One May Eve

Let us undo these strands that knotted by itself the moment we whispered cool breaths into each other’s dry mouth. Take the next flight home and leave me with nothing but a pen and paper, pairing vowels and consonants, gathering them like constellations which I will seek out in case it gets too dark.

Because you probably won’t remember. 

It was one May eve when it happened and it needed no magic, no science, nothing needing of knowledge and years of hard study like a college degree. It was a force of earth that gave us a push and suddenly swung us into bed. There were no required rules of tongue and hand games but just the pure and raw want to collapse into each other’s trembling arms and drown out the voice of God who watched us in silent anger as we, now like Adam and Eve heeding the serpent’s wisdom, gyrate to the rhythm of the planets, chests heaving with the silent pull of the supermoon that candled the evening as we fuck our mouths and brains out. I am at once in the midst of sin as I always am, nothing different from how I threw myself a year ago, forever ago. It was just you and me, suddenly metamorphosed into winged creatures sans the halos. And we do not despair, do not regret, do not blow each other’s guts out and begged for love. “There was no love!” I shouted loud enough for my central nervous system to catch it. And yet something inside me stirred. It could’ve just been a laugh rising from the pit of my stomach, a much needed punctuation to complete this lie.

    

 May 10, 2012

painting: Marc Chagall's "Lovers in the Moonlight"

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

The news about the Woodpecker Lazarus broke out just in time as Gabriel Witter (15) mysteriously disappears. While the sighting of the mythical bird threw the entire town of Lily, Arkansas abuzz, the Witter’s over the loss of their beloved Gabriel are thrown out of their peaceful and normal lives as they struggle to cope up with this heartbreaking news. Meanwhile, Benton Sage was sent to Awasa, Ethiopia for his first missionary work. Realizing that he wasn’t cut out for this he begged to be sent back home where a very disappointed family awaits him. Benton Sage soon kills himself (on Christmas day) leaving his roommate, Cabot Searcy, in a religious quest to bring light into Benton’s self-murder and into a misguided quest that will only lead him to a crime he didn’t intend to commit. These are two different stories one will find skipping in and out of from John Corey Whaley’s first book of fiction “Where Things Come Back”. I have often wondered the relevance of Cullen Witter’s story that of Benton Sage’s. It wasn’t until I approached its last few pages that I found out about its relevance. The ending, though predictable, was at least the kind that did not leave you guessing or devastated at all. It was the kind of that evokes a smile as one closes the book. I enjoyed it and felt myself holding back tears as I approached its final chapters.

A few years from now I will surely forget what it’s all about just as I am now slowly losing some whos, whats, whys and wheres but I know I’ve read a beautiful story. And what comes from this is a lesson that one must carry around in life: everyone is entitled to second chances, that blind faith is dangerous and that one must keep a pocketful of hope in the midst of despair. But of course you must read it yourself to understand.   

Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"

Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" is a book I've been reading over breakfast these past few days. Though I am aware of how famous a writer he is, I only managed to get hold of 3 among 12 of his works of fiction (Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka On Shore of which I sold off to a friend).

A flush of memories overcome Toru Watanabe (37) upon hearing a sweet orchestral version of The Beatles's "Norwegian Wood". This haunting piece of melody took him exactly 20 years back, right at the time when Japan and the rest of the world  (in effect of the ongoing "counterculture") was in the midst of various revolutions. He was 17, a university student and right about this time in his life he'd experience a love that he is bound to remember and the greatest loss he will ever have to go through, Naoko. Like the song, the book is dark and it caught me in a certain gloomy mood that took a few days to get over with. It is depressing, ridden with sexually eager and emotionally disturbed characters. They are greatly flawed. They are not preternaturally smart (with the exception of Toru), sometimes you just feel like shutting them off or give them a hard hit in the head for being so utterly perverse and daft. Yet despite these obvious flaws, one can still appreciate them for they are indeed characters with no hint of pretensions. They are young, curious and seekers of answers about various things in life. They make awful decisions which makes life even more complicated than how it actually is. But then, like the divine taking a hand in all these confusing chaos, there is always deus ex machina. On reading "Norwegian Wood", one finds one's self  in a bit of competition between Midori or Naoko, who each has her own charm and peculiarities (Midori being too restricted by her rigid boyfriend, too caught up with looking after her ailing father and also too blatant with her sexual curiosities; Naoko too, who was too emotionally disturbed with no willingness to recover at all). I find Toru's heroic love for both women quite admirable, albeit wrong (when we really think about it) yet we find this willingness to embrace other people's flaws in the name of love (or lust) quite uhm ... relate-able?. I think Murakami has a knack for killing his characters just to lessen the tension that builds up in every chapter. Good enough. But still, despite the obvious "intervention" by the author, the book did not reach a predictable ending, in fact it was ambiguous and it got me thinking. The fuzzy ending leaves us to decide for it ourselves.

** 

Toru (on Euripides)

    "What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they've got all their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it's basically impossible for everyone's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple --- a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ' You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.' Like that. He's a kind of fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this 'deus ex machina'. There's almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that's the point where critical opinion divides over him."

***

I found myself reading this book right at a time when I feel like my life needed a drastic turn. And what more, I always find myself reading a Murakami book on such life-turning decisions. I find this quite odd since I can hardly say that Murakami is one of my writers (but that will soon change, I feel). The very first Murakami book I bought (Sputnik Sweetheart) was to earmark the start of a relationship which will run an unbelievable 4+ years. How timely, that I as soon as I put the book down, I am also putting this chapter in my life to a certain turn.

Meanwhile, "Let's wind our own spring."

   

 

I also found out that there was a movie adaptation of this book back in 2010.

Ken 'ichi Matsuyama as Toru Watanabe in Tran An Hung's movie adaptation of "Norwegian Wood".