The Cherry Tree & A Sperm Whale

And so I took my guitar and sang the song written by Cass Elliot (The Mamas & The Papas) for John Denver whose original title was ‘Oh Babe I Hate To Go.’

“But, Im leavin on a jet plane. Dont know when I’ll be back again. Oh babe, I hate to go.”

The gal who destined to be a doctor one day and who lived next door stared at me through the window of her bedroom. I knew she hated the folk songs. The day before, I sang Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright:

It ain’t no use in callin out my name, gal
like you never done before.
It ain’t no use in callin out my name, gal,
I can’t hear you any more.
I'm a-thinkin and a-wondrin walkin down the road.
I once loved a woman, a child I’m told.
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul.
But don’t think twice, it's all right.

It was at this point, she blasted her Wharfedale Denton, brought from the UK by her dad years back and the sound of the electric bass thundered through the calmness of the late afternoon.

Say you dont know me or recognize my face.
Say you dont care who goes to that kind of place.
Knee deep in the hoopla sinking in your fight.
Too many runaways eating up the night.
Marconi plays the mamba, listen to the radio, dont you remember…

That is a fragment of my childhood memory. Part of the growing up days. Our bedrooms at the rear section of our respective houses faced each other. Im sure she saw Earnest Borgnine yelling at some burning train. Can’t remember what it was. Just a movie poster given by my mom for my room decoration. And from my room I could see a huge studio print of Henri Matisse’s View of Notre-Dame hung on her wall.

And we never did talk thoroughout those years. Somehow I knew she will always have Notre-Dame.

On the subject of a cherry tree and a sperm whale, I’ll tell you someday.

The Eternal Return Of A Highway Man

Yeah I know I’ve not been updating this blog of mine for a while now. Maybe I was just being plain lazy about having to crack my head to think of what to write. The fingers seemed lazy too and the weather has reached its punishing point.
Not that these days the weather is friendlier than it was months ago, but it is just that at times when the heat is so unbearable due to other factors not attributed to the weather itself, there is this certain itchiness that calls upon me to re-open this self-writing-and-reading session.
Writing a blog like this isn’t really meant for any reading audience. It is more like a monologue aimed at satisfying my own desire for expressing my personal thoughts and opinions about things according to my own whims and fancies.
Maybe I would pretend these entries were not written by me. They do not represent my thoughts in any way but of someone’s else. Only this way I would be free to explore the writer’s mind – without being bias and without fear or favour, as they said it.
Having said that, I don’t think the provisions in the Sedition Act is applicable to me in this instant because every piece of writing here is solely meant to be read by me and not about indoctrinating other people about anything, political or otherwise.
To shorten the story, as I must have known and most probably others too, Malaysia has been besieged by all kind of problems – political, judicial, economics et cetera ever since the last general election. This state of affair is pretty disturbing.
A couple of months back when I received the news on the three-month suspension of the bi-weekly tabloid Harakah, one of the many things that triggered my mind was the ‘idea of eternal return’ resurrected from the ancient Greek thinking by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Putting it simply, the idea of eternal return means that everything recurs as we once experience it (although in different forms), and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum or forever.
Now, this sheer thought of “eternal return” has caused Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to visit some compartment of my mind. Kundera explained the term ‘eternal return’ as: “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”
Kundera then went on to say: If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest burdens.
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all the splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives comes to the earth, the more real and the truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earthly being, and become half real, his movements as free as the are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
The “unbearable lightness of being” isn’t just about Tomas and Tereza (the main characters in the novel), isn’t just Kundera’s portrayal of the authoritarian government he once had to live with, but it is about us too.
Watch the following clip, and you will know what I mean.

Another Highwayman

I dedicate this entry to brother Shah. It is just another Highwayman.

While Waiting

I’m not someone who stands on a raised platform and recite poems before a group of friends. I don’t memorize stanzas from Longfellow or Dickinson. But while waiting for my next blog entry which is due any moment soon, perhaps some of my nice friends out there would like to read this classic poem from the Englishman Alfred Noyes.
I have a fond memory about this poem. I discovered it during the time All At Once was a hit for Whitney Houston. How did I discover it? I’ll tell you someday. Meanwhile, the poem – THE HIGHWAYMAN.




Part One
I
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding-
Riding-riding-
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

II
He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

III
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

IV
And dark in the old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say-

V
"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

VI
He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.

Part Two
I
He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gipsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching-
Marching-marching-
King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

II
They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through the casement, the road that he would ride.

III
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her.
She heard the dead man say-
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!

IV
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till here fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like
years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

V
The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain.

VI
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs
ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did
not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up strait and still!

VII
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night
!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him-with her death.

VIII
He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

IX
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.

The Moon Paper vs. The Paper Moon

It was TokAsid who first coined the term “Moon Paper”, at least in my head when he referred to the Harakah newspaper when commented an entry in my blog some time ago.
Since the publication of its maiden issue in March 1987, the newspaper has found its way into the minds of millions of Malaysian Muslims. For more than 20 years now it has played the critical role in providing alternative views and reshaping public political opinions. More so, this in turn has helped to put PAS figures in the Parliaments and various state assemblies and provided the much needed check-and-balance against the ruling coalition.
The Ministery of Home Affairs first approved the permit for the publication of Harakah as a twice-weekly newspaper. This newspaper then gathered momentum at a breakneck speed (at least as it was viewed by the ruling coalition then) and finally became a force to be reckoned-with as the millennium drew its curtain down.
When the ruling coalition suffered a lackluster performance in the 1999 general election (failed to recapture Kelantan and lost Terengganu), the government of the day put Harakah to task by curtailing its publications from twice weekly to only twice a month.
But if you can call Harakah as a media idea, then it very well is. It fits what Victor Hugo once said: “No armies in the world can fight the idea whose time has come.”
Although looked ill-equipped to stage a reasonable media fight in future political battles especially after the subsequent general election, Harakah emerged as among a major media hero in triggering the political tsunami during the recent general election.
Contrary to the prediction that Harakah might be reduced to a monthly publication, the government instead re-approved its original publication permit of twice-weekly.
The twice-weekly Harakah will be relaunched during the PAS Convention to be held on 15th August in Ipoh, which is just round the corner.
Let us hope the Moon Paper will help to change the fate of this beloved country of ours after some powerful politicians have made it to look like a Paper Moon.

The Schrodinger's Cat

To all the known friends, the unknown friends and the yet to be known as friends out there. I just wanna say sorry for not being able to join the fun of blogging and the friendly spirit as well as the warm atmosphere of our small own circle of bloggers (in term of reading and commenting each others’ entries).
I’ve learned from Cakapaje (upon calling him a few days earlier and reading through his blog a while ago) that our fellow bloggers, Raden Galoh and Muha Aziz are having to undergo some medical treatment of some kind. It is therefore my sincere hope that they will be recovering real soon. With that, goes my prayers to Him that He shall bestow them both the speedy recovery needed and eventual good health.


And now the entry:

"The Dancing of Wu Li Masters" (in my last entry) refers to a book written by one Gary Zukav which attemps to explain Quantum Mechanics/Physics to the laymen and those who have no scientific background. (Gary himself is not a physicist but rather a writer on biblical subjects.)
Wu Li, in his book, suggests “patterns of organic energy” (as how physics is called Taiwan). In the introductory chapter, the author explained further that “wu” can either means “matter” or “energy” and “li” is a poetic word. Thus, “like a Wu Li master who would teach us wonder for the falling petal before speaking about gravity…”
Of course, this book is one of the many books I’ve read on discussions on the beauty of Quantum Physics (not textbooks on this discipline though.) It is my long personal journey in seeking the beauty of how God created the Universe and created/creates everything else from an entirely different perspective (which is supposedly to be explainable but in the end, even the field of Quantum Physics at its best surrenders to the unexplainable phenomena.)
Indeed, “God don’t play dice” as Einstein put it. One such unexplainable phenomena which challenges the very foundation of this science as represented by the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is put put forward by an Austrian/German physicit, Erwin Shrodinger.
In this entry, I would like to share this strange phenomena (which governs our existence) with my fellow friends. For this purpose and for ease of understanding, I shall now reproduce a writing on this subject by Dilip D’Souza of India:

***

WHO is Schrodinger's cat? Arguably the world's most famous purely hypothetical feline. Never lived, but some say he's both dead and alive. At the same time. Ask your nearest physicist.

Erwin Schrodinger was a Nobel winning German physicist who died in 1961. The cat was part of a thought experiment he devised to explain one of the fundamental ideas of modern physics: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Shorn of jargon, the Uncertainty Principle says something very simple: the act of measuring something changes the result of that measurement. Heisenberg showed that simultaneously determining both the position of an electron and the speed at which it is moving is impossible. If you can measure its speed accurately, that measurement will itself make its location wildly uncertain. And vice versa.

Put another way, measurement decides the state of the electron.

This is not such an esoteric idea. Examples abound, and not just among electrons. Imagine an anthropologist visiting a remote tribal village to study its inhabitants. His very presence disturbs the villagers, who will behave differently with this stranger in their midst. So by simply observing, the anthropologist affects what he wants to observe; and thus can never hope to get a true picture of life there.

This is all very well with tiny particles nobody can see anyway, and maybe also with distant tribals. But what about everyday objects around us? What about, say, cats?

Well, that very question occured to Schrodinger. His famous thought experiment goes something like this. Let's say we have a sealed box with a cat in it. Also in the box is a device that can randomly emit marbles. In the course of a minute, the chances are exactly 50-50 that it emits one. If it does, the marble breaks a vial and releases a poisonous gas into the box. Kitty is instantly asphyxiated. Otherwise, nothing happens.

We put the box somewhere far away, where we have no way to tell what's going on inside it. Suppose we turn on the device for exactly one minute. Question: what happens to the cat?

It must seem like a trivial question. The answer is that we don't know. We cannot predict whether a marble was actually emitted. So we don't know if the cat is alive or dead.

But if we walk up to the box and open it to hear -- let's hope -- the loud miaow of a very puzzled cat, only then do we actually know that it has survived its uncertain ordeal.

Before then, the best we can say about the cat is the non-sequitur that it is either alive or dead. But that's not really such a non-sequitur. It is entirely consistent with the laws of physics to think of the cat, before we open its box, as being both alive and dead, with a probability of 50 per cent for each state. Here's the point of the experiment: our act of opening the box and observing the cat -- taking a measurement, in other words -- is what puts the cat definitely into one of those states.

Cat, alive.

So what's the point, you want to know. What's so earth-shaking about this cat shut in a box?

There are many points, actually: the effect of measurement, the idea of uncertainty, the fact of indeterminacy (of that, perhaps another time). But probably the deepest and yet simplest point is this interesting view of the world: reality takes shape only when, precisely when, we sense it. Until then, it's uncertain. That's the Principle.

The anthropologist gets a picture of tribal behaviour only when he actually observes them, even if that changes the way they behave. We really know the fate of that poor cat only when we open Schrodinger's box.

All of us have wondered on these lines. Is my image in a mirror really there if I cannot see the mirror -- if I've turned my back to it, for example? Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound, if nobody is there to hear it?

Is there reality without observation, existence without consciousness?

Schrodinger's cat showed that the laws of physics might answer that last question with "no". That may be too extreme a view for most people's tastes, people who believe reality surrounds them without needing to be looked at. Then again, Schrodinger's cat wasn't real himself.

The Dancing of Wu Li Masters

Almost two Saturdays ago I was talking to some writers at the S.H. Alattas’s daughter garden wedding reception after a feast of sayur nangka and sambal tumis udang (among other things) when I noticed a young man on a wheelchair moving among the guests. I immediately excused myself and walked towards him, “Excuse me, brother, may I know your name if you don’t mind.”
He seemed taken aback by my sudden appearance but nevertheless tried to force a bewildered smile. “Im Moeha,” came the reply.
I knew it was him. I could recognize the face easily. He was wearing a bright scarlet polo shirt. Another young man who pushed the wheelchair Moeha was sitting on, was wearing an almost identical attire.
He asked for my name and told him I am Shirzad Lifeboat. There was joy in his eyes as we hugged each other.
I supposed life is like that. You could never tell whom you will meet in the future. For instance, I met Cakapaje as just another person who sat next to me (and who cares, just few exchanges of smiles and hi and the moment you step out of the vicinity, you’ll soon forget if such a meeting had actually taken place.)
But for the next few weeks, Cakapaje seemed to be behaving like an electron spinning about an atom (and I’m sure he must have thought of me in the same way but probably with a different analogy), because we kept on crossing into each other paths. Later we found out that we are connected in a certain way. But of course I’m not at the liberty to reveal how we are connected. But I can tell you, I’ve never met him all my life except on that occasion he mentioned in his blog entry.
Sorry. I could not write anymore. I don’t know what I was writing a while ago. I must be having this damned stream of conciousness. Let me light a cigarette. Okay. Lighted one. Took a single puff and blow the smoke above my head. Yeah. I am kind of slow at writing entries on my blog. I was juggling with time trying to drink, eat pizzas and even smoke a cigarette or two while diving underwater. Let me see what should I write now. I love cats. Just the other night I saw a homeless Bengal kitten running about near a coffee shop. Maybe I should write something about cats. But then I have not seen or talked to Cakapaje for a while. He has ceased to behave like an electron spinning about an atom. And so last night he called me to ask if I’m alright. The electron is back now. I told him I am a little busy with the endless things I needed to do and promised I’ll be writing my new entry some time next week. But today, I think I just have that small space of time which I can devote to this. Unfortunately, I’ve used that space to write this note. As such, the real entry needed to be postponed sine die.

P.S. Please ignore the title of this entry as it has no bearing with this entry but rather with the next one, which is about a strange cat and some strange men.