I think the best luxury in my possession right now is to be able to say these two statements not on separate occasions. Not because I am successful in turning my hobby into a job, no.
After all, I have a wide range of hobbies, among others are reading, listening to my favorite music, playing Dota2, collecting yellow duck souvenirs, walking alone in late afternoon, or sitting quietly contemplating random stuffs—all of which have little to do with my day-to-day job as a translator.
What I mean is that I am in no time or spatial restriction on when to do which. I can work, then read a magazine, then work, then drink coffee, then work, then leave my laptops on the table and go for a walk, then go back to work.
It has allowed me to retain a wide perspective on this world. Not one confined to a single spot from a window of an office chair. Having no mode of transportation, I walk myself to different spots where I can sit, open my notebook, and call that place my office.
I move periodically, I always want to change the atmosphere, alter the setting, read different stuffs I could find stashed in the coffee-shop I visit, think about everything I see, every conversation I hear.
I don’t want to be two different persons, shifting between two different spheres. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to work as a professional, while experiencing everything that is so emotional, so profound, so simple, so personal.
This has been a luxury I will not trade away for anything in this world. And for this, I am thankful.
While Shakespeare has enlightened us on suiting its use to the interest of the hopeless romantic, some less internationally-recognized poets like Indonesia’s Chairil Anwar has demonstrated to his nation the vital importance of poetry in the struggle for independence. But whichever it may be—a social device or genuine form of expression, poetry has always existed to serve more than a single, uni-dimensional purpose.
In today’s era of the most technologically enlightened, however, the art of poetry seems to face an endangerment much fiercer than anything it has ever been in close encounter before: a competition from a ‘professional’ vision which regards anything to be of value only as long as they possess practical qualities.
Findings from multiple surveys hint on an all-time-low interest in poetry. “Poetry is dead,” they say, and its murderer most probably would be the common sense that listing “I read Hamilton and Dylan Thomas for breakfast” adds no value to a resume. But does this supremely hold true? Can all of us really function solely on numerical efficiency without the reassurance that we are, after all, serving a more profound, meaningful cause?
It can’t possibly be true. Otherwise, every advertisement in our industry would simply show the technical specs for every fancy new phone, or list the horsepower and torque of each new car. Instead, what remains central in advertisement is convincing us that the advertised product is laced with qualities of our desire—be it happiness, trust, sympathy, assurance, company, or love. Thus, the success of advertisement—much like everything else in our industrial world—hinges not upon the conveying of its value, but rather by convincing us that it is a vessel of profoundness and meaning.
But if by possessing more, we only crave for more, then the ideal sold to us by our industry through advertisement might not be so true after all. Otherwise, we’d have to agree that we have an insatiable thirst for profoundness and meaning. What is more likely is that profoundness and meaning reside somewhere else; perhaps within the genre we had dismissed as obsolete for lacking practicality; perhaps our next step forward is to look back—in the removed dusty covers of books of poetry.
It may take a detour to our quest for meaning. It might seem nothing less than a time-walk to an age of antiquity. And there may lie the biggest problem with poetry, or so we are led to believe, that it conforms not to our futuristic interest, the so-called modern vision.
It will still hold true that the compilation of sophisticated diction may still not add any relevant entry to our CV. However, in the events where that very CV is successful in bringing us a new office and new suit to wear, poetry may complement us with the profoundness we need to carry on.
Because poetry, and art in general, does nothing less than equipping us with passion. And while we may run out of professional work ethics after exhausting series of chases with deadlines, I honestly never think we would ever find ourselves in short supply for passion of being human.
There is perhaps, nothing more frustrating than being unable to deliver a piece-of-mind in a very precise manner. And I don’t merely speak of telling someone else a story, or an information, which they may have hard times in understanding the context. I believe what is even more difficult is to communicate an understanding, a comprehension, a vision.
It is often a desperate pursuit, at the end of the day, you are only successful in transferring to someone else a fragment of your thought. And it may lead to misunderstanding, or backlash, or downright rejection where the partiality of their integration of your thought is to blame.
And this happens all the time, often not because they are intellectually incapable, or less engaging emotionally, but because there is this un-bridgable gap. Normally communication is only capable of facilitating the passing of simpler ideas, of concrete concepts, but when it comes to a full and intact biased perspective, it requires a certain leap, a jump, a process in which some of the details would unfortunately be left behind unable to find itself reaching the receiving end.
Just like those times where saying “I love you” is just not enough anymore. When the word “love” is too simplistic to fully explain what we really experience. Or when you don’t have the right word to tell someone who is mad at you that you didn’t mean it that way.
I have always lamented at how apparently no one really understand how I think—how the world appears from my perspective. But after meeting Selvi I started to realize, it is not really because I haven’t found someone whom I can share it with, but because of our own limitation to really experience the bias of others, despite she or he being the closest person to us.
I often tell her that I see colors from time to time, that in my rapid but very random and decentralized mental processing, it’s like I can see a pattern, so abstract I cannot reproduce into something else more concrete. The best I can convert them is into words. And because of that I have always envy her . . . And I think sometimes love can originate from envy; that she has always been good at artistic reproduction: into colors, into drawings, into songs, into photographs.
Me? I can only put them into words. I may call myself a poet, but sometimes poetry is my half-ass excuse at being unable to replicate the exact manure of my mind. No praises for my writings can ever console me enough for my failure of creating a feasible or satisfying reproduction. And where transcendence and metaphysical consolations have failed, there appears to be barren wilderness where remaining solutions are scarce.
But the true journey of relationship is arriving at the realization that not every understanding can be mutually shared. Some are of unique encoding, exclusive to a person, and not even your partner can quite grasp your vast methodical imaginations or your excessive sentimentality.
Still . . . why would it matter? The lament on my face, the worries in her expression are more than enough happy signs. That each of us care for each other, that we are desperately sorry for ourselves and all our limitations, for being unable to dive into the depth of thought that replicates the mind of our lovers.
As long as we try our best to put on our virtual glasses to experience the life of our dearest. That’s it, while we can’t really live the thought of their head, our appreciation can find its farthest extent in trying to put ourselves in others’ shoes. In their condition.
Because in every polite plead to request an understanding, in every desperate cry of lovers who want to be understood, for strangers who want to be acknowledged, for children who want to be noticed by the parents, for greenhorns yearning for recognition, we are all holding the same thing by the tip of our tongues:
“Please simulate mine, would you?”
That is, the desire for the most basic need of our being: understanding.
Once upon a time, I was a judge in a poem-reading competition. It was the second day of the competition, the participants who made it so far were required to write their own poems then recite it.
Now, as someone who has written poetry for so long I have my fair share of expectations of what the participants would write. I thought, for kids their age (all participants were senior high-schooler), their poetic sensibility might find itself lost in an effort to present an ultimate moral message. Like how every movie seems to fashion a trend of bringing an ‘unexpected’ twist nowadays, I prepared myself to get something within that line of expectation. My job was thus simple, determining which among them communicated the most compelling message.
My suspicion was confirmed, almost all participants took it to themselves to present something with ‘preachy’ substance. Then came the turn of this particular shy-looking girl to recite hers. She had given quite a good impression to me and the other judge for speaking in clearly better English than the rest of the participants. But this time it was not about reciting classic poems anymore, this was her own work, and I was still solid in anticipation that her work too should fall in the same category with that of her peers.
I couldn’t be more wrong. I swore hers somehow evoked an image of a crayon-picture in my mind, of dragons, of wizard, that of medieval tales, before turning it around with almost an absurd conclusion. It was an extreme opposite to her peers: hers was all poetic sensibility without any intention to preach—a pure subscription to subjectivity.
After she finished, the other judge asked me “her English was indeed excellent but what was her poem supposed to mean Jeremy?” I said, “It didn’t have to mean anything.” All I understood was she conveyed me a glimpse of the world in her head, in her own way of expressing it. Those with tendency to connect the dots to reality would find only frustration for not being able to link her work with any present moral message or any present phenomenon for that matter.
It was an ineffable experience for someone sitting at the judging table. Her poem was not supposed to be presented there, exactly because it was not meant for public evaluation, for ignorant impartial critics.
It was too much her own to be shared; no one else should put their hands on something that personal. Yet it was there, and it was beautiful.
And I saw in her not a participant tied to all the expectation in the eyes of a judge. Instead, I saw simply a person. I was appalled by how rare this was, in a world where performance is a norm, that one often finds him/herself crippled with the expectation of ‘correct’ form of expression.
I learned from her the importance of being human in this circuit-and-cable world of ours; to subscribe to elements of simplicity and honesty that truly makes us a person. It was ironic how all the other participants failed to teach me a bigger, far more transcendent lesson, compared to somebody who was not even trying to impart any lesson at all.
What’s that? Where is she nowadays? Oh we kinda lost contact for a year. Then we met again and now she is my girlfriend. What? So this is just a cliche retelling of how Selvi and I met? No it’s not, you totally miss the point, forget it!
Recently my presence is substituted by that measly little toy . . . How dare you Optimus. Your last movie is not that good anyway.
For someone living in a country where marriage is somewhat a norm, I was among the few with a rather strong reluctance for marriage. I used to say “I am never ever ever ever gonna get married.” Needless to say, my statement had been met with gaze of surprise and criticizing look, as if I just revealed that I had six arms.
But there was a strong reason for holding onto it for quite some time—one that goes beyond “I am always going to be cool and hang out with my friends” or “who needs settling down when you can be as free as a bird.”
Despite being a romantic, I am pragmatic enough to know that friendship often lasts only as long as contacts are maintained, and even then there is no guarantee the dynamics would remain the same. I realize that once people enter new social sphere, to strike new friendships with new circles serves our best social adaptation and survival trait.
We can’t always hope to cling to the past group we once hung out with. This doesn’t mean I regard friendship in a cynical manner—rather, I choose to make the most out of every second spent with the closest circle I have at hand, without counting out the possibility that one day everyone would go their separate ways.
So, what actually was it that made me somewhat resentful towards the idea of marriage? (to be honest, I once envisioned my old life would be spent alone in a mansion full of duck plushies)
Why are we getting shot a lot lately?
In order to understand that, we have to go way back to my childhood. I started reading books at a very young age. As long as I remember, I have maintained the same reading capacity now since I first picked up the alphabets when I was four.
I remember my kindergarten teacher expelling me (in a soft-spoken manner) out to the Primary School library (it was a big protestant-founded school) because in my annoyance that everyone my age was still learning the alphabet when I could already read, I became a noisy ruckus in class.
It was easy to see how I got rapidly acquainted with a lot of new ideas and started to see everything in a new light. By the time I was a teenage, I started to scrutinize the dynamics of my own family. Now, don’t get me wrong, my resentment towards the idea of marriage has no root in a broken home environment either.
My family, in my opinion, was a relatively ideal one. My father and mother were always there for me, bringing me books, teaching me stuffs, introducing me to video games (my mom completed the NES Bomberman using her foot to press the joystick), sparking my curiosity for the universe and the outer space, in short I had a very happy childhood. This played a crucial role in shaping my own opinion in my adolescence that my parents could do no wrong.
It was when I just entered my teens that I could clearly see that my parents, much like everyone else, make mistakes. And it suddenly came to me that I could have been raised very differently had they screwed up more in the past. I realized at a rather young age that managing a family comes with no manual and that a large portion of it consists of impromptu decision making.
And it scared me even in my sleep, because I never thought I was a capable person. What if I had kids and I screwed up? How to not screw up? I’ve seen my parents getting frustrated with financial problems, getting involved in legal suits, I came to realize that there are just too many unpredictable factors to threaten a family. It grew worse once I picked up my dad’s books on politics—my once colorful vision became monochromatic.
I became very acute at spotting the error of my parents in their ways of bringing me and my brother up. I remember never skipping a day without thinking about it, without deep down criticizing them. It took me a while and a big hurdle to realize that such excessive fear of failure can become a self-fulfilled prophecy.
As time passes by, I started to shift the focus of my criticism mostly on myself instead of my parents. After all, they have to play a ‘game’ without a tutorial level, errors are to be expected. Sooner or later, I would have to play my own ‘game’ of life
Instead of blaming them for who I have become, I start to evaluate myself for some bad habits rooted in the culture of my family (such as my poor financial management and excessive procrastination).
At this point, the dynamics in my family has become much more fluid and balanced, with everyone free to voice their opinion and criticize one another. I am quite vocal in my family to voice what I think is done wrong by my parents, and they too never hesitate a bit in scolding me for any poor management on my behalf. I slowly but surely strip away the deep rooted fear regarding my own incompetence.
Eventually, settling down only becomes a matter of meeting the right person.
And then I met her
I think it is very important to arrive at a sort of self-discovery before committing to the idea of settling down. Most people in my culture seem to be too eager to the level of being obsessed to start a new family without even questioning whether they are going to be a good husband, or wife, or parents.
Looking back now, I am relieved that I have to take such a detour before considering myself to be ready in near future (a solid life philosophy and the newly acquired professional skills I’ve picked up along the way also greatly help).
All in all, either trying to adjust to yours or starting a new one, there is always problems to tackle when it comes to family. And it might take forever to solve, you might even have to inherit to your offspring, but in its every moment, it always is a rewarding experience.
It is December already. It’s been raining a lot recently where I live, and the window these days presents view-after-view of drizzles, droplets, occasional lightning flashes, and folks running right and left for cover.
In all the times I spend by the window typing articles, working on translation projects, and browsing for porn or scrolling down 9gag writing my thesis, I find it odd how the view from the window seems to transmit varying mood. I swear the view was depressing yesterday—somber, sad, and kinda made me want to cuddle with my duck plushies collection all day.
Not that I possess such sort of collection obviously, that’s just a . . . err . . Metaphor.
Haha . . . ha . . . They are Selvi’s . . . Obviously . . . Right? No, that’s not my room. Shut up!
Yet today, upon gazing at the same thunderous glooms of the graying image through the glass, I am feeling this emanating upheaval of spirit—the sort normally accompanying the storm of inspiration which initiates my writing.
What a phenomenon–a festive mood of cheer today, a haunting restlessness tomorrow. While this alternating impression seems nothing less than a magic (remember the time you look through the window and feel like you are in a video clip of a gloomy song? Magic), it is a mere illusion—the view may stay static, but to the spectating end the only thing constant is change.
And within this delicate process of change, underneath the ever-morphing flux, we apply selective criteria to capture only details of the view that associate best with our emotions. It doesn’t matter if grey dominates, a single spot of white would be the only thing noticeable during times when joy thrives.
For anyone wondering, we supply our own photo and image. This one is taken by Selvi.
And just like the projection of our image mirrored by the glass (if not, it obviously needs a scrub), our window doesn’t only reveal the outside. If the presented picture seems so distant and cold, we may have dwelt too long in solitude. If the gust outside appears so vicious and cruel, we may have relied too much on suspicion and distrust. And if each moment of the window-theatrics is a fleeting race we can barely capture, we may have forsaken much for the sake of routine to even appreciate.
At the end of the day, through every view, we are only getting lost deep in our own thoughts. And it’s not really independent of control. We have all the options to be positive and sweet when we sit together with our lover looking at the rain from inside the cafeteria window or being creatively engaged by the sound of droplets while typing down that document for a client. We choose the mind we live and work with, regardless of the weather, regardless of the environment. Optimism is always beyond being predetermined.
Then again, if you only enjoy staring into hard platform of wooden or concrete surface, you are totally missing out on the chance to be a hopeless romantic.
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