In Arcadia

"Every now and then life sends us little messages. The messages are meant for us alone. No one else can see them. No one perceives them as messages. They may seem perfectly banal to the world, but to you, for whom they were intended, they have the force of revelation. Much of the failure and success of life, much of the joy or suffering in a life, depends on being able to see these secret messages. And much of the magic, or tragedy of life depends on being able to decipher or interpret these messages.

Those who spend their lives over-deciphering tend to go mad, they go round the bend, they become paranoid; and every billboard and scrap of paper which the wind blows their way, or every other image or word called out on a television screen becomes a message of overwhelming importance to them. Then the messages drive out living, drive out life.

But those who live their lives without seeing the mesages at all, or seeing them but not deciphering them, or no interpreting them properly, live dumb lives, perpetually adrift on the barren seas of mediocrity and insignificance, the deadly boring wastes of orthodoxy. In short, they have no dialogue with the universe or with themselves."

- Ben Okri, In Arcadia

"In Arcadia" reads like a study on life masquerading as a story.

No, haven't been receiving any secret decoded messages. Life now plays like a simple song, a nursery rhyme of sorts, those kind that you'd enjoy to have, for a while. It doesn't require you to ponder, it doesn't tax your spirits, it doesn't offer you peaks and nadirs of emotions. Like cruising on a barren plain, with no rocks or bumps in sight, just the warm humid air of monotony that smothers slightly, but which you ignore because you don't want to get off the straight and clear path. Life is unfulfilling at the moment, but it is an unfulfilment that you can safely embrace, because it is safe.

I can feel the synapses of my head switching off one by one from lack of rigorous use, rusting under the lack of practice, crusting slowly until the cogs finally grind to a stop when National Service swallows me whole. Do I miss school? I don't think so. This emptiness of life is every student's Eden, his or her Arcadia, free from the plagues of homework or the endless routine gauntlets they must subject themselves to. But it is a life so mind-numbing that the inactivity is leading to detachment. Any moment soon I can imagine myself ceasing to feel, to taste or to want, because I simply cannot appreciate these feelings.

Waitering

Lesson to all: Always be on the receiving end of the service industry. Always.

Having lost my right to student concessions, homework and exams, I have discovered a new life awaiting me - the life of a paid employee. Having to be civil to people is not difficult, but then being unused to long hours standing and serving is a problem. And this work experience has reinforced my distaste for fat rich snobs.

Right now, I feel like a rug, ready to be stepped on. A rug with tatters and holes, worn out from a new lifestyle I am obviously unused to.

Jeux D'Enfant

I lost all my old toys today. Mom threw them out. I never touch them anymore, but then knowing that they are no longer around is a harsh feeling to have.

Every article harbours a childhood memory, something to look back to and remember when you were young and foolish and ignorant and happy. Losing all the toys, is almost a symbolic loss of childhood. The Optimus Prime discarded is a little piece of my life sliced away. Every Ninja Turtle tossed away is a little bit of myself shredded into viscera. Damnit, I know this is childish, but then I cannot help feeling indignant about my childhood possessions.

Dare

If there were one movie I really wanted everyone I know to watch (apart from the really obvious LOTR finale), it would have to be this. Jeux D'Enfant. Love Me If You Dare. If you ever needed a movie that explored the destructiveness of love and passion, the persistence of an affection to the point of suicide, this has to be it.

At the end, after the montage of lost might-have-beens, and the marvellous crazy dares done in the name of affection, you'll leave with a bittersweet aftertaste - the taste of love perhaps.

All Over?

You'd think that you'd have plenty to do after whatever you have got to do. In the days leading up to the exams, you sit staring blankly at your notes and wonder at what you want to do after the papers, filled with certainty that you will do them. And when you're done, you're just... Done.

Not much strength to do anything. Not much drive to do something. Just sitting there waiting for your life to be taken hold of by someone else, as you run circles in camo-gear in a stupid haircut.

Temperate

Chill winds are the highways of hitchhiking sorrows. You can't feel more lost than when you're alone with them.

Revolutions

I took time off to watch "The Matrix: Revolutions" today. I wish I could say it was a well-deserved break, but my revision is strolling at too leisurely a pace, and there are too little mad-panic-attacks to constitute a deserving rest.

As he beat Neo to a pulp near the end of the movie, Agent Smith asked our intrepid protagonist - "Mr Anderson" - what it was that kept him going: Justice? Hope? Peace? Love? But they were artificial constructs weren't they, cheap inventions by a frail human ego-mind to justify a meager existence? Amidst all the punches thrown in the rain, that line got mired in my brain.

Wish we had an answer to that. Love is but a rush of hormonal chemicals to the brain that disrupts its equilibrium; justice is blind (and open to appeal); and hope is easily crushed. Maybe we exist because we don't know better, or just because we do. And why is there an intrinsic, primal fear of death, if we cannot know why we live?