Feet

Sunshine on Leith

Today, I left work at 6pm, like most other Singaporeans. By the time I got home, the sun was still up and I managed to take a little stroll in the garden with Liz. After the garden tour, I had dinner and even managed to watch a DVD. Feeling a tad restless after the DVD, I checked Ava's fluids and and tinkered around her engine bay before taking her out for a nice long drive. Simple pleasures. Its days like this that make me wonder why we do what we do. Is it the thrill of the chase? Is it to keep up with our peers? Is it because we truly enjoy it?

月球

O let not time deceive you

当你说太聪明往往还是会寂寞
我笑着倾听孤单终结后的寂寞

Alcobaca

Now I lay me down to sleep

The ancients believed that understanding takes place on four levels, the literal, the metaphorical, the political and the mystical. Dante believed that one cannot proceed to the other levels without first grasping the literal. But what does it mean to have a firm grasps of the literal?

Corner

"The man stood in the corner."

And immediately your mind starts to actualize the text by contributing a sense of the man's age, size, skin colour, clothing, facial appearance and maybe even emotions. Your mind might even start to actualize the corner in question and the way he stood. This process of concretization allows a text to be read in a multitude of ways and probably evidences how reading a book stimulates the brain more than watching a movie of the same title. It is innately human to want to fill in the gaps, a man in the corner, snippets of a telephone conversation, a nervous twitch or a fleeting change of the conversation topic.

Contact

Remnants,
Of a weekend very well spent.

Essence

Deus Caritas Est

I am Love and I have wrath, justice, jealousy, kindness.
What do we make of this? "I" as used here is simply a linguistic category; it doesn't look like me, it doesn't walk like me, it doesn't register how thirsty I am. In short, it can never capture the fullness of me. Yet it is suppose to be me. Is this an example of the imperfection of language in describing what truly is? That we have to rely on some intangible, pre-programmed conception of what is? And where did this conception come from? Is it innate or derived?

Reader

How he is often right.

Often I think that his idea of what we should do is wrong, and my idea is right. Yet I know that he has often been right before, when I was wrong. And so I let him make his wrong decision, telling myself, though I can't believe it, that his wrong decision may actually be right. And then later it turns out, as it often has before, that his decision was the right one, after all. Or, rather, his decision was still wrong, but wrong for circumstances different from the circumstances as they actually were, while it was right for circumstances I clearly did not understand.
~Lydia Davis, How He Is Often Right

Umayyad

And let they feet millenniums hence be set in midst of knowledge.

Instead of tourists and pilgrims, the great courtyard of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus once held as many scribes and philosophers, hungry for knowledge, thirsting for light. The Qur'anic emphasis on ilm, the pursuit of knowledge, is perhaps the reason why the modern world has knowledge of Western Philosophy. This 'urge to know' spurred Muslim scribes to scour for the texts of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and transcribing them into bound volumes destined for great centres of learning like Al-Azhar in Cairo. Without this contribution, Western Philosophy as we know it today would have been lost and the world, a poorer place. The Islam that I read about and that I experience I travel is so different from the sensationalized version of Islam and Islamic Jihad. What seems like an absolutist form of belief upon deeper scrutiny reveals itself to be an enlightened and all encompassing faith. Islam seems to abhor all kinds of monopoly, of truth, power, wealth, knowledge and authoritarianism. Most of its general principles are designed to break down monopolies and subvert unquestioning authority. For even belief in Islam itself cannot go unqualified and blind, unquestioning faith is not appreciated.

天空

之间的空间

我想说
谁听我说
我真的爱错

Trio

Happy Birthday

I can't believe a year has whizzed by just like that. And what a year it has been. 12 months of excitement, disappointment, frustration and joy. In a way, my life seems to have mirrored the path taken by Arbite over the past year. Without launching into a legalistic argument of how this would constitute grounds for the personification of a corporate entity, I would like to say that both Arbite and I are looking forward to a smoother 2011-2012. We both have new challenges ahead and we both need to know what we want in life; and get it. Both of us could never have made it this far, without the help, support and love of our friends and family. Thank you, you know who you are. We are here only because of you.

Reflections

Looming or sidelined?

This photo is a composite of reflections and sub-images and in a way reflects the complexity of politics in the middle east. As things seem to worsen in Syria, I like many others in the world hoped that President Assad would take this opportunity to put into effect some positive reforms. But it seems like it is not meant to be.