Category: Poetry

Agaration of Empathy
On Spoken Word, Music, Technology and the Self

Recently, our prime minister reiterated that the arts and culture are an integral part of Singapore which the country must continue to nurture. He went on to say that we must continue ‘to make connections between knowledge and real-world application.’ Typically, I don’t expect anything else of our leaders. They always have to figure out a way to find economic value from our art. Therefore, art must become translatable… today’s painters must become tomorrow’s animators in the service of an MNC, or some other faceless corporation. The bottomline is that all art must become monetised otherwise it is stigmatised.

We are particularly susceptible as a country to believing that progress is couched only in terms of a monetary imperative, and that art and culture are options that we can ‘explore’ once we are comfortable in our ensconced wireless bubbles. We cleave to technology as a byword for capable communication,we drive the creation of endless apps and push for green technology in buildings, flooding our homes with screens, consuming our spare hours with a banality that demarcates the narrow fields of thought circulating on the interwebs.

Apparently, our PM also quoted the Bible, since he offered that ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ in relation to arts and culture moving us beyond subsisting on basic needs. But, since he took the verse out of its original context, I shall take the liberty to finish it up, ‘but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of those who minister to us.’

 

Somewhat related to this, for the last six months, I have been working on a show called ‘Agaration of Empathy’ with four fellow artists; Bani Haykal, Weish, Isa Ong and Suhaili. They are all maestros in their own right, each fronting a band or bands or just performing and creating solo work both locally and overseas. It has been humbling and enlightening, a tumble into the possibilities of sound art as espoused through the vagaries of voice.

We started tentatively though, and it took us a while to figure out, like any devised/built work, what exactly we wanted to say. Eventually it felt that there was an artistic discourse waiting to be birthed in regard to the function of the self in the age of technology and how it affects conversation, interaction and emotion.

This lead us to our title, which combines a Singlish word, agaration – from the Malay word, agak, or agak-agak, to guess or estimate something. We coupled this with the often unquantifiable notion of empathy to attempt to do three things: Create, conceive and concatenate.

Here is a piece that I wrote for the show, which we performed as a group. It encapsulates a certain absorption of post-human impulses for modification through technology onto the fundamental limitations of the self.

Directions for the attenuation of desire as a function of electrical providence

(slow to fast)

  Tch tch tch

  Tch tch tch

  Tch tch tch

  Tch tch tch

  Tch tch tch

Commmmmmpreeeeeeeeehennnnnnsionnnnnn

 schism chasm orgasm schism chasm orgasm schism.  (loop)

(throat whistling)

(to sing in numbers)

 

silence for ten seconds

 

The body as destruction, turns upon itself, the pivot points, pointing out the point where pointilism appoints some point of inquiry

The body as design,

Slick wetness of wire and desire to lengthen, straighten, shorten, fatten, unshape, unmend,

Pretension is only pre-tension, before tenses present, continuous, this is the best present we can give to ourselves, always becoming past, never future, never perfect.

screen screams (in various forms and modes, for 20 seconds)

Consider the possibility that the screen is the only means we know how to communicate.

Does this mean any other means will be subject to means testing?

Meaning

Tch tch tch

Tch tch tch

Tch tch tch

Plate glass cheekbones, magnetized to draw kisses from the ether, the cognizance of like-minded thoughts hurtling together.

A ridged skull honed from concrete, weatherproofed against the cost of living and other forms of terror

Shaved feet, bone and sinew unburden to mould into luxury shoes, or the compact between those who foreshorten toes like unwieldy pencils

The image of a skull in the retina, the eye looks upon another eye without the clarity of the soul; a cloud of burnt grass is in the way

When Judy ignited, it was from the subdermal weight of all the mods they had implanted in her, beauty was a fiefdom of wetware, ideas running like teflon armies under her skin, ocular desires of dream merchants spat on the face of an unassuming proletariat.

Her skull shaven of popular culture, she inserted triceratop spikes in thin metal revolutions, daring anyone to challenge her head-on.

Her feet shod with titanium, she was no longer an elephant on an ocean floor.

Under the ruin of her eyelids, they embroidered a Persian patchwork of binary runes.

When she spoke you controlled her volume through an app.

A grounding wire ran from her heart out through her fingertips.

(not in unison) Make the sound of greatness Judy

Make the sound of greatness

We are finite loops, memory is only marrow

The rainbows stop when they hit concrete

but her tongue,

her tongue is the same

her tongue is the same (echoes)

Ah, but don’t you see it has been weaponized, circa 2000, the one fallout from the millennium bug we never caught, here is her last recording, listen…

This was my speech for the Proposition during the Art’s House 10th Anniversary celebrations debate on 29^th March 2014. The motion was ‘Singapore can be a city of literature.’ To our chagrin, we won.
Singapore. We are a city of literature.

When we reserve tables, the word chope is personified through a multitude of creatively employed objects.
We photograph sonnets of inappropriate behavior in public. We write incredible monologues of public transport breakdowns, of long waiting times between our stanzas.

We the people are always reading… between the lines.

We are always stomping stories onto each other.
We are an efficiency of prose; precise and purposeful.

And there is great literary value found in Korean dramas, which have become a staple diet for us Singaporeans. We have learned to plot our lives through the perfect skin tone of story, to cry on cue against the moving metonymy of Seoul food.

Facebook buzzfeeds our daily dose of deep thought and connects us to dozens of denizens who dream in the same language of like. We tweet in haiku, rendering the mundane into concise catapults of meaning.

Singapore, we are a city of literature, despite all they might say.
After all, visitors misunderstand the figurative language of our gantries, the need to pass under these small taxes of our travail.

We are pilgrims bearing alms in cash-cards, the great temple demands a daily offering, and who are we, who have been blessed with vehicles, who are we to complain?

We must be grateful, as we pause in jams and squeeze onto elevators. Our hours are long, but like extended metaphors, they build us up, unrelenting, with all indicators of progress covered.

For we have gone first world, a world of fine first lines and long last lives.

We truck in similes as popular as reclaimed sand and foreign talent.
As expensive as Tokyo,
As crowded as Hong Kong,
As rich as, nay richer than New York.
Our billionaires sit like jewels atop Mount Faber, sparkling high above newborn citizens, who stretch out in boxcar apartments.

And our people are writing poetry on trains, listen to this gem from a blogger:
Love.
Teenage love.
A fire burning in their nascent loins.
Uncontrollable.
Too in love to know love.
And too like love to have love.
Too hot.
Searing hot. In warmth and scorching wind.

So when the trains do stop between the stations of our lives, we shall walk the last mile, hand-phones raised in wonder at the greatness of our structural engineering, the power of what lies beneath.

At the end of this tunnel, we always see the light.

Singapore, we are not just a city of literature, we are a country of literature.

The whole nation is a poem with matching end rhymes; the right analogy graces every occasion.

The best people, in the best order.

 

RE: TO ALL CHICKENS CONCERNED

Here is the latest coop from the Progressive Chicken Party (PCP):

 

The Party believes in equality for all chickens;

no chicken should be left behind, caged against its own will.

Eggs must not be aborted into omelettes but must claim

their rights; as shell-shocked chicks scrambling to life.

 

All chickens suffering from cage layer fatigue

will be given a free pass to watch Chicken Little.

Chicks are yellow because they have escaped the yolk;

they are free range children of the sunny side of life.

 

Cockerels rise to greet the dawn, chasing the devil away.

As hens lay blessings, chickens are the progressive proletariat,

watchers of time and egg, hard-boiled believers in suffering.

Stop chicken genocide. Go for the cows, they won’t see it coming.

 

Chickens will be restored as oracles; once we brought

prophesies to pass, we still guide nations from the dinner table.

The foundations of philosophy have been laid from us;

which came first, the chicken, or the egg?

 

In other news, the Hen Pecked Association of Cockerels is organising

its annual summit on ways to minimise committing domestic fowls.

In the beginning was the Word eternal,

sunshine of the spotless,

mind petals on a wet, black bough,

the best laid plans of mice

between the shadow and the soul.

 

Death is nothing to us, since

there’s a bluebird in my heart, for love

is strong as death, friends, Romans.

Countrymen, lend me your hope,

is the thing with feathers, all kisses

 

are metaphors decipherable by sea

that bangs in my throat. Between my

fingers and my thumb, I wandered lonely

as a cloud, the mind is its own place.

I have heard the mermaids singing

 

when a woman loves a man, the clock

strikes with her hands, when we two

parted in silence, your absence has

gone through me. The breezes at dawn

have secrets, the rain is full of ghosts.

 

Do I dare disturb the universe?

You can hear the dew falling.

I carry your heart with me and

your fingerprints on my windows

in the machinery of the night.

 

Between the dark and the daylight

the stars are not wanted now,

death makes angels of us all.

Two roads diverged in a wood

and in between are the doors.

 

Now I’m trying to dig deeper, things

fall apart; the centre cannot fear

in a handful of dust to be, or not to be;

I still have time to be, a narrow fellow

in the grass, going where I have to go.

 

Tonight, let us not become tragedies.

To err is human; to forgive, I celebrate

myself, and sing myself. Like a bridge

over troubled waters, the weight

we carry is love.

 

Although this is technically not necessary, nevertheless here are the lines by their authors in order of appearance:
The Bible, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda, Epicurus, Charles Bukowski, The Bible, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Saul Williams, Anne Sexton, Seamus Heaney, William Wordsworth, John Milton, T.S. Eliot, David Lehman, Saul Williams, Lord Byron, W.S. Merwin, Rumi, Edna St. Vincent Millay, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, Allan Ginsberg, Henry Longfellow, Jim Morrison, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Jim Morrison, Richard Siken, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Anis Mojgani, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roethke,
Buddy Wakefield, Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Paul Simon, Allan Ginsberg

 

A little experiment with Google…

After three years of plugging away at my next collection of poems, I’m really proud to say it’s finally coming into the light! Postal Code is going to launch on 4th November at the Singapore Writer’s Festival at 7 p.m., alongside Desmond Kon’s The Arbitrary Sign. Expect a special guest appearance from my former prof at NUS, Dr Rajeev Patke, as well as a reading and Q&A.

 

Postal Code is a book about place. It divides into five sections; broadly speaking.

Singapore

Faith

Love

Death

Endings

While the Singapore section seems to encapsulate all of the other sections thematically, I felt that it was time to return (after the nomadic wanderings of my previous book, Chai) to more home-grown issues. Hence poems about the 2011 elections, Mas Selamat, the 6.9m white paper, reservist training in the Army, and so forth.

The poems in the other sections consider other geographical places, but never quite stray from stories and experiences close to my heart.

And if you want to get a sneak peek of one of the poems, do drop by the Smoke-Filled Room this weekend. ‘Suara,’ a poem from Postal Code, is part of a collaborative work with Vikas Kailankaje. And I’ll be performing poems from Postal Code and more together with two other smashing poets, Jennifer Champion and Raksha Mahtani, on 27th October, 6pm. The gig is called Smoke-Filled Poets (naturally, right?) Come on down to get a lungful of socio-political incorrectness!

 

An artistic dialogue with painter Janette Maxey. First exhibited at Lit Up 2013 as part of Tête-à-tête, a progressive conversation between three pairs of artists from different backgrounds. For Aproximity, Janette started with a painting and I responded with a poem. She then replied with another painting and I countered with a poem. The final exhibition featured eight paintings and poems, all created within a month.

 

a(proximity _)

by Marc Nair & Janette Maxey

The large, unseen gaps that hover between things

Exploring distance in a crowd, or any similar density

Growing from the nearness of space, time and relationships

 

Commute

 

These hooks hold a neck easily,

less so the baleful glance. Queue

please, this is transit ordered

en masse, a rapid conveyance

from coop to set meal. Whether

part or whole, we are all flayed

to the bone, laid in fragrant bowls,

our skins roasted with endeavour.

 

Shelter, Becoming

 

Moment of sky,

with its shades of blue opal,
descends, a pendant hanging

from the neck of God,
above the hands of casual fronds
that drift lazily across the fence,

some rich man’s walled-in
dream; unbarbed, yet high
enough to be a shelter, becoming
home, for those who have enough.

 

Clasp

 

Could this be the hand of a great man,

curled into original thought, holding
in the veneration of meditative years?

Or it could be a bunch of bananas,

arcing in ripe repast, a prayer before
being twisted off, and consumed.

 

Veil

A new day is sold behind metal hoardings

soon to ascend from pathos; the scaffold

of progress, the bones of a millionaire’s

new playground, rising higher over the

frayed houses that window lost seas,

the sad waves of tattered palm trees

and a sky that cannot see its stars.

Shimmering skirts walk by night

like tattered blue veils; only a

streetlamp will keep aglow.

 

Chamber

 

This pot of necessary excess

This chamber of effluent secrets
painted with an indistinct eye on nature

This studio apartment of inner wealth
collecting drops the color of gold, a
dank waterfall in the wee hours of dawn

This is no cistern of desire, from which a
poxy of withering men may gulp a toast
No history stagnates overlong inside,
everything empties with the rising sun

Cosmetic

She would dream this cosmetic fantasy,
a regression from riches into youth

Eyes the allure of perfect almonds,
eyebrows a delicate arch to hold the

weight of pencilled-in propriety and
those lips; what rounded reasons,

what bodied desire, what bee-stung
kisses to plant on the skin of some

natural fool, who will never know
the difference between collagen

and candour

Wrap

Last of the mannequins,
they hold stories in plastic silence.

Stand too close,
and they’ll stare down your
imperfections, though that
uniform smile makes them
two sisters in a family feud,

a wealth of colour wrapped
around serious eyes.

Each one takes on her own hue;
some haughtier than others,
some an inviting cup of tease.

No one has asked for a sister along
with a scarf, so they carefully
wrap their dreams like these shawls,

wishes warm against sudden chill.

 

A Hairball of Rambutans

 

It was our secret proper name for luscious memories

set against evenings in neighbors’ dense gardens,

wielding a home-made pole with a kind of scissors

at the end to pull a string and snip off thin branches.

We watched the rambutans fall like circus jugglers

collapsing into heaps of laughter and juice. Too much

rambutan is just too much, and nothing more. Nobody

we knew ever fell ill from overeating, and there was

always extras to bring home, our sticky fingers

clutching plastic bags, as we stopped for a second

before getting in the car to break off wild ixoras

and slurp on stems, a nectar of kampung and sunset.

 

 

Save

with no caterwauling, or hissy-fit pussyfooting

Pawsibly psychic, they make the best mewsic.

The cream of the bowl, it’s time to rowl and roll.

No alive or dead Schrodinger suppositions,

not the product of random composition,

they’re conceived under howl and hiss,

on moonlit nights in tuna bliss.

Though they lick you into hairballs,

and scratch poetry on your walls;