I want to wrap them back in a bouquet. At least they'll look pretty lying on my desk." I nodded in approval.

As S. proceeded with her task, she put on a familiar love song on her phone and hummed along to it. I gazed outside the window, squinting. The room is now warmer.

SS #3

I am overly critical of things. I read another page of SS and my whole conviction's been unseated from me as if  a rug pulled from beneath my feet.

Perhaps there's nothing to it after all. I shouldn't worry about my well-being in relations to it (other darker concerns shadow that anxiety).

I shall write of it no more. Save one, once I am done.

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SS #1

One reads of a lover's rapture having the other return their passions thus achieving her desires, then one reads of the friend's repose having pacified the other by relinquishing his own desire.

I love that Mishima chooses to juxtapose the two. One puts Kiyoaki in a position of counterpoise (over Satoko) while the other in a position of equipoise (with Shigekuni).

P.S. While I'm on the subject of Spring Snow, let's just mention that I adore the scene on pages 9 - 10. I adore it equally as much as the scene I've just ranted about above (chapters 12 - 13).

Cogency

And I destined to be the vague wraith from the past, ever struggling for ambiguous motivations, is eternally the one who seeks to leave and stay. Yet being single-minded in certain things, I vainly agonise over dusty one-sided proclamations of undying loyalty, only to cease after realizing it's futility and foolishness. I endeavoured to simultaneously annihilate and immortalize what was real and fantasy.

But it was all but a game. I deigned to think that it was an elaborate game involving the gamut of human emotions ranging from the innocent to the decadent, encompassing pure earnestness to villifying indifference.

I write this now from an island, having segregated myself from any such childish capriciousness. I do not gaze at the Sky with clouds of asinine magnanimous thoughts anymore. Although I admit, in this particular moment of reminiscing, I taste my bitterness and savour its fullness. I felt slighted by you & my own foolishness. This needs to be said (again. A thousand times over).

To be completely honest (as I seem to be in the mood for it right now), this drunken  display of old wounds is the effects of my reading a book. I have not read, truly read a book in a while now. I have forgotten what it was like to explore the vagaries of human motivations in such beautiful passages.

The book came by your hand. No, simply left behind. That distinction I am now fully capable of making now that I am not affected by you anymore. 

Again, what can anybody construe this for anything but-, I shall say no more. I expect this to please you, no matter how superficially. Though I understand that it might not affect you at all. Not anymore, not ever, in fact. See how desolate I actually am?

In this frame of mind, in this indulgent moment, I acknowledge what I have (finally) discarded. We are not meant for the proximity that I idealised. 

Spring Snow

I can't believe I've let it sit on my shelf unread for about a year. I am quite in love with it.

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For the ever solitary soul, ever in pursuit of ideals unspoken, learns the joys and sadness of the wayfarer en route in a foreign land. He sees a majestic sight; a mountain, the sea, the setting of the Sun, its splendour overjoys him but he has none to share it with so the beauty ends with a muted loneliness.

I am one such soul. 

Fated

Before Stars were made

upon the Night Sky to decorate,

their Souls were fashioned together

their hands, written for each other

lovingly, faithfully, forever.

Their Love will be,

the cave, the lake, the winds, 

shelter, stillness, vigor

the thorn, the roots, the flower,

grief, strength, pleasure.

Though Stars burn out

Life gives out,

For the Love that is written,

   Of Death is transcendent.

Nadon

At one of the open houses today I found this really pretty girl with a really pretty room who reads (e.g The Catcher In The Rye). Bet she goes to those Buku Jalanan events. I've a bit of a crush on her room. Love the Mucha posters.

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I feel like writing the 'Camel Scene' for my HH. It's supposed to be the starting of chapter 2, where Hafiz will meet a white pregnant camel and name her Kawthar. She'll be standing with a herd of shaggy bactrian camels eating cacti flowers under the moon's gentle glow. She'll be his companion for a while. They'll encounter a djinn snake, an oasis guarded by a black swan, and an Arabian horse dying in quicksand. She'll take him through the snowing desert to the foot of the mountain.

Here I am writing about the thing I'm supposed to write. I'll do this later. Let's call this brainstorming shall we?

2:185

The imam started the khutbah Raya with references to Al-baqarah ayat 185 interlaced with takbirs. I am pleased that I recognised the ayat. Thanks to those Qur'an weekly Quranic Gems by Nouman Ali Khan.

I've got a cold for a week now. It's dampening my mood but it'll clear up soon hopefully.

Normalities aside, I actually feel rather concussed. It just seems to me that I've left too many goals hanging. I say I try to be good and all that but really, do I really?

*sigh* I read As-Saff's translation just now. Because the imam also mentioned some wonderful things about the strength of women, mothers in Islam, about Musa AS's mother and step mother specifically, he stresses on surahs al-qasas, as-saff and another Surah I can't remember. All so he could illustrate the point that Allah SWT does things He does not need to but He is afterall The Most Gracious and the Best of Planners. 

So, as-saff, it says God dislikes people who 'say they do things they didn't do'. Fasik.

I fear for myself. Constantly. The need to be able to remain khusyuk in my prayers is ever growing because I keep catching myself failing.

I feel displaced. The killing of time is smudging the edges of my reality.

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Ramadhan at home has been wonderful. I cannot express how grateful I am to be able to spend most of Ramadhan at home. I look forward to next year. I am going back to Melbourne tomorrow night. Tonight was my last night of tarawih at Surau Al-Madani.

I will miss our Indonesian ustadh's lovely, lovely recitation. He sounds so young, his recitation clear, modest. Absolutely beautiful. If sounds are images, what comes to mind is of a cool breeze blowing across grassland on the slope of a mountain. Blue, sun-gold, green. Cool, airy, earthy. Lapang, tenang, sederhana.

In Melbourne, Winter will greet me.

I am even more determined this time. I am a wayfarer, seeking knowledge in a foreign land across the Sea. I once again will assume the role of Stranger & Knowledge Seeker.

Allah musta'an.