Musings. Ex Libris

* Jan van Eyck, Suckling Madonna Enthroned (1436) Jan van Eyck might be notable for his great details to the landscape and the infusion of that to the almost sculptural, grotesque figures of men, but this acclaimed painter never paid much-needed attention to the accurate proportion. Just look at the volumnousness of Madonna’s robe clashing with the unpractically slight forms of her throne and the baby. The narrowness of the cell, on the other hand, provides a rare intimate fixation on Madonna and her baby, but an underlying anxiety of claustrophobia might lurk stealthily somewhere. The suckling baby looks upon at once warily at his mother- Madonna’s maternal gentleness hardly overcomes the baby but the world, in which he was fortunately born, escapes his youngish vision and its wonders are yet witnessed by this pure soul. Him and I are appointed to sit a person’s house until that person comes back. Clock is ticking away, inflicting that person on a crime of being unpunctual and going b

* Van Gogh, Road with Cypress and Star (1890) Cypresses have featured in numerous paintings of Van Gogh. The leaves and branches stretch and pitch to the zenith, yet such vision of the cypress bears more unnervedness than hopefulness. With the painter’s characteristic speckled treatment of brushstrokes, series of overlaying swirls are dimly created, with the cypress seemingly to mingle gradually into them. The tree cut the painting roughly into two parts, with a sun and a moon occupy each firmament. It is doubtlessly grotesque to have a sun and a moon in concurrence, but if this painting could be interpreted as one’s blurred and gradually faded memory, then the swirls and the anomaly should be duly explained. While the shape of one’s retrospection is at risk of distorting itself and dissipating into the ever-increasing swirls, the colour of it swells and fight tenaciously on the verge of being vanished for good. People have dreaded and warmed their young not to approach that tree. The

* Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1892, 1895) Lautrec’s love for caricature is apparent in the figure’s rough and sketchy lines and unprimed background. Balls and café scenes have been adopted by numerous French painters, extending back to the Impressionism period when they became the dominant subject matter. Rarely one fellow French painter, however, presented a wholly endearing scene of people in their indulgence. Manet’s luminous figures belie their unbounded sexuality; Degas’ marvelous performers can hardly hide their exhaustion when off-stage; the revelers in Lautrec’s paintings, as recklessly as they can be, unreservedly trumpet their decadent lifestyle. A phlegmatic insouciance or coolly restrained emotion is not a sentiment that best sums up Lautrec’s works. The light that shines ruthlessly on the woman’s face in At the Moulin Rouge, everything within or without her is exposed, including unnervedness and fear. A masquerade was taken place in the grand mansion of

* (Gentile Bellini, St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria (1504-7) With his posthumous ubiquity paled comparing to that of his baby brother, Giovanni, Gentile Bellini nonetheless managed to achieve an optical accuracy through his relatively less prolific oeuvre. Providing a monumental painting like St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, the canvas has ample capacity to enclose an almost panoramic view of the religious ceremony- people uniformly thronging around here and there, blocked only by the encompassing buildings. Every subtle detail is attended to with great finesse. Just by looking at those adorned pillars and the ruffles on the monks’ robes one might be illusioned of seeing some work of photography. A compelling sense of solemnity surges from the painting and swirls around the pillars, the rooftops, until it finally reaches the zenith.) I toss and turn yet the somnolence is ever one-step behind the descending darkness. I feel the pulsating heart of weariness, my eyes glance involuntaril

* Robert Doisneau, Musician in the Rain (Contrary to the prevalence of artists yearning for the things of the past and gloating over people’s wounds, Robert Doisneau had his eyes on the present and envisioned as best as he could an idealized world, hence explains the often seemingly staged performance his photography works appear to be. Not too much an idealization to be elevated to divinity, however much Doisneau’s photos strive to present the world in its most endearing fashion, realism is an element that the photographer failed to leach away. It is by no means a wonder that some certain rawness should crop up in a supposedly uplifting humour. A man cherishes his cello so that he shields it with umbrella when the rain pours. Whoever witnesses and appreciates the man’s love for his musical instrument is nonetheless a moot question. The only other person in the photo has his eyes fixed on the canvas. Situated in a same scene and under the same overcast weather, the two characters howev

* Egon Schiele, Seated Woman with Bent Knee (1917)(Portraitures are often deemed pale in comparison to other more elaborate forms of fine arts. Even the most quotidian can flourish into something wondrous, such fact is however sadly overlooked. Schiele was long notorious for the zigzag strokes when delineating human’s distorted forms. Striking a rather impertinent pose the viewers are invited to gaze at the woman’s intimate parts. The salient point of this portrait seems to be focused on the reveal or the disguise of the woman’s thigh, either of which the viewers are uncertain of what the woman is intended to act. There are still so many to be plucked out of Schiele’s painting- besides the thigh, the steely gaze of the eyes and the sketchy handling of the feet. The monstrosity of a statuette existence looms.) She stares into the front and falls silent. Gaze exudes no sentiments nor expression, both eyes resemble stones rather than flints that obstruct stubbornly anyone who wishes to ob

* James Tissot, A Little Nimrod (1882) (Tissot’s paintings are often overshadowed by a veil of disquietness despite their seemingly idyllic setting. The innocent child-play depicted slowly creeps into a Lord of the Flies-esque malice. Three children feign prostrate under the defeat of the victor, who draws a sword ready for another bout of ruthless slaying. The distorted body of the child on the right makes the game seem more realistic than playful, the mother, however, is moved to a rear end to prevent from witnessing the imminent dreadful outcome.) Little Jim dreads to tell everyone that he has left little John on the playground. A surprise little Jim initially intended to plan yet when the dusk sets in his fear rises, rises like the sunset-red that seems to emerge amid the coming darkness, only one knows that the redness is doomed to fade away. Little Jim could feel the dusts gathering around his feet when he sped away from little John, who was obviously too engrossed in his picture

* Johannes Vermeer, Officer and the Laughing Girl (The unconventionality of this painting lies in how the viewers can only get a partial view of the man, who is suggestively in depth conversation with the smiling woman. The window is ajar while lights flood in the room, encroaching unto everything except the viewable part of the man's face. Whoever is trying to surmise the man's facial expressions will remain a doubtless fool.) What makes a good story sound if the world is already packed with sounds? He seats her cosily in a room robbed of all possible noises, except the regular pendulum-swings of the man, who promises the girl to tell the tale no sooner. The tale unfolds and speeds faster than the gusts lilting on the man's tongue, spanning widely from the child who was lost from the rose that ailed. An excellent tale needn't veer too far from its quotidian matter to make it exciting. The man has traveled far enough to dismiss the chimerical account of amusements, for

(J.M.W Turner, Eruption of Vesuvius ) I set my sight on what was before me and thought I owned the scenery. There was an eruption happening, true, but the burning red of flame was made beautiful when it soared amid the oppressing dark of sky. I had an impulsion of holding what I saw into my hands, like a ravishing possession, although it might be like coals, tossing and turning about. I could answer anyone who questioned, that I did covet the scenery, so exceedingly that the ongoing flame trailed through my head, casting an indelible badge in commemoration of my frenzied passion. No, not did I once awake and eradicate the covetous image from my memory. Nor did I rack my brain feverishly for a more accurate delineation of the scenery. I simply needed to draw up the curtains of my bedroom and there provided before me the same image I had always dreamed of dreaming. But as I wound up the curtains in a fury, with my searching eyes I discovered a picture which, although doubtlessly bearing

(Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin ) We dance through our lives. Ever been to a waltz where partner changes from every turn of the back, every swirl of the body? I was once in a waltz, where happened to be my most eventful, I found myself pursuing in coincidence by two women in their prime. Despite my visible discomfort away I danced with the more striking one of the two, leaving the other grimly jilted. Her palpable sadness I can still recall- two eyes stared straightly to the front while the shadows of dancers skidding before her higgledy-piggledy. What belied those eyes was fire of jealousy that simmered, whose tongue lashed over across my back. Flicker of fire that itched me. Not only in love but we also dance through all aspects of life. That was how I once waltzed pass a fair, where a troupe of children with hobby horses on their heads frolicked about. How I was seized with a sudden panic when those hobby horses surrounded me so, as if I was the sole target of their

(Frans Hals, Catharina Hooft with her Nurse ) Hand, delicate like a bud stippled with spring dew, gently brushing off an apple- an equanimous dismissal of so radiant a temptation. For her heart is flooded with extreme merriment, such merriment that is ineffable for whatever form of expressions. I stare into the front, rigid my facial expressions into sheer solemnity and at pains to contain my fizzy exuberance. Why the stiffness of the dress always impedes the outburst of my inner joy? She is told to reduce her smile into a mere smirk, as conforming to the ever-celebrated tradition of portraiture. I take yet another sigh of impatience and waiting for another flash of light, exploding straight before my face. My nurse holds an apple and is told to stage a performance of offering me the prop. I, doubtlessly, am supposed to convince the viewers that a reject of the apple is retorted. My nurse bundles through the dumb show, while I, being as adept as a good actor can be, fail to r

(Francisco Goya, Un incendio ) She fancies imagining herself dropping into an abyss. She wants to experience the tangible darkness, to be able to witness throngs of them skid pass her like clouds. Colours are no more than a sense of contrast, so light is never blocked by darkness, nor is darkness relieved by light. It might be more appropriate to say the two compensate each other: light humbles itself for the sake of darkness, and darkness cedes its territory to light. She never shudders at the suggestion of not seeing anything but herself. It is not a reflection if you see yourself in the dark. It is certainly you that you stumble into. According to the aforesaid light/dark theory, it should not be a discovery if darkness lights up something you never know. She once heard a story of a plunger, who found throngs and throngs of human flesh pile together at the pit of a cave. “Who are you and what are you doing?” the plunger asked with voice trembled of horror. One of them wr

Some sighted a little girl, clothes bedraggled, picking up her stuffed doll afore a painting by Salvator Rosa, The Death of Regulus. How and why a grand museum piece ends up on the walls of ghetto is beyond comprehension. Maybe the painting is transported through the flicker of light the little girl recklessly ignited. For the weather is irrefutably dismal and the sale of candles soars. So soars the price of candles, the most invidious vendor makes it so. Some sighted a man facing heavenward and lamenting his inability to purchase even a short, unreliable candle. This winter is made austere, since it is too expensive a flame to exorcize the pricking coldness. No mists nor fogs but something dense and humid descends from the sky, encompassing all. Like a weightless carpet it falls, presumably a white whispering from God. A doddering old man stares up and declares he sees snows. A stout egg-white candle held by some silky-skinned, taper fingers illuminated all. At least to the little gir

A person is by no means identified as a maestro even when he is infused with every creativity one can grasp, words, music, paints or crafts. Once being depraved of all these, what is left of that person is a question to be begged. I am now sitting in a room four-walled by white blankness. Nothing blotted onto those walls but sheer palpabaleness. I feel things through my sentience when nothing stands in the way to juggle with the vision. Everything is nullified into its bareness. I feel I can be cooped up in this room forever. Other rooms are hemmed in with canvas blatantly-sprinkled over. Noises blaring out of every line and every shape. Their inhabitants are convinced of their superiority. Milk cows scuttering across the floors whimpering like a weanling baby. Nevertheless someone is weeping in the corner of my room. My eyes penetrate the white screens but do not reach the one who cries. The muffled sobs are titillating yet at pains to raise my sympathy. Something far away tumbles in,

She is always deemed a mute girl. Her uneventful reticence raises eyebrows. It is actually she who raises eyebrows first when being interrogated of her quietude, and living up to her label she offers no reply. That quietude was more of a latent idiosyncrasy than a natural inclination, for she used to ramble like any of you. The picture is still vivid in retrospect of how she rambled: angels with velvet wings lilting puckishly on streams of innocent words. Presumably too innocent those words that they immediately provoked the Authoritative. An offhand decision was made from the Authoritative, and the grave quietude descended. Supposedly the aforementioned is too embellished a paragraph. She promises to whittle down any surplus of her story for sake of concision. Concision denotes dead silence. The night is shrouded in velveteen silence as she ponders about. Plans roll out of gestation and into the embryonic stage of action as she ponders. A spectre she is made by those malicious flesh w

All attention now turn to a shrouded figure on the flee. An escapee he is not, nor is he a bustling commuter. Night is impossible to bear such muted tone. All the hurly-burly seems to be swept away without mercy. A swirling smoke of dusts he incites in the wake of his hobbling pace. Beware! Night murmurs to itself as the smoke uncontrollably swerves up. Disquiet lurks threateningly in, the murky smoke slowly gnaws. No music and not a sound are heard. Imagination sets flames on them. Alive, the music yawns itself alive from below. Like the residue of a closed bakery, smouldering melodies emit from below his mud-scattered boots, from below the pulsated earth; the flagrance of music wafts. A mirage he illusions of seeing: little girl dancing under a ring of light in pleated-skirt. Her movement coheres with the arpeggio taps. All perked-up dynamics ironed somewhat at the end of every four bars, in which a slight squeak of the girl’s ballet shoes is audible. Under the conspicuous spotlight

Objects focused: fruits poised in a red bowl placing against a black screen. Music sashays in: free jazz, notes drop in an abrupt curve at every bar. Figures silhouette on the screen because night falls. And the rare lights, traveling from the moon, sift through the somewhat worn curtains. Lights slant on the fruits; their silhouettes thrown onto the screen- they imprint each other. The apple crookedly distorted into half, one in dark and the other in light. Angles and depth thus testified. Funny no questions are posed for the apple’s substance, for it is truthfully flat, as flat as red smears. With the aids of light the flat apple simply conforms to the tradition of concreteness- one side in dark and the other in light, a shape is virtually born. The fact confounds everybody, of how the flatness extends and predominates. A hulking something shrinks into a blob then some turbid water cocooned tentatively in hands. A blotch the thing might eventually land in. That banana, a perfect yell

Sometimes when a story is so powerfully fabricated, it horrifies you. This eventually leaves an imprint in your memory that galvanizes you whenever some evocations appear. The fact well-applies to a story I just finished reading, and a subsequent reference is drawn between the deserts in the story and the world I’m situated in. I hate to dredge up world-weariness when there are actually so many other things I can relate to. It is such a self-centered awareness to impose every story onto oneself. So I will only make it brief by concluding that my conception of the world is like a desert where one is encompassed by hazards, and it is impossible for him to escape far since supplies must be begged first. But nobody will be that benevolent to lend you anything when every entity is on the fringe of demise in this dreadful desert. I tend to stay in one spot and shut up my mouth so I won’t be overcame by thirst too soon. Most of the things I’ve read are abound with people. Vile bodies, goodie-

One night I was waken by the noise of a couple bawling to each other outside on the corridor. Being galvanized up at such untimely moment, I resolved in switching the channels desultorily while the bawl heated on. Motions and images flipped through the screen like batches of vignettes. The ebb and flow of the noise outside kept with the fleet of the channel, thus a comical consequence was induced. It is funny how people are implicitly inclined to match their lives onto the screen, and into the screen however they result in. Some concierge, I presumed, settle the argument briskly and everything restored to its order like every yesterday. People can be categorized into three: one with those who are always brimming with confidence and wielding their dominance wherever they go- they are the victors. Most people in general should be in the second one, who surface and sink just like every other but refusing to sail close to the wind, they secure themselves a perfect spot where they can witne

As I drew out the curtain I saw almost nothing before me but clouds of white smoke predominating the scenery. It was one of those few days when fogs descend the city. I have an inexplicable penchant for fogs, which are impressively neutral, positioning between the drab clearness and the radical inclemency. I saw the fogs cleared before me, gradually, in dribs and drabs. Without any assistance from the sun the fogs petered out until dim traces of buildings or every-day-matters crept their way back in their forts. I’ve been aspiring to do music and working diligently for years to hone my ability and knowledge just to make me eligible for the career. Owing it to my volatile taste in too many genres I have yet pinpointed of what direction I should tend to. The problem surfaced as well on my writing, which are frankly a batch of desultory rots that offer no fruits for your grey matter. It is a topic or a concept that I’m constantly stressing upon and groping for, or else things just litter

I felt forlorn watching the calamity of Japan on the telly since months ago I just spent my most brilliant time traveling around its capital. It was one of those chill but not bleak days when I strolled about the streets of Tokyo. I had an image of colours instantly, of a swaying white and grey. For me it was the cleanest and most impressive combination of colours, and the one that exuded the most contented serenity. The titillated image of white and grey rarely popped up in my life. Besides the aforementioned the closest one I can conjure up is when scouring around the vicinity of my house after a washover rain. I deem the white-and-grey incidents my happiest moments in life. When such moment occurs the colours are wrought in a most cliché romantic veil where they will dance and swirl around me like bubbles. And like bubbles they pop and vanish within a blink of an eye. Everybody has his own definition of what a suffering will be. It would be indubitably ungrateful for me to acknowled

Studying Children’s Literature and reading several likeminded young adolescent fictions these days remind me of tireless repetition, which is believed to be a significant technique widely used in those books. I never really like repetition, nor assume it dreadfully dull, for with the evocation of both rather wicked-looking twins in Diane Arbus’ picture and The Shining, an odd feeling of grotesquerie creeps up behind my back. Yes, it is certainly the image of two identical selves that really scares me, for whom are you going to fight off first? Nevertheless, the benefit of employing repetition in children books is psychologically affirmed. It is generally believed that there is no better way of memorizing things promptly and effectually than having a nagging one dinning them like rambles into your ears. Therefore, with children books once grasping the template of plots in the first chapter, the other ones are just another flip of the coin. I reckon the complacent predictability of those

When being asked about the drawbacks of her budding career, Diane Arbus revealed a rather unsettling facet of her job as a photographer to get almost perversely intimate with the people in her shots. Having the reluctance to intrude upon others’ personal lives is just a euphemism for snooping too closely around them. An impish peep show turns into a grotesque freak show eventually, hence the harrowing effect of how Arbus’ works present. Both Rear Window and Blowup tackle the unexpected outcome of an initially random peeping. The antics in the movies are ubiquitously replicated still now, that whenever a curious george peeps, it is merely and ultimately a highly-entertaining murder he will seek out. The abode I’m currently staying in offers a grand view which is fortunately not plagued by any buildings flanking by or protruding in front. For Monet he would probably look beyond to the infinity of the sky and marvel at its subtle vicissitudes; Munch, on the other hand, transfix his eyes o

I conclude the incident that evokes my greatest bewilderment is getting lost. Lost not in an utterly unfamiliar land but a familiar labyrinthe where all paths lead to the same starting point. It is like tracing your way out in the lines of God’s palm which proves indisputably futile the attempt. Several synonymous experiences I’ve had, much to the general disbelief, stamp on my nightmarish horror. Few of the many trips to Singapore consist collisions with festival days. I slink from overwhelming hubbubs so any authentic festivities are stranger to us. However once after a gorged supper on greasy Thai culinary, I raised an uneventful suggestion of taking a walk around the vicinities. My curiosity of nightlife was then still in its embryonic and most fermenting stage, and a further suggestion was made of ambling to the harbor through the festive crowd. An outrageous stomachache ensued when my family and I were obscured and almost swallowed by a looming mob of people. Witnessing lines of

Ever since relocating in Auckland to complete my university education, life has become more or less pseudo-vagabond. The whole year can be chopped into numerous portions, with me traveling tirelessly between Taiwan and New Zealand, neither of the two places in which I spend for a considerable period. A change of pace is essential but a change of ‘accelerated’ pace might appear overwhelming. Thankfully I do not have any glaring symptoms of disorientation. It is overtly pretentious for some to divine their ceaseless traveling as a cause leading to a subliminal consequence of ‘calling every place home,’ which is equivalent to ‘calling nowhere home.’ And a prolix of how they find their vagabond lives dreadfully lonely and inconceivable for human beings is expected to follow thus. As the intensity of my traveling increases, the first thing I perceived was how everyone seemed sulkily lonely or mad. Yes the whole world seems to be pervaded with extreme madness. I feel peculiar and dull of bei

I’ve always aimed to be a nice girl, or I’ve being brought up to be one. It was transparent recently that I was gradually derailing from the justly road onto which a nice girl duly treads. Being in a certain character is not something that is delineated or suggestive, but rather an empirical awareness manifests in that person’s temperament. I sketched in my head surreptitiously the world I map out with which came intuitively one without boundaries or disciplines. I’m still holding the dogged belief that nothing can be explained by anything. It sounds prematurely maddening but I used to keep in my mind that everything I’d done was done for the sheer effort of striving to be a paragon to my children, if I did have one in the future and I’m sure I will have no matter what. However, the ideal starts to fragment when I’m having troubles impressing my parents. I may be pleasantly malleable but am sure can never be shoehorn into the mould my parents idealized. That was the time when I was ala

Categorically I dislike melodramatics. People devote to melodramatics to perfect their creation. The purposefully-furrowed faces some adopt when boasting about the piquancy of a severely-tragic story which influences their creation. The faces that are teemed with wrinkles and creases, on they put an unworldly veil. If I happened to be an ant I would take refuge in one of those crisscross lines and guarantee the longevity of my inhabitation. I used to hold the receiver conventionally like how everybody holds, but now I have the natural inclination of holding it lateral, does that make me admirably histrionic? Vacillation is the commonest and dreariest symptom of a young adult who is trying too hard to assert himself. I’ve been vacillating like a tumbling ocean whose tides are already fizzled with cloying foams. The result is a doubtlessly exhausted body causes by constant rotundity. Headaches also occur occasionally. But my soul is never exhausted. It is generally believed that vacillat

For days the odd feeling of a defunct mind is acute. All the fuelling motivation of undertaking some constructive task is nipped in the bud when all the words and ideas are suspended in a hackneyed chaos. Therefore I've sit and waited for the moment, the moment which some will divine as a slip of a thought across the mind, to come. I made it a goal of writing some proper songs this holiday but have yet to land in any presentable works. There are only snippets of songs which sound no smarter than nursery-rhymes, crop up uneventfully with distorted notes. Listening to those dreadful demos disgorged everything from my head into a notorious hole. A hodgepodge of anger and befuddlement tumbled in my stomach. I dislike the self-glorification of writing kooky songs only due to one's futility of producing beautiful if not coherent notes. It's the sublime excuse for those dogs in the manger. My stupidity of following the masters of Syd Barrett, Donovan, Marc Bolan and Jim Morrison o

I deem that everybody is at least a monomania. Life will be lifeless if without a fixation. Some high-minded bigwig might dismiss fixation as the snag of the road to success, but they are too indifferent to calculate the impossibility without it. Those who are dogged about relinquishing fixations are the ones who sit in the pitch-dark. Sheer darkness they can only witness and hallucination comes imminently afterward. Sheer hallucination their mind ecstatically dwell upon, and monomaniacs they all somehow become. A fixation offers an excusable explanation to hound after something. The real intrigue behind such pestering perseverance is the feeling devoid of extreme indignation or hatred. There are certainly frustrations encountered from time to time, but with a fixation one will never grind his teeth and bite it from sheer impulsion, because the larger the wound the longer one will take to heal it. Heal the wound so you can try to woo your fixation back, and once you fortunately hold th

Somebody used to have the illusion, or the obsession, of becoming a bird. Therefore he flapped his scraggy arms as violently as possible, in a vain hope of conquering the gravity and eventually gaining elevation. What he had been anticipating wasn’t the posture he had painstakingly practiced to fly like a bird, but the pain on his head he was told to get when rocketing out of the roof. From day to day he glared at the leak on the roof and spurred him on to tearing it even asunder. It wasn’t until some balmy day, while taking a stroll with my mom in a nearby park she mentioned randomly of some pathological case of people who dream of becoming birds, did I realize the severity of the aforesaid incident. It won’t become a talking point if there weren’t at least a handful of similar instances. Thus it wasn’t merely my whimsical fabrication, people do dream of flying. Levitation is what I came the closest of flying. Sorrow, exaltation and excitement prompt the inclination of levitating. Pre

I’m afraid I have to say I have long passed the teenybopper phase of keeping idols. Someone you revere is most suggestively not to be met brusquely, it is believed. I once read how Robyn Hitchcock met Syd Barrett after the former Pink Floyd lead vocal retired from the music scene, and the encounter was apparently too disappointing that he did not even bother to prolong the description. Sometimes you have to put into account that your idol still runs to the grocery and wears shorts. Therefore while walking to school I try not to dwell too long on one specific object lest the longer I dwell upon the oftener I will like to come across it every day, and an astonishing disillusion is prophetic and imminent. People often end up reversing to what images you inflict upon when you first meet them, and being one who affirms accurately of how one’s appearance suggests, I feel like the easiest math question which contains merely a + and =. Incredulity is often foolishly magnified when countering s

The gust exerts its full force and crackles mercilessly the frail windowpane, well-secured from the impervious inclemency, the owner of the room quibbles with a trifle cold. A dismal day reminds me of some Impressionist painting- blurry, sombre, patchy, with smudges of blue there and grey here. An indisposed state evokes the childhood memory of incessant bedridden days, in which the vapid image shows its rays of hope with the installation of the sickly heifer’s mom. Story after story the mother tried to invoke, her incantation even more alluring than the Magical Flute, and image after image those stories played up before that heifer, with snots ceaselessly dropping into her wide-opened mouth. My mom loved to read me stories when I was young. However, while most of my childhood memories are recklessly blocked out, it is often those unfestive moments that I remember the most. The bedtime stories that still retain their vividness are those I used to digest when I was overcome with a fever