Musings. Ex Libris

Weather constantly affects our mood. It is as if we were the creatures of the ocean, drifted by the unpredictable ebbs and flows and with the convergent water as the sky that overhung us. We are the ill-fated ones who are cooped up beneath the hemisphere. Some wily magician, with his sleight of hand, conjures up natural happenings that we ever abiding by. Our volatile moods seem the only conscious beings that know how to rebel. We sulk as our moods are dampened by the gloomy weather. All elements war within our bodies and we expose the emotions on our facades: a ruddy redness that encircles our cheeks, like a feverish child entrapped in his fitful dreams. I, however, feel relatively lucid when days are overcast. With no sunlight that blinks my eyes I can stare unflinchingly towards the infinity. And no fogs can blur our image. We are like the characters in the old movies who manage miraculously to poke through piles of dense blue smoke. Blue is not merely a

                    *Clarence John Laughlin, Imagination (1944)* It almost feels like a sweet dream- I walk back to where I grew up and had spent a large chunk of my youth until last year; leaves rustle when I walk past, this gentle din is coupled with a faint, almost inaudible echo that can be heard growingly amplified when I am nearing the destination. The source of the echo is unknown, for the ground of where I’m standing is more or less reduced to a boundless land of desolation, and not a single soul can be seen wandering about. During the course of my journey the interminable lines of trees beside the road are my sole companion. The trees look exactly the same as I perceived them when I was young- they are the tall, gangly ghosts that are shrouded in their morbid gloom. These ghosts also walk, too, as I can feel them hounding in the wake of my footsteps, always without a sound, without a silhouette. And thus I hasten my pace. Some people’s lives are constant

When I gaze at the word, its formation of letters renders it an uncanny oddity: “grotesque”- one that comprises a lot of twists-and-turns. One always draws towards the grotesque without reason- perhaps it is how we express our delights of spotting something markedly different amongst the other homogenous hogwash. The commonplace bores us. Nevertheless, those who make it a purpose before out seeking for the grotesque often find themselves land in with the shams. The real grotesque is not wholly stripped off its normalities. According to Sigmund Freud’s “ The Uncanny ,” the uncanny belongs to the ones that bear the most resemblances to your own selves- those are virtually the images you stare into the mirror and find it smiling back at you, a smile that conveys both malice and mystery, a smile that is foreign to your mundane understanding. It is an odd fact that I’ve never got along well with twins and usually I like to scrutinize them piercingly, in hope that any

I feel exhaustion from time to time when things do not go as smoothly as I presumed them to be, and that exhaustion might be coupled with weariness when in nervous anticipation of something bad afoot. It is principally a physical exhaustion that influences psychological listlessness. In paintings, exhaustion is not merely represented by whirls and swirls- a sensation I often clichely correlate to Hitchcock’s Vertigo - but it can also appear as a transient moment of rapture: when one is exhausted the head grows fuzzy, and gradually the body is levitated. Bearing in my mind now is a picture of a decadent beauty, made wearied by strings of engagements and courtships day and night, eyes constantly bleary and heavy-lidded. Exhaustion turns into sultriness, which is like wisps of smoke lingering in the air. The Pre-Raphaelite beauty is one that seems invariably indolent and lackadaisical, weighed down by the labour of god-knows-what. One can only probe into the char